What Are We Supposed To Do Here? - A Reflection on the Missa Gaia
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 03 May 2009 01:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2009-05-03-9am-reflection.mp3}
Readings
Emergent Life
by Robert T. Weston
I am amazed, and all but mute with awe
That on this cinder, hurtling around the sun,
A living thing arose, to clothe the earth;
That all this splendor of the leaf and flower,
Life in the sea and on the earth,
From crawling thing to singing bird and man,
All fruit of the same life, continually renewed
Through cell and seed and birth-
In spite of winter's storms that sweep the earth,
This miracle of shared and sharing life,
Arose and, still evolving, still goes on.
Here on this whirling ball warmed by the sun
(As on what planets of what other stars?)
Through countless deaths and many million forms
Life bore its varied cells,
And there were those from which the coral grew
To atolls in the sea;
The fish, the insects and the nesting birds
All played their varied parts through which
A widening community spread across the earth.
Thus as through us the same life flows through all
Making us debtor and creditor, brother and sister, each of all;
Each as the grass, springing from common earth,
Adding to others and receiving as well,
And all of us, seed, plant and flower and seed
En route through love and the awakening mind
To what we cannot guess.
Wolf Song
by Clarence C. Kean
Under the fading day star
dawn lifts the edges of the night.
The light of early morning
rides the wind into this rocky chamber
facing to the east.
We are drawn to this sacred place
because we are young
and have need to feel the warmth
which feeds our souls
when we are with the pack.
Then, of course, there is the matter
of our speech, our native tongue,
how we tell our sisters and our brothers
of the deepest longings
in our hearts.
If we do not come
to hear our elders sing
how will we learn our song?
Sermon
These are simply some last words of gratitude: for the composer, for the musicians – the director, the singers, the instrumentalists, for this room, for this light, for those near us now, for those we love, for life itself, for the wolf and the whale, for this blue green earth we call home.
A writer on NPR this week referred to Unitarian Universalism as akin to a non-alcoholic beer, an insult to both, I suppose, but sitting here now, I could forcefully disagree. We have received the full bodied brew, a celebration of creation, here in the splendor of another New England spring, the colors, the smells, oh the pollen, the birds, the grass, the trees.
In the days after Easter, Eliz and I were in Arizona: the Sonora desert, the red rocks of Sedona, the San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, the Painted Desert, Canyon de Chelly, all of it, magnificent, awesome. Awesome, except to one nine-year-old boy we encountered at a Grand Canyon overlook, trailing behind his mother, with the panorama before us all. “What are we supposed to do here?” he asked his mother. “Just stare?”
This is a morning to celebrate creation (creation with a small “c”, I should say), with a nod to whatever Creator or Big Bang that placed the moon and the stars, made possible the immense beauty of those canyons and deserts and mountains and seas and the birds that come to my yard and the loves that have come into my life. It is enough to drink it all in and let our hearts speak thanks.
Our Concord ancestors taught us that the holy can be found in the rhythms of nature and in the spark that passes from one heart to another, one eye to another, one touch, one smile, one tear. We are co-creators on this heart. “Honor all beings,” we say here, week after week.
In Carl Jung’s autobiography, her remembers coming to America in 1932 and meeting Chief Mountain Lake in a pueblo in New Mexico. “See how cruel the whites look,” the Chief says to Jung. “Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed… Their eyes have a strange staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are all mad.”
When Jung asks why he thinks they are all mad, Chief Mountain Lake replies, “They say they think with their heads.” “Why, of course,” says Jung. “What do you think with?” “We think here,” says the chief, and he touches his heart. “We’ve lost the poetic heart,” Gail Godwin thinks. “The only heart we truly believe in is the one we watch on our angiogram screen and feel pumping fast as we plot our tactics for the morrow.” Godwin says this rift between heart and head came in the seventeenth century, with the Industrial Revolution, dividing us into camps of “intellect versus feeling, provables versus intangibles.”
“What are we supposed to do here?” the boy asked his mother, there on the rim of the Grand Canyon, one of the seven natural wonders of the world. “Just stare?” “Yes,” she might have said, “that is just right, and let me teach you how.” There is the earth, the stars, the trees, the wolf, the whale, the birds. There is creation, the night and the day, the animals, the fish. There we are, by name.
Let us open our eyes to see what is beautiful. Let us open our minds to seek what is true. Let us open our hearts to love one another.