Earth Hospice Rites
created by Trebbe Johnson and Rev. Alison Cornish
Trebbe Johnson and Rev. Alison Cornish joined together to create Earth Hospice Rites in October 2022 as an online, ongoing, facilitated space to lament, celebrate, share, and offer mindful attention to the places and species we love that are endangered by climate change. The short 20-minute sessions have drawn individuals from around the globe who desire an ongoing place to honor their grief for what is being lost even as we also sustain our roles, responsibilities, and actions to address the plight of planet Earth. Each gathering revolves around a particular theme and includes reflections by the hosts and at least one opportunity for participants to join in the conversation, whether by sharing with a partner in a Zoom breakout room, writing their responses to a question in the chat, or joining in a ceremony.
This guide to facilitating Earth Hospice Rites is intended to help others grow in confidence to offer this practice to their own communities. It includes reflections on the philosophy behind Earth Hospice Rites as well as instructions on how to facilitate a gathering of your own and suggestions for themes and structure.
Meet Alison and Trebbe
The Rev. Alison Cornish serves as the Coordinator of the Chaplaincy Initiative at the BTS Center. Alison spent the first half of her professional life working as an historic preservationist and architectural historian, primarily in New England and on Long Island, NY. After 20 years of work with museums, municipalities and nonprofit organizations, Alison attended Andover Newton Theological Seminary in response to a felt sense of call directly from Earth to address what is it that we are doing in our daily lives and habits that is destroying the planet that we inhabit.
Following CPE, field education in interfaith work and parish ministry, and ordination in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, Alison served congregations on Long Island while also embarking on studies with the Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy and Dominican sister Miriam McGillis. Alison became a GreenFaith Fellow in 2013, and a Climate Reality Project presenter in 2017. She has served as Senior Director of Programs at Partners for Sacred Places, Executive Director of Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light, Director of Seminary and Congregational Initiatives at Interfaith Philadelphia, and as the Affiliated Community Minister at First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia.
Alison’s facilitation work includes the Work That Reconnects, training-the-trainers for Civil Conversations, group practice of Nonviolent Communication, and the curriculum “Healthy Congregations.” A Program Consultant for the BTS Center since 2021, her work has focused on ecological and climate grief, religious imagination, and chaplaincy in a climate-changed world. Alison and her husband Pat live in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, on the unceded lands of the Nipmuc and Pocumtuc peoples, in the watershed of the Connecticut River. When not working, Alison can be found along, on, and in, a local natural body of water, currently the Deerfield River.
Trebbe Johnson is the author of Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Broken Places, and other books, as well as many articles and essays that explore the human bond with nature. She is also the founder and director of the global community Radical Joy for Hard Times, devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places. She lives in Ithaca, New York.