EarthQuaker Issue 102
It is Sunday, ten minutes into meeting for worship, and Margaret stands to speak. She speaks slowly, letting the words come. Someone else is on their feet – my two year old, standing on her chair. With great concentration, she throws every crayon she can reach at Margaret in quick succession. “We listen when someone speaks” I whisper, gently removing a crayon from her poised hand. “ not listening,” she says, turning it into an angry song. “I not listeniiiiing, I not listeniiiing.” My husband takes her out to run in circles in the foyer.
It is Thursday morning, a steering group meeting for the Quaker Earthcare Gathering. People speak rapturously of children’s ability to naturally minister and how the younger generation have the answers to the issues that face us. I think of the numerous Duplo-related fist fights I have broken up in the last six months, not to mention my own chequered past as a 13 year old activist where I used to make up climate change facts to spur people into action when I couldn’t remember the real statistics. I am not sure I am convinced.
Apart from overexposure to children, part of my reluctance is a protective effort to keep my feelings about the earth crisis as far from my daughter as possible. “I do not have the luxury of despair,” another parent told me over dinner at the Earthcare Gathering. We have bills to pay, swimming lessons to get to, grazes to kiss. We cannot let things fall apart.
For me, it all fell apart at about 6pm on Friday evening. I had taken my daughter and another child to set up the big hall. They sped down the long corridor laughing hysterically, adoration beaming out of my daughter’s face at the fact a Big Girl would want to play with her. I physically felt my heart tear in my chest as I thought about the myriad horrors they could face in the slow car crash of ecosystem and societal breakdown. I don’t let myself feel that very often, but their joy made it unavoidable. I took a breath and blinked back a tear. The feeling hadn’t killed me. I could still kiss a graze.
I am still learning what shape “radical” takes with a child on my hip. There seems to be something in it about this daily fierce love being a transferrable skill; about the entanglement with other caregivers weaving a relational net; about recognizing your gifts incisively enough to know when the best thing for your community is for you to do a job and for some else to hold the baby. By 24 hours into the Gathering, I had around ten people volunteer to mind my little one if I needed to do other things. In the evening, as my daughter fell asleep in my arms upstairs, I sang protest songs as lullabies, upholding you all. I reworked the lyrics of a song a Friend recently taught me to reflect our witness: “EACOP to the great tar sands, a picket held in frozen hands, shut down the M25, we keep the little flame alive.”
We didn’t reach unity at the Earthcare Gathering, but I think we got a bit better at diversity. I trust the mysticism of our faith, which for me partly shows up as accepting things happen in deeply connected ways I cannot explain cleanly. I trust it because I have experienced it but also because having to do it all myself is not a practical option anymore. The limits of parenthood have been humbling for me in a way 30-odd years of mistakes probably should have been already. Regardless of our age, we are all nothing more or less wondrous than people, with our own gifts and foibles. This is true of children too. We need their ministry and they need our eldership. It is both unfair and unwise to leave the future singlehandedly at their door, even if it is theirs to inherit. Like the prophets and the reconcilers, it’s about the space we hold between us, where something magical happens.
The Monday night after the Earthcare Gathering, after my daughter has fallen asleep, I unpack the bags and load the washing machine. After talk of sustainable buildings and hurricanes hitting Jamaica, our three-bed semi feels cold and obscene. I crawl into bed with her, the single bed the only thing in the house we really need. The next morning, she sits up in bed and taps me. “Look,” she says, her hands cupped together as if holding a secret. She opens them and shows me her tiny empty palms. “A stingway. TWO stingways. A big wun and a likkle wun.” This is new. At some point over the weekend, she has learnt to imagine creations into being completely out of thin air.
Ailish Carroll-Brentnall