I begin with a reading by Nancy Shaffer, from her book of meditations, Instructions in Joy.
Because we spill not only milk
knocking it over with an elbow
when we reach to wipe a small face
but also spill seed on soil we thought was fertile but isn't,
and also spill whole lives, and only later see in fading light
how much is gone and we hadn't intended it
because we tear not only cloth
thinking to find a true edge and instead making only a hole
but also tear friendships when we grow
and whole mountainsides because we are so many
and we want to live right where black oaks lived,
once very quietly and still
Because we forget not only what we are doing in the kitchen
and have to go back to the room we were in before,
remember why it was we left
but also forget entire lexicons of joy
and how we lost ourselves for hours
yet all that time were clearly found and held
and also forget the hungry not at our table
Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
and precious papers left in rain
but also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as though
they might be rearranged but which
once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless
Because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days,
we need the gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
Yesterday was Yom Kippur. It’s one of the days from the Jewish calendar that presses itself into me, not so much on the day itself, but in the time of year. In those days after Rosh Hashanah when the air turns crisp, when the pumpkins in my garden turn orange. It’s a time of turning, not just for the weather, the pumpkins, the season itself, but for us, for the human part of creation. How wise the ancient Jews who thought to observe this time, to reflect on what has bent askew, what has fallen or been pushed out of right relation.
What milk have we spilled, or poured unnecessarily? What lives have we overturned? In what relationships have we made holes? Where and when and for what do we need to atone?
Atonement parses into at-one-ment, which appears the simplest way to get at the heart of this day. Observant Jews set aside the ten days between the New Year and Yom Kippur to take inventory, to tally the tears and fissures, to note the unkempt words, the careless actions, the slivers of meanness that may have chipped away from our own pain or frustration. And then, the tally taken, observers of Yom Kippur consider as their Buddhist brethren and sisters do, what right action to take to restore balance and harmony. What amends must be made? What change need occur to re-establish trust and cooperation? What must one do to feel at home in oneself and thus able to welcome another?
Yom Kippur extends beyond contemplation into action. Regret is not sufficient. Though we find the virtue of humility embedded in remorse, Yom Kippur summons us to the virtue of courage as well. It summons us to wake early, to pad into the kitchen in our jammies and robe and sit at the table where the milk has spilled—to reckon with how much is gone that we never intended to lose.
Yom Kippur calls to us in the middle of the night when the branches outside our windows stir. We hear it in the tapping wind and creaking panes of glass urging us back in the rooms we wandered out of forgetting why we were there.
What did we promise ourselves that we have not kept? Where have we trailed off from our essence, the nature of our being that requires adherence lest we lose integrity? It has become easier to let slip the who of what we are.
In the last several months I have noticed during the excavation of self-reflection, that for the first time in my life I am completely at home. Home in my body and in my being—the ways I am, the essential nature that makes me Leaf. I am at home with you in this joyous ministry. I am at home where I live, in the house I inhabit, in the woods that surround me, in the region that holds me. I am at home in the friendships and kinships that sustain me as lovingly as the trees.
I share this because the recognition of being home now allows me to understand how all the years of not being home in one way or another—in body or spirit or place—caused a great deal of spillage. Nancy Shaffer in her lovely meditation speaks of “forget[ting] entire lexicons of joy and [losing] ourselves for hours yet all that time [we] were clearly found and held.” How wise and true of her to note. To know in our experience of utter lost-ness, when we feel most untethered from what grounds us, that we are held, reminds me of a poem by David Wagoner called "Lost":
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
where you are. You must let it find you.
Herein lies the distinctive offer of Yom Kippur. We approach the day willing to atone, yearning to restore and be restored. We name the moments, the methods, the meanderings where we have lost ourselves, our bearings, our attention to right and wrong. We yield for a day or a week or the ten days and nights of awe, arms upraised, calling into the indigo scrim of sky, here, here is where I faltered. And from the depths overhead, the winds sings to us through the branches tapping on the window, get up, get up, and I will show you in the darkness how you have been held.
Yom Kippur is the day Jews make the way back home to God. The days preceding it are meant to find our way back into right relation with self, followed by a restoration of relation with other human beings and as I see it, all the beings beyond human that sustain us: the earth and its creatures, its flora and fauna and waters and stone. Perhaps for some it is the collectivity of the cosmos and all its being that comprises the God or Godness that await us on Yom Kippur. When we reach the day, having done our best to align ourselves, to resume or at least attempt living right-sized, we are ready to place ourselves in the presence of the tree of life, the burning bush. If the value of doing so eludes us, if we are lost to the purpose of God, that thrum of being that holds us in our waking and our sleep, our living and our death, the gift is that the forest knows where [we] are.
