At the 2023 Yale University Graduate Conference of Religion & Ecology (GCRE) I performed Blue: a lament for the sea. I also gave a paper on the development of its poetics. Many thanks to Yale Institute of Sacred Music for their honoraria payment for my performed reading, and to the whole team at GCRE.
The field of religion and ecology began with the Religions of the World and Ecology conference series at Harvard University from 1996-1998. The field focuses on retrieving, re-evaluating, and reconstructing narratives, practices, and worldviews that influence relationships between human society and the environment.
Paper Abstract
How can a landscape find voice? What happens when a prophecy is spoken over a ‘sacred’ island for a thousand years, foretelling escape from an apocalyptic sea-flood? How may lament with hope engage with reality, as distinct from ‘hope’ that glosses over our grief? This creative-critical paper explores these liminal uncertainties brought to speech through the poetics and theopoetics of ‘Blue: a lament for the sea’, a long verse narrative by an award-winning writer. Ecological grief is woven into the academic intersections of trauma theology and the contemplative medieval theology of Julian of Norwich. Trauma theology, following Professor Shelly Rambo, invites a generative bearing witness to ‘wounds’. In Julian’s incarnational theology, the ‘wound’ becomes a site of crossing. Nature becomes a paradoxical gateway to divine love without negating fragile material reality. At the end of her nuanced argument, while there is no refuge from suffering, suffering has no refuge from love. Julian’s contemplative holding of complexity and loss, this paper suggests, provides us today with a framework for ecological grief with a lamenting hope that can engender action. In hyperreal autofiction, ‘Blue: a lament for the sea’, a woman swims off the island of the prophecy as she laments the climate crisis; the landscape responds. The end of ‘Blue’ asks, what newness may be birthed? This forms a strand of an interdisciplinary PhD project exploring trauma and loss, in the ground- breaking research programme ‘Theology through Creative Practice’ at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
A longer version of this paper was given at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds University, 3.7.23.
Liz MacWhirter Novelist & Poet 