For the beauty of
the earth…..
April 23, 2006
Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris
PRAYER FOR THE GREAT
TURNING
May the turning of the Earth save us.
May the turning of the
seasons & the turning of the leaves save us.
May we be saved by the worms, the beetles & the microbes turning the soil.
May we be saved by the turning of
vegetation into compost
& the turning of compost into rich soil.
May the turning of seeds into plants & the turning of
flowers
into fruits save us.
May the grasses & weeds, the vines
& mosses all conspire to save us.
May we be saved by the turning of sprouts into saplings, of saplings into
trees,
& the trees into forests.
May the scurrying,
foraging, pouncing & lumbering of the animals save us.
May the breath of heaven
in the breezes & the stormy winds save us.
May the dance of the
butterflies, & the musical flight & return
of the birds save us.
May we be saved by vapors turning into clouds & by the turning of
the ever-changing clouds into rain.
May the waters flowing
from springs into the lakes save us.
May the streams flowing into rivers, the rivers into seas,
& the great heaving of the oceans save us.
May we be saved by the patient turning of
the rocks, the hills,
the mountains, & the volcanoes.
May the metabolism of the climates of the Earth save us.
May the turnings of all Beings great
& small move us to find wisdom in our own turnings.
May we be saved by our waking & sleeping, by the rhythms of our blood
& our appetites, by the cycles of birthing & nurturing, injury & healing,
mating & nesting, loss &
discovery, joy & mourning.
May we find in time the grace to turn to
one another, & may this turning
also become our salvation.
May we learn to benefit the life of Earth with peace, humble in our needs,
& generous in our giving.
May we learn to celebrate the abundance
of life with gratitude, & to embrace
the Earth with our bodies in return.
Sermon
How do you think of the world? As something too large to comprehend? As the beautiful blue marble seen from the space pictures? As the firmness of the very soil under your feet? How about as something you embrace or caress? In her book, “World as Lover, World as Self,” Joanna Macy, deep ecologist and Buddhist, makes an impassioned case for us to view the world as something that is not separate from us, rather as something closely connected to us. Not held at arm’s length or viewed objectively and dispassionately. In fact, she suggests that we cannot begin to do what is needed to save our environment until we can see the world as intimately as we would a lover.
Now even on the Sunday following Earth Day and the first day of Spring, this may seem absurd or extreme, even to those of us for whom the natural world is key to our spiritual being. For me, the way into any kind of spiritual life was through my explorations of wild places that I first experienced that feeling of relief that indeed, something was larger than I was. It was the enormity of a bay when I crossed it in a canoe. The eternity of the sky when viewed through the sheltering arms of towering trees and without light pollution. The immortality of the ocean. My spirit was connected—and yet to vastness, not to fragility.
When I was a child in the early 1970s, we believed we could save the environment. We threw colored bottles into concrete stalls filled with broken glass and imagined a glittering new world. My first role in a school play was as a piece of trash ( I can still remember the chorus from the big finale number about pollution which I will spare you!). I took that love to heart and ended up thinking I might make this sense of connection my life’s work. In my environmental management graduate program, we calculated the optimal yields for forests; we focused on the link between organized crime and hazardous waste; we promoted alternative technologies. Yet these were bobbing technical fixes in a sea of dire predictions, hopes too small in a vast ocean of relentless doom, and as I learned more and read more and joined every environmental group there was, I increasingly got overwhelmed. I dropped memberships, stopped reading, feeling too powerless, the specifics seemed trivial; the vastness turned threatening, what was the point?
Many people feel that about our seventh principle of Unitarian Universalism, affirming the interdependent web of life. How exactly is one to do that everyday? To comprehend that can make people feel too small, can lead, in fact, to despair. Joanna Macy says this despair is part of what we must embrace. That means to say, yes, it is okay to feel frightened about the state of our world. And even to feel helpless. As a people, we are not prone to allowing this sort of existential fear to permeate us. To truly allow ourselves to be taken this deeply into the uncertainties and fragilities of our world.
Despair is like grief in this requirement for depth and yet despair is different from grief, Macy points out. Grief is the intensity felt around a loss. Despair is felt around the possibility of a loss. In some ways it is a more ambiguous—and more frightening emotion. We have only to open our hearts and minds a little to see that the world truly is fragile. In our daily conversations, we chat about global warming, we drive by acres stripped of trees, we think about the availability of fresh water. It IS like what happens in a relationship, when, after the first glow, you start to see the odd habits and the little annoying tendencies and some dark places yet unexplored. Yet is it the stuff of religious work? Our seventh principle says that we covenant to affirm and promote the interdependent web of life of which we are a part—in this sense, we have placed ourselves in a closer relationship than others might—and yet is engaging with despair a part of relationship?
Macy says it is, that we must feel our despair and not rush
to hope, judgment and miracle cures.
