This liturgy was originally written for greenfaith’s “sacred season for climate justice” resource
Blessed are we when we treasure the wisdom of the earth, receiving survival strategies whispered underground by bristlecone pine and sequoia, returning the praise songs of nuthatch and titmouse, flocking together with the murmuration maps of bees and bats and butterflies, and pollinating possibilities for living in these beautiful ruins.
Woe to us when losses of profit are considered more costly than losses of habitat, health, or home. Holy confrontation with corporations that harm is the faithful labor of Love.
Blessed are we when our daily actions and interactions align with dreams for collective flourishing, and pattern our days with the small, the slow, and the simple, moving through the world gently, with gratitude, attentive to beauty, savoring the lifeforce that flows freely through it all.
Woe to us when we privatize natural resources, when we hoard and steal the gifts of the land, or conceal patterns of colonization. The only way to planetary healing is through return, reparations, and repair.
Blessed are we when our grief propels us toward protection, our wild love for the world motivating our every dream. No escape, no denial, but holding what is in our cupped hands and broken open hearts, our prayers poured forth like libations of lament, remembrance, and promise.
Woe to us when we cross the boundaries of the earth; when we continue to push, extract, and consume in willful refusal of glaring devastation, and need for rest. Unsustainable practices diminish and destroy the rhythms of life.
Blessed are we when we remember we’re “we,” not “me,” or “us and them,” bound to each other cellularly and socially, holding and being held in the web of relations, honoring each species extinction as a death of divinity, each oil spill opening our veins, each pipeline poisoning our precious lifeblood, each encounter, an opening for the medicine of care.
Woe to us when we do not choose solidarity, when we protect ourselves at the expense of others, or silo our struggles as if they are inseparable. For climate justice must be gender justice must be racial justice must be disability justice must be a matter of leaving all domination behind.
By Rev. Anna Blaedel and Rev. M Jade Kaiser, enfleshed