Planting Sequoias

This sermon service includes testimonials by Ann Saalbach, Amanda Chaves, and Tricia Caspers-Ross.

On this Easter morning, as the tight buds on branches reinvent spring, let us consider resurrection as Wendell Berry, the great Kentucky farmer-poet does.

So friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world …
Ask questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest . . .
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years…
Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
Though you have considered all the facts.…
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade.…
Be like the fox
Who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

What would it mean for us to invest in the millennium? To take as our main crop the forest we did not plant—our forebears did that—nor the one we will harvest—for it belongs to our children.

Resurrection is about life preserved and restored. In sixth chapter of Genesis, long before Jesus appears in the Gospels, we read of a flood that threatens all existence. In that famous narrative, Noah builds an ark and ferries his family and pairs of animals to dry land. As the story goes, were it not for Noah and the ark, all of creation would be submerged. Hence, the ark preserves and restores creation. It is the first biblical example of resurrection.

On January 30th, I spoke of the ark we could build, the ark our congregation could become. In every sermon since then I have made some reference to the land on Fisher Road, to the potential it holds as an integral part of our ministry. Why land? You might ask. Why now?

Last week, while I was in Nashville celebrating Passover with my cousins, a meeting took place after the service where a conversation ensued. I have talked to enough folks about it to gauge that questions linger.

Why “go with [our] love to the fields [and] lie easy in the shade”? Why “be like the fox/who makes more tracks than necessary/some in the wrong direction”?

“To practice resurrection. To invest in the millennium. To plant sequoias.”

Sequoias as you know take a long time to mature. They are immense beings, stately and majestic. They remind mere humans to take the long view. To invest in them is to invest in a future we will not experience firsthand. But that doesn’t mean we will not be part of it.

In 1768 when the First Parish of Fitchburg formed, the folks who gathered did not live to see the building we inhabit. They never heard the melodious sounds of our organ. They could not glimpse even with power of prognostication the merger of Unitarianism and Universalism. But their gathering formed an ark that traveled the seas of time into a future that we know as the present. We are here because they congregated, week after week, year after year. And because the good folks of the late 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries instilled in their children the value of a liberal religious community. Had they failed to do that, this congregation and our beloved denomination would have gone the way of the Shakers. No matter how simple and sensible their aesthetic, the Shakers did not plant sequoias.

If we do not invest in our children we imperil ourselves the way the Shakers did.

One of the great joys, indeed purposes of a congregation is to form a multigenerational community where we can learn from and enjoy each other: where the wisdom and patience of experience commingle with the inquisitiveness and energy of youth. Several years ago, I preached a sermon on aging wherein I quoted a doctor whose research found that folks in their seventies and eighties were better baking companions to children than forty-year-olds. Middle-aged folks are often too focused on results whereas older folks more often enjoy the process without worrying about the final product. This comes in handy baking with young children. And it works in reverse. Young children not yet steady on their own feet and free from fixed ideas offer an appreciativeness and realness often lost from late adolescence to mid-adulthood.

Ann Saalbach has agreed to share her thoughts on commingling the generations.

Ann’s testimonial:

Let’s face it – humans are tribal. We need our own private cave-space to retreat to but in the end, we want to join a group around the fire and we want that group to just move over to make space for us because we belong there and with them.

As I grow old and wise, I have realized that one’s own age cohort is special – we all lived through the same global events at the same age, we are going through similar transitions in our personal lives and we understand each other in special ways. But I’ve also realized that my own cohort is not enough. I want elders, newborns and fledglings, middle-lifers – the whole gamut of life – in my tribe. Our western world can make this hard. We are isolated in our own homes and nuclear families. Where can we taste that sense of community?

My tribe is FPC. I treasure its diversity, not least its diversity in age.

Last spring I regularly attended women’s group. It was a magical time for me and a magical mini tribe. Five of us were regulars and three of those five brought their children. Thus we had members in their first decade of life, their second, their third, fifth, sixth and seventh. (Somehow I think we missed out on the 4th decade – none of us in our thirties.) Those of us who were raising young ones got help and advice from the rest. Those of us who were young ones got spare adults who were not at their wits’ end with us at that particular moment. And those of us like me, whose young one is now grown up and very far away, got to rejoice in being stuck into a chaotic family meal once again.

We need small people. And they need us. Amen.

Some of you asked last week, why does an urban congregation need rural land? John Muir wrote upon reaching Yosemite: “We are now in the mountains, and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell.” Nature is not just for so-called “nature-lovers.” It is the best way we have to remind ourselves we are creatures of this earth. Everything we make, ingest, discard, adore and disregard is of this universe that births and sustains us. Spending time with the fertile earth reminds us how our forebears lived by the rhythms and seasonal cycles of the sun, moon, and earth. It restores us to green pastures and invites members of the wider community to “put faith in the two inches of humus / that will build under the trees / every thousand years.”

