Editors’ note: In April 2022, Mark L. MacDonald resigned as National Indigenous Anglican Archbishop and relinquished the exercise of ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada due to acknowledged sexual misconduct. His resignation was announced by the Most Rev. Linda Nicholls, archbishop and primate of the Anglican Church of Canada.
REPENTANCE, SAYS RABBINIC teaching, is one of seven things that preceded the creation of the universe. Without it, Creation could not survive. In our own time, we will witness the truth of this teaching in painful clarity.
The crisis of climate disruption is directly and intimately related to an unsustainable exploitation of Creation’s resources and the ecospheres that create those resources. By design, this exploitation only benefits a few, a few mostly shielded from the consequences of this obscene theft. The great mass of humanity is not shielded. People living in poverty, racialized minorities, and Indigenous peoples—those least responsible for this planetary breakdown—are the primary targets of climate injustice.
For some, it seems adequate to simply adjust their disposal of some of the waste and by-products of exploitive consumption. This has recently taken on an air of piety. Others look forward to technological and economic solutions that promise that the wealthy few can consume their way out of trouble.
While there will be many aspects to a livable future, the most critical is the one also most ignored. There is no livable future without a spiritual revolution that will have its essence in repentance. Though repentance is an increasingly small part of contemporary Christian conversation, it will be the framework of the livable future that economic, political, and technological solutions find elusive.
Last summer, I attended a wake in an Indigenous community in rural British Columbia. We gathered in an area besieged by relentless misery. This community holds generations of trauma delivered by a culture that openly announced its plan to eliminate them from the land and dismantle their culture, clan, and families. When I arrived, the members had recently learned of the discovery of the remains of 215 children who lost their lives in a genocidal system that had no interest in documenting their lives. This happened in a residential school in a nearby town. Later in the summer, the same people in this area suffered severe and unusual heat, wildfires, and, in the autumn, devastating floods. Though the brutal weather is undoubtedly related to climate injustice, a larger crime is the built-in vulnerability resulting from the systemic poverty necessary to produce extreme wealth for the few.
At the communal wake, a very sad gathering had a moment of hope that tied the faith of the elders with the living hope of a world that is coming into our midst now. An elder rose and prayed in her own language, praying in the name and life of Jesus. She, in the weakness of her age and its fill of suffering, was a voice of past, present, and future spiritual power and its love.
In her faith and courage, we saw a path to the future—if only we would let it disciple us. Another world system is making every effort to disciple us into death. We must choose the repentance that is Creation’s life and foundation, the repentance that is the doorway to life.
Mark L. MacDonald is the National Indigenous Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Canada.
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