Healing our Lives, Healing the Earth

Good morning! It’s so great to be invited to speak with you this morning in this beautiful worship space. Somehow I can’t resist an invitation to share my “gospel of the Earth” with anyone willing to give me their attention for a few minutes. So I thank you for this opportunity.

I really love this time of year—its color, its cold, its increasing darkness and rain. It reminds me of the Pacific Northwest—my home only during the 1980’s, but my spiritual home since I was a child, when my family would travel from California to the Olympic Peninsula to visit relatives.

There’s something about the memories of roaming the trails in the woods behind Grandmother’s house, a troop of cousins and a younger sibling or two in tow. There’s something about hiking with friends and colleagues in the forest outside of Portland, learning about the relationships among the plants and animals that inhabit that ecosystem. And there’s something about hunkering down beneath a great douglas fir, watching the misty rain falling outside the protection of the tree’s branches, listening for the footsteps of a browsing deer and breathing in the spicy dampness of the decaying needles and leaves underneath.

How many of you feel that kind of a relationship to a place? A place that for some reason reminds you of who you are, what’s important in life, how you should be in the world? A place where the physical world draws you to a higher plane?

You know, some people will deny this—it’s too mystical, a feeling that can’t be explained rationally. But I’ve known hard-core rationalists who return year after year, decade after decade, to that special place.

They always have their reasons: To visit friends or relatives… They got a bargain when they bought that beach house or cabin years ago so now it’s habit. I use the excuse that my son lives there with his wife and my two year old grandson—I have to visit once in a while.

But the truth is, every time I’m there, I’m reminded of how my soul is soothed by the landscape—the shape of the mountains, the texture of the forest, the smell of the air—that’s different for some unexplained reason than anywhere else on earth. It feels like home. I have lots of reasons to live here inside the beltway, and I’m almost certain to find myself in one or two other areas for some years, but I still expect to return home to the Columbia River for my final years.
As a teenager, I learned to backpack in the mountains of southern California and in the High Sierras of central California. These experiences made me a different human being than I might have been. I learned about the importance of natural relationships. About letting things grow at their own pace and die in their own time. I learned about myself ; and what I could do, and couldn’t do. About the importance of my connection to the Earth. About the greed and carelessness that pervades our contemporary lifestyle, and how it damages not only the Earth, but our very souls as well.

I believe our relationship with the Earth is the basis—the foundation—of the way we live and breathe, and relate to one another. I don’t think the early pagans were far off with their belief that the Earth was our Mother, that the actual possibility of life was a divine presence all around us. They worshiped the Goddess, seeing her in everything in the natural world. This belief instructed the clan, or the tribe, in how to behave toward the Earth. They found wisdom in nature—learning from how the plants and animals related to each other. And they figured that they were subject to the same rules as the rest of creation.

If we still believed that way, it would have huge implications for how we live on the Earth today. We have scientific explanations for how the world works, and we have a wondrous mixture of technologies that allows us to control and manipulate the world to suit our needs. Nature provides the goods and services we need to sustain ourselves. But the Earth is more subtle and complicated than we know, more complex than we can know.

Indigenous people performed rain dances to implore the gods to end a drought. Today, the National Weather Service seeds clouds with minerals to force whatever moisture is present to precipitate out and dampen the parched fields. But we don’t create the moisture—we only manipulate what’s already there. And we aren’t very skilled at that, at least so far!

On the other hand, we can affect nature, more profoundly now than at any other time in history—and often in ways we can’t anticipate. We’ve invented all kinds of wonderful synthetic chemicals to allow us to increase yields from our farms and fields: fertilizers to make things grow faster and bigger; pesticides to eliminate the small critters that want their share of the harvest before we get ours. But we haven’t figured out how to protect ourselves from the cancers, immune dysfunctions, and reproductive disorders that seem to be a consequence of our use of those chemicals.