In my upstairs window hangs a piece of stained glass edged with the words of E.B. White: “I rise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world.” It is in savoring the world that we find reason to save it; without saving it we lose the capacity to savor it at all.

Many of us seek communal worship to give expression to our savoring of life’s sweetness, just as we seek the comfort and companionship of Sunday services in troubled and troubling times. Since I have been here, this church has closed during the summer months, an oddly counterintuitive gesture since as we all know illness, accidents, grief, loss, and loneliness don’t go on holiday. But truth be known, our sanctuary is just too darn hot and many of us retreat to our gardens and lawns or seek the shade of backyards, parks or woodland trails.

I believe presence matters. I am old-fashioned enough to think consistent weekly connection builds community. Last Friday in Nashville, I reveled in my cousins’ weekly Sabbath dinner, a tradition instigated long before I was born. After my aunt and cousins die, my cousins’ children and their children will carry on the tradition just as they will gather annually for Passover Seder which Jews have been doing for thousands of years. Even though I cannot read or recite Hebrew, the prayers for the bread of the earth and the fruit of vine roll off my tongue. Simply because every Friday night of my childhood, my family gathered to light the candles and bless the bread and grape juice. How grateful I am.

Now I invite Tricia Caspers-Ross and Amanda Chaves to share their thoughts with us.

Tricia’s testimonial:

Like many people, I joined the UU church for my children because I want them to grow up in a thinking, exploring, community, one that teaches them that every person, every being, is valued.

When Rick and I were deciding whether or not to move across the country, we brought the kids to visit Ashburnham. Seamus was three months old, and one summer Sunday I packed him up along with all of his baby paraphernalia, borrowed my mother-in-law’s car, and drove to this church for Sunday service. But, as you have probably guessed, when I arrived there was no one here. Later, I was dismayed to learn that there are no regularly scheduled summer services.

While I was disappointed, this wasn’t a deal-breaker for our family, as it might be for some, but I did wonder how the congregation, especially the children, maintain a sense of community through those long, wet, summer months. How do parents reinforce UU values out in the (sometimes very un-UU) wider world without the weekly support of a UU community?

When I think about the land at Fisher Road, I see an answer to that question. I see a place where those who choose could meet on a sunny Sunday morning and garden, walk a labyrinth, hike, birdwatch, do outdoor yoga or tai chi, play croquet or hide-and-seek. The land is not only a way to maintain the connections that the adults have here, but also to create connections between the older and younger generations in the church, which for the most part, are lacking.

Right now there’s maybe one teenager in the building on any given Sunday, and the youth group is, for all purposes, defunct. I see the land on Fisher Road as a way to re-vive the teen community here, to draw in new families by reaching out to other youth groups in the community. I see the possibility of picnics and barbecues and campouts, Frisbee, and soccer games. I see our youth living UU values and having fun in a way that’s not possible within the confines of this building.

If we buy the land on Fisher Road, we show the children and the teens of our church that we hold true to our UU beliefs by valuing them. And when the children want to be together, having fun, they will continue to come, and the church thrives, and we raise a generation who, like us, want to make the world a little bit better.

Amanda’s testimonial:

I’ve been kicking around this church for I guess about 10 or so years. I started as a teenager watching over the littlest ones who are now as old as Ayla is….she was a just a baby then. I’ve watched a lot of these kids grow… I’ve been pregnant here, and my son Connor has grown up here almost five years now. My family has connected to this family so strongly. When we needed to be held up during uncertain stability, and extreme loss many of you came without call. For this and many other reasons this community is very special.

Today I invite you to take a journey with me…

Imagine the warm sunlight peering into the sanctuary while the astounding sound of the organ and the loving voices of our church family come together and form worship. Where we sit and stand, pray and meditate, share moments of laughter and times of troubles together. Where there is no better place to pass the flame from candle to candle on Christmas Eve, where our dear Leaf can stand before us delivering just what we need to carry through the week and remind us who we are and what is important.

Picture a Labyrinth, a long winding labyrinth with one threshold where the object of walking its path is not to get lost, although it resembles a maze, but rather to clear your mind, breathe deep, and remember yourself…to find peace, and equilibrium inside yourself only by walking, walking down a path to it’s center where all you find is clarity of mind, a wholeness of spirit and an overwhelming sense of love.