To put it more biblically, it is Cain who having murdered his brother, calls out to God, “I shall be hidden from your face.”
Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you, if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
This is the gift—that we get to return. That we may feel lost, we may be lost. We may stray so far from the true edge of ourselves that we become something contrary to what we are meant to be. We may become foolhardy or unkind, greed-filled or wanton in our desires, careless with lexicons of expression and joy. We may roam so far from what we intended that we do not recognize the visage in the mirror staring back.
Or we may feel lost not by virtue of our own wandering, but by the mighty tosses of fate, the gales and riptides of life that unseat us. Uprooted we raise our tiny fists to God, we bellow or shriek our curses into the brooding sky, forgetting it reaches down to meet us. Anything above ground is sky. We hold onto that image of sky as the blue overhead because it looks clear in front of us, but the sky’s embrace is everywhere—or as Julian of Norwich, the 14th century Christian mystic put it: “ in falling and rising again we are kept in the same precious love.”
We get to return because we are never forsaken. Sure, God as rendered in the fourth chapter of Genesis. booms to Cain. “You will be a fugitive and a wanderer. When you till the ground it will no longer yield to you its strength,” but the same human imagination that penned those lines, that conceived God thoroughly brokenhearted by the blood Cain spilled, went on to write, “And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” Nod meaning wandering. The land of wandering. A prescient forbear recounts the consequence of fracture: the brokenness of Cain, the brokenness of Abel, the brokenness of God. In our wandering we feel lost but we remain found. Attached to the cosmos that spawns us and never lets us go, not in our dying, not even in the spilling of another’s blood. We are held, but it is our journey to return to the awareness of embrace.
That is the summons of Yom Kippur, to return to that awareness.
In the words of Nancy Shaffer, “Yet all that time [we] were clearly found and held.”
And—
Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
and precious papers left in rain
but also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as though
they might be rearranged but which
once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless
because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days,
we need the gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
Yom Kippur, in its own ironic or non-ironic way is about salvation: the kind that comes from turning and returning. Not from a man nailed to a cross. Not from an angel on high who assures disruption, but from the human capacity to stand still: before a tree, a burning bush, even a mirror, before the creatures with whom we share creation and re-create our lives each day—to still ourselves so that we may be found—by the wind that upturns the silver back of leaves, by the indigo sky that can always place us in the darkest night, by the churning waters that recognize us whirling in the undertow.
Whoever you are, wherever you may be, stand still and let the forest find you. Yom Kippur invites us to be found, to rediscover not just the true edges of self but the real not imagined permeations of being: the embrace of God, of a cosmos that holds us, that waits patiently for us to turn back, to lift our face to the sky and head home again. Amen.
Copyright Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish Fitchburg UU 19 Sept. 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Of Ducks & Caravans
Come, come whoever you are—wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving, ours is no caravan of despair. Come yet again, come.
The words of Rumi, 13th century Sufi, everlasting. Each year we turn and return—we gather again, the caravan circling round to pick up each one as we are—wherever we are in our journey.
We are not all in the same place for over the summer some of us have taken journeys and some of us have been taken by them. For many, it has been a summer marked by transitions—changes of heart, of home, of spiritual, emotional, physical condition.
As the caravan stops, waits for each of us to board, we take note of our fellow travelers—the ease or difficulty with which we climb on—some hopping, some creeping—color radiating from our faces or color drained. Some with our last two chickens, some with jewels.
We each join the caravan because it transports us here—together in our separateness.
Arlene Gay Levine writes:
Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.
Not so unlike William Blake who bid us to see the world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour, each moment in time is time. Each step is the journey. The journey of a thousand miles begins again with each step. That’s why we never step in the same river twice. The river flows, ever-changing—and we who bob and float and flow, sometimes snag, drift or swirl about in the eddies. We travel the river of life never coming up for air in the same place twice for just as the river changes, we change—we age, we ripen like cheese or wine or pears. And as we know, some of our ripenings toughen our skin and others tenderize us to bruising.
Thus we gather this ingathering Sunday once again, each in our own state of being—our ripeness fragrant or aromatic; some of us thick-rind as the rhino, some of us thin-skinned as the grape under a heel. We gather not just to be renewed but to be noticed in our renewing.