Scientists are nearly unanimous now that we are having a profound impact on the climate of the Earth. And the evidence continues to mount. Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is causing temperatures to rise, with all kinds of unforeseen results. If you aren’t aware of what’s in store for us, you’d better start checking it out. With health affects and food production issues, not to mention coastal land losses due to rising ocean levels, we’ll have lots of adjusting to do in the coming decades! Our technical prowess is not always successful or benign. And I think that scares us sometimes. So we ignore or deny the consequences and keep working on the next generation of technologies. One of these days we’ll get it right! Right?

So what does all this have to do with us on Sunday morning, here at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Silver Spring? Yes, that is the bottom-line, isn’t it? What does all of this have to do with our religious faith?

Well, here’s my take on it:

As I see it, a religious perspective on the environment covers three major facets. First, there are the gifts that nature provides for us: food, shelter, and other survival needs, of course; and, just as important, solace and sustenance for our spirit.

The next facet is the theological meaning we find in our world. This is usually sketched out in the stories or mythologies that explain the world in a particular culture or tradition – Where did we come from? Why we are here? What’s our relationship to the other parts of the world? For UUs, this explanation is held in our Seventh Principle, in the metaphor of the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.

And finally, a religious perspective considers the morality of the way we live on this Earth. This is about more than our individual and communal behaviors—like energy conservation and recycling. It is also about the social and economic structures we create that result in justice for some, and lack of justice for others.

Now let me try to weave these all together for you. I’ll start with the gifts…

When we think of what our spirit receives from nature, many of us imagine the solitude and beauty of wilderness. According to writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams, wilderness is a metaphor of “unlimited possibility”. “What do we wish for?” she asks. “To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from…”

So when I ask people “Where do you feel most connected to the Divine?” at least someone always replies, “In nature, in the wilderness.”

In the 1830’s, the great Unitarian preacher Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke eloquently about the benefits of immersing oneself in nature—for sustenance and rejuvenation. He recognized nature as a place to seek enlightenment and awakening, a place to meditate and seek wisdom.

Thomas Starr King was both a Unitarian and a Universalist minister a few decades later in the 1860's. (His name was adopted for the UU seminary I went to in Berkeley, California.) He found beauty and relaxation in the wilderness of California’s Yosemite Valley, and today, one of the towering peaks of granite in Yosemite National Park bears his name—Mt. Starr King.

We find all kinds of images in nature that serve as much more than just pretty metaphors. They illustrate fundamental truths about the world and our place in it. Nature’s metaphors impart a wisdom that we ignore at our peril.

I spent most of my professional career in the U.S. Forest Service in California and the Pacific Northwest, before coming back here to work in Washington in 1990. So it’s no surprise that I look to images of trees and the forest for wisdom. The Tree of Life is a religious icon in most of the world’s traditions.

Here is what it means to me:

A forest exists in relation to its mountain. The individual trees germinate from tiny seeds, grow to great height, develop and drop their leaves, produce and release seeds to be scattered across the mountain, and finally die and decay on the forest floor. Together as the forest, they share in the task of nurturing and sheltering the plants and creatures of the mountain, including each other.

Throughout the cycle of the forest’s life, soil develops from the material produced by the trees, and other plants and creatures participate in the life of the mountain side. In turn, this soil becomes part of the mountain that supports and nurtures the forest, even as it remains part of the forest that birthed it. Residual from the other plants and creatures is integrated into this rich, pregnant matter.

A new generation of trees, of forest, is nurtured here. Without the mountain, the forest would have no place to stand, no food to nurture its growth. Without the forest, the soil would dry up and wash down the face of the mountain in a rainstorm, or blow away in the wind. The forest and the mountain need each other, and they are changed by each other.

The wisdom the Earth shares with us requires getting to know a place, a location, a particular spot of ground. Developing a relationship with it. This was something I learned from my forestry colleagues as I accompanied them into the Oregon and Washington forests. I was not a scientist—I didn’t know the identity of most of the plants and forest creatures. And I understood the geological processes and life cycles only at the broadest level. But the foresters and biologists—the ones who had been in that location for some time—they knew the names of every tree, every shrub and flower, every critter from the tiniest fungus in the soil to the largest elk or bear.

