Regenerative practices are relational by necessity. When we care for the earth, we are caring for ourselves and our neighbors. It’s this relational aspect of earthkeeping that generates and regenerates visions of hope and community that we need to carry us forward.
My name is Rachel Wyffels (she/her), and I’m interning with the Climate Conscious Chaplaincy Initiative at The BTS Center. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the ancestral homeland of the Dakhóta Oyáte, where I am an MDiv. student at Luther Seminary and a candidate for pastoral ministry with the Lutheran Church (ELCA). I’m so glad to be joining The BTS Center team this semester!
Welcome to “Relationality of Earthcare“:the third edition of Murmurations. This edition will come to subscribers’ inboxes in four installations. It’s also here online. Through this edition, you’ll hear again and again that none of us can do good earthcare alone. And good earthcare requires good care for one another.
In this edition, you’ll find:
- The beautiful phrase that Climate Chaplain Gabrielle Gelderman says when faced with the enormity of polycrisis
- Stories about chaplaincy with our domestic creature kin
- What lies at the intersection of “I want to” and “I need to”
- An invitation to learn more about the evolution of climate anxiety — here at The BTS Center
- Other resources and events
Warmly,
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“There’s been a sea change in how society understands grief.”
For Rob Gierka, pet chaplaincy opens the door for earth chaplaincy. The transformation and love that animals bring into our lives becomes the means by which we can see our relationship with the earth differently.
I (Rachel) got to sit down with Pet Chaplain Rob Gierka to learn about his work and the organization he co-leads with Karen Duke.
Rob has “always been an environmentalist” and has a deep love of the biosphere. After the destruction of Hurricane Rollie in his hometown of Raleigh, NC, Rob became the chair of the Congregational Care Committee at a Baptist congregation. During that time, he also trained as an interfaith chaplain, completing CPE at a hospital in Raleigh.
After volunteering for three years, Rob created Pet Chaplain in 2004, a “community service organization dedicated to providing interfaith spiritual care and educational resources to people who love animals and grieve their loss.”
Rob shared that he has observed a “sea change” in how society understands grief. In years past, grief was understood in sequential stages as in the Kübler-Ross model (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). In recent decades, more people have awakened to the importance of integrating grief into their lives, acknowledging, and honoring how loss forever shapes our lives. As climate change becomes a more common shared reality, chaplains will increasingly be called to help integrate the grief of losses and irreversible destruction into our everyday existence.
Spiritual traditions that have influenced Rob include:
- The St. Francis tradition of Catholicism, known for its “heart connection with animals and with the earth,” as Rob calls it;
- Diamond Rock, a sacred place to indigenous peoples located in what is presently upstate New York;
- The Baptist tradition that he comes from; and
- The “groundedness” of the Jewish tradition that has influenced him
Rob and Karen anticipate the release of three books this fall and winter:
- Heart Animals: Sacred Stories About Pets Who Change Our Lives
- Always in My Heart: Coping Creatively With Pet Loss
- Just an Animal: Reflections on the Human-Animal Bond and Western Culture
You can find all three and learn more about pet chaplaincy here.
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From soil to sangha, relationality is at the heart of everything that Cam McCartin (they/he) is about.
Cam is a Master of Divinity student in Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity School who is dedicated to promoting agriculture as a locus for Buddhist practice. They also help manage the Youth Climate Corps at Eastie Farm, a community-based non-profit in East Boston that “pursues climate justice, food security, and community resilience.” When asked what about his work is most important to him, Cam gratefully and energetically responds, “The people at work animate me.”
Cam characterizes their journey to the intersection of Buddhism and the environment as a “circuitous path.” They enjoy working with young people and providing opportunities to demystify the environmental sector. Though Cam does not describe themself as a chaplain, community care and spiritual care with other young people are central to their vocation.
In July, Cam led Climate Corps fellows to testify at the Massachusetts State House in support of a Food Justice Frontline Program. Recognizing the intersectionality of food justice, economic justice, and climate justice, the program would expand outreach and education for food access programs such as SNAP and HIP, as well as increase opportunities for food justice jobs specifically for people who live in overburdened communities.
