Here at Theodore Parker Church, we have been doing a lot of reflecting upon our relationship with the earth. As I thought about it, I began to form a fairly lengthy list of what has and will occur within this year alone:
We have two task forces whose work is explicitly environmental, the Green Sanctuary and the Sustainable Agriculture Task Forces, who periodically collaborate on projects. Indeed, next week, the Slow Foods Film Festival is back, perhaps to standing room only once again, for the film "Eat at Bill's," which you can read about in the leaflet. Thanks to Sue Barnard and Laura Dowd and everyone else who has been involved in creating these very successful events. A week after that, on Sunday, March 16, these two task forces will team up to engage us in what sounds like a very lively service, including a play and puppets.
In early October, Greg Maslowe gave us a very moving talk in worship reflecting on the ethical and theological basis of community-supported agriculture and his work as the farmer at the Newton Community Farm. On Oct 14, several members of the congregation, led by Robin Colgrove, offered a service called "There Are Prayers in the Trees," sharing their insights on the connections between the natural sciences and spirituality. On Dec. 9, I shared with you "The Story of Stuff," about the burden of unbridled materialism on natural and human communities, and talked about "getting off the cow path" of consumerism. On Dec 23, we celebrated the Solstice and the spiritual messages in the natural season, as we're doing today with our maple sap and pussy willow communion.
In early January, Ellie Jarrell convened a book discussion on Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, part garden journal, part reflection on the global implications of food production, transport, and consumption. On February 3, Roger Gottlieb spoke to us about a hopeful movement arising across the religious spectrum connecting faith and environmentalism. On April 20, as part of the "Sources of Our Faith" series, I'll be talking about earth-centered traditions-especially those traditional cultures and languages around the globe that are vanishing as the world changes, and the spiritual vision of the world that vanishes with them. On April 27, the junior and senior youth in our congregation will be leading a service that seems to be coalescing around their environmental activism.
Ongoing, our property committee tries to bring environmental sensitivity to its purchasing choices and recommendations in caring for our facility. And I know there have been others who have raised some aspect of the message in other ways. I apologize if I haven't mentioned here someone or something that has contributed to this theme in our community life.
With this consistency of focus it's possible to begin to feel that we've heard quite enough about all this. All right, all right, I get it already! The environment, climate change, mass extinctions, etc., etc… Particularly in worship, I wonder if folks will begin to tune out, if we'll start to think this is old news. "Oh, please, not another service about the earth. Didn't we hear about the earth two weeks ago?" I hope we will not become numb to what is probably the most fundamental crisis facing the planet as well as the most miraculous thing under our noses, literally.
There's an old joke about a minister who had just recently come to serve a congregation. When he delivered his first sermon, the congregation found it to be properly challenging and inspiring and edifying, and they were pleased with his fine discourse. The next week when he began to speak, they noticed that it sounded oddly familiar-in fact, it was the same sermon he had given the week before. The congregation was puzzled, but since it was a good message, they took it in stride. The following week he preached the same sermon again! This congregation was a pathologically polite group, and though they began to feel disconcerted, no one said anything to him. When it happed for the fourth time, at last someone approached him and questioned him. "Why are you giving the same sermon over and over again? We've heard it four times now!"
He said, "Well, you all seem to think I've spoken a true word, yet nothing seems to have changed around here. When folks actually start taking the lesson into their hearts and letting it change them, well, I guess then we'll be ready for a new sermon."
That's either wisdom or a form of torture, depending on the sermon, I suppose! Now, I place myself among the congregation in this story, not the preacher. We all know, painfully, what a big difference there is between understanding something conceptually and being able to manifest changes to our way of being, our habits, our lifestyle, our relationships. And we all know that transformation does not come only from thinking, but from practice, practice, practice. As a community, our environmental understanding is gradually shifting from the thinking stage to the practice stage. Still, most of us, if we really look at it, are pretty new to that.
When it comes to our relationship with the earth, the human species-particularly those of us who live in this affluent, industrialized, digitized, climate-controlled world of our own making-are so profoundly estranged from our earthly source of life that it takes a long, long time and lots of encounters and lots of learning-lots of sensory, visceral learning-to get it, to remember what we are and how we are a part of the web of life.
Feminist Mary Daley, when she writes the word "remember," puts a hyphen between the "re" and the "member" (re-member) to express the idea of knitting back together what had been torn apart, relearning a way of being in our body-minds, integrating knowledge that we had forgotten or that had been socialized out of us.
I came across a passage by A.D. Gordon that spoke to this. Aaron David Gordon, I learned, who lived in the second half of the 19th century, was a force behind the development of practical, socialist Zionism. He was said to have made a religion out of the humble labor of hoeing the fields.
He wrote these words, probably somewhere in the late 1800's:
And when, Humanity, you will return to Nature, on that day your eyes will open, you will gaze … into the eyes of Nature, and in its mirror you will see your own image. You will know that you have returned to yourself, that when you hid from Nature, you hid from yourself. When you return, you will see that from you, from your hands and from your feet, from your body and from your soul, heavy, hard, oppressive fragments will fall and you will stand erect. You will understand that these were fragments of the shell into which you had shrunk in the bewilderment of your heart, and out of which you had finally emerged. On that day you will know that your former life did not befit you, that you must renew all things-your food, your drink, your dress and your home, your manner of work, your mode of study-everything! On that day, deep in your heart, you will know that you had been wandering, until you returned to Nature."