This week I received a few photos taken on Star Island where I spent a week in mid-August—photos of my mother and me laughing, no, cawing wild and exhilarated as crows; photos pixilated with innumerable points of joy—my mother’s sun-drenched face upturned, me banjo in hand. The photos tell of our renewal—not just mine and Taya’s, but an island of people, travelers all. Who gathered as we each “moved through a world of stone and stars” whirling together—alone but collected, separate but connected.
Each experiencing the moment co-created by each other. No moment belonged to any being alone. Every moment held the sound of the surf, the scent of salt air, the heat of the sun. Each mote of stone dust rising from the dirt embedded with particles of light—solar yes, but sacred, too—“nor do I mean anything miraculous,” to quote Mary Oliver,”only the light that can shine out of a life.”
I had never been to Star Island before but once there I understood its allure—the way our separate togetherness formed an invitation to dance at daybreak, to say yes because each note is the song.
And just like here, the song changes—it shimmies and coils, undulates like great undersea grasses swaying from the ocean floor.
At church, people make decisions about all kinds of things—steeples and buildings, budgets and mission, but that is not why we come; that is not what compels us to climb on the caravan—deciding things. No, we gather for something else—we gather to be the note in the song, the duck in the sea.
Donald Babcock writes:
Now we are ready to look at something pretty special.
It is a duck riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf,
And he cuddles in the swells.
There is a big heaving in the Atlantic.
And he is part of it.
He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.
Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.
And neither do you.
But he realizes it.
And what does he do, I ask you.
He sits down in it.
He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity – which it is.
That is religion, and the duck has it.
I like the little duck.
He doesn’t know much.
But he has religion.
We come like ducks to the ocean to be religion, not to study or parse it, analyze or justify it. To experience it, full-bodied; to make ourselves “part of the boundless, by easing [ourselves] into it—we come just to be where it touches us”—where the fragile and tenacious humanity of another brushes our skin, thick or tender, calloused or bruised, and like the duck, we probably don’t know how large the ocean is. We may ponder, dare to imagine its vastness though we cannot know with our finite bodies its infinite waves—we can rest while it heaves; we can bob and float—and because we lack the poise of ducks, we may overturn. We may churn in the undertow gasping for air, popping back up, scanning the water for a glimpse of the others, “finding repose in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.”
We come together this ingathering Sunday “to repose in the immediate, to make ourselves part of the boundless, to ease into it where it touches us”—here and here and here.
We return to one another, to the river never the same twice, to notice the changes, to feel them in our bodies and in our souls. We gather to witness and be witnessed, to hear and be heard, to behold and be held—whirling with and yet alone.
Come—come whoever you are—wanderer—worshipper—lover of leaving. Ours is no caravan of despair. Come. Yet again. Come.
Closing words
Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.
The words of Rumi, 13th century Sufi, everlasting. Each year we turn and return—we gather again, the caravan circling round to pick up each one as we are—wherever we are in our journey.
We are not all in the same place for over the summer some of us have taken journeys and some of us have been taken by them. For many, it has been a summer marked by transitions—changes of heart, of home, of spiritual, emotional, physical condition.
As the caravan stops, waits for each of us to board, we take note of our fellow travelers—the ease or difficulty with which we climb on—some hopping, some creeping—color radiating from our faces or color drained. Some with our last two chickens, some with jewels.
We each join the caravan because it transports us here—together in our separateness.
Arlene Gay Levine writes:
Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.
Not so unlike William Blake who bid us to see the world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour, each moment in time is time. Each step is the journey. The journey of a thousand miles begins again with each step. That’s why we never step in the same river twice. The river flows, ever-changing—and we who bob and float and flow, sometimes snag, drift or swirl about in the eddies. We travel the river of life never coming up for air in the same place twice for just as the river changes, we change—we age, we ripen like cheese or wine or pears. And as we know, some of our ripenings toughen our skin and others tenderize us to bruising.
Thus we gather this ingathering Sunday once again, each in our own state of being—our ripeness fragrant or aromatic; some of us thick-rind as the rhino, some of us thin-skinned as the grape under a heel. We gather not just to be renewed but to be noticed in our renewing.
This week I received a few photos taken on Star Island where I spent a week in mid-August—photos of my mother and me laughing, no, cawing wild and exhilarated as crows; photos pixilated with innumerable points of joy—my mother’s sun-drenched face upturned, me banjo in hand. The photos tell of our renewal—not just mine and Taya’s, but an island of people, travelers all. Who gathered as we each “moved through a world of stone and stars” whirling together—alone but collected, separate but connected.