I learned from their experience how to observe and listen to the wisdom of the forest. So when I write about the forest as a metaphor, I can extend the image to include our scientific understanding of the ecological relationships in the circles of life. The metaphor of the forest shows us about connections, about the interdependence of all existence, about the essence of our seventh principle. The forest and the mountain need each other, and they are changed by each other.

Science and technology can explain what we observe about the Universe. But our faith gives us the framework for explaining its meaning, suggesting the questions we should ask, and how to think about what we know, and what we don’t know.

Our connection to the land is a major component of our theology, whether or not we are conscious of it. A sense of place that comes from a personal connection grows out of our direct experience with that place. It is a deeper connection that allows us to view the land as something more than just an object to be utilized to get the most out of it. It becomes possible to know the land as a sacred inheritance, made available to us through the generosity of the creator, with an accompanying responsibility to take care of it, express gratitude for its gifts, and pass it on to future generations without diminishing its condition.

In recent years, most of the mainstream religions have developed theologies of the environment to encourage a more sustainable way of life. The various traditions present differing frameworks, and each affects its culture in different ways. The relationship between the human community and the natural world cannot be healed by a single, particular faith, but only by a profound understanding that all faiths should revere a single earth. I’ve heard it said that idolatry is not worshiping the wrong god, but rather worshiping only one part of the greater reality and calling that God.

For Unitarian Universalists, our seventh principle raises a number of fundamental questions that should lead us to reconsidering how we live on this Earth. What is the nature of nature; how do we relate to it? What is the nature of spirit and how does it arise from the natural universe? How does our concern for justice arise out of the material stuff of the natural world and to which portions of creation does it extend? Unfortunately, the seventh principle does not give us the answers to these questions.

If it’s detailed instructions we’re looking for, we probably have to look to a different religion, one with explicit Truths and doctrines provided in their scriptures, and rules for everyone to live by. But our free and responsible search for truth and meaning, affirmed in our fourth principle, means just that: We have to consciously search out the answers. Then – out of this Truth grows the requirement and motivation to live by it.

This is brings us to the third facet of our religious perspective, the morality of the way we live on this Earth. It’s about how we live out all of our Principles, including our seventh Principle.

I mentioned a few minutes ago that one of the mountains in California’s Yosemite Valley is named for UU minister Thomas Starr King. But you should also know that one of the streets in the City of San Francisco bears his name. Starr King Boulevard runs alongside the block that contains the Unitarian Society of San Francisco where he was minister from 1860 to 1864. Starr King is remembered for his work as an orator and activist for justice in California’s political landscape. He did not separate his faith from his politics, and he looked toward nature to sustain him in his work. His theology provides the starting point for my own: Religion as social activism, integrated with nature as sustenance.

So how do we do that in the real world? Well, here comes my blatant commercial:
The Seventh Principle Project is a UUA affiliate organization aimed at healing our relationship with the Earth. (I brought some membership brochures with me, so you can ask me about it during the coffee hour.) As Ester mentioned when she introduced me, I am the Director of Environmental Ministry for that group. The Seventh Principle Project sponsors a program we call Green Sanctuary that helps congregations work toward a vision of a sustainable future.
There are many ways to do this, and none of us can do it alone. UUs across the continent are committing themselves, individually and as communities of faith, to make this a reality.

In the final analysis, to heal the Earth is to participate in the cycles of life with love and respect and compassion. It is to live, work, and play in communities… communities that celebrate our interconnectedness and strengthen our ties… with one another, with the land, and with all of nature.

We must deepen our sense of place, and take time to watch, and listen, and absorb the wisdom of the Earth. And we must also spread the message of our continuity with all of nonhuman nature, a message that challenges us to heal the Earth for our selves and our children, and for all of God’s creatures.

May we heed that call of the Earth.

Amen, and blessed be.