Belonging to the World through Body, Trust, and Trinity: Climate Change and Pastoral Care with University Students

Abstract

This article explores how pastoral care is performed in an age of climate change. University students suffer from a wide range of stresses, reducing their well-being. Climate change compounds these stress reactions, even where students are not directly affected. As climate change affects concrete, material matters, human reactions to it may no longer be viewed and treated as purely inner psychic states. Thus, climate change disrupts usual divisions of material, social, and mental features as separate categories, underscoring instead the close-knit relations between them. Given the far-reaching ways climate change affects mental health, the article presents an ethnographical-theologically-driven model for basic conversation in pastoral care with students in the midst of escalating climate events. Making use of theories from anthropology, psychology, and theology, this article builds on in-depth interviews with Danish university chaplains about their pastoral care with students. The model extrapolates from these theories how pastoral care may support students in the era of climate change through a triad of organizing themes that come to the fore in the interviews: “Mothering the Content”, “Loving Vital Force”, and “Befriending the Environment”.

1. Background

“Only rarely do students seek pastoral care specifically expressing a need for help because of stress arising from climate change. However, the whole preoccupation with the climate … it is a part of the students’ scenario for the future. It enters the pastoral care room through statements like: ‘I’m now going to live vegan’ or ‘What do we do about the globe?’ or ‘I wonder if we have a future at all?’. The utterances are placed in the periphery. Yet, climate change remains an underlying concern in the foreground conversations. Remarks about food and second-hand clothes, open questions about the acceleration … how difficult it is to stop on your own, like: ‘Can I change it myself?’”

Student Chaplain H

Pastoral care at university has to work with a multiplicity of stress states in students. Students suffer from different kinds of stress, such as anxiety, depression, bereavement, discrimination, suicidal ideation, failed studies, loneliness, abuse, breakups, troubled relationships, family, and interpersonal functioning (Smith and Khawaja 2011; Field et al. 2011; Haldorsen et al. 2014; Appiah-Brempong et al. 2014; Sharp and Theiler 2018; Ribeiro et al. 2018; January et al. 2018; Thai and Moore 2018; Russell et al. 2019; Klein and Martin 2021). Psychological stress is classically defined as “a particular relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as taxing or exceeding his or her resources and endangering his or her well-being” (Lazarus and Folkman 1984, p. 19). Studies have shown that high levels of stress reduce students’ well-being, and this negatively impacts their performance outcomes (Keech et al. 2018). Even though stress is experienced and often treated individually, it can also be viewed as a collective form of societal reaction (Kirkegaard and Brinkmann 2015).

Studies on students’ mental health have shown positive effects of psychological treatment and prevention and social support (Regehr et al. 2013; Rith-Najarian et al. 2019; Maymon and Hall 2021). Further, there is a growing awareness that spiritual well-being and religiousness have a beneficial impact on students suffering from stress (Krägeloh et al. 2015; Fabbris et al. 2016; Hai et al. 2018; Leung and Pong 2021). Hence, the literature indicates that pastoral care may also help youth and students in crisis (Cardoso et al. 2012; Murphy and Holste 2016). Addressing different types of stress and distress in the context of pastoral care, the American pastoral theologian Robert C. Dykstra (1997), in his book Counseling Troubled Youth, addressed how young people are overwhelmed by forsaken hopes for a meaningful future. Dykstra drew attention to the importance of pastoral caregivers having “theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom” to offer youth and students on their way to finding their “self”.

Following this, recent literature also shows that climate change concerns can lead to different kinds of psychological distress and stress—a phenomenon often called “climate anxiety” (McBride et al. 2021; Pihkala 2020). Young people experience a wide range of emotions related to climate change, including anxiety, anger, grief, fear, powerlessness, and hopelessness, even though they may not directly be affected by the climate changes (Wachholz et al. 2014; van Nieuwenhuizen et al. 2021; Burke et al. 2018; Lancet 2021). Studies indicate that higher pro-environmental behavior among students may be associated with greater well-being, possibly because it satisfies basic psychological needs like autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Senbel et al. 2014; van Nieuwenhuizen et al. 2021). However, while activism may prevent feelings of helplessness and increase young people’s sense of empowerment, meaning, and purpose, it may also lead to decreased health due to increasing the stress states (van Nieuwenhuizen et al. 2021).

Studies also suggest that different kinds of psychotherapy may have a positive impact on stress from climate change (Budziszewska and Jonsson 2021). However, climate stress relief may be viewed from other perspectives and disciplines beyond psychotherapy. Climate change stresses are not just feelings to be got rid of but indicate lessons to be learned; climate change stress should not be seen just as a problem to be solved or a condition to be medicated but rather an important encounter with our awareness of our impact on the world (Pihkala 2020). We are dealing with a widespread—and often unconscious—environmental anxiety which posits a pastoral challenge (see, for example, Campbell-Reed and Lartey 2015; Pihkala 2016; Calder and Morgan 2016; LaMothe 2016; Miller-McLemore 2020).

Given the far-reaching ways in which climate change affects psychological well-being among students and the youth, pastoral theology and care may have an important role to play. In developing alternative dialogues, supportive social networks, and a living relationship with the Earth, pastoral theology and care may “think and be otherwise” (LaMothe 2021). Here, some basic questions arise: How might pastoral care conversations with students respond to states of stress under the further pressure of climate change? How might these conversations create a basis for the release of stress whilst simultaneously nourishing opportunities for positive changes in the action and thinking of the students in their relationship with the Earth?

2. Aim, Empirical Research, and Methodology

2.1. Aim, Argument, and Outline

This article explores the basic contact in pastoral care between chaplains and university students, addressing the context of climate change. By scrutinizing empirical practices in pastoral care grounded in theological and psychological theory, the aim is to unfold “a sustainable pastoral care practice” in the midst of escalating climate events.

