Confessions of Awe and Awkwardness

Fumbling in January's darkness

Today is the feast day of Bishop Saint Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers, comms folk, and educators. So it felt like a good day to get back in the habit after a hiatus of several weeks.

Starting before then, ramping up through having an opportunity to visit Rome for Pope Leo presiding over an event marking the 10th anniversary of Laudato Sì, and reflecting through the dark weeks since COP30, it would seem I’ve become one of those people I found slightly off-putting when I was young. The sort who carries around a saint’s medal. In this case, a souvenir made in 1865 that I found on eBay after learning more about Francis de Sales.

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St Francis de Sales medal

Let me come back to him in a minute. But just to quote the man briefly, from the preface to his Introduction to the Devout Life:

 …you will find very little precision in the work. But rather a collection of well-intentioned instructions explained in clear intelligible words. At least that is what I have sought to give, but as to a polished style, I have not given that a thought having so much else to do.

A bit of playful self-deprecation (guy is literally a saint and Doctor of the Church because he’s a bloody good writer) but fitting for an online world 400 years after he wrote. So with that health warning…

Signs of the Times

Have you had the experience of falling out with a good friend, only to meet again decades later and find that you’d both changed after having been through some stuff, and now had a lot to talk about? It’s been a bit like that for me in re-engaging with the Church after a very long absence.¹

I never renounced my faith and found the “New Atheist” Dawkins and Hitchens (on this subject but not others) types as brittle and shallow and ungenerous as the sort of Bible-bashing carnival-barker types that - as Peter Wehner wrote powerfully about this week in The Atlantic - have done so much to make the very word “Christian” an epithet in their support for fascistic performative cruelty:

Right-wing populists don’t view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the “pure people” against external “others,” while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions.

Many right-wing populists, despite being secular, are successfully recruiting Christians to their cause. And rather than Christians leavening the secular right-wing movements, those movements are prying Christianity further and further away from the ethic and teachings of Jesus.

The Trump administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling in a dozen different ways cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies.

But I stopped seeing the relevance of what the institutional Church had to offer, and when living in Ireland heard stories from too many people who had been victims of an institution that, as Vatican-watcher Colleen Dulle memorably summed up, demanded people “pay, pray, and obey”.

Working in climate, starting Wicked Problems as a means of exploring climate solutions, over time led me to think about climate as a lot more than “windmills”, as some at Davos this week were fond of using as shorthand to dismiss any care for the climate (or, let’s permit it to be called creation) - or empathy for other humans whose inalienable rights can’t be enjoyed without preserving the conditions for human society to flourish we call ‘climate’ - as soft-headedness.

First I did spend a lot of time thinking about climate technologies, which of course don’t scale without the right type of capital, which can’t flourish without the right economic outlook, which can’t work without the right politics, which can’t work without the right cultural matrix, which can’t work without having some basic agreement about the point of any of this. As a failed philosophy student I did not like where that train of thought was leading me but if one is going to stop pretending that things are…basically fine…not following where the thought leads is not an option.

The science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, despite his avowed atheistic communist perspective, returns over and over again through his fiction over the 30+ years I’ve been reading him to this fundamental insight: without an understanding of ourselves as part of something greater than what we can perceive in the material world we are never going to stop doing the things to the planet that threaten our ability to continue living here in any way that would seem like flourishing².

It’s the difference between “throwaway culture”³ and cathedral-building. Does the belief system most of us live our lives in allow for, never mind reward, thinking and acting in terms beyond the next dopamine hit? If we can see it does not, even if purely from a desire for survival, what is to be done?

Ecological Conversion

That is what brought me to Laudato Sì and over a period of time back to the Church. I’m no theologian, but I found it interesting that successive Popes identified the climate crisis as a defining “sign of the times”.

Over the past year I’ve immersed myself in ways that, like getting to know that lost friend again, have felt both familiar and new and sometimes uncomfortable.

One could argue that the “pay, pray, obey” paradigm was a zombie version of a Church from before the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. It wasn’t alive but it wouldn’t go away.

In 1962, human civilisation reckoned with its own imminent destruction in ways it had never known before as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded. Then-Pope John XXIII had a little-appreciated role in helping ease the crisis, communicating both with Kennedy and Khrushchev in the worst moments of those 13 days. And going on Vatican Radio midway through the crisis to say:

“Lord, hear the plea of your servant, the plea of your servants, who fear your name.” This ancient biblical prayer today rises to our trembling lips from the depths of our dumbfounded and afflicted hearts. As the Second Vatican Council opens, in the joy and hope of all men of good will, threatening clouds once again darken the international horizon and sow fear in millions of families… We plead with all rulers not to be deaf to this cry of humanity. Let them do everything in their power to save the peace. In this way they will save the world from the horrors of a war, the terrible consequences of which cannot be predicted…May all our children, all those who are marked by the seal of baptism and nourished by Christian hope, and finally all those who are united with us by faith in God, join their prayers to ours to obtain the gift of peace: of a peace that will not be true and lasting if it is not based on justice and equality.

A few months later, as the first output from Vatican II, Pope John XXIII published Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), which many old-skool Catholics never recovered from: resolving that the Church could not fulfil its mission if it just ignored the imminent destruction of the humanity it was supposed to be there to save, and so it must therefore emerge from behind its walls and doors and engage with the world.

