Imagining Wildfire Religion
Brianne Donaldson
Imagine a wildfire religion revealed by grief. As a synagogue, mosque, theosophical society, and over a dozen churches burned to the ground in Los Angeles this month, a fledgling faith ignites. Its doctrines find no shelter within buildings, no refuge in apocalyptic fantasies, no safety in a privileged humanism. Its embers catch upon illusions that neither wind, nor flood, nor flame can breach our walls. An ever-expanding fire season is just another adaptation, we said; nearly 30 extreme U.S. weather events last year, just a cosmic realignment happening somewhere else. But then the seasoned journalists cried: standing at the rubble of their childhood home, then watching a friend’s house alight as the live feed rolled, as another was overcome by fire fighters’ nick-of-time appearance to assist neighbors fending off fire from a roof.
The wisdom traditions have long taught that grief will teach any lessons unlearned. Saint Ephraim the Syrian believed lament to be a sacrament, counseling to “increase the tears in your eyes.” Rumi exhorts one to weep like a waterwheel. The shortest Biblical verse says simply, “Jesus wept.” So, too, did the donkey cry when St. Francis of Assisi, upon his deathbed, thanked the mule for his friendship. So, when climate scientist Peter Kalmus chokes out the sob to “take a risk for this gorgeous planet,” that sob joins every ache incurred with the expected harms to come. It is the spark of wildfire religion teaching lessons we have not yet learned.
Because maybe we missed it when the poet said, “no man is an island”; or when physicists laid out the quantum entanglements foreshadowed in the ledgers of ancient karmic traditions, the yin and the yang, that a flapping wing can start a hurricane across the globe. The New Testament cautioned that we’d “reap what we sow,” and the Seventh Generation insight of the Iroquois told us that we choose the debts to gift the future. Kalmus got near to the spirit this week by asking what it will take for people to “believe what’s right in front of their eyes” and to recognize the self-injury produced in short term use of carbon intensive fossil fuels and industrial animal agriculture sidestepped in every election cycle. Wildfire religion might be that passing moment when eyes are opened because tears are falling from them.
Emissaries of sorrow can come in every burned form. A graveyard of nails let loose from plaster and plywood of 16,000 structures gone. Miles of hiking trails through state parks and recreation areas lay barren of feet and forest. A long ecological shadow stretches over watersheds, land erosion, migratory birds, endangered wildlife, water pollution, and air quality, each a sermon of what will land upon the most vulnerable. With seven percent of California tree cover lost in the past 40 years due to intensifying fires and droughts, one wonders if the Buddha would have attained enlightenment if his Bodhi tree was set ablaze.
Even the animals might spread a wildfire faith that’s felt through mourning. “These 6 Videos of Animals Caught in the LA Wildfires Will Make You Weep,” declares BuzzFeed, as if to modernize St. Isaac the Assyrian’s “merciful heart” that “cannot bear to hear or see any injury or slight sorrow in any in creation.” Accounts of rescued peacocks, raccoons, and backyard chickens call forth Rebekah’s drawing water for thirsty camels in the Hebrew Bible, or the Quranic promise that “there is no animal on earth, nor a being that flies, but they are communities like you.” When the Eaton Canyon Nature Center burned before any of the fifteen animal residents could be evacuated, the throb of sadness affirms the nonviolent Jain tradition’s declaration that “all beings are fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, like life, long to live.”
Conversion can come in the experience of sadness, when, as portended by political philosopher Judith Butler in Precarious Life, “we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted.” Ultimately, a wildfire religion can only offer us what we already know within our knowing: “It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there,” Butler says, “especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am.” The grief of ruin leads us toward collective well-being as personal well-being, exposing the lie of liberal individualism and atomistic separation. So, whether our brains are wired for altruism or we are shaped by cultural commitments—like the Jewish tikkun olam, “to heal the world; African ubuntu, “I am because we are”; Gaunyin pouring out the water of life to relieve all suffering, much as Martin Luther King, Jr prophesied to “let justice roll down like waters”—the rituals of wildfire religion already fill our liturgies. A local tavern may demonstrate the sacraments best in its happy hour fundraiser to “Pour it Forward” for wildfire relief.
Imagining wildfire religion means imagining, and acting toward, a different future, with courageous grief as the guide. Wildfire religion invites us beyond blame to a confessional rebuilding—not just of homes and businesses, but also concepts, language, and habits—that have blinded us to our co-constitutive well-being. We can no more cede responsibility for the flames merely to politicians, utilities, corporations, or gods, than we can deny our own complicity for a wounded home which is our father, mother, stranger, and friend.
It may only be flames, after all, that can cut through canyons of complacency, kindling needed truths. Fire brought our hominid ancestors out of the trees. Zarathustra found friendship and divine judgement in the cosmic flame. God spoke to Moses through a burning bush to bring the people out of slavery. Rebirth requires the funeral pyre be set alight on the banks of the Ganges from the sacred coals of Vedic history and myth. Wildfire is a consequence, and it can also be a catalyst. As the crumbled walls of sacred temples smolder, we need not sweep away our traditions, doubts, or agnosticism. We need only carry the epiphanies of grief to clear any obstacle that keeps tomorrow’s beloved community from emerging in the ashes.
Brianne Donaldson writes on religion and ethics related to animals, environment, and medicine. She holds the Shri Parshvanath Presidential Chair in Jain Studies at University of California, Irvine and lives and hikes in the foothills of Los Angeles County. www.briannedonaldson.com.