The argument is that pastoral care, as it is often intuitively done through social and material enactments, may hold an emerging climate pastoral care. Such pastoral care would contain practices concerned with alleviating stress but would also be given through communication and a spacious image of God that is related to the single individual through social-material manifoldness and communality. I aim to show how pastoral care contains a trust-building and embodied practice as a basis for change as it unfolds a doctrine of the Trinity which breaks open traditional images of God. Attaching theory to practice may open new insights and possibilities for pastoral care addressing climate change. Thus, this article establishes a constructive pastoral theological perspective, not with the purpose of being in agreement with one particular theology, but for the purpose of outlining a grasp in pastoral care practice which is consistent with students’ contemporary understanding of reality.

As a part of my ethnographical-theological research project “Sustainable pastoral care and stress release”, this article builds on my in-depth interviews with Danish university chaplains about their student pastoral care. Seeking some kind of order in the chaplains’ many narratives, descriptions of their practices, observations, and interpretations, my analysis takes a point of departure in the chaplains’ reflections on how stressors from climate change come to the fore as viewed through the prism of a philosophical-anthropological-inspired repertoire on climate change (Bruno Latour). Using a theological repertoire, making reference to a feminist interpretation of Trinity as “Mother, Lover and Friend” (Sallie McFague), and a psychological repertoire, making use of concepts of “epistemic trust” and “mentalizing” (Peter Fonagy and colleagues), I develop a pastoral care model extrapolated through a triad of organizing themes, as they come to the fore in the interviews: “Mothering the content”, “Loving vital force”, and “Befriending the environment”. The leading idea is that pastoral care conversations transcend differences between everyday language and Christian theological language. In fact, the three themes cannot be separated in pastoral care conversations, rather they unfold together as a network of connections, which transcends the understanding of them individually. These connections create a network of entanglements that tie together the psychological, the pastoral, the theological, and climate-related issues.

2.2. Empirical Material and Method

The empirical data derive from recordings and notes from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with participant observation carried out among eight Danish university chaplains from the Danish Lutheran Church. The inclusion of chaplains intended a wide socio-demographic distribution. The ethnographical method used is in line with ethnographical principles in anthropology and pastoral theology (Spradley 1979; Moschella 2008). The duration of the interviews varied between 75 and 150 min. Audio records were transcribed. The chaplains were asked to describe their practice of pastoral care in detail in relation to different kinds of students’ stress.

Ethical guidelines were followed accurately in relation to The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ALLEA 2017) and The Danish Data Protection Agency (Datatilsynet.dk n.d.). The chaplains were provided with information about the research before the interview and informed that they had the right to withdraw from the study. Chaplains gave their written consent. All the names mentioned were converted into random letters to secure anonymity for the persons who participated in the research project.

2.3. Methodology

This article’s use of the term “pastoral care” starts from a broad meaning of the concept, as it addresses diversity in gender, age, race, sexuality, social class, and religious and non-religious/secular convictions and values in order to include everyone who seeks pastoral care. Thus, the concept of pastoral care operates in line with Rodney J. Hunter’s broad intercultural definition, here cited in a slightly moderated version:

“Pastoral care is considered to be any form of personal ministry to individuals and to family and community relations by representative religious persons (ordained or lay) and by their community of faith, who understand and guide their caring efforts out of a theological perspective rooted in the tradition of faith.”

(Hunter and Ramsay 2005, p. x)

In order to form a useful clinical resource for the pastoral care of that particular emotional dilemma that our ecological crisis creates, I draw on three grounds of theories—from anthropology, theology, and psychology—that inform the practices of pastoral care, as each of them in different ways corresponds through different kinds of perspectives that operate and relate—with their similarities and differences—in constructive ways.

The eco-anthropological theory presented draws on the constructivist Bruno Latour’s (1993, 2017) “empirical philosophy”. It holds critiques against a modern worldview and argues that humans and nature—instead of separating them from one another—become more and more interconnected as entangled hybrids. As a co-architect of Actor Network Theory, Latour is preoccupied with tracing “the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors including objects, subjects, human beings, machines, animals, ‘nature’, ideas, organizations, inequalities, scale and sizes, and geographical arrangements” (Law 2009, p. 141). Thus, Latour claims that religion holds the language and passion for the force of the world in which everything is entangled. In this sense, this amodern approach to science and religion can lead us through our crisis in order to care for the Earth.

In the context of pastoral care practice, a theological “translation” of Latour’s anthropological view is necessary in order to address and interpret beliefs, faith, and trust with further regard to the cultural (and confessional) context in Danish society. Turning to theological theory, I present a protestant, constructive, and postmodern perspective by the eco-feminist theologian Sallie McFague (1987, 2008). McFague argues that God is not a distant supernatural force but incarnated in the world as “the body of God”—a God who will hold us “close through our greatest fears” (McFague 2008, p. 172). By use of McFague’s theology correlated to anthropology, Latour, in turn, presents a theo-anthropological ground, which unfolds the relation of nature-culture, that shows complementary to McFague’s framework. However, McFague’s systematic theology and Latour’s empirical philosophy raise the question of how theology and anthropology are clinically applicable in pastoral care in order to work as a stress releasing mental health practice related to the individual—as it is simultaneously not only related to self and others but directly connected with communality, the collective, society, and world.

In addressing this clinical need in pastoral care, I turn to psychological theory. The concept “mentalization”, developed by Fonagy and colleagues, has strong roots in psychoanalysis. I suggest this therapeutic framework for mental health as a stress releasing and “Earth healing” practice in pastoral care, as mentalizing builds up (“epistemic”) trust in care practice through its work with relating self to others and the world. Mentalizing is related to everyday concepts, such as thoughtfulness, empathy, and self-knowledge, and integrates elements from, e.g., psychoanalytical theory, evolution theory, developmental psychology, affect theory, neurobiology, theory of mind, social cognition, meta-cognition, and attachment theory. Mentalization-based therapy (MBT) has proven to be useful in the treatment of mental disorders and has further expanded the knowledge on mentalization in relation to mental health in general.

Emphasizing in this context that pastoral care practice is not MBT in its classical clinical form and that pastoral care does not indicate psychological treatment as such, I suggest that pastoral care may be inspired by the ways that mentalizing, among others, highlights the role of imagination in the intersubjectivity between self, others, and the world. I suggest that this imaging may come near to both Latour’s anthropological understanding and McFague’s theological interpretation of our connectedness to Earth, indicating a kind of openness towards the spiritual—an openness which is further supported by scholars in mentalization, who point to the fact that clients, in general, are more inclined to talk about religious and spiritual matters than psychotherapists (Allen 2013).

