Love and Reparation: An Approach to Climate Pastoral Care

Climate change evokes many kinds of feelings, including anxiety, inadequacy, guilt, shame, and despair. Scholars have found that hidden desires for reparation may be found in the midst of these eco-emotions. In pastoral care conversations with students, climate change adds extra pressure to the students’ underlying stress. The chaplains, who often represent “parental qualities” to the students, are challenged to navigate complex and powerful dynamics within pastoral conversations, where the sporadically expressed climate change stressors are entangled in other kinds of challenges in student life. These are experienced through a multiplicity of feelings, relations, values, cultures, views of life, and religious beliefs. Such complexities call for a pastoral care that encounters climate matters, requiring that chaplains be capable of moving between theology and psychology while differentiating between self and other, to process healthy and resilient meaning-making. Based on an ethnographic-theological study of chaplains’ pastoral care with students, this article argues that relief and strength may lie within an often implicit “theology of love” taken as the heart of the pastoral care practice. Using Sallie McFague’s theology on “God as Mother” and Melanie Klein’s psychology on the “love” and “reparation” of the “mother,” this article presents a practice-oriented model that may open up deeper understandings of the stress-relieving function of pastoral care in the era of climate change.