Lydia Wylie-Kellermann was the guest last week on ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’
by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service
Lydia Wylie-Kellerman
LOUISVILLE — Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, the mother of two children, has thought about and experienced enough of the effects of climate change that she’s set to publish a new book, “This Sweet Earth: Walking with our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse” on July 23.
Wylie-Kellermann appeared last week on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” to share parental stories of lament and hope with hosts the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong. Listen to their 57-minute conversation here.
The hosts’ conversation starter included three questions: What does it mean to be a parent in the age of climate change? How can parents wrestle with their own emotions and fears regarding climate change without simply passing them on to those they parent? How can they also pass on hope?
“Those questions have been hanging on my heart for a long time,” said Wylie-Kellermann, who in addition to being a mother is a writer, editor and activist. “I’d like to start with talking about parenting in the most expansive way we possible can. Being part of a queer family, I feel so grateful for the practice of claiming family really wide, knowing that’s such a gift for our kids and my partner.”
Just about everyone, she noted, is in some relationship with children and with future generations, including people in their faith community. “We’re all carrying some level of grief and anxiety and wrestling with how we love kids in this moment,” she said. One of the gifts that children bring “is the ability to be right in the moment.” Wylie-Kellermann sometimes finds herself in the pain of considering an existential crisis for the planet when her children “drag me over to watch a cicada coming out of its shell.” She marvels at “holding that tension together and being really grateful for my kids.”
“This is what we need,” she said, naming “that grief, because we love this world, and that anger, which is what’s going to move us forward. But we can’t hold it alone. It either leads us toward despair, or it’s so big we’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist.” The task is to “create spaces of community to hold our hearts. How are our churches creating space for grief to ritualize that?”
She pushed back against the notion of not passing emotions about climate change, including fear, along to children.
“I think sharing what’s on our hearts with our kids is really important,” she said. “If they know they can bring their hearts to this space and know that it’s something we care about, I think that’s a huge gift, rather than them waking up when they’re 16 saying, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this, and why aren’t you angry?’”
The work we need to do with those we parent “is to help them fall in love with the places where they belong,” she said. “What are the names of the bugs? The trees? The birds that come through? That knowing and learning what those creatures are turns into loving.”
In recent years, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which periodically looks at which words children need and which have become irrelevant, has been adding tech-related words and removing some words tied to nature, including “acorn,” “willow” and “dandelion.”
“We learn the names and we sit still, and we call them by names — the Northern Cardinal and the Mourning Dove — so that when they start to go silent, we’ll notice,” Wylie-Kellermann said. “That becomes the first act of learning a place, and we hope that leads to falling in love. Once we’re in love with a place, it changes everything.”
The work, she said, “is to let our kids get muddy and climb trees and swim in the watershed and harvest wild edible plants … and come back to the same place again and again.”
When Wylie-Kellermann began writing her most recent book, “there was so much grief that was just palpable,” but “the more I wrote, the more I was startled by hope,” she said. “The more stories I told, the more beauty I saw. The more attention I paid to my kids, the more wisdom I found.”
“I want my kids to know how to grow food and to bury the dead and to lean on community to find joy in the midst of chaos,” she told Doong and Catoe. “I want them to know themselves as creatures in a wild ecosystem. That’s a good life.”
A few years ago, Wylie-Kellermann’s oldest child, then about 7, ran out of the bathroom to return to playing with Legos. “Mom,” he told her, pausing for a moment, “when I die, I want you to drag my body out to the woods so that it can be eaten and no part of me will be wasted.” Then he returned to his play.
She marveled at “his ability to say, even in dying, ‘We’re a gift to this Earth. Our bodies become food for creatures, and life keeps moving on,’” she said. While the climate crisis could be signaling the beginning of the end for humanity, “even in our dying, we are a gift to this place.”
“A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” with the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong drops each Thursday.
Wylie-Kellermann is part of a group that’s been thinking about and acting on “this idea of watershed discipleship. We are committed to the people who are fed by the same rainfall. This is what community looks like, and that’s who we become disciples to,” she said. The gospels “are full of watersheds and ecosystems. Sometimes I think we know those ecosystems better than we know our own.” Gospel stories are replete with “bread and fish, wheat and grapes. Those aren’t metaphors,” she said. “People were actively involved in their ecosystems.”
“One of the really hard things about climate change is that parents have a tendency to say, ‘I’m not going to explain this to my kids until I know how to say it just right.’ We can’t do that with climate change,” Wylie-Kellermann said. In answer to children’s “really good questions,” all we can say sometimes is “I don’t know,” she said. “We can say, ‘I don’t know, but I love you, and we’re going to keep walking through it together and we’re going to keep talking about it.’”
New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Watch previous editions here.
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