Altogether, I relate these three theories to the empirical material from the University chaplains—as they unfold and crisscross through similarities and differences—and suggest that they create a room of conversation in pastoral care practice, which has the opportunity to use theological and pastoral knowledge and religious beliefs to solve environmental issues. Hence, as I draw on implicit ideas of pastoral care imagined as a “web” (Miller-McLemore 1996) or “network” (Johannessen-Henry 2012, 2013, 2017), I leave the suggested model open as actualizations of unprejudiced, anti-hierarchical, and devotional spaces.

3. “Down to Earth”: A Point of Departure for an Ethnographical-Theologically-Driven Pastoral Care Model

“The condition of living with climate change lies as foil on everything in the conversations. They [the students] get in contact with basic anxiety, the anxiety of vanishing. The situation of climate changes appears in one way or the other—intensified by the fact that we seemingly are much, much closer to disaster than we have earlier believed. This triggers conflicts between the generations; it is my boomer-generation who prompted the climate changes and placed the whole responsibility on the youth. So, when we present explanations of meaning (of life), they do not listen at all, saying: ‘You have really no idea what you have done. You have created a situation that leads to the Twilight of the Gods’. I feel it through their anxiety: ‘What is the meaning of life, if we are not here anymore in a few generations?’. The students raise climate issues directly by saying: ‘Well, then there is all that with the climate …’. It is like blind spots appearing in the conversations that you cannot deal with rationally. It’s about gaining more knowledge about it, more, more, more, how to prevent it and what we can do, where is the worst happening, and what is the best to do. It runs constantly on other levels during the pastoral care conversations.”

Student Chaplain C

The quotes from Chaplain H and Chaplain C both illustrate how a deep intensity pervades the pastoral care as it takes place. The content of pastoral care concerning stress from climate change is difficult to represent in all its many different and indirect shapes. As a starting point, the direct expressions regarding climate changes are characterized by being sporadically spread out through a diversity of situations, feelings, states, and beliefs. The expressions come to the fore directly almost only through short statements or quick words and questions which fall into the conversation. Because of this, the climate content is impossible to just mark with a label or distil as “pure” climate change stress separate from the rest of the content. Quite the contrary, it seems like we are dealing with invisible connections and lines, which somehow inseparably cling to the students’ state of mind as “foil”—or even as something penetrating the things that go on in the lives of the students. Student Chaplain Z phrases the impact of climate change like this:

“It is like all over. Like anxiety of the future. Like their future is in liquidation. I can tell the students that it is not an individual problem. Talk with them about it. In itself that is no comfort. That something outside us sets an agenda, that we do not have the power over.”

In many ways, the interviews bear witness to content that takes shape as something intangible and global. At the same time, the narratives are also characterized by being rooted in something local to them—in things that are concrete, bodily, and fleshy, which also “messes” things around in connection to the feelings, thoughts, and beliefs as they flow out during the pastoral care conversations. Continuing with Student Chaplain Z:

“A student said that she had been used to hearing a particular bird coming back to the same place year after year. Suddenly the bird wasn’t there anymore. So, the student googled it and found out that it was endanger of total extermination. She became so devastated and sad that life around us is destroyed. Young people are supposed to expand, while biodiversity and climate are about to crash.”

As exemplified by this quote (which some term: “ecological grief”, Comtesse et al. 2021), the interviews testify that the climate’s state is related dynamically to the students’ states of mind as both global and local. It is experienced as materially connected to feelings of sadness, despair, loneliness, etc. In other words, we are dealing with some kind of entanglement. Rather than trying to divide or split climate change stress in pastoral care from the rest of the content, the interviews show that the global and local, entities and parts, humans and non-humans are inseparably interwoven.

In this respect, the chaplains’ narratives seem to be captured, in different ways, by the thoughts of the philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist Bruno Latour (2017), not least presented in his book Facing Gaia. The pastoral care experiences, at first glance, seem to match his opening image drawn from “The Angel of Geostory” by Stéphanie Ganachaud:

“A dancer is rushing backwards to get away from something she must have found frightening; as she runs, she keeps glancing back more and more anxiously, as if her flight is accumulating obstacles behind her that increasingly impede her movements, until she is forced to turn around. And there she stands, suspended, frozen, her arms hanging loosely, looking at something coming towards her, something even more terrifying than what she was first seeking to escape—until she is forced to recoil. Fleeing from one horror, she has met another, partly created by her flight.”

(Latour 2017, p. 1)

Illustrating the force coming at us in this harrowing form—the “emergence of an enigmatic figure, the source of a horror that was now in front rather than behind” (ibid., p. 2)—Latour seeks to draw the contours of the New Climatic Regime. In this new regime, the physical framework, which has earlier been taken for granted in the modern way of thinking of the world and reality—the ground on which history had always played out—has become unstable. Contradicting the modern view, Earth seems to react to our actions.

In our climate change situation, Latour argues, this force of the Earth may be captured by the metaphor of Gaia. In the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s narrative, Gaia plays the role of a primordial and ancestral force. Gaia (‘Ge’ from the ancient Greek root for ‘earth’) is not a goddess, properly speaking, but a force from the time before the gods (ibid., p. 81). Hence, she is not a figure of harmony. There is nothing maternal about her—in the traditional understanding of “Mother”, anyway; her performances are “multiple, contradictory, hopelessly confused” (ibid., p. 82). In Hesiod’s telling, she animates her children to castrate their father, her husband Uranus. In that, she is an active prophetess and advisor. Gaia makes others act.

Latour calls attention to Gaia because she is presented as the occasion for a return to Earth that allows for a differentiated vision reduced to more modest, that is, “earthbound” views of reality (ibid., p. 4). Gaia reacts to us, calls us. This way, Latour describes Gaia as a force, which indicates the need for humble, situated actions that can break down or make up the blindness and blind-ended Anthropocene—calling attention to the “terrestrial” (terra) forces to become less anthropocentric, as we interact with birds, foods, seas, air (cf. the quote from Student Chaplain Z), and in our scientific approach of things, including the discipline of theology. Latour holds that when we seek to grasp what is coming at us with climate change, we need to “come back down to Earth” (ibid., p. 87).

