Lament and hope in a time of climate crisis
One year ago, fire swept through the mountain town of Jasper, Alta., reducing St. Mary and St. George Anglican Church to its stone foundation, ringed by ash and charred timbers. The absence of that sacred space lingers, a scar in the town’s centre and in the hearts of those who prayed there.
Almost exactly one year later, Toronto woke to a different wound: for days, the city ranked second-worst in the world for air quality as wildfire smoke drifted in from hundreds of kilometres away. The smell of burning forests hung over high-rises, seeping into lungs and homes.
In these moments, whether in a mountain valley or a sprawling metropolis, climate disruption becomes impossible to hold at arm’s length. It settles into our breath, our landscapes, and our sacred spaces.
Across the country, the signs are multiplying. In Vancouver, Christ Church Cathedral has become a cooling centre during extreme heat waves, its shaded nave and humming air conditioners offering refuge to those most vulnerable. To the north, in the Yukon community of Mayo, the Anglican church of St. Mary with St. Mark stands on ground once locked in permafrost. That long-frozen stability is giving way. As the earth shifts beneath it, parishioners watch cracks creep toward the foundation, carrying the fear that without intervention, their church could be lost.
While the loss of a historic church building is a visible marker of our changing times, the effects reach far deeper. “In the North, communities are especially affected by climate change,” says Archdeacon Jeffrey Mackie-Deernsted, priest-in-charge at St. Mary with St. Mark. “It is said that the Yukon is warming three times faster than the global average. This affects the salmon population that First Nations in the Yukon depend upon… Recently, communities have held prayers for the return of the salmon. The Church has a role in being in solidarity and working for environmental protection alongside the First Nations.”
These stories, of fire, smoke, heat and thaw trace a single truth: creation is groaning, and the church stands within that lament, holding fast to its calling to embody hope and point toward renewal.
Grief as kinship
Genesis tells us humanity was formed from the dust of the ground, animated by God’s breath. To love the earth is, in a sense, to love our own body. Poet-translator David Hinton calls this “elemental kinship”: our continuity with the very elements of soil, air, and water. The Incarnation deepens this truth: God took elemental form in Jesus, divinizing the dust itself.
When wildfires raze a parish or melting ground undermines its walls, the grief we feel is not sentimental environmentalism but the ache of injury to our own flesh. Like Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s tomb, knowing resurrection would follow, we can feel the wound fully without rushing past it. This is the Christ-like posture toward a warming, unravelling creation: to stay tender in the presence of loss.
Too often, we avoid lament because it feels like surrender. Yet lament can also be an act of fierce love, holding its gaze on what is broken instead of turning away. In Mayo, parishioners still gather for worship while the ground beneath their church shifts. Their faith rests in the conviction that worship and care will endure, whatever changes the earth may bring.
Lament, in this sense, is also hope. It is the stubborn act of standing with creation in its suffering, trusting that God’s Spirit is present in the ash, the smoke, the heat and the thaw.
Hope as resilience
Hope, as Scripture frames it, goes beyond naïve optimism. It is the steady work of loving and building even when change cannot be undone. When Christ Church Cathedral opened its doors as a cooling centre, the act did not fix the climate crisis. But it offered something deeply needed: protection for life, honour for the image of God in overheated bodies, and a place where dignity could be preserved when the streets became unbearable.
This is the shape of hope available to all of us. We may not be able to prevent the next wildfire or halt the thawing of permafrost, but we can keep showing up in advocacy, in care, and in practices that remind us we belong to the earth.
From Jasper being reduced to stones to Toronto’s smoke, from Vancouver’s cooling refuge to Mayo’s shifting ground, the signs are clear: the church’s ministry in this century will be inseparable from the climate reality. This work is woven into the very heart of the gospel.
We are dust and breath, earth and Spirit. To walk as Christ did is to walk as kin with creation, tender to its wounds, steadfast in its hope for renewal.
A year after the fire, Jasper’s hillsides are dotted with green shoots among the blackened trunks. New life emerges slowly, shyly, from the ash.
So it can be with us: in lament, we remain rooted; in hope, we rise.
