Back to the Garden

Rev. Peter Friedrichs

October 4, 2009

How many miracles did you experience today? How many miraculous things have taken place already this morning, in the four or five hours since you woke up? How many times in the span of less than half a day are we subject to astonishment, and we didn't even give it a second thought? I decided to count them up the other day. In just the few hours between when I woke up and when I arrived here at church I reckoned that I had experienced at least a couple dozen miracles. Let me give you a brief accounting:

• I walked from my bedroom to the bathroom and flipped a switch and the bathroom light came on. Miracle number 1.
• I pushed the lever on the handle of the toilet and my waste was whisked away. Miracle number 2.
• I turned the knob on the faucet and clean water poured over my hands so I could wash them. 3.
• I turned another knob, this one on the shower, and steamy, hot water came out of the shower head. 4.
• After showering and getting dressed, I went to the kitchen, opened the cabinet and made a selection from one of the cereal boxes on the shelf. 5.
• I opened the refrigerator door and grabbed a cold half-gallon of milk. 6.
• I poured the pasteurized milk onto my shredded wheat. 7.

You get the picture, right? You see where I'm going with this. It is nothing short of miraculous that most of us in the developed West, including all of us here in this room today, can flip a switch, or turn a knob or press a button and clean water appears, or the lights come on, or our houses are heated or our computers boot up and we can communicate with friends and family who are literally living on the other side of the world. And if you don't think these are miracles, let me briefly contrast my morning routine with that of a woman living in Togo, West Africa.

• In the dim shadows of the pre-dawn hours, she rises from the mat on the dirt floor of her mud hut.
• In the dark she slips on her complait and her sandals, and she straps her infant to her back.
• Stepping over the sleeping figures of her husband and her other children, she slips outside as the rooster crows. She goes out back to the latrine that her husband hand dug several years ago, wiping the thick cobwebs from the tree branches, keeping an eye out for any snakes along the path.
• If she is lucky, she lives in a town with a central well and some basic plumbing, and she grabs a large metal tub from the yard and makes her way the few blocks to a neighbor's house, where she pays a few cifa to her friend. With the bowl balanced on her head, she stands under a spigot as her neighbor fills up the bowl. Carefully, she walks back to her compound with 30 pounds of water balanced on her head (and the baby still strapped to her back).
• If she's not so lucky, she walks, sometimes more than half a mile, to the village well. There, she waits in line for her turn to haul a leather bucket up from the bottom of the well, perhaps 200 or 300 feet deep, repeatedly until her bowl is filled. Then she puts the bowl on her head and walks the distance back to her compound where her children are rising and her husband is waiting for his breakfast.
• She gathers up a few pieces of charcoal for the stove and lights them, fanning the flames until the fire has taken.
• While the coals warm, one of her toddlers stands restlessly in the courtyard as she pours cold water from the bowl over his head, lathers him up and rinses him off. She repeats this ritual with each of her children, then makes her way back to the well for more water, this time to cook with.

These are the scenes that I witnessed each morning two summers ago when Irene and I visited our daughter in West Africa. After an experience like this, it's impossible to see our daily lives here in the States, with all our modern conveniences, as anything short of a series of never-ending miracles.

Did I say never-ending? All of us know, at least intellectually, that our current consumptive lifestyle is taking its toll on the planet and that we are straining and draining the earth's resources at an alarming rate. Images of polar bears swimming endlessly in search of arctic ice floes and dustbowl-dimension droughts in Africa demonstrate that global warming is a clear and present danger to the planet. Scientists around the globe have directly linked that phenomenon to our consumption of fossil fuels and the carbon dioxide emissions created as a result. Here in the US, the typical American household generates 55,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year. Collectively, US households generate 8% of the planet's CO2 emissions, and through our purchases we are indirectly responsible for another 17%. That's one-quarter of the world's CO2 emissions, right here in the United States. If you think of our carbon footprint as a footprint, we are the Shaquille O'Neil's of the planet.