Relating Latour’s thoughts to the interviews on students’ pastoral care, the point is that it matters how each of us thinks and does—coming from a view of our interaction with Earth. In this sense, supporting the students is not about serving “perspectives” on the world, distancing us from it, but about enacting the world (cf. Mol 2002). This means that pastoral care, which seeks to take this new climatic regime into conscious account, is, in the words of Latour, “to discover a course of treatment—but without the illusion that a cure will come quickly” (Latour 2017, p. 13). Connecting this point to the above quotes from the chaplains on the lack of any possibility of a traditional “safe comfort” through a modern view of ensuring Earth as a stable object, Latour suggests:

“There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world. But, by taking care, we can cure ourselves of believing that we do not belong to it, that the essential question lies elsewhere, that what happens to the world does not concern us. (…) In these matters, hope is a bad counsellor, since we are not in a crisis. We can no longer say ‘this, too, will pass.’ We’re going to have to get used to it. It’s definitive.”

(Ibid., p. 13)

What I suggest here is that in the practice of pastoral care, the local and basic enactments of things, bodily expressions, feelings, and views which drive (and hinder) our being as belonging to the world are not separated from the issue of climate change, but they are interconnected. Climate change is not just something passive “out there” in itself that humans then relate to. Hence, Latour’s alternative narrative is that instead of separating the world into a nature/culture binary, as passiveness and activeness, respectively, (which modern thinking has usually done), we ought to realize that our planet is full of ‘agents’—things—which have the power to act according to their own intention, will, force, desire, need, or function. Our environments are anything but passive. Humans and things are inextricably connected. As Latour puts it:

“Don’t try to define nature alone, for you’ll have to define the term ‘culture’ as well (the human is what escapes nature: a little, a lot, passionately); don’t try to define ‘culture’ alone, either, for you’ll immediately have to define the term ‘nature’ (the human is what cannot ‘totally escape’ the constraints of nature). Which means that we are not dealing with domains but rather with one and the same concept divided into two parts, which turn out to be bound together, as it were, by a sturdy rubber band. (…) They were born together, as inseparable as Siamese twins who hug or hit each other without ceasing to belong to the same body.”

(Ibid., p. 15)

My interviews show precisely that climate change discourse and changes in the environment are not distant issues separated from moods, feelings, beliefs, anger, joy, faith, etc., but are entangled in social activities, disciplines of science being studied, and the imagination of every single student seeking pastoral care. In this sense, climate change is socialized and incorporated into pastoral care practice. “As soon as we abandon the borders between the outside and the inside of an agent, by following these waves of action we begin to modify the scale of the phenomena considered” (ibid., p. 104). Latour speaks of a “multiplicity of modes of action that are capable of intermingling (…) human and nonhuman actors” (ibid., p. 50). The Earth is lively, vital, and active, though certainly not as a single agent or a unified subjectivity. Humans and nature are connected as complex, heterogenic entities, as intensely interwoven hybrids (Latour 1993, 2017). They are not distant but entangled in the same multiple bodies of the world (cf. Latour-quotation above).

From this opening analysis, leading into an earthbound approach in pastoral care, we now turn to a theological view that might further unfold the new climatic regime leading to a more specific model for pastoral care practice. For this purpose, we need a form of God-talk which does not address a God of distance, but a present and participating God—a theology approaching exactly our belonging to the world—the Earth—as the body of God.

4. Climate Theology

“I usually inquire into the students’ projects as crisis may also grow out from them. To most students who write about sustainability, it is seen as a societal task. They can do something for the environment. But some are confused about how slowly science is moving forward—the stress is related to this, even though it is difficult for them to put it directly into words. Ambitions and career, the character of working stress, contributes to channel that anxiety they feel about what is going to happen in the future. Thus, they do something, going out to look at the trees and birds, prefer to bike instead of driving a car, protest against nuclear power. Much merges exactly there. It is a kind of a monk’s understanding of the world, go out and do good. They live by it. Become vegans. Charity. The matter of the climate is such a charity. Sincerely magnanimous motives.”

Student Chaplain X

It clearly emerges from Student Chaplain X’s quote that, in the “repertoire” of everyday experiences, the awareness of climate change is embodied and material. “Events are necessarily local. Somewhere. Situated” (Mol 2002, p. 180). For that reason, pastoral care practice needs a broad image of God or imago dei—a metaphor that is able to hold life’s multiplicity, that is, diversity, difference, connectedness, and the entanglement of humanity and nature—addressed by Latour as the new climatic regime. Such pastoral practice requires theological images and models which are able to express the claims of Christianity in contemporary and vigorous language, which contains embodiment, commonality, imagination, and vision.

In connecting Latour’s thoughts on climate change to God-talk, associations arise to a range of climate theologies that have advanced through decades, not least those related to thinking of Gaia (Ruether 1992; Primavesi 2009). However, in search of a model of God that can develop an empirically-driven grasp for pastoral care communication, I turn to the American theologian Sallie McFague. McFague (2008) was experimenting with alternative, new languages of God and ourselves, later insisting on the need to find a language that addresses the planetary agenda—“with the hope that different action may follow” (p. 3). According to McFague, we become ourselves by acknowledging our radical dependence on God and on our planet. What McFague presents is exactly a theology, which brings the church—in the words of both Latour (cit. above) and McFague—“back down to Earth” (ibid., p. 32). She proposes a God-talk where God is not supernatural, distant from humans, but in which God and humans are entangled and connected. “Because God is always incarnational, always embodied, we can see God’s transcendence immanently” (ibid., p. 76). “In the world as God’s body, God is the source, the centre, the spring, the spirit of all that lives and loves” (ibid., p. 76). This way God is permanently and “bodily” present to us, in all places and times of our world (McFague 1987, p. 60). Humans are not to “rule” but to be responsible for the world (cf. Gen 1:27). McFague writes:

“The significance of the truth that the transcendent God is with us cannot be overestimated as we struggle to care for the Earth. It means that we are not alone as we face the despair that creeps over us when at last, we acknowledge our responsibility for climate change. We do not face this overwhelming problem on our own: God is with us as the source and power of all our efforts to live differently”.