Cam locates gratitude at the heart of their practice as the meeting point between necessity (“I have to”) and desire (“I want to”). They also emphasize the importance of good friendship for the whole of the spiritual life. Traditions that have influenced them include Thich Nhat Hanh’s lineage of Vietnamese Zen in high school, Rinzai Zen and Vipassana in college, and Sōtō Zen, which has become his spiritual home since working a growing season as a farm apprentice at Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center in 2022. Cam also finds home in many interfaith friendships.
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(Re)building Relationships:
Good Medicine for the Climate Crisis
Tuesday, December 9
12-1pm ET • Online
As spiritual care providers, you’re invited to a dynamic, insightful discussion with justice advocates and social scientists:
- Joshua Moses (co-founder, Education Ecologies Collective) and
- Sarah Jaquette Ray (author, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet).
Anxiety is fraying our social infrastructure: friendships, collegial relationships, and work and learning environments.
Come to learn what constitutes good medicine to help support a spiritual and ethical life characterized by connection. Click here to register for free.
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Announcing a new climate-conscious CPE program
Led by Rev. Karen Hutt & the JED Center
In partnership with the JED Center (an accredited ACPE Center based in Connecticut) Rev. Karen Hutt (ACPE Educator) will be leading the first ever Climate Based/Climate Conscious CPE program in the United States beginning in 2026.
Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) is a foundational requirement for many seminary students in the United States. Traditionally, the primary goal of this intensive experiential learning is to prepare clergy for the challenging work of providing spiritual care to congregants and patients experiencing existential crises, personal transitions or traumatic events.
More recently CPE has created alternative sites for students to do their clinical work and reflection that are outside of churches and hospitals. This has created many new opportunities for educators and students to provide a variety of care modalities in courts, harm reduction programs, libraries, unhoused encampments and community centers. Click to learn more.
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Based in Orange County, California, formerly of Treaty Six territory in Edmonton, Gabrielle Gelderman offers spiritual care, most often to young people, inviting care seekers to ask courageous questions—about grief, love, and what it means to live in the face of uncertainty. In our conversation, Gabrielle reflects on the deep skills, practices, and commitments that shape her approach to care in a time of intersecting polycrises.
Gabrielle, paint us a picture of the spiritual work you offer.
It depends on the person I’m sitting across from. Sometimes it feels like a space to slow down and meet whatever arises in them. I love spiritual care work and chaplaincy because they can be so open, which can be a challenge, but also so beautiful. It brings in this kind of trust in the mystery.
I used to work in a hospital, and it taught me this immediately and concretely—because when you walk into the hospital room of someone who’s dying, you can’t fix anything. You have to find what love can do. What a caring, slow presence can do in a space of grief. I’m simply providing a space for love to happen.
You mentioned a direct translation of a competency you gained from the hospital and its impact on your current work. What else from your hospital experience have you carried with you?
A big takeaway was just how lonely people are. It affirmed how hard it is for people to hold grief—of any kind—without community. It’s a big reality check, realizing how many people feel like they’re alone in it. As a result, I encourage people to find and invest in community, because that’s the only way to do the healing work and stay connected to your life.
Tell us more about the terminology you’re using. I’m enjoying exploring the language people use to describe themselves and their work.
I use the term climate chaplain. A lot of people don’t even know what ‘chaplain’ means in wider circles, and people have a lot of connotations with the word’ climate’. I have also used “politically informed chaplaincy or spiritual care work,” which is a bit of a mouthful.
I came to climate work through organizing, as an activist and organizer. That was my world. It was very political. And then I made the shift to spiritual care. The work has been beautiful and so needed, but it’s felt good to try to keep my feet in both worlds. I invite the people I’m with to do the same. I challenge them because we can often be more comfortable in one world than the other, and we neglect the other.
In my chaplaincy classes, professors have stressed that a key point of chaplaincy is justice work. I’ve come to think of it as preventative medicine for future care seekers. We’re helping people now, but if we can move toward a more just society, we’re stopping future trauma and harm. In the meantime, tell us about how you handle setbacks.
For a while, I felt I needed to acknowledge how bad things are at the start of every circle or session. I’ve eased off on that a little, but it’s still essential to make space for it. People are in different places—some are angry, some went through that anger years ago. Your experience of the crisis depends on your social-political situation.
