“Last week, I dreamt I unfolded a map,” Christina Rivera writes in her collection My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women. “I kept unfolding the map, to a long river-meandering length.” Reading the collection is a lot like this act of unfolding: We wander through waves of connections, an ebb and flow carrying us between climate change, the sixth extinction, motherhood, all kinds of oceans and personal challenges—including the writer’s desire to leave the Catholic Church she was raised in.
Last year marked the 10th anniversary of “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change and the earth as our common home—and it was with this in mind that I read Rivera’s essays. As Catholics witness the miracle of Christ, Rivera witnesses the miracle of life. She dives deep into the sea, she interviews ship captains, she joins activists. She writes, “I once planted myself for half a year on an Ecuadorian coastline where I dragged around burlap sacks, machetes, empty jugs and shovels as my work on a reforestation team. My favorite of the little trees in the plant nursery was the ceiba…. I admired the ceiba for how she put a hand to the world in order to protect what was dormant inside her.”
The author’s adventures and meditations take us through a world of turtles and whales, coral and obscure species like the vaquita porpoise.
“Diving is all about witnessing,” she writes. Off the coast of Australia near the Great Barrier Reef, she reflects, “the thing about witnessing is the expanded scope of concern.” What swims by her mask does not leave her mind but is documented and becomes part of the larger story she wants to tell. She knows how threatened life is by the physical materials we use to construct our daily lives, such as plastics and chemicals and carbon fuels. Her own body is afflicted by toxins—“but moving my guilt from the altar of self-incrimination to the table of honest acknowledgement might be the better step forward.”
“What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?” Francis posed this question in “Laudato Si’,” but it has a special urgency to Rivera, a mother of two who experienced multiple miscarriages. At one point in her adulthood, she is regularly awakened by nightmares about ecological disaster. Her nightmares feature “tidal waves and flooding houses and crumbling cliffs and emaciated climate refugees and fevered children—all on the set of a shriveling and quaking planet.” Only by participating in an eco-grief program does she arrive at some semblance of peace.
In another essay, what keeps her up at night is “not only the swirling trash-eye gyres of great garbage patches, but the decomposing albatross, the everlasting black octopus, the mini-candy wrappers, and the impending calendar of plasticized holidays in which we will ‘invest’ in single-use pleasures and then sweep the evidence into green plastic bins of stupid optimism.”
In “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis wrote that to face climate change, we must also confront the purpose and meaning of our sojourn on this planet; such questions also speak to Rivera when she fields her children’s inquiries about what happens when we die. These are the most important questions, she writes.
Rivera’s writing about motherhood is tender and imbued with a strong sense of responsibility. She mentions a professional experience of “the first room I had ever walked into my life where the leadership was tone-set by a predominance of women” that leaves a mark on her, bringing to the surface her rejection of the Catholic Church because “men, only men, teach behind pulpits.” The idea of inheritance runs throughout this collection: She does not want this future for her daughter, neither the male-led church nor the extinction of so many unique species.
For Rivera, the church is simultaneously an institution that she credits as being the place she “learned how to speak publicly from behind the lectern at Mass” and an “imperialist and sexist” institution. Rivera wants to make more “space for the laws of the spirit that supersede human law” and “make room for voices that know more about oppression.” She also craves rooms where women hold power. Perhaps, her work suggests, to truly tackle the rebirth of our planet, we need the experience of motherhood.
As we seek to recover the health of our planet, can we reform our church for women who, like Rivera, may want to see more women in our leadership, even as priests? While Rivera and Pope Francis shared a fundamental concern for the environment—and Francis was a leading voice on the subject—the two operated in vastly different social structures. Francis was the captivating leader of more than a billion Catholics, while Rivera seeks a way to be free from the organized church. Yet she also notes that people from different places can “still meet in the middle that holds life sacred.”
Rivera worries that even her own husband doesn’t believe the rate at which species are going extinct. “If I can find extinction denial in a grocery store parking lot and in my smart husband’s blank eyes at my own dinner table,” she asks, “where else is it rife?”
The earth and the species that dwell on it, including humans, are not abstractions in Rivera’s book. They are physical bodies that live and die and have their own histories with ancestors, whether it be coral or her children or those she miscarries. “Now I see,” she confesses, “that all I ever wanted to do was look for godliness wherever it could be found.”
Perhaps in reading Rivera alongside works like “Laudato Si’,” we can achieve the dialogue that Francis had in mind—and in doing so both honor his legacy and make Rivera’s experience of “accepting the interdependencies of nature as my religious nature” a reality.
This article appears in April 2026.
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