(McFague 2008, p. 77)

Thus, according to McFague (1987, p. xii), theology must try out images which can lead the reality of God’s love into the imagination of today’s people. Working with ideas of “the body of God”, McFague (1987) proposes a metaphor for the Trinity in her book Models of God. For the purpose of a pastoral care model, the Christian dogma of the Trinitarian God—traditionally interpreted as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—offers a symbol or image of God that is fluid, multiple, and relational (Cooper-White 2007). The relations in the Trinity show a true network, a web, an image of God, who is not simple, but rather a multiple One (Keller 2008, p. 64). The image of God as Trinity operates in web structures in the sense that the single parts cannot be separated but hang together as they weave into and out of each other. This web of relations opens for lived and bodily experiences. Through such images, God is experienced physically (Moltmann and Moltmann-Wendel 2003): God is body, not released from the body (Moltmann-Wendel 1995). In this sense, faith in God is organic.

As a corrective to a traditional imperialistic image of God, which typically runs through the patriarchal expositions, McFague proposes an image of the Trinity of God as “Mother”, “Lover”, and “Friend”. She understands the metaphors of God as a parent, lover, and friend of the Earth, which is precisely expressive of God’s very self (McFague 1987, p. 62). As corrective, she argues, these more concisely call attention to heterogeneity, diversity, and difference, and thereby open us for change. As imago dei, humans are called to be Mother, Lover, and Friend to the world, other humans, and non-humans; these specific metaphors originate from the deepest levels of life (ibid., pp. 86–87). To practice the presence of God means to embrace what God embraces: life and love (McFague 2008, p. 172). God is what keeps us from giving up (ibid., p. 173).

In what follows, I make an attempt to organize the chaplains’ numerous practices, experiences, considerations, and intentions about pastoral care with students by letting these reflections cross with McFague’s metaphoric expression of God’s love and rescuing presence. At the same time, I let the interviews and McFague’s model be escorted by a “psychological repertoire” on stress-regulating communication by use of the concepts “mentalizing” and “epistemic trust”, which are to serve the social understanding. Herein, trust is viewed as crucial in order to be able to open up to and interact with the world.

5. “Mentalizing” and “Epistemic Trust”

“As a chaplain, you let burdens be burdens. The climate problem cannot be fixed. But God makes the whole difference in how the pastoral care conversation turns out, and in exactly that belief lies the relief: The experience of truly speaking about our condition of life here and now. To have trust in life itself, in God, that things are moving, by taking one step at a time.”

Student Chaplain L

To have trust, to have trust in life, to have trust in God. “Trust” is a word that recurs again and again in the reflections of the student chaplains, as the interview quote from Student Chaplain L illustrates. This points towards what we might call “down-to-Earth” social and material enactments that go on outside the pastoral care room. Trust is here intimately related to feelings of connectedness—to others, life, the world, and God. Trust and connectedness seem to be central in the related psychology, too.

“To mentalize” (Fonagy 1991) is about attending to mental states in the self and others; it is about “holding mind in mind”—“seeing yourself from the outside and others from the inside” (Allen et al. 2008, p. 3). To be able to mentalize is to be able to imagine what is behind the other’s behavior and, at the same time, imagine how one is affecting the other. The point of highlighting the concept of mentalizing in pastoral care is that mentalizing, in its ideal form, provides intimacy. That is, mentalizing can nourish a loving feeling of connectedness with the reality of another person (Allen and Fonagy 2006). In pastoral care, it is necessary that chaplains are able to draw on imagination and ideas, and this is what mentalizing is referring to.

The psychologist Peter Fonagy and his colleagues have argued that mentalizing plays a part in the process of change as a “common language” in the therapeutic process regardless of the details, nuances, or particulars present in the conversation and regardless of the way the professional shapes the conversations (Fonagy and Allison 2014). Drawing on newer research in the area of communication and learning processes concerning “common factors” in psychotherapy, Fonagy and colleagues argue that limitations in clients’ capacity to learn from their experiences—that is, where the client is difficult for the professional to reach—can be generally overcome by letting the clients feel understood. To feel understood serves to reconstruct/restore a capacity for social understanding, that is, mentalizing (ibid.).

However, newer developments in the concept of mentalizing have further developed this argument and call attention to the development of “trust” (Fonagy and Campbell 2015). To feel understood does not only restore social understanding but also creates the trust needed to learn from social experience. The prerequisite for being able to open oneself to good advice, guidance, notions, and contact is the willingness of the individual to regard new knowledge as trustworthy and relevant—and thereby as worth integrating (Campbell et al. 2021). “Epistemic trust” is defined as “openness to the reception of social communication that is personally relevant and of generalizable relevance” (Bateman and Fonagy 2019, p. 15). In short, Fonagy and colleagues suggest that a rise in epistemic trust is the potent driving force in therapeutic change and that restoring epistemic trust may be at the core of all effective therapeutic work (Fonagy and Campbell 2015).

Taken together, social understanding (mentalizing) and increased epistemic trust build some basis for life outside the therapy room upon which new information about oneself and the world may be acquired and internalized. Ultimately, this may imply that the changes happening in therapy (or pastoral care) are not just due to new skills or insights which are acquired in the professional room. Rather these are due to the capacity that is implied in the therapeutic (or pastoral care) relationship, which creates a potential for learning about oneself, others, and the world outside the therapy room (ibid.).

Fonagy et al. (2017) describe the therapeutic change in terms of three processes that facilitate the development of epistemic trust and the capacity to mentalize: Communication System 1: “The teaching and learning of content that lowers epistemic vigilance”; Communication System 2: “The re-emergence of robust mentalizing”; and Communication System 3: “The re-emergence of social learning”. The following analysis is inspired by these three processes and weaves them together with McFague’s Models of God (Mother, Lover, and Friend) and also with the chaplains’ efforts in pastoral care based on the interviews. The aim is to show how trust-building activities and movements in Trinity traverse the pastoral conversations taking care of the “blind spots” of stress arising from climate change (cf. Student Chaplain C).