For example, Indigenous peoples and communities of color have long reckoned with polycrisis. So I honor where people are.
There’s a phrase I love and use: You made it just in time. Because when people wake up to a crisis, they often feel guilt or urgency. The phrase is a reminder to honor where you are right now. Everyone has their own timeline.
I also ask people: Where is the love right now in your life? Not where you think it should be. Where is it? And where is the grief? That’s your life. That’s where the work is.
The accrediting process currently lacks guidelines on climate-informed competencies for spiritual care providers. What essential skills and knowledge would you want every spiritual care provider to possess, regardless of their setting?
Two things: somatics as a field of healing and collective liberation.
Somatics is about how we hold everything in our bodies: trauma, memory, spirit. Chaplains have intuition about this, but we also need to do our own somatic work, to tune in to what our bodies are saying, and invite the same in the people we serve.
Secondly, collective liberation, referring to the racial justice concept that our liberation is bound up with one another’s.
Chaplains long for creative ways to approach the climate crisis and the accompanying spiritual crisis, both for themselves and those who seek care. What new and creative interventions come to mind you’d like to share?
Yes, people want concrete practices and rituals. It’s something we’ve talked about in The BTS Center’s Conversation Circle. Someone shared, “I work in a hospital where people can’t leave. I’ve tried to bring a patient outside to sit in the courtyard, but the nurses don’t allow it. What do we do?” They want to know how to connect with Earth and land in spaces where people might be indoors without seeing the sun or feeling the fresh air for months. It’s devastating to think about.
The group felt the grief and wrongness of being in such a setting. People are saying, “There’s so much I can’t do, but what can I do? What could I bring?”
Those in the Conversation Circle shared beautiful ideas that were so simple. One was to bring a seed to a patient or client, and ask them to imbue the seed with hopes and dreams, or grief, or whatever it might be they want to share, or maybe let go of, and then the care provider offers to plant the seed somewhere as a way of creating new life out of grief, or new life out of whatever they needed to pass on.
Rituals like this offer a sense of creating new life out of loss. There were many ideas like that—simple, beautiful, practical.
When humanity started to move away from Earth-based cultures and rituals, we lost critical relational skills. We need those back for the hard work ahead of cultural and ecosystem repair, as well as healthy grief work. What qualities and skills do people need to grow and maintain community?
It’s easy to idealize community and then neglect it in your own life, day in and day out, because we live in a culture that encourages that. We live in bodies that can be scared of real community.
There are several important skills we need to turn to: first to acknowledge the communities we’re already a part of simply by being alive – the ecosystems that we’re a part of, these webs, these complex webs of human economy and interaction and production. We see these in where our food comes from and where our waste goes. Everything that’s in our living space was created by someone’s hands, and then brought to us by someone else’s hands.
These are our current communities to tend. Then also to be serious about giving and receiving care to the people, places, and animals in our proximity, whether physically or virtually.
We’ve all had those moments—a fire, a flood—when we realize we don’t know our neighbors well enough to ask for help. Building safety nets is real, practical work. Asking for help and receiving it well has become a spiritual practice for me.
Lastly, conflict. Community is messy. If it’s not, you’re probably not really in community. I grew up in a very conflict-avoidant family, community, and church. I have a lot to relearn. It’s hard. I respect people who do restorative justice work—it’s going to be essential as stress and breakdown increase. Start now. Learn how to handle conflict well in your own relationships so you can help others, too.
I imagine a reader, feeling the overwhelm, telling themselves: “Now I have to work on conflict resolution and racial justice and my own trauma. And now I have to learn about somatics.” The list goes on and on for the things we could focus on in our lives and chaplaincy work.
I want to remind them to surrender, trust, and provide space. I believe the only way to do this challenging work is to return to the present, again and again.
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Now Accepting Applications
Climate Conscious Chaplaincy Initiative Internship
If you’re actively pursuing graduate-level education in chaplaincy or in pastoral or spiritual care: we welcome you to apply for The BTS Center’s Climate Conscious Chaplaincy Initiative Internship.
Interested? Learn more and apply here.
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A Practice for Impossible Questions
an Earthbound Practice for you
We hope you’re nourished by this 15-minute episode of the Climate Changed podcast — a guided meditation through the spiritual practice of uncertainty. Listen here.
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