Grief is part of contextual mission, and the land can teach us how to hold it in ways the church often struggles to. We are good at moving a room from trouble to hope inside an hour, but some griefs don’t run to a Sunday timetable, and when we rush them we fail the people, and the places, that most need us to slow down.

When things at home were difficult as a boy, I went outside. There was a stream half a mile down the road from our bungalow, under a little bridge, with a wild yellow orchid on the bank in summer. I didn’t call it prayer, it was just the one place nothing was going to raise its voice. For years I told that as a neat origin story for Mountain Pilgrims. Writing the book I had to admit something harder. The stream gave me a door, somewhere to slip out when the room got too loud. It kept me safe physically and mentally from the feelings of despair, but it never taught me how to stay present while the loudness was actually happening, and nobody taught me how to grieve what was happening, only how to be comforted by it.

It took ten years on the Cumbrian fells to start learning that. Over that decade I watched the Lake District change. Locals priced out, farmers unable to buy land, the post Covid surge of campers leaving wild places trashed, a warming and drying climate. Coming from a farming family I filed most of it under environmental concern, that safe abstract place where you can care about something without it costing you anything. Over time I started to use the word grief out loud on a walk it cost me something, but it also helped.

Sophie Strand writes about mycelium slowly breaking down a fallen log, rot as resurrection in slow motion. That image took me a long time to stop flinching from, because like many of us I was formed in a faith that wants to get from Good Friday to Easter Sunday as quickly as possible. But Holy Saturday is part of the story too. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus even though he knew what was coming next. Paul talks about the whole of creation groaning and waiting. Grief isn’t a delay on the way to resurrection, it is part of the holy work. The log doesn’t apologise for taking years, nobody stands over it demanding it hurries up, and eventually it becomes soil and soil becomes the next thing.

So when I talk about composting despair, I mean letting grief sit long enough to be broken down into something we can carry, rather than burying it whole where it stays toxic, or rushing it into a hope nobody has earned yet. And it isn’t a solo practice. Mycelium works with bacteria, insects and weather. Donna Haraway calls this becoming with, and grief held in company on a fellside does something that grief carried alone never managed for me as a boy. The land becomes a partner in that grieving. It shows us decay done without shame or hurry, in a way human institutions almost never model. It a way of meeting the soul of the place.

Early on in Mountain Pilgrims we tried something. Everyone wrote their name in chalk on black card and put it in their pocket. We walked to Cathedral Cave and down a long tunnel, and at the darkest point we switched off our torches and I put a tea light in a jar. We watched it go out as the oxygen ran out and stayed in the dark for a moment. I was nervous it would feel forced, and some of it didn’t land, a couple of cards hadn’t faded at all. But when we took them out at the end and saw most of our names fading, something deeper happened. Nobody rushed to fix anyone. We refused, together, to skip the grieving and simply held the space.

For pioneers this matters. If contextual mission is about our soul meeting the soul of a place and its people, then we have to be willing to meet that place in its grief as well as its beauty. Many of the communities we serve are carrying loss, of industry, of land, of young people moving away, of a whole way of life, and a church that can only offer quick hope will never really be present there.

So hit me up with comments:

– Is your church or pioneering community able to hold lament that doesn’t resolve quickly? What helps?
– What is your place grieving right now, and how might you stay with that rather than rushing past it?

*This post draws on Part Two of my book, The Soul of a Place and Its People: Re-Remembering Contextual Mission, which looks back on ten years of Mountain Pilgrims in Cumbria.*