6. A Down-to-Earth Pastoral Care Model: “Mothering the Content”, “Loving Vital force”, and “Befriending the Environment”

6.1. Mothering the Content

“The awareness of the climate’s changes is experienced by some students as a place of powerlessness. Here, faith becomes involved—in the community together. A student comes and sees me. And then she sobs her heart out. I go round to her and hold her. She is blessed with a nice boyfriend, the right study, a good family. We talk about her sense that she is in some state of powerlessness. She is to discover the things she has got … The Mother-Child-feeling appears thinking: ‘Oh, you little biscuit’. The care. The young ones are to take responsibility for their lives. Evidently, of course, it is a shock, suddenly to become and be grown up. Feelings storm within them. They have to take a position on so many things—achieve endlessly, love affairs. It is a bit like Ecclesiastes. It is new experience. Then we try to break it down together into many small winds, instead of one big storm. … In the gospels we find plenty of love and pain and suffering …”

Student Chaplain Z

The quote from Student Chaplain Z illustrates the chaplains’ wish to grasp the complexity of the student’s situation in the world through eyes, voice, and bodily attitude that are open, caring, and calm. As the students enter the chaplains’ rooms they are exposed to “unusual” or everyday objects, such as small cards with prayers lying on the table, chocolate beans which are on offer, ecological coffee and tea to drink, natural water poured from the tap, small cookies to crunch, plants on the floor, a Jesus-figure wearing boxing gloves on a bookshelf, posters on nature lectures, a chaplain’s cyclewear on a chair in the corner, trees, or a dozen tiny birds in a big cage outside the window “participating” in the conversations. The senses are activated by all of the materials—a wealth of human/nature hybrids creates the surroundings for the pastoral care talks/conversations.

With reference to the repertoire of psychology, the first step of the therapeutic process seeks to offer a coherent, closely reasoned, and continuous framework that enables the student to explore their issues in a safe and relatively low-arousal context. That is, a communication is taking place which is personally suited enough to make the student able to feel recognized. The contact provided by the chaplain to the student is to be experienced as personally relevant (Fonagy et al. 2017; Bateman and Fonagy 2019).

The basic contact provided by the professional has, in classic psychoanalytic literature, been compared to a “good enough mother”’s ability to provide “a holding environment” (Winnicott 1965). In McFague’s model of the first person in the Trinity, God resembles a mother, not only because she gives birth to the whole universe but also because she is not distant from creation. On the contrary, she is coming near the world, as incarnate God is in the flesh (McFague 1987, p. 110). God as Mother refers to a parent’s love—deep and unprejudiced, caring for life in all its manifestations and on all levels, saying: “It is good, that you exist” (ibid., p. 120). It is wishing growth and fulfilment for all, caring for the weak and vulnerable, as well as the strong and beautiful. In her action, Mother God is the life-giver, she is creative power. The metaphor of God as Mother does not build on stereotypes of maternal tenderness, softness, pity, and sentimentality but on women’s experience of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding (ibid., p. 113). God as Mother is imaging a presence of God signifying a force of action.

Relating this to pastoral care, the above quote reflects Student Chaplain Z’s use of maternal mirroring. If the student looks worried, the chaplain feeds back to the student that they are admittedly in a context that is different to what they are used to. Z mirrors the student’s bodily reaction with bodily action, meeting the student’s expressed feelings of powerlessness with an understanding, maternal voice. The chaplain sends “ostensive cues” to the student, including eye contact, exaggerated facial expressions, use of voice tone, and turn-taking—in a “playing” manner, as Winnicott would have put it (Bateman and Fonagy 2019, p. 16; Winnicott 1971). These cues show that what the caregiver is trying to convey is significant and should be remembered (Bateman and Fonagy 2019, p. 16).

If the student is to get the sense of being understood, the mirroring is to match the student’s own experiences of her or his own mental states: the mirroring should be “marked” (Fonagy et al. 2002). There is to be a difference between that which is mirrored and the mirroring itself. At the same time, the mirroring is to be recognized by the student. The chaplain mimes the student’s affects. Simultaneously, the chaplain mimes affects that the student does not have. As the chaplain undertakes marked mirroring, the student is capable of relating as a mental actor to the chaplain’s mental states and thereby is able to relate to her/his own mental states. The quote indicates how Student Chaplain Z mirrors the student’s sobbing by simultaneously reflecting the student’s worry and maternally holding her, using calm breathing, and mothering words. Herein, the student gets the feeling that the chaplain really begins to sense how it is to be the student. In short, the chaplain is to recognize the feeling that the student experiences and expresses and mirror it as marked. In this way, the chaplain can appropriately regulate, that is, scale up and down, the feelings expressed by the student and by the chaplain herself. In other words, if students are stressed then this stress needs to be regulated.

In McFague’s model of Mother-God as life-giver, that which is most ordinary and close is taken as central. Coincident with the creative force, God as Mother holds justice. As a force involved in the world, she establishes justice and liberates creatures from oppressive structures (McFague 1987, pp. 117–18). This was imaged by Student Chaplain Z too, who was aware of the pressures exerted by escalating climate change insofar as they may be linked to the student’s feeling of powerlessness. In this way, the image of Mother-God expands love’s different shapes and their meaning—internally, but also beyond our closest family, society—connecting nature and Earth (ibid., pp. 120–21).

It is the contact with the student that always comes first, and it needs to be worked on a lot. If the chaplain gets too occupied with what the problem is or what is to be talked about before establishing personal contact, learning cannot take place. The student who learns is the one whom the chaplain really sees and shows genuine interest in. The chaplain is seeking to form a connection and holds the connections by basic bodily and emotional expression and with the world as the body of God.