Each experiencing the moment co-created by each other. No moment belonged to any being alone. Every moment held the sound of the surf, the scent of salt air, the heat of the sun. Each mote of stone dust rising from the dirt embedded with particles of light—solar yes, but sacred, too—“nor do I mean anything miraculous,” to quote Mary Oliver,”only the light that can shine out of a life.”
I had never been to Star Island before but once there I understood its allure—the way our separate togetherness formed an invitation to dance at daybreak, to say yes because each note is the song.
And just like here, the song changes—it shimmies and coils, undulates like great undersea grasses swaying from the ocean floor.
At church, people make decisions about all kinds of things—steeples and buildings, budgets and mission, but that is not why we come; that is not what compels us to climb on the caravan—deciding things. No, we gather for something else—we gather to be the note in the song, the duck in the sea.
Donald Babcock writes:
Now we are ready to look at something pretty special.
It is a duck riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf,
And he cuddles in the swells.
There is a big heaving in the Atlantic.
And he is part of it.
He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.
Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.
And neither do you.
But he realizes it.
And what does he do, I ask you.
He sits down in it.
He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity – which it is.
That is religion, and the duck has it.
I like the little duck.
He doesn’t know much.
But he has religion.
We come like ducks to the ocean to be religion, not to study or parse it, analyze or justify it. To experience it, full-bodied; to make ourselves “part of the boundless, by easing [ourselves] into it—we come just to be where it touches us”—where the fragile and tenacious humanity of another brushes our skin, thick or tender, calloused or bruised, and like the duck, we probably don’t know how large the ocean is. We may ponder, dare to imagine its vastness though we cannot know with our finite bodies its infinite waves—we can rest while it heaves; we can bob and float—and because we lack the poise of ducks, we may overturn. We may churn in the undertow gasping for air, popping back up, scanning the water for a glimpse of the others, “finding repose in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.”
We come together this ingathering Sunday “to repose in the immediate, to make ourselves part of the boundless, to ease into it where it touches us”—here and here and here.
We return to one another, to the river never the same twice, to notice the changes, to feel them in our bodies and in our souls. We gather to witness and be witnessed, to hear and be heard, to behold and be held—whirling with and yet alone.
Come—come whoever you are—wanderer—worshipper—lover of leaving. Ours is no caravan of despair. Come. Yet again. Come.
Closing words
Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Something to Keep
The Gift (by Li-Young Lee)
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
A few weeks ago as I considered what I might preach on this Father’s Day, I cradled the final lines of this poem. I turned them over in the palm of my heart. The biblical scholar Ellen Davis says in biblical language, heart most closely resembles imagination in 21st century terms. As I imagined what a child does when given something to keep, when I imagined a father’s hands, two measures of tenderness… laid against [a] face/ the flames of discipline… raised above [a] head, I conjured images of Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament—a Creator both delighted and devastated by the creatures of his creation.
And as the days mounted and the news reports of the Deepwater Horizon explosion continued to gush oil and catastrophe in equal measure, I knew I would have to summon the courage to consider with you today the spiritual costs of this egregious environmental disaster.
For those of you who have not seen it, I encourage you to watch online Rachel Maddow’s version of the speech she wished President Obama had given Tuesday from the Oval Office. No doubt all of you have heard newscasts and read commentaries detailing the toll on shorelines and marine life, human beings and economies, international political and corporate relations. Millions of barrels of oil released, millions more to come. The iconic images of brown pelicans slick with crude, beaches black with tar. Docked shrimpers, dying turtles, eleven dead oil workers, no real end to the damage in sight.
It is a rapacious hunger we have for oil and the life of more. In 21st century parlance, it is an addiction to an unsustainable way of life where we, the addicts desperate for more, ransack our home, trash our relationships, and cast ourselves further into estrangement from what gave us life, what rooted us in belonging, what calls to us still.
The great wisdom in the modern recovery movement is the understanding of addiction as not just a physical disease, but a spiritual malaise. A recognition of an unquenchable compulsion for something to fill the black hole. Years before I found my way to AA, I sat in a therapist’s office noting that I would eat Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in a vain attempt to fill the black hole. When I got to the halls of AA and heard countless others use that phrase I knew I was home because I didn’t have to explain what I meant or how the black hole felt. In recovery, the black hole disappears as one gains or returns to spiritual alignment. I remember telling my counselor I came into the world with a black hole. No one made it, not my parents or peers or even strangers. I used to think it made me unique. AA suggests it makes me legion with millions of others. Contemplating the most recent horrific oil spill—a word frighteningly euphemistic—makes me realize the black hole of spiritual estrangement may well be a condition we all face.