Picture a garden, where you or I, or our neighbor can sit and be still, or work the land in community, or smell the flowers. Where we can learn from each other and get back to our UU roots where summers off from congregating in a hot, sticky church are replaced by community and spirit in harvesting a crop that was gingerly cared for and watered and talked to the year through.

Picture an invitation to walk the trails of a more peaceful place in our city. For Fitchburg has many facets. That we may hold our presence for now in the graces of the inner city common…and a more rural place that reminds us of our human roots where people used to experience daily what it means to be surrounded by the natural world.

Picture a place where old and young and somewhere in the middle, find common ground. Where each can do their share, in his or her own way, own ability, and yet common ground invites us to learn from each other and share with each other the things we know, the things we wonder, the things that make us who we are.

Picture our children, for they are all ours, playing games and laughing as they run out of breath and fall cushioned by the greenest of grass and lay watching the birds fly overhead. Learning what it truly means to take care of our earth by doing just that. Learning from Nature what an interdependent web of life is by watching it take place right in our patch of earth. Where children who are able to sit and listen patiently and those who use their bodies to experience life can both participate during a lesson by having lots of room to be free to move and yet be close by without walls or doors so that they too can listen. For those whose voices carry far, that a walled room can make it impossible for those with small ears to hear… that the free air outside will absorb it into the sky.

Picture the sun shining on your faces as we all gather during the summer for a vespers that takes place in the cool evening air. A place that is always open for visitors with no reservations or obligations from each other to celebrate our end of the year picnic.

Someone I know is very interested in Bee Keeping…as I’m sure many people are. They long to learn the ways of having a relationship with the bees. I for one am so far from that desire. Quite frankly bees scare me…I would be utterly terrified and besides I have never been stung so they could be deadly, however his passion for it excites me and I know that something very good comes from this relationship and love for the bees…honey... and I definitely love honey. I can appreciate that keeping the bees is not for me but in seeing the good in it and the good that can come from it…I support it. And so for those who feel that they don’t connect to the vision or the possibilities at Fisher road…know that there is a bigger picture…that our current family and future UU’s, Maybe Connor’s children, just may benefit from our decision to journey together and take a leap of faith. (end of testimonial)

When Wendell Berry says do something everyday that won’t compute: love all that is sacred and love the world, it is a bold reminder that love doesn’t always compute. Perhaps it never does for love is not about bottom lines and accounting columns, nor is it a series of zeroes and ones. Love resides in the joyfulness we find even when we have considered the facts. Love stirs and coheres us even though we have markedly different experiences and desires. Love allows us to hold on and to let go.

Consider this Easter morn, dear Jesus who like the fox, made more tracks than necessary often in the wrong direction, not because he was lost, but because like many a spiritual wanderer, Jesus understood the value of unsettling himself as much as he unsettled others. Jesus did not merely advocate change. He resurrected it. He turned commandments inside out exposing their fleshy truths. He brought a fresh perspective to accepted ways of being and he took risks for the sake of preserving and restoring creation. In short, he did Noah proud.

Resurrection is not for the faint-hearted. Every spring as the trees transform their bareness and the bears lumber out of their dens, life renews itself. Whatever we as a congregation decide to do—to borrow the words of Lincoln—“fondly do I hope and fervently do I pray” that we each embrace the invitation not just to build an ark, but to become one—an ark sturdy enough to carry First Parish into its next incarnation, among sequoias whose mammoth trunks cannot contain our immeasurable laughter. Amen.

War is Not Inevitable: Memorial Day 2010

Tomorrow the bells will toll for fallen soldiers. Cities and towns will have parades. Members of the American Legion and VFW posts will place flags on graves of servicemen and –women. Politicians will make speeches. Veterans will offer remembrances of fallen comrades. At Arlington National Cemetery taps will be played, wreaths will be laid, and the tomb of the unknown soldier guarded in solemn ritual. And all the while war will rage on.

The fallen soldiers, airmen and -women, sailors, marines, guardsmen and –women barely whisper from their graves. Quieter still are the fallen civilians.
There is little more sobering than poring over the faces of war dead. Inch-square portraits, row upon row filling pages of The Washington Post, The Globe or The Times. Such earnest visages rendered in miniature as if their lives, their call to service and their wrenching deaths could be contained in an image the size of a thumbprint. While the photos momentarily arrest us, like a lock of hair falling forward we brush from our eyes, the battalions of images have yet to indelibly inscribe the futility of war.