Allowing ourselves to feel an intense and negative emotion does not feel
nourishing to the spirit. It may, again,
seem absurd, the way dancing—or watching people dancing—the Elm Dance may seem
ridiculous. Yet the Elm dance has been
danced by many since this simple Latvian tune was composed under an oppressive
government. Joanna Macy once danced it
in a village much affected by the
So yes, to do this work, we may have to experience things that don’t always feel as familiar, as firm, as rational as we would like. Yet in doing this work, we may discover something essential, some older truths. For as Joanna Macy recalls:
Some of our friends
from
The dance produced a turning like that which Joanna Sunshower’s poem spoke. I know that many people in this community are awaiting the kind of shift. They have quiet despair about the state of our world, not only its treatment of the air and water and the earth, also its treatment of the human family and the ways that the two interact in awful ways. We can easily be subject to paralysis by analysis in this area. A bombardment of facts can leave us stiff and defensive. How can we comprehend even a fraction of the data provide by one place, World watch Institute which reports that 1 in 4 animal species is in decline; that if all the trips taken by U.S. drivers were laid end to end in a year, they would equal 14,308 trips to the sun using 8.2 million barrels of fuel a day; that an average of 9.4 million hectares of forest (roughly the size of Portugal) was lost annually during the 1990s. After decades of dire predictions, we seek merely to cover up the roots of despair the way we often try to ignore despair when it appears in our intimate relationships.
Instead, we must give our despair tangible images, Macy says. Our poets and musicians this morning invite us into their images: the river, the wolf cry, the grinning bobcat, the colors of the wind. The worms, the beetles, the microbes. The rocks, mountains, and volcanos. The mating and nesting. We called out images in the Elm dance of specific things endangered by the world as it is. The feeling and the images are what can invite us in to the realities that confront us, realities about what truly needs healing in our world.
And then, as if despair—seen, felt and given form is not enough—Macy tells us to wait. To wait, like those standing and swaying beats in the dance. Waiting like the fallow periods in relationships. With notable exceptions, I would venture a guess that most of us do not consider ourselves to be accomplished in the area of “waiting.” I feel pretty certain that this was not what those who added our seventh principle had in mind. Ours is the action society, the do-ers, the achievers; Action News and Meals on the Go. We are not wait-ers. And yet, Macy says, to truly grasp the changes that we need to have, to truly do the spiritual work that we must do, we must wait.
Waiting is hard and yet sometimes waiting is necessary, the way you wait for a lover whom you have lost to depression or to illness. Waiting is hard. Since my student ministry days, I have had a dream of our having a special ministry for those for whom emotional wellness is a special challenge. Last Friday, in light of recent events here and after years of dead-ends, I was able to have a conversation with two people who want to make it happen. Others here today are waiting to see if enough momentum can be found to start an environmental ministry. Tangible images can lead to tangible steps. Macy asks those who dance the Elm dance to contribute money to a group which helps by monitors for the people of Novozybkov, for they still face several generations of life before the radiation levels will allow them to interact with their beloved woods again
Fiinally, Macy reminds us, all this happens in the context of a community, for no relationship can be re-envisioned by one alone. “Despair work is not a solo venture, no matter how alone one may feel,” she writes. “When we face the darkness of our time, openly and together, we tap into reserves of strength within us. Many of us fear that confrontation with despair will bring loneliness and isolation, but, on the contrary, in the letting go of old defenses, truer community is found.” And yes, this we have identified the reason why this is faith work, why this is part of our religious work as a people.
Macy’s work does not just have relevance for our relationship with the Earth, it has a relevance for our relationship with life. It offers a message for any issue in which we need a true turning, a deep change. She writes: “We can turn from the search for personal salvation or some metaphysical haven and look instead to our actual experience. When we simply attend to what we see, feel and know to be happening in our world, we find authenticity.” So, perhaps, this is how we comprehend the interdependent web of life, to see the earth as a lover, and despair and waiting as investments in relationship. May we find the courage to dance—for the beauty of the earth and for the beauty of all life, vast and fragile. So may it be.
In honor of the unity that is required to do the work of a great turning, to do any great work and to accomplish any great act of faith, I ask you to rise in body or spirit and join in Sarah Lammert’s Litany , your response is printed in the order of service.
Litany - Sarah Lammert
We
create a web of life.
This is finally the time to let
go of that crazy notion that we can live separate and aloof from one another
We
create a web of life.
This is the time at last that we
can come home to each other, to our mutual belonging.
We
create a web of life.
And we create a web of life out
of which every single one of us can use everything our stories have given us.
We
create a web of life.
Every part of our lives... even the cruelty, even the abuse, even the addictions, even
the loneliness, even the failures...
We
create a web of life.
A web of life is created within
which you can rest in that knowing. Because out of that you
can act. Out of that, all power is yours. Out of that, you travel light.
Out of that, you can step forward.
We
create a web of life.
Let every encounter be a
homecoming as we step forward now for the healing of our world. The world is not
going to be saved by good people or noble people. The world is going to be
healed by ordinary people, like you and me, who are not afraid of pain and who
are not afraid of loving each other. Amen.
Adapted by the
author from a transcript of a radio show with Joanna Macy on KPFA,