6.2. Loving Engagement

“I experience how students stress out about climate change—about eating vegan, food production, recycling—the social control that goes on. It lies implicitly as something stressful, but is expressed directly by saying: ‘I am not good enough—because I am not good enough!’ It is very difficult for them to be in here. I tell them ‘down to Earth’. We wonder if it is okay to put our feet on the ground and live this life. Climate changes are not stopped by not seeing and not living. Creating a peaceful space in the pastoral care room, I attempt to let the student’s inner voices be heard so that we can talk with their inner voices, wonder about what the voices are saying. Let voices that control, what they can’t stand about themselves, come out. There are voices they are scared of. We try to find out if some of the voices also contain some good. On the positive, the voices are concerned with the climate, but they may have prevailed in the student’s mind, shouting too much. Together we wonder about how the inner voices tell us to sustain life—socially and earthly—but wonder if, maybe, the voices need to be calmed down. We say to the shouting voice: ‘You are good enough, but now you must lie down a bit’. We treat stress and anxiety a little like a guard dog that needs to be calmed. The voice is to be heard, but needs to be let off a bit sometimes. By doing this we express our trust in it, that there is also something that holds us in the middle of our stress. To have trust in life. To get from control and mistrust—daring to take a few steps and see if it holds. Have faith that life holds us. ‘And if it doesn’t?’, some students ask. There are no guarantees. But the alternative is a life with hands clenched and mistrust. To have faith that something holds me up, that is deeply Christian. We cannot take responsibility for it all. I say sometimes (with a caring smile): ‘You don’t have that much power’. Otherwise, we must think that we ourselves are God. As chaplain it is about stopping ‘private metaphysics’.”

Student Chaplain L

The chaplains’ interview narratives witness practices which insist on experiencing “present moments” in life (Stern 2004)—both inside and outside the pastoral care room. Drawing from the interviews, the occupation with the presence here and now in the pastoral care work and in relation to the world outside the pastoral care room seems crucial.

The second step in a psychological repertoire is that the chaplain provides the impression that he or she genuinely seeks to understand the student’s perspective—this helps enable the student to listen and hear for themselves (Fonagy et al. 2017; Bateman and Fonagy 2019). Actually, the chaplain models this for the student; she demonstrates it by engaging in mentalizing. The pastoral caregiver seeks to make sense of the way the student behaves—and of the way the pastoral caregiver is behaving too. The chaplain looks at the student and looks at herself, asking: “I wonder what the student is doing?”, “I wonder what I am doing myself?”, “I wonder why you said and did that?”, and “I wonder why I said and did that?”. The chaplain explores the intentions of what is being said. The chaplain is curious about what she does not know. Then the chaplain and student begin to wonder together why they did as they did—preferably involving some use of delicate humor.

In McFague’s model of the Second Person in the Trinity, God as Lover, she points to the act of salvation. This represents a certain approach to the loved one, assuming that the loved one is not bad but that they only love improperly—by loving the self instead of God in the body of the world (McFague 1987, p. 144). This action assumes that the work towards healing the body is the revelation that we are loved deeply and passionately by the force whose love pulses through the universe. This may be a revelation which we are not able to imagine on our own. This knowledge performs what a lover’s declaration of love to the loved one can do: to stir up an answer of the same kind. The loved one feels valuable and wishes to repay the love, which is to be closely connected with the other. Interpreted as an image, the Lover, in a climate context, is the world in its many material and non-material forms and shapes, rather than one specific individual (cf. ibid., p. 145).

When we mentalize, we attempt to feel clearly (Allen and Fonagy 2006). Our emotions are then better able to attune us to our surroundings. They enable us to quickly see things precisely as they are so as to be able to react appropriately; our emotions make it possible for us to “get it right” (ibid.). When the chaplain sees a facial expression, the chaplain may create stories about why such a feeling arises (rather than just jumping to a conclusion about the feeling involved). Thus, the chaplain makes use of wondering and imagination without jumping to immediate answers. With this sort of “playing”, we can enter into—ideally, at least—an intersubjective community and see ourselves, others, and the world in more nuanced ways.

Connecting mentalizing to the model of God as Lover, salvation is here to be connected with a sense of what is valuable in life and, by extension, with a longing after all kinds of life and creation. Healing, viewed as a way to perceive salvation, emphasizes our opposition to the suffering and destruction of all of creation. This is done by identifying with it (McFague 1987, p. 153). God as Lover says: “You are exceedingly valuable” (ibid., p. 128). Incorporating pastoral care practice into McFague’s model, the act of mentalizing can be understood as enabling a feeling of community which connects all life on a deep level. This is by virtue of the powers of imagination that make it possible for us to empathize with all creation despite our differences (ibid., p. 153).

These mentalizing movements create an open and trusting social situation, which can nourish a better understanding of and connection to one’s own actions and others. This has the potential to open the student’s sense of being related to in a sensitive way by the pastoral caregiver through interpersonal communication. Herein, the student’s own ability to mentalize re-emerges. It is a (re-)ignition of the student’s wishes to learn about the world.

6.3. Befriending the Environment

“The students are certainly very aware of climate change—at the same time, these are very abstract, because we don’t really experience them in Denmark. I mention this, when we are out on our arranged moss and mushroom excursions. We attempt to make the students engage in nature. What you have knowledge about, you care more about. What you care about, you are interested to know more about. You may be able to teach the students to care for biodiversity by teaching them that there exists more than one bird, but many species, by learning their different names, learning that you can find them in our [local] nature and be absorbed in them—or in plants and flowers—and that the life that goes on is of interest. Learning that the way moss grows and reproduces and lives is extremely interesting, although alien to us. To arouse their curiosity in nature by naming all things. To raise questions. To philosophize about them while we walk: does it actually bring a greater understanding of nature and make our relation to nature different, when we are able to say: ‘Hey! That was a cormorant’, instead of ‘I think there was a bird’ What it means, when it is named. I think it plays a rather big role. The crisis of biodiversity … my excitement for such action is related to the Christian idea that it is your duty to save the world. When you get so preoccupied with a bird, well, then love is obliged. When you love something, you cannot help but do acts of good.”

