Sermon: “On Holding all the Truths”
I was once more honored to share a reflection with the UU community in Charleston, WV this past Sunday. I am now one of the youth mentors at the congregation, along with Laura Davidson, and we had planned to take UU youth up on a trip to Kayford Mountain the day before, with Chad Cordell of the Kanawha Forest Coalition. This trip was meant to help inform and infuse Sunday’s services.
Due to a mini snow blizzard, the trip was postponed until next Saturday — but this past Sunday’s services and sermons still had to connect to the theme of mountaintop removal…
Thanks for having me again today. You know, two sermons in 4 months—the synagogue might be getting a little jealous.
So you know yesterday we were supposed to go up on Kayford Mt, which is this island inside a park, this island of trees and benches and wooden overhang~y things, surrounded by a sea of strip mines, of scarred earth, of a site that doesn’t make any sense, but makes enough sense to make you want to weep.
This island we’re going to visit next weekend — it’s called Kayford Mountain.
And it got me thinking.
When I first started to pay attention to West Virginia — and first started to visit in 2011 or so, trips to Kayford were how I experienced West Virginia. Trips and tours, of Kayford, and of Coal River Mountain. I had seen all these documentaries about West Virginia and the battle over coal and the battle over these mountains. They were about Us vs. them. They were about: Which side are you on? The valor of the tree huggers vs the incomprehensible ranks of the coal barons.
These were the places I visited first — and even where I first lived when I first moved here. And I wasn’t alone. I followed in footsteps of a whole bunch of other young outsiders who started here by way of hurting mountains.
And now, just 5 years later — I don’t hear about a lot about trips up Kayford anymore. Some, sure. But I haven’t visited the Coal River Valley — especially Naoma or Rock Creek, in years. In fact, I can only count one or two friends, outsiders, who moved here to help with MTR, after I moved here.
It seems to me: we’re in a different place now. Something happened. We don’t really talk about it — but yesterday’s trip that’s now next Saturday’s trip, it’s happening in a different world.
And that’s what I want to explore today: that different world.
As many of you know, the practice of blowing up mountais for coal is dying, it’s dying — but not quite by our own hands.
Gas prices are so cheap that fracking makes hard coal more and more untenable. And most of the easy coal is already carved up and wedged out of the mountains. And sure, the EPA did some of its job.
Activists made a difference, but mostly time and the ephemeral favors of a cheap energy economy did the work.
And the thing is, those who may identify as treehuggers, we can’t really celebrate.
Even if we did bring all this about, all this decline of coal, it would be a bittersweet victory. And bitter is the first word there. Hundreds and thousands of miners are losing their jobs, in counties that desperately rely on coal — and those miners and their children are left with an unclear, even scary future.
It’s hard to celebrate the headlines of coal mines laying of hundreds of workers every quarter, and of nearly every big coal company going bankrupt — of pensions going on the chopping block, and so on. You can’t celebrate this news as a victory, not in a whole, full, human way.
And even given the dwindling: mountaintop removal is still real. There are those mountains that are still under attack, and that means the communities that live under them are still at the mercy of poisoned air and water. The cancer clusters in the Southern Coalfields are still real.
And let’s just say — Let’s just say — even if we had gotten all the miners jobs, and even if we had won legislation that ended strip mining for good, well, we’d still have the long litany of mountains lost, of thousands of miles of buried streams, of miners — fathers and sons — who were buried inside Upper Big Branch and too many other explosions inside darkness of loved ones lost. And heroes, both big and small, like Judy Bonds who we’ve lost to the premature darkness of coalfield cancer.
So you can’t call coal dying a victory. And nobody really does. And to be honest, I’m grateful for that.
But here’s what I worry about — the thing I struggle with — for the most part, progressives, people who work on creating a more just and compassionate place here — we don’t talk about mountaintop removal anymore. We don’t touch it. Not in the halls of power, or on the path to building power.
And it’s not that we have to — not everyone has to bring up MTR — we’ve got a lot of issues to work on here. But those who still do the work are shunned, sometimes it seems forgotten, their grant money pennies compared to what it once was. And those who might give the issue breathing room — have seemingly made the strategic choice not to.
We don’t talk about the not talking about too much. But from what I can tell, it’s too politically divisive.