When Pope Francis published Laudato Sì more than 50 years later, he early on grounded his description of a responsibility to engage with how the climate crisis also threatened the destruction of the humanity the Church said it was there to save in the response to the previous crisis of nuclear holocaust:

More than fifty years ago, with the world teetering on the brink of nuclear crisis, Pope Saint John XXIIIwrote an Encyclical which not only rejected war but offered a proposal for peace. He addressed his message Pacem in Terris to the entire “Catholic world” and indeed “to all men and women of good will”. Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration, I wish to address every person living on this planet. In my Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, I wrote to all the members of the Church with the aim of encouraging ongoing missionary renewal. In this Encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home.

4. In 1971, eight years after Pacem in Terris, Blessed Pope Paul VI referred to the ecological concern as “a tragic consequence” of unchecked human activity: “Due to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation”.

Francis develops his arguments in Laudato Sì that lead to the conclusion that an “ecological conversion” to appreciate an “integral ecology” is necessary to people address the climate crisis. These are, to say the least, unlovely - as forms of words.

But, to me anyway, the secret to the multi-millennial survival of the Catholic Church is its iterative nature and its understanding of “creation” as a constant iterative process, rather than limited to a sort of “fire and forget” / First Mover / ‘God-as-watchmaker’-style Deism.

And while I find “ecological conversion” to be a term that feels super-awkward, I feel like it points to something useful - the idea that, like a Zen master telling a student to empty her cup, it is periodically necessary to reset, reboot, and rediscover the existence of a relationship between ourselves, “creation”, other humans (“the neighbour” or “the stranger”), and whatever unseen force gives meaning and coherence to those relationships.

As the popular Jewish mystic/theologian Martin Buber recalled in The Way of Man, there isn’t just one path to that point of insight and they may seem to be contradictory:

“It is impossible to tell men what way they should take. For one way to serve God is through learning, another through prayer, another through fasting, and still another through eating. Everyone should carefully observe what way his heart draws him to, and then choose this way with all his strength.”

“Be patient with everyone, but above all with yourself”

St. Francis de Sales would have done a brisk business hawking self-help books were he alive today and I would bet they’d be a lot less crap than most of the McNuggets of wisdom people scoff on a given day.

He was, fair to say, an outlier. Born into a wealthy Savoy family in 1567 he seemed - like St Augustine - destined for a career as a lawyer. But (perhaps not coincidentally) also like St Augustine he dropped that for a life in the Church, over the initially pretty strong objections of a father who planned for him to be a politician.

Francis got a particularly crap assignment, to look after Geneva, which by that time in the 1590s had been decades into Calvinist Protestantism and rejecting Catholicism and the Pope. He was given the impossible gig of ministering to an almost completely Calvinist enclave called Chablais, where Calvinist ministers accused him of sorcery and several times was nearly killed by assassins. Also fair to say that Francis de Sales was as quick to anger and withering in his criticism of opponents as a 2015 Twitter denizen or 2026 BlueSky scold.

But he took a lot of abuse on the chin, spent a lot of time on the run, and simply by not being a dick and speaking plainly what he actually believed without fancy rhetoric he won people over sufficiently that they started to listen. He wrote (using newly-readily-available inexpensive printing tech) - a lot - aimed at people he was trying to persuade to come back to his faith. “A spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a vat of vinegar” is one of his best-remembered aphorisms. The result was that tens of thousands of people - possibly a majority - in the Chablais region converted back to Catholicism.

Despite being made bishop of Geneva he made time for the spiritual direction of a number of individuals (let’s be honest because they were mainly ladies with significant fortunes to will to the Church) in addition to everything else he was doing. Some of his podcasts, sorry - instructions, he later edited into Introduction to the Devout Life.

It’s a remarkable text that I come back to now and again. It’s credited with de Sales being made a ‘Doctor of the Church’, because of its lucid and persuasive prose aimed at people living in the real world who for various reasons can’t give up everything they own and all their family obligations and become monks or nuns, but still aspire to be better than jonesing for the next dopamine hit.

Should any of them be taken seriously, even though they don’t renounce the world and still need to live in it? And is a “devout” life a path open only to the Bible-bashing freaks above mentioned? This is what Francis de Sales wrote:

… we all color devotion according to our own likings and dispositions. One man sets great value on fasting and believes himself to be leading a very devout life so long as he fasts rigorously.

Although the while his heart is full of bitterness and while he will not moisten his lips with wine, perhaps not even with water, in his great abstinence, he does not scruple to steep them in his neighbour’s blood through slander and detraction. Another man reckons himself as devout because he repeats many prayers daily, although at the same time he does not refrain from all manner of angry, irritating, conceded, or insulting speeches among his family and neighbors.

This man freely opens his purse in arms giving, but closes his heart to all gentle and forgiving feelings towards those who are opposed to him. While that one is ready enough to forgive his enemies, but will never pay his rightful debts, save under pressure. Meanwhile, all these people are conventionally called religious, but nevertheless, they are in no true sense, really devout.

Thanks for reading this. Until next time.

1. Ever see that scene in Ray Donovan where Liev Schreiber says “it’s been 36 years since my last Confession”? Fortunately I hadn’t killed a priest (or a brother, like Michael Corleone confessing in Godfather III) but suffice to say the experience of going back into a confessional and saying it’d been 30+ years was like having a dental procedure go wrong and the doc sighing and buzzing reception to say ‘cancel my appointments the rest of the day’.

2. From his Mars Trilogy to Ministry for the Future to Aurora, that’s been a leitmotif of his work.

3. “As examples, I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle. These questions will not be dealt with once and for all, but reframed and enriched again and again.” - Laudato Sì, 16