Of course there have always been pacifists among us. One of my favorites within our tradition is John Haynes Holmes, born in 1879 in Philadelphia and raised Unitarian. John Haynes Holmes helped found the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice and what became the American Civil Liberties Union. But for most Unitarians of his day, Holmes’ absolute pacifism went too far, and he disassociated himself with Unitarianism during World War I. In 1925, John Haynes Holmes authored his tenth book, Patriotism Is Not Enough, published by my grandfather. In it Haynes wrote, “The result of all this sacrificial heroism was—what? Death, destruction, despair—the bankruptcy of nations, and the wrecking of civilization…little was won; well-nigh everything, material, ethical, spiritual was lost.”

It’s fair to say Holmes, like the other absolute pacifists among us fall out of favor with the majority, who may dislike war, but nonetheless believe in its efficacy. Of course the profiteers of war, the military industrial complex identified by President Eisenhower, may not dislike it, but most of us on a gut level understand the profits war generates come at tremendous social cost.
Yet beyond the circle of Gold Star families and veterans who know first hand the “death, destruction and despair,” beyond the hundreds of millions of non-combatants worldwide who have suffered the physical, political, economic and environmental devastations of war, the rest of us may register such ravages intellectually yet we assent with our silent acceptance, our complacency and complicity.

I am not suggesting we like war or approve of it, even though we may have the utmost appreciation and respect for the valor of fighting forces. Some may harbor frustration that killing even in the name of national defense gets valorized because killing on foreign soil or sand begs the question: what risk to our life or limb are we defending? And what spiritual and ethical principles do we sacrifice in the process of increasingly roboticized warfare where the faceless enemy becomes even more abstract?

We all know the stories of a Christmas ceasefire where young troops in Europe paused in their trenches, smoking cigarettes, singing “Silent Night” together across enemy lines in English and German. Probably far less chance wary young Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan will pause to set down arms and sing Qu’ranic verses with local combatants whether they long for safety and self-determination, too. Surely no songs fill the air beneath predator drones.

As staggering as war is for combatants, it victimizes women and children beyond compare. The rapacious hunger for oil, minerals and other resources has turned their torsos into battlefields.

In her eloquent and moving keynote address to the 2010 Women’s Nobel Initiative International Gender Justice Dialogue, social psychologist, writer, and Benedictine sister Joan Chittister said at the turn of the last century, civilian casualties were 5% of the war dead. In World War One, 15%. World War Two, 65%. By the mid 1990s, 75%. Today, civilian deaths comprise over 90% of war deaths. “If you want to be safe,” she suggests not as sardonically as it sounds, “join the military.” Major-General Patrick Cammaert, former commander of UN peacekeeping forces in the eastern Congo concurs when he states, “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict.”

I will spare you the grim list Joan Chittister provides but in summary, she calls the sixty million civilian deaths in the twentieth century “an orgy of war and civilian slaughter.”

It is not that the deaths of our military should go unnoticed, unheralded, it is that for each tiny portrait published in the newspaper, another dozen faces or more, belong in those pages. For while we may distinguish between the patriotism, or economic need of men and women who enlist, who join officer training programs or the National Guard—over and against those who simply die in the line of fire—the breath of life than animates each of us, the cosmos that bears us, the creative wellspring that brings us into being weeps no less for the lone boy ambling across the road, the elderly couple hiding in their home, or the hundreds of thousands of women and girls broken by systematic rape meant to brutalize them and shatter their communities with the blunt force of shame.

It is not simply that war happens, Joan Chittister tells us, it is that entire societies are organized around war. “Our generation, yours and mine, has made the whole world into prey but only some are armed.” Where, she asks, in the monuments we erect to the war dead, are the monuments to those whose lives have been denied not just from stray bullets and bombs, from predator drones and landmines, but from soil erosion, deforestation, diversion of water and food and natural resources used to fuel combat? Consider the children who go uneducated, the women who remain illiterate, the houses that go unfinished, the roads that go unmade, the minds and hearts and bodies untended because there is war—not in our yard but in our name. And not just ours, for there are many nations with denizens so depleted it takes nothing to grind them into fodder of war. Yet so often the line of connection ensnares us.

Sixty Minutes recently reported on “conflict minerals” in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the broadcast, there are over a million displaced people, over 200,000 women raped, and five million deaths in eastern Congo from a civil war “being fueled by a multi-million dollar trade in minerals that go into our electronic products.”

Cell phones, computers, even jewelry bears the bloodstains and misery of a nation despoiled. Sixty Minutes interviewed a woman in a refugee camp who told of her village destroyed in 2007, where 280 people including her parents and husband were burned alive. Later three of her children were shot dead and she suffered rape by uniformed men armed with machine guns. Her story, horrifically, is common in Eastern Congo where there are no monuments to war dead, only mineral exports that supply our demand for instance access and communication.