If you’re fighting inside the capitol, and you bring up mountaintop removal, then you get grouped in with the hippies and the tree huggers and the radicals and you’re just written off. It’s either a non-starter or it’s a deal-breaker.
And that’s a reality for advocates, and that’s real.
And I’ll confess — I’m now among these folks who shun even mentioning mountaintop removal. When we just organized that big Remember in November rally at the capitol just a few weeks ago — we didn’t invite a coal field resident to speak, certainly not to speak up against MTR. That would have meant labor would have fled, it would’ve polarized the whole thing and we would’ve been written off. I remember when Junior Walk- a real champion in the Coal River Valley, called me up and asked if he could come to one of the Remember in November meetings. I remember, I said sure, but you know, let’s just talk about “clean water”.
And so, it seems to me, we’re in this moment, this hurting, healing, complex moment — and we can’t really talk about it — the mourning we haven’t finished, the resistance that’s still happening, or how it all connects to figuring out what’s next.
Among some social justice circles, from what I can tell, the topic of mountaintop removal is actively shunned. Why is that? What’s going on here?
I’m just an outsider. Someone who moved here maybe 3–4 years ago. So, I’m not sure.
Maybe it’s because treehuggers, like myself, never quite played the long game. And so now that we’re losing more people than any other state as the coal mines close and shutter — well, who wants to associate with the treehuggers?
Maybe it’s because those of us who engaged in direct action, myself included, polarized communities — reinforced the us vs. them, and the outsider vs insider mentality — and we don’t want to go back to that.
Maybe it’s because economic transition work is just so sexy, and it’s a conversation that hasn’t happened is such a long time that it has this undeniable draw. From hoophouses to solar co-ops to literally tearing down and re-building anew — we can finally build a post-coal positive narrative.
Maybe it’s because we lost our most treasured charismatic leaders — Judy Bonds and Larry Gibson. And maybe we relied on treasured charismatic leaders too much?
Maybe it’s because Friends of Coal just plain won the culture war — they made enemies of coal into enemies of the state.
I wonder, also, that maybe it’s because it’s harder to hold all the things — all the mourning, all the losses, all the cancer and the funerals, all the bearing witness, all the fighting — all the in-fighting, all the coal explosions, and the anniversaries of deaths in darkness ….
…that maybe it’s harder to hold all that…
with the bright alternative work that’s having a renaissance, that’s gaining traction, work that doesn’t feel as much like fighting — work that’s giving way, that might get us out of this mess, one day. Work that might make coal fade away on our own terms, that may give miners more chances to serve with dignity, that may allow this place and ourselves time to heal. Work that may keep us all here, one day.
And I’m not saying it’s hard to hold all the things and so we don’t hold all the things. I’m not saying that.
What I’m saying is: nobody can mourn every day.
We’ve got to look up. Children run and play in war-torn refugee camps. Seedlings sprout on strip sites. Flowers even bloom. Water finds a way. Life finds a way. We know we are driven by hope, by visions, and by dreams.
But. Yet. I wonder.
How can we still hold the mourning?
How we can we hold the losses and the pain. How can we feel the wounds?
How can we simply hold — the hurt and the hope, the pain and the potential. The holding back and the giving birth.
How can we look out next Saturday, at the wounds and the gaping scars of the land, and look out from the island of Kayford, out to the sea of loss, and see, not shut our eyes, but see — and while keeping them open, also see — the possibilities and wildness that is afoot.
The changes in the soil and in our communities. The food farms being blazed on strip sites in Mingo county — the solar farms being researched on strip sites in Fayette County. The future that’s being written but is largely unwritten, as Catherine Moore would be say, for we are its authors.
How we can hold these forces together? This hope and hurt, this pain and potential, this mourning with what can be.
It’s all real: and I think it’s realer when we hold it all together.
Thank you Reverend Tricia Hart for inviting me and Laura to co-shape Sunday’s services and for encouraging us all to step into spaces of injustice to learn, explore, change, and be changed. Thank you also Paul Dalzell for holding the congregation together in sometimes subtle but powerful ways, and to Sara Golden for lending your voice, and vision.
And thank you to Catherine Moore who’s wisdom and sense of home and her love of West Virginia and all of her complexities inspires me to listen and listen and listen more deeply.