My message in sharing these words is not that we must all go and become farmers, or go out into the wilderness and become wild men and wild women living on roots and berries-although it might be an enlightening experiment!
My message this morning, after this rather lengthy preamble, is simple, and it began with the opening words, and the chalice lighting which was all about praise, and the maple sap and pussy willow communion….
The message is that there is something fundamentally important for us in being able to summon enough presence of mind to tune in and attend to the natural world. Even if it's a pussy willow sprig or a plant in a pot, it still has something to say, something to teach, something to reveal about the intelligence of Nature. Can we slow down and become available to the experience wonder, appreciation, and full aliveness? As expressed in the poem we heard for our opening words: When I am alive, wonder goes through me like spring through a seed… Nothing hurries, and everything is new…
I believe a connection grows between the practice of awareness and sensitivity and the internal desire to bring one's life into greater harmony with the needs of the web of life. Especially if we live and work in cities and manmade environments, there is something crucial for us in returning frequently to "the peace of wild things," to use Wendell Berry's phrase, and thus re-membering ourselves. Berry writes in that well known passage:
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
From what are we free when we rest in the grace of wild things? Free from the heaviness and restlessness of our own minds? Free from the shell of our bewilderment? Free from our relentless needs and our sense of incompleteness? Free from the human burden of memory and forethought? For a moment we can "rest in the grace of the world and be free."
The experience of wonder, however we may come to it, is one of the most powerful portals for breaking out of the small circle of one's personal concerns and perspective. In a state of wonder, we are utterly humbled before some greater majesty, and yet also know ourselves to be a part of that majesty. We feel a kinship with the larger life and touch our own wholeness in that knowledge.
As we began this service with a celebration of the maple season, I wanted to share with you an experience of wonder I was blessed to have, apropos to the maple theme.
Around 1988-89, I lived in the little hill town of Conway, Massachusetts, out in the rural, western part of the state. My housemates and I lived in what had been a farmhouse at one time, on a quiet road lined with enormous, ancient trees.
One of the many charms of that place was that just a little ways up and across the road, a rustic sugarhouse was tucked into the woods, a small sugaring operation that had probably been in operation for generations. At this time of year, its winding column of smoke rose up day and night as the sap was boiled down into syrup.
One wet day in March, I was taking a walk and wandered my way into the woods. I found myself in the midst of a stand of maple trees that were being tapped for sap collection. Each of the trees had a couple of steel buckets with lids. I peeked inside one of the buckets, wondering what maple sap looked like, having never seen it. I stuck my finger into the clear, cold liquid, and took my first taste of raw maple sap right out of the tree.
As I was standing there, alone with the trees, it gradually began to rain - not a fine mist, but big, heavy blobs of water. As the drops fell through the trees, they hit the steel bucket lids - plink…plink…plink-plunk…plink-plank-plunk - each making a metallic percussive sound - in fact, a note. Each lid was like a steel drum. Each of the buckets was a resonance chamber. And each of the buckets had a slightly different amount of sap in it, changing the pitch of the note.
I was gradually encircled by an intricate web of rhythms, a perfect music, yet unfathomable because of its pure randomness. The density of the rain drops increased, the drumming grew faster and faster, and I was slowly engulfed by a roar of sound so intense I thought it would slay me-not because of the volume, but because of its power and intricacy.
And then it gradually subsided the way it had begun, slowly falling back to discrete plinks and plunks, and eventually into stillness. I must have been drenched, but I don't remember that. I only remember the music, the sense that I had been honored with a kind of secret performance. I had been given a gift by the rain, and the trees, and the human introduction of steel sap buckets into this natural landscape.
When I think of the intricacy of a music made by purely natural events, I am reminded of a passage in Shunryu Suzuki's book, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. He describes the Zen calligraphy practice of attempting to place dots randomly on a page - perhaps the way raindrops might fall? This simple practice turns out to be quite difficult, because simplicity eludes our busy, artful minds. It is instinctive for human beings to seek and impose patterns upon the world, to make meaning. Almost inevitably the dots would begin to coalesce into something intentional. This practice of making something without making anything at all is a practice of finding and maintaining beginners mind, finding a state of flow coming out of empty, pure attention. I read that passage long beforehand, and yet didn't understand it until I heard the rain on the sap buckets.
In the end, all I want to do is encourage all of you - all of us - because I myself need the same encouragement - I want to encourage us to take time for wonder, to let ourselves become available, now and then, to the miraculous in the world around us.
I believe that Nature longs for us to return to it. Nature longs for us to show up for it, to appreciate it all around us, to learn from it, to be reconciled and renewed in it. Our own healing and the healing of the world depend upon that return. Like the prodigal son, all we have to do is come home, and we will be welcomed into its wise arms.
May it be so.
Closing Words: adapted from When I Am Alive by Raymond Baughan >blockquote>Be blessed, and let yourself taste the sweetness of life. Let wonder go through you as spring goes through a seed; Look how a bursting bud's the universe; In that moment nothing hurries, and everything is new.