It will not be parades or statues, wreaths or speeches that absolve us or honor the dead. In the words of Joan Chittister, “It’s not what the mind knows; it’s what the heart knows that changes the world.”

In 2009, a Democratic representative from Washington State, Jim McDermott introduced legislation to “put in place a system of audits and regulations that would help stop companies from importing conflict minerals into the United States,” though the bill has not gained passage. As important as that piece of legislation may be, what lies before us is the willingness to re-see war, from the heart not the mind. Our analytical, ever-reasoning brains accept the inevitability or war. Some of us see it as a sad signature of being human. Other species may be predatory but aside from wily ants, we don’t see much that looks like war.

It is excruciating to see in the cell phone we use to call home in an emergency, in the laptop I use to write this sermon, the inconceivable costs of war from the pillaged earth and polluted air to rape and child labor, burning flesh to immolated villages, to displaced millions in despair. It is hard enough to watch The Hurt Locker and imagine negotiating a landscape pocked with IEDs.

But as Joan Chittister and John Haynes Holmes dare to assert, war is not the inevitable consequence of evolution. It comes from a willingness, in some cases couched as patriotic fervor, and sometimes in complicit assent. If it is “only with the heart that one can see rightly,” if “what is essential is invisible to the eye,” (Antoine de Saint Exupery) we will have to look beyond the convenience to its costs. We will have to listen more closely to what the soul knows and the mind denies. Too often we have conflated entitlement with God’s grace, ingenuity with providence, war with religion.

Joan Chittister says, “Violence defines religion consumed more by the national than the universal.” John Haynes Holmes sharpens the image:
Patriotism has its holy days, its saints and martyrs, its sacred books and documents. In its national anthems it has hymnology, in its ceremonials of the flag, a ritual as august as the mass.…And it is this religion of patriotism which denies and defeats the ideal of brotherhood, the love of all mankind.

In 1986, an international group of scientists in fields ranging from neurophysiology to behavioral genetics, ethology to psychology addressed the question of whether scientific theories and data can legitimately justify the claim that war is hard-wired into us. These scholars concluded it is not. In a statement on violence adopted by UNESCO, they arrived at five propositions:

1.It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.… The fact that warfare has changed so radically overtime indicates that it is a product of culture.… War is biologically possible, but it is not inevitable, as evidenced by its variation in occurrence and nature over time and space. There are cultures which have not engaged in war for centuries, and there are cultures which have engaged in war frequently at some times and not at others.

2. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature. While genes are involved at all levels of nervous system function, they provide a developmental potential that can be actualized only in conjunction with the ecological and social environment.

3. It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior.… Violence is neither in our evolutionary legacy nor in our genes.

4. It is scientifically incorrect to say that humans have a “violent brain.” While we do have the neural apparatus to act violently, it is not automatically activated by internal or external stimuli. Like higher primates and unlike other animals, our higher neural processes filter such stimuli before they can be acted upon. How we act is shaped by how we have been conditioned and socialized. There is nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to react violently.

5. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by “instinct” or any single motivation. The emergence of modern warfare has been a journey from the primacy of emotional and motivational factors, sometimes called “instincts,” to the primacy of cognitive factors. Modern war involves institutional use of personal characteristics such as obedience, suggestibility, and idealism, social skills such as language, and rational considerations such as cost-calculation, planning, and information processing. The technology of modern war has exaggerated traits associated with violence both in the training of actual combatants and in the preparation of support for war in the general population. As a result of this exaggeration, such traits are often mistaken to be the causes rather than the consequences of the process.

The signatories of this research statement conclude:
that biology does not condemn humanity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of biological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake the transformative tasks needed…Although these tasks are mainly institutional and collective, they also rest upon the consciousness of individual participants for whom pessimism and optimism are crucial factors. Just as “wars begin in the minds of men,” peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.

This Memorial Day we can do something far more meaningful, far more consequential than marching or attending a parade, more lasting than placing a wreath, flag or flower on a grave. We can begin the task of changing our own consciousness, of undoing a lifetime of cultural imprinting that has stamped the inevitability of war on our brains. Joan Chittister reminds us: “War is not inevitable. It is chosen; it is planned.”

The great Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry asks:
Who has invented our enmity?
Who has prescribed us hatred of each other?
Who has armed us against each other with the death of the world?
Who has appointed me such anger that I should desire the burning of your house or the destruction of your children?
Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to destroy you, or that I would improve myself by destroying you?
Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you, or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with you?

The silenced soldiers in their graves, the civilian dead, the scarred earth. and the living “whose souls have been disfigured” by war beseech us to answer. Amen.

Closing words:

“There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool.

There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.” (Wendell Berry)