Spirited Away

Red Rebels in front of the Stortinget, the Norwegian Parliament. (Image courtesy Lars Verket). The color red symbolizes the lifeblood of all creatures, and Red Rebels silent pantomime seeks to express love and care for all life, but also deep grief and loss.

Recently, a climate acvitist spoke to me about how worn out and down they feel. That after many years of struggling along to raise awareness and mobilize more people to push for climate action, they felt that they had come to a point where the science looks so bleak and the prognosis for sufficient climate action looks so short of what would have needed to happen, that they see less and less how catastrophic loss can be avoided.

Climate activists are some of the people that have the ability to see and find agency where many others who may have given up or feel powerless do not, so to find the core population that will not give up close to the edge of burnout and demoralization gives much to think about and is a warning to the rest of us.

Life as it has developed in the Holocene is at stake in the climate crisis. When religious traditions speak about spirit, what they often manifest is that Spirit is about life. The classic metaphors in Hebrew, Latin and Greek - ruah, spiritus, pneuma - refer to the process of breathing, of life in bodies that breathe.

The Spirit of Life is then to claim the Holy Spirit in the Christian tradition as a metaphor for the presence of divine life among us, all species.

In the current spacetime, holding on to a sense of agency and any achievable action to reduce the damage being done to our common life-sustaining systems seems increasingly hard to imagine.

How to keep up our spirits in this barrage of policies, actions, lobbyists and capital against the Spirit of Life?

Spirited away can then refer to having your breath taken away - and not in a good way. Species are being 'spirited away' in ways that impoverish the community of creation.

The Japanese Manga film Spirited Away follows a girl getting pulled into a spirit world that eventually seems to consume all there is... But eventually, she finds her way out of the alternate reality of the all-consuming No Face, and is able to reestablish relationships with her family, returning to reality, where the life-stealing spirits have lost their power and are released from their greed.

What will break the spirit possession that capitalist convenience and neoliberal growth ideologies hold us captive with, both spiritually and materially?

Whatever it is, it requires perhaps first and foremost a spiritual practice, a spiritual discipline, a way of being in the suffering and loss that mourns the losses, prays for the deal and fights like hell for the living (free after Mother Jones).

Veli-Matti Kärkkainen, Finnish American theologian, suggests that one of the problems with classical theologies of the Holy Spirit is that it is in fact primarily focused on the Holy Spirit but does not account or give much guidance how to deal with destructive presences of spirits in our lives. (Kärkkainen, Kim & Yong, 29). He writes:

"... by and large, 'mainline' Christian pneumatologies are still imprisoned in what may be called 'unitive' pneumatology, that is they only speak of one spirit, the Spirit og God, and leave out of consideration other spirits, powers, energies."

Spirits is thus a term with many meanings, and it does not serve us to limit our

If we want to still have something to offer in the fight against the enemies of the created world and the many forms of life that have found their being and becoming in it, we may need a broader appreciation of the multitude of spirit and energy experiences that obtain within it.

Spirits animate also the resistance against climate destruction and the polycrisis. At Standing Rock, the action against the building of the pipline was declared by the local hosts a ceremony, not a protest. 'We are protectors, not protesters,' they declared. Those who came to support were told that in order to be at this ceremony of protective action, they needed to be in prayer, whatever that meant to them.

This site seeks to speak about spirited resistance to the forces of exploitation, extraction, enslavement and disregard for large and small creatures.

It engages mostly resources from liberation, postcolonial and constructive theological traditions from many parts of the world. I would be honored if you followed along here and there, perhaps finding sustenance for your own struggle for the defense of the sacred cosmos, and seeking tools to continue your own spirited resistance.