The impacts of our modern, western lifestyle on our environment are well-documented. I would venture to guess that most of us have watched at least parts of Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The last thing you need this morning is a lecture on the evils of coal consumption and the importance of turning back the thermostat and recycling your bottles and cans. As our congregation embarks on its exploration of sustainability, and as we learn how we can live lives that are "greener" here at church, in our homes and in our communities, I would like to spend some time this morning exploring the spiritual dimensions of the ecological movement. And so, I ask this one question, a question that is of paramount importance for our lives and for the survival of future generations: What is our relationship with the earth and all its beings?

About ten years ago I went with a group of friends to hike Mt. Katahdin. It was late September and in the mountains of northern Maine that means it was late autumn. The air was crisp and clear, and we hiked into Chimney Pond, a campsite that sits at the base of the summit ridge. After dinner that night we sat in a circle, huddled in blankets around a campfire. We told stories and laughed at each others' jokes and then, as happens at times like these, we fell into a comfortable silence. At some point, one of us looked up to the skies, full of brilliant stars, and he raised his arm and pointed to the east. We all looked skyward to where he pointed and there, rising above the ridge, was a perfectly round, intensely white, incredibly large, full moon. There is a trick that the mind's eye plays when a distant body is seen close to the horizon: it appears bigger and closer than it is. As the moon peeked over the ridge and revealed itself, it looked like it was sitting right on the mountain top, like we were going to touch it when we reached the summit the next day. Our group sat in stillness as we watched this magical, miraculous event. The feeling I experienced is hard to describe, and the best I can do is to say that I was at that moment a witness to creation, and I was one with it. There was no separation between me and the moon, or only a short one that I could cross with a few deliberate steps. I was at once an observer, filled with awe, and a being completely at home, belonging to this ancient landscape.

Father Thomas Berry, a deep ecologist and a theologian, or as some have called him, an "eco-logian," once said that "Humans can be described as that being in whom the universe reflects on itself in a conscious mode of self-reflection. We humans actually enable the planet Earth because we are members of the planet Earth. We enable the Earth to reflect on itself."^[1]

Here's another way he has stated this view of the relationship between human beings and the earth: "The human being within the universe is a sounding board within a musical instrument…If we can say with assurance that Emily Dickinson is composed of the stuff of the Milky Way, we need to say with equal assurance that Emily Dickinson in her person and in her poetry activates an inner dimension of the Milky Way."^[2] This is heady, spiritual stuff, to be sure. But what Father Berry is reminding us is that we are made of star-stuff - the same elements as the rocks and the rivers, the earth, the sun and the stars - and that we are a part of, not apart from, all of creation. And more than that, as sentient beings we give the universe the capacity to think and feel and speak.

Western thought and religion have robbed us of our identity, of this identity with all that is. The ancient stories we tell ourselves, most notably the creation story of Christians and Jews, tell us that God created the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and all the animals so that we could have dominion over them. And that God tossed us out of the Garden of Eden when we misbehaved, never to return. Renee Descartes told us that we exist because we have thoughts, that our mind is our creative force. Newtonian physics taught us that the world is made up of separate beings acting upon each other, creating reactions in each other. And technology has insulated and isolated us from each other and from the Earth, all in the name of convenience and progress.

But new views of how the world works have shown us, on a micro level, how we are related in the most macro of ways. Modern studies of quantum physics have proved that the universe is not made up of individual particles circling in orbits around each other, occasionally exerting forces that move them in one direction or another. Rather, we now know that the universe is made up of an intricately related web, where the nature of one being is dependent upon the existence of another. Thomas Berry extrapolates these molecular observations to describe our place in the cosmos. He writes: "In a similar sense, we cannot speak in a scientifically viable manner about an independently existing sunrise. Sunrise is an evocation of being that involves the sun and the air and the water and sentient beings. There is no independent sunrise that a being then experiences. The universe, rather than existing in an inert objective way, is a mutually evocative reality."

This may be a lot to wrap your minds around at 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning, so let me break it down for you: We are not outside of creation or apart from it. We are one and the same as the earth and the sun and the stars. The interdependent web of which we are a part does not just link us human beings each to the other, but its strands spread across the cosmos linking us to all of space and time. This concