Our Only Life: A Sermon for Earth Day
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- Created on Sunday, 02 May 2010 01:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
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Early May and driving through town,
I see the froth of white blossoms on tree branches,
Pale green of new leaves rippling out across thickets and braches.
After the hints and teases of a New England April that blew hot and cold,
We lift our faces to the sun.
We are like the woman in Katha Pollit’s poem,
Who inches her walker down the sidewalk
And goes out to find her Eden in a tiny plot of land in mid-town Manhattan.
It is early May and this week our teenagers and our town have been rocked by the suicide death of Tyler Ryan, a young man of spirit and compassion.
It is good to be together this morning here at first Parish. Today we welcome new members and we celebrate the earth and I am glad they come together in this way. How many of us locate our experience in nature close to the heart of what it means to be spiritual beings on this planet.
As Unitarian Universalists, we were one of the first religious traditions in America to put nature and spirituality side by side, to make them piece of a piece, breath of one breath. That’s what I want to talk about today.
* * * *
When young Harvard divinity students stuffed themselves into that small chapel on the second floor of Divinity Hall in 1838 to listen to their graduation speaker, they would have expected him to begin in one of two ways.
With a quote from the Bible. Or with words about Jesus. Failing that, it would be something about the church, prayer, Providence.
But the young man who stood at the simple wooden lectern in Divinity Hall chapel, the young man who stood almost six feet tall
With brown hair and piercing blue eyes,
He did not begin in this way.
On that July day Ralph Waldo Emerson was 35,
He had been married for three years,
He owned a home in Concord where he welcomed friends like Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott.
He was the father of a two year old son he adored.
After years of almost unspeakable personal loss and vocational confusion, he was entering a time of consolidation and growth.
“In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.
“The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. “
Not the bible, not Jesus, not god. “Luxury” “breath of Life”
For a young man born and bred in the Puritan tradition, son and grandson and great-grandson of ministers, some right there in this church,
It was unthinkable.
Emerson continued.
“The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay.
Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade.
Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. . . . “
Emerson went on to attack the current Unitarian church as lifeless, “corpse cold.”
He went on to plead with the young graduates to feel their call in throbs of desire, to preach soul, to infuse new life
We often remember the Divinity School Address as an attack and it was one, a blistering one but it was more than that.
But beyond that, beyond the attack, the positive part of the Divinity School Address was Emerson’s basic statement of religious belief and it never changed the rest of his life.
For him, religion wasn’t something outward. It wasn’t a matter of institutions, buildings, priests, ministers, bibles, texts or dogmas.
It was an inward thing. It was about the soul and the soul’s contact with something beyond itself.
With the universe, with the Oversoul, with God, Emerson used different words.
We use different words
In the tradition of Schleiermacher and George Fox and Plato and others, Emerson said religion was inside of here not out there. Inside of you and inside of me.
The heart of religion was in human experience. Our experience. Day in and day out. That’s where we would find the holy.
Emerson started his talk with nature, living, breathing, pulsing nature, because for him, religion was inward.
Religion meant direct personal lived experience and and that could be felt most powerfully in Nature.
“Crossing the bare common,” he said “I am glad to the brink of fear.” “All mean egotism vanishes.” “The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.” “I am part and particle of God.”
Emerson craved these moments of contact with the elemental. And I think we do too.
Revelation is pouring into us, he said, with the rain and the stars and the wind. It is not sealed. It is not something that happened long ago. It is happening right now. The universe is speaking to your soul, right here, right now.
In how many churches, he asked, are we made sensible that it is drenching into us that we are drinking forever the soul of God.
That sense of time dropping away, the self vanishing, you have described that, too. You have spoken about moments in nature that mattered to you.
Speaking about moments in nature that mattered to you.
It is is walking through the pine woods of a forest with the sunlight slanting through the branches in just that way
It is sitting next to the shores of a lake, listening to the water lapping against the shore, lapping, lapping, taking you away into a world of quiet and daydreams where you drift and float for a time
It is in the chair by the kitchen window,
Winter’s morning
The flash of bright red cardinal at the bird feeder.
You have said that for you it is
River
Mountain
Sky
Sea
Shore
Wind
Blossom
Bird
Over years of ministry I have listened to Unitarian Universalists
Have listened to you as you have spoken of these moments in nature
When you lose yourself
And then you find yourself again,
Or are found by something beyond you
You’ve talked about times of confusion in your lives, times of loneliness or sadness and the places you would go for solace
To try to quiet and to still your soul
You’re talked about a kind of peacefulness that sometimes came to you
We call these experiences by many names
But whatever words we use,
These moments of mystery name us and claim us
And for a minute
We know ourselves and the world around us
As if for the first time ever.
For a moment we are lifted up and out of the ordinary
Into the timeless.
In this life where we skate so often on the surfaces of things,
For a moment, we dip into something deeper
Into that Deep River of silence or spirit that is always there flowing beneath our days
And when we return to everyday life,
As of course we must do,
We return a little stronger,
We return with the spirit of the Mountain in us.
We return with the spirit of the sea.
It is something that stays with us.
Giving us a kind of courage and grounding for our days.
I believe those moments never leave us
Even if they have happened long ago, they are somehow mysteriously part of us
Helping and healing long after our conscious mind has forgotten
For William Wordsworth, it was when he was discouraged
Lying on his couch,
That he remembers that “host of golden daffodils”
“Ten thousand saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance”
It is years later, he is pensive, he is sad but that image comes back to him
“They flash upon the inward eye….
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.”
The actual moment is long gone, but the power it gives him is not.
You may not realize it but when you tell the story of a moment you remember in nature
Your eyes can get a different look, faraway
You speak more slowly; your voice gets softer
It is as if a piece of you has drifted away for a moment,
Back to that time of which you speak,
Back to that moment your body remembers,
That essential grounding moment where your soul found solace
And your heart took wing
Ralph Waldo Emerson said on that hot July day and the words are still with us, they are part of us, they are a part of what makes us who we are, this church you join today, he said that the important thing about religion was not its outward forms, buildings, texts, ministers, dogma
The important thing was what was inward, what was inside of your human experience and my human experience.
It was there we would find the heart and soul of a spirituality that would sustain us.
And for many of us some of the most powerful moments are in nature.
River. Sky. Sea, wind. Rock. Blossom. Bird
I can’t give them to you. You can’t give them to me. We can only go for ourselves
Outside to woods or river or field
To river sky sea wind rock
We can only try to open up ourselves, our souls
And receive some of that revelation that is always there
In the stars and the wind and the rain and the river
Pouring into us, drenching into us
Here I am, world.
Here I am, spirit.
Here I am, soul.
Speak to me.
* *
It is May and the earth is coming back to life. And there is a part of us that wants to come back to more life, too.
We are there in the sun with Mr. and Mrs. Tozzi
Their garden in mid-town Manhattan, birdbath, roses, aloe plants
“It’s only the young who ask if life is worth living,
Not Mrs. Sansanowitz
Who for the last hour has been inching her way down the sidewalk, lifting and placing her new aluminum walker”
“On days like these, the poet says,
I stand for a long time
under the wild gnarled root of the ancient wisteria,
dry twigs that in a week
will manage a feeble shower of purple blossom,
and I believe it: this is all there is,
all history's brought us here to our only life
to find, if anywhere,
our hanging gardens and our street of gold:
cracked stoops, geraniums, fire escapes, these old
stragglers basking in their bit of sun.
I believe it. Our whole life has brought us to this.
To this day.
To this one more chance
To this day to open up our eyes, to crawl out of our own little world,
To shake ourselves free of whatever it is that might hold us back.
We get discouraged. We get weary. Sometimes there are weeks that make us shaken and sad.
Have courage we say to one another.
We pick up our heads
We listen for the bird song
We watch the white flowers that in a day will be gone
This is it
Our whole lives have brought us to this day
To this breath, and the next, and the next
We say with Emerson, we say with one another
We say with birds that sing
Blossoms that burst
Rivers that rise
Hearts that break
Souls that are born again and again
“It is a luxury to draw the breath of life”
Amidst birds that sing, blossoms that burst, rivers that rise, hearts that break, souls that are born again and again and again
“It is a luxury to draw the breath of life.”
The Old Neighbors
The weather's turned, and the old neighbors creep out
from their crammed rooms to blink in the sun, as if
surprised to find they've lived through another winter.
Though steam heat's left them pale and shrunken
like old root vegetables,
Mr. and Mrs. Tozzi are already
hard at work on their front-yard mini-Sicily:
a Virgin Mary birdbath, a thicket of roses,
and the only outdoor aloes in Manhattan.
It's the old immigrant story,
the beautiful babies
grown up into foreigners. Nothing's
turned out the way they planned
as sweethearts in the sinks of Palermo. Still,
each waves a dirt-caked hand
in geriatric fellowship with Stanley,
the former tattoo king of the Merchant Marine,
turning the corner with his shaggy collie,
who's hardly three but trots
arthritically in sympathy. It's only
the young who ask if life's worth living,
notMrs. Sansanowitz, who for the last hour
has been inching her way down the sidewalk,
lifting and placing
her new aluminum walker as carefully
as a spider testing its web. On days like these,
I stand for a long time
under the wild gnarled root of the ancient wisteria,
dry twigs that in a week
will manage a feeble shower of purple blossom,
and I believe it: this is all there is,
all history's brought us here to our only life
to find, if anywhere,
our hanging gardens and our street of gold:
cracked stoops, geraniums, fire escapes, these old
stragglers basking in their bit of sun.
"The Old Neighbors" by Katha Pollitt, from The Mind-Body Problem. © Random House, 2009. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)