Student Chaplain P

Student Chaplain P’s interview reflects in different ways a social-minded position to the surroundings and the environment, which they talk with the students about. When trust is present, it creates possibilities for taking in something new, for taking one’s understanding further. As one chaplain stated: “there is resurrection in pastoral care conversation”—new beginnings. The new can start in that which is quite basic and ordinary. It can also start in embodiment: holding hands, crying, eating, laughing, maybe praying together.

This is part of the stress relief of a caring community. The third step in a psychological repertoire relates to being able to learn from those who have a precise and personal understanding of you as a person (Fonagy et al. 2017; Bateman and Fonagy 2019). If I feel understood by you, I will open myself up to you, so that I will be able to learn from you about things. This helps change fixed and persisting convictions. The reopening of the potential for understanding by feeling sensitively reacted to may set off more trustful and new relations outside the pastoral care room. This may thereby open the student to new understandings of various social situations when these appear outside the pastoral care room.

When the student relaxes, the ability for trust increases and the student may discover new ways to learn about others and new settings. Such positive social experiences now have the potential to have a positive impact. In other words, the student may begin to experience social interactions in a more benign manner and see their social situation more precisely. The change that happens between the pastoral care sessions is a consequence of changed attitudes towards learning brought about by the pastoral care. In this sense, the changes owed themselves to the transformation of the ways in which the student uses their social environments rather than by things happening in the pastoral care. In the case of Student Chaplain H, this means that the transformations begin in the pastoral care practices and that the students bring them further by expanding their awareness of their entanglements in belonging to the world outside the pastoral care context too—becoming “friends” with birds, moss, and flowers, and learning a praxis of handling plastic, foods, clothes, woods, and so on.

According to McFague, friendship is the most elementary form of bond, a relation created by one’s own choice. The image of the third person of the Trinity, “God as Friend”, represents a God who sustains, whose immanent presence is the faithful companion, who operates with us in reciprocity in generating healing in all parts of the world’s body (McFague 1987, p. 167). We are God’s auxiliary force in that mutual project that embraces the whole creation. The basis for friendship is freedom; when friendship is chosen, one of the strongest bonds is created: the bond of trust (ibid., p. 162). Friends are absorbed in a shared interest in the world. However, friends in shared, collaborative projects do represent another aspect of friendly interactions. Collaboration on large projects means that many friends are needed with many different abilities. Of course, one can be friends with anybody across gender, race, class, nationality, age, conviction, and religion (adding species). To be like-minded—across forms of life (and ontological distinctions) is the primary thing. In that sense, one can indeed be friends with God, especially as part of a large-scale collaborative project, such as caring for the Earth really is. In that sense, friendship is the most all-embracing form of love. It means a willingness to take responsibility for the world. Thus, God as Friend can be taken as a model of hope, defying despair (ibid., p. 169).

Enhanced epistemic trust and dismantling of the student’s rigidity, by which social experiences are interpreted and reacted to, opens the way for the student to change their views in a safe and secure way; it releases the opening of an “epistemic superhighway” (Fonagy and Allison 2014). All in all, this may serve to nurture a growing resilience in life, whereby the student is able to find new ways of moving forwards through their various difficulties and distress. In short, the experience of feeling understood in pastoral care makes the student feel safe enough to think about themselves in relation to the world. It enables them to learn something new about the world and how to operate in it in a positively responsible manner.

The chaplains’ interviews are filled with narratives about students who seek roads to walk by. Student Chaplain C expresses this need for the caregiver to act as a wise person, to give advice on life’s conditions, to understand how life is for the young student, and how to take life’s problems one piece at a time:

“I talk with the students about living in the moment and being present instead living only in the future ‘Also try to live now and grasp the day instead of just putting all your strength and courage and hope and faith and joy out in the future. You don’t know if you are going to be here tonight or tomorrow, and neither do I’. Try to get them to relate to their life. If they constantly try to calculate it in advance, say: ‘Are you to figure it out beforehand?’ I turn to action: ‘Just do it!’ ‘The plastic wrap is to be saved now!’.”

Finally, the core of McFague’s model of God as Friend is the joy of being together. An image of eschatological completion is Lord’s Supper: sharing a meal. Strangers are welcome. The guest’s requirements are what is needed in all human life: food, shelter, clothes, and company. Koinonia applies to every life: openness towards what is different, unexpected, and alien (McFague 1987, p. 174). This represents a community of all creation united in the source of life—enacting together just that: food, shelter, cloth, company, birds, moss, and plastic wrap, too.

7. Conclusions

In the present era, the world is undergoing fundamental changes. Thus, our usual understandings of the relationship between humans and our surroundings are changing, too. Based on Danish student chaplains’ narratives, this article has attempted to extrapolate a model of “Down-to-Earth Pastoral Care”, seeking to build up trust in the process of pastoral care. This is in order to support students suffering from stress by bringing the new climate regime to the foreground.

This practical-theoretical conception for pastoral care conversations has put forward a suggestion regarding how developments within climate anthropology, mentalization-based psychotherapy, and feminist climate/eco-theology may be profitably interwoven. Thereby, through a triune of organizing themes that arose in the course of my chaplain interviews, namely: “Mothering the Content”, “Loving Vital Force”, and “Befriending the Environment”, I have shown how pastoral care conversations transcend differences between everyday language and Christian theological language. They unfold together as a network of deeply interconnected entanglements. This, furthermore, transcends the understanding of each individual theme taken in itself—thus resonating with the image of the Christian Trinitarian God.

The result is a kind of plastic model that seeks to break away from rigidity and monodox thinking within the self, in regard to the world around us, and in relation to God. Ideally, this will give impetus to two movements. Firstly, through its psychological and theological repertoire, the model points towards community, generating resilience against isolation. Secondly, the model puts forward an image of God that, through its feminist framework, insists on an imago dei for all—regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, social status, and religion.

Informed by the student chaplains’ narratives, this framework model for pastoral care may indicate a practice, actions of taking care, which may contribute to supportive ways of being able to endure the stress of the reality of climate change. This would work by encouraging thinking about belonging to the world and realizing that the world is not just something “out there”. In this sense, pastoral care promises a space for students to realize that our planet is full of “agents”—things—which have the power to act according to their own intention, will, force, desire, need, or function—as humans and things are inextricably connected in the body of God.