Ellen Davis, the biblical scholar I mentioned earlier, who teaches at Duke University Divinity School, explained in a recent interview with Krista Tippet on the marvelous public radio program, “Speaking of Faith,” that human beings reading the creation accounts in Genesis overlook that we are indeed creatures, beings of creation, not separate and apart from creation but integral to it. We are placed into a context just as other creatures are. Professor Davis says, “We are living amongst creatures who are blessed before we even come into existence. I think that's an important thing to recognize.”
We live in a nation and function within an economy and political system informed by a biblical understanding based on a single verse in Genesis that appears to give humans dominion: license to manage, control, even exploit what we perceive as resources not fellow creatures. Ellen Davis, scholar of the Hebrew Bible, nuances the word that undergirds our assumptions and entitlement.
The Hebrew word is a strong word and I render it “exercise skilled mastery amongst the creatures” because…the notion of skilled mastery suggests…a craft, an art, of being human without taking away the fact that humans do, from the perspective of almost all the biblical writers — not every single one but almost all —occupy a very special place of power and privilege and responsibility in the world. But the condition for our exercise of skilled mastery is set by the prior blessing of the creatures of sea and sky, that they are to be fruitful and multiply. So whatever it means for us to exercise skilled mastery, it cannot undo that prior blessing. I think that's pretty convicting for us in the sixth great age of species extinction. 1
Whether or not we turn to Genesis in our own lives, its influence on the framers of history, the captains of industry, and the keepers of culture cannot be overlooked. So it is worth noticing as closely as we notice the solstice, as we notice the rhythms to which we were born, as we notice what calls us toward home.
Ellen Davis continues:
“Let the earth grasp forth grass,” the Hebrew says. “Let seed-bearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it,” and it goes on for another verse. Continual emphasis on how the earth is a self-perpetuating system of fertility, of fruitfulness to provide for all. And then there is the creation of the earth creatures, including humankind. And then again at the very end of the chapter, God says to the humans right after they have been given the charge to exercise skilled mastery, God says, “Look, I give you every seed-bearing plant that's upon all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit that shall be yours for food. And to all the animals and to the birds and to the things that creep on the earth.” So food has been provided for all. 2
We come into being in the context of mutual relationship. We are not the favored children. We like all children receive particular gifts that carry attendant responsibilities. We are part of the family of creatures, of the cosmos. We live with and among the bacteria; our bodies contain elements common to stars; we slosh with water and breathe the air that levitates birds. The trees that give us oxygen relieve us of our carbon. The soil sustains us, literally, and then at our death, it welcomes us back. So how can we not be in a state of spiritual exile as we poison the soil, the water, the air? The poet, farmer and essayist Wendell Berry asks, “How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade?” 3
How can we consider our condition anything other than spiritual exile—what recovering addicts recognize as the black hole?
Berry writes:
The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong.
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast and cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay.
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.…
Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits. 4
Our culture is rooted in a narrative of creation that begins with a garden.
The First Lady plants a garden on the White House lawn and we think it quaint. A movement of organic farmers emerges in this generation and we call it countercultural forgetting sixty years ago, all gardening was organic. The locavore impulse, the slow food movement, the spate of books calling for a return to whole food instead of non-nutritive edibles, the current work of evolutionary biologist and plant geneticist Wes Jackson of the Land Institute to change “the dominant model …[of] annual plants grown increasingly in monoculture [to] … perennial plants grown in polyculture” 5 —these are not just passing fancies or elitist ideas. They represent a human yearning to return to the garden Wendell Berry speaks of; the garden imagined in Genesis where God sees what God has created, including Adam from adamah—the Hebrew word for earth, and it is good; it is very good.
The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico that erupted April 20th and continues to fume, bespeaks our ongoing alienation, our exile from the garden, from right relation with creation, dare I say our separation from God, from that wellspring of creative energy that spun our cosmos into being.
This oil spill did not create the state of exile. It emerged long before. I’m not suggesting as traditional Christian doctrine does, that human beings fell permanently from a state of grace when Eve ate the forbidden fruit. I am not suggesting any two people stood in a garden talking to God several thousand years ago. But I am positing that the exilic experience fundamental to Judaism, and common to hundreds of millions of humans now, is deeper than a literal separation from one’s geographic homeland.
Stephen Prothero, professor of religion at Boston University writes in his new book, God Is Not One, “…the problem of exile is chronic…so it is the job of the Jewish people to make things ready and to make things right—to “repair the world” and put an end to exile.” 6
I suspect however, it is not just the job of the Jewish people; it is the task of humankind, especially those of us who have traded in the garden, who have picked up that “shard of metal” and “christen[ed] it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart.” It is our reckoning to return home—not as the desperate addict does, to ransack the house in search for something else to sell, to feed the habit, to satiate an insatiable hunger—but to begin the arduous, painful, necessary work of making amends, mending the torn fabric of creation, healing the estrangement that has exiled us from our mother/father earth.
A few weeks ago I quoted Sister Joan Chittister who says war is not inevitable. A few days ago, Wendell Berry said in an interview, “I’m so tired of that word inevitable.”
As weary as he is, as we all are, of what we have come to accept as inevitable: oil spills that guarantee environmental disaster; wars that ravage the earth and the populations it sustains; a disequilibrium we call capitalism and sometimes scorn as greed—as weary as we are of what we accept as inevitable, our hearts long to end the exile: the state of alienation from our birthright of creation: a place in the garden: participation in the fecundity of life.
In the book of Genesis we are bestowed blessing and responsibility to “exercise skilled mastery,” to use our gifts wisely and respectfully, remembering that our blessing neither precedes nor supercedes the blessing or placement of any other being.
The tragic oil disaster that began on April 20th bears many costs, the greatest of which may be spiritual, if we do not notice and respond to the tug at our sleeve, the tear at our heart, the great gushing of grief from the creative energy some of us call God, from a cosmos so astounding and astounded that we have pillaged our home.
Wendell Berry writes “there are no unsacred places: there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”7
Ellen Davis asserts “in different ways the first and second chapters of the Bible are telling us about our place in the world, telling us about the web of relationships into which we are born as a species. And we are placed creatures.”8
Clearly, we have lost our place, gone terribly awry, not because we are bad, but because are estranged, wandering far beyond the garden toward industrial factories of agriculture we cannot even rightly call farms. Our appetites, our habits, our cathedral ceilings and large cars, our recreational pursuits and entire way of being have taken us further and further from a life planted deep in right relation. We can’t feel God tugging our sleeve. The consequences of this oil spill, of global warming and global inequity affect us all, not equally, not simultaneously, but spiritually, we all bear the cost.
Perhaps Fathers’ Day can call us back to “what a child does when he’s given something to keep.” May it coax us, the prodigal sons and daughters, to find our way home. Amen.
I leave you with the wisdom of Rumi:
Let yourself be silently drawn
by the strange pull of what you really love.
It will not lead you astray.
1 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/land-life-poetry/transcript.shtml
2 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/land-life-poetry/transcript.shtml
3 from “Questionnaire,” published in Leavings. Counterpoint, 2010
4 from “A Speech to the Garden Club of America,” published in Leavings. Counterpoint, 2010
5 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/land-life-poetry/transcript.shtml
6 Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One, HarperOne, 2010, pp.253-4
7 from “How To Be a Poet (to remind myself),” Given (poems), Shoemaker Hoard, 2005
8 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/land-life-poetry/transcript.shtml
Copyright Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish UU, Fitchburg 20 June 2010
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
A few weeks ago as I considered what I might preach on this Father’s Day, I cradled the final lines of this poem. I turned them over in the palm of my heart. The biblical scholar Ellen Davis says in biblical language, heart most closely resembles imagination in 21st century terms. As I imagined what a child does when given something to keep, when I imagined a father’s hands, two measures of tenderness… laid against [a] face/ the flames of discipline… raised above [a] head, I conjured images of Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament—a Creator both delighted and devastated by the creatures of his creation.
And as the days mounted and the news reports of the Deepwater Horizon explosion continued to gush oil and catastrophe in equal measure, I knew I would have to summon the courage to consider with you today the spiritual costs of this egregious environmental disaster.
For those of you who have not seen it, I encourage you to watch online Rachel Maddow’s version of the speech she wished President Obama had given Tuesday from the Oval Office. No doubt all of you have heard newscasts and read commentaries detailing the toll on shorelines and marine life, human beings and economies, international political and corporate relations. Millions of barrels of oil released, millions more to come. The iconic images of brown pelicans slick with crude, beaches black with tar. Docked shrimpers, dying turtles, eleven dead oil workers, no real end to the damage in sight.
It is a rapacious hunger we have for oil and the life of more. In 21st century parlance, it is an addiction to an unsustainable way of life where we, the addicts desperate for more, ransack our home, trash our relationships, and cast ourselves further into estrangement from what gave us life, what rooted us in belonging, what calls to us still.
The great wisdom in the modern recovery movement is the understanding of addiction as not just a physical disease, but a spiritual malaise. A recognition of an unquenchable compulsion for something to fill the black hole. Years before I found my way to AA, I sat in a therapist’s office noting that I would eat Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in a vain attempt to fill the black hole. When I got to the halls of AA and heard countless others use that phrase I knew I was home because I didn’t have to explain what I meant or how the black hole felt. In recovery, the black hole disappears as one gains or returns to spiritual alignment. I remember telling my counselor I came into the world with a black hole. No one made it, not my parents or peers or even strangers. I used to think it made me unique. AA suggests it makes me legion with millions of others. Contemplating the most recent horrific oil spill—a word frighteningly euphemistic—makes me realize the black hole of spiritual estrangement may well be a condition we all face.
Ellen Davis, the biblical scholar I mentioned earlier, who teaches at Duke University Divinity School, explained in a recent interview with Krista Tippet on the marvelous public radio program, “Speaking of Faith,” that human beings reading the creation accounts in Genesis overlook that we are indeed creatures, beings of creation, not separate and apart from creation but integral to it. We are placed into a context just as other creatures are. Professor Davis says, “We are living amongst creatures who are blessed before we even come into existence. I think that's an important thing to recognize.”
We live in a nation and function within an economy and political system informed by a biblical understanding based on a single verse in Genesis that appears to give humans dominion: license to manage, control, even exploit what we perceive as resources not fellow creatures. Ellen Davis, scholar of the Hebrew Bible, nuances the word that undergirds our assumptions and entitlement.
The Hebrew word is a strong word and I render it “exercise skilled mastery amongst the creatures” because…the notion of skilled mastery suggests…a craft, an art, of being human without taking away the fact that humans do, from the perspective of almost all the biblical writers — not every single one but almost all —occupy a very special place of power and privilege and responsibility in the world. But the condition for our exercise of skilled mastery is set by the prior blessing of the creatures of sea and sky, that they are to be fruitful and multiply. So whatever it means for us to exercise skilled mastery, it cannot undo that prior blessing. I think that's pretty convicting for us in the sixth great age of species extinction. 1
Whether or not we turn to Genesis in our own lives, its influence on the framers of history, the captains of industry, and the keepers of culture cannot be overlooked. So it is worth noticing as closely as we notice the solstice, as we notice the rhythms to which we were born, as we notice what calls us toward home.
Ellen Davis continues:
“Let the earth grasp forth grass,” the Hebrew says. “Let seed-bearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it,” and it goes on for another verse. Continual emphasis on how the earth is a self-perpetuating system of fertility, of fruitfulness to provide for all. And then there is the creation of the earth creatures, including humankind. And then again at the very end of the chapter, God says to the humans right after they have been given the charge to exercise skilled mastery, God says, “Look, I give you every seed-bearing plant that's upon all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit that shall be yours for food. And to all the animals and to the birds and to the things that creep on the earth.” So food has been provided for all. 2
We come into being in the context of mutual relationship. We are not the favored children. We like all children receive particular gifts that carry attendant responsibilities. We are part of the family of creatures, of the cosmos. We live with and among the bacteria; our bodies contain elements common to stars; we slosh with water and breathe the air that levitates birds. The trees that give us oxygen relieve us of our carbon. The soil sustains us, literally, and then at our death, it welcomes us back. So how can we not be in a state of spiritual exile as we poison the soil, the water, the air? The poet, farmer and essayist Wendell Berry asks, “How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade?” 3
How can we consider our condition anything other than spiritual exile—what recovering addicts recognize as the black hole?
Berry writes:
The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong.
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast and cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay.
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.…
Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits. 4
Our culture is rooted in a narrative of creation that begins with a garden.
The First Lady plants a garden on the White House lawn and we think it quaint. A movement of organic farmers emerges in this generation and we call it countercultural forgetting sixty years ago, all gardening was organic. The locavore impulse, the slow food movement, the spate of books calling for a return to whole food instead of non-nutritive edibles, the current work of evolutionary biologist and plant geneticist Wes Jackson of the Land Institute to change “the dominant model …[of] annual plants grown increasingly in monoculture [to] … perennial plants grown in polyculture” 5 —these are not just passing fancies or elitist ideas. They represent a human yearning to return to the garden Wendell Berry speaks of; the garden imagined in Genesis where God sees what God has created, including Adam from adamah—the Hebrew word for earth, and it is good; it is very good.
The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico that erupted April 20th and continues to fume, bespeaks our ongoing alienation, our exile from the garden, from right relation with creation, dare I say our separation from God, from that wellspring of creative energy that spun our cosmos into being.
This oil spill did not create the state of exile. It emerged long before. I’m not suggesting as traditional Christian doctrine does, that human beings fell permanently from a state of grace when Eve ate the forbidden fruit. I am not suggesting any two people stood in a garden talking to God several thousand years ago. But I am positing that the exilic experience fundamental to Judaism, and common to hundreds of millions of humans now, is deeper than a literal separation from one’s geographic homeland.
Stephen Prothero, professor of religion at Boston University writes in his new book, God Is Not One, “…the problem of exile is chronic…so it is the job of the Jewish people to make things ready and to make things right—to “repair the world” and put an end to exile.” 6
I suspect however, it is not just the job of the Jewish people; it is the task of humankind, especially those of us who have traded in the garden, who have picked up that “shard of metal” and “christen[ed] it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart.” It is our reckoning to return home—not as the desperate addict does, to ransack the house in search for something else to sell, to feed the habit, to satiate an insatiable hunger—but to begin the arduous, painful, necessary work of making amends, mending the torn fabric of creation, healing the estrangement that has exiled us from our mother/father earth.
A few weeks ago I quoted Sister Joan Chittister who says war is not inevitable. A few days ago, Wendell Berry said in an interview, “I’m so tired of that word inevitable.”
As weary as he is, as we all are, of what we have come to accept as inevitable: oil spills that guarantee environmental disaster; wars that ravage the earth and the populations it sustains; a disequilibrium we call capitalism and sometimes scorn as greed—as weary as we are of what we accept as inevitable, our hearts long to end the exile: the state of alienation from our birthright of creation: a place in the garden: participation in the fecundity of life.
In the book of Genesis we are bestowed blessing and responsibility to “exercise skilled mastery,” to use our gifts wisely and respectfully, remembering that our blessing neither precedes nor supercedes the blessing or placement of any other being.
The tragic oil disaster that began on April 20th bears many costs, the greatest of which may be spiritual, if we do not notice and respond to the tug at our sleeve, the tear at our heart, the great gushing of grief from the creative energy some of us call God, from a cosmos so astounding and astounded that we have pillaged our home.
Wendell Berry writes “there are no unsacred places: there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”7
Ellen Davis asserts “in different ways the first and second chapters of the Bible are telling us about our place in the world, telling us about the web of relationships into which we are born as a species. And we are placed creatures.”8
Clearly, we have lost our place, gone terribly awry, not because we are bad, but because are estranged, wandering far beyond the garden toward industrial factories of agriculture we cannot even rightly call farms. Our appetites, our habits, our cathedral ceilings and large cars, our recreational pursuits and entire way of being have taken us further and further from a life planted deep in right relation. We can’t feel God tugging our sleeve. The consequences of this oil spill, of global warming and global inequity affect us all, not equally, not simultaneously, but spiritually, we all bear the cost.
Perhaps Fathers’ Day can call us back to “what a child does when he’s given something to keep.” May it coax us, the prodigal sons and daughters, to find our way home. Amen.
I leave you with the wisdom of Rumi:
Let yourself be silently drawn
by the strange pull of what you really love.
It will not lead you astray.
1 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/land-life-poetry/transcript.shtml
2 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/land-life-poetry/transcript.shtml
3 from “Questionnaire,” published in Leavings. Counterpoint, 2010
4 from “A Speech to the Garden Club of America,” published in Leavings. Counterpoint, 2010
5 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/land-life-poetry/transcript.shtml
6 Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One, HarperOne, 2010, pp.253-4
7 from “How To Be a Poet (to remind myself),” Given (poems), Shoemaker Hoard, 2005
8 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/land-life-poetry/transcript.shtml
Copyright Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish UU, Fitchburg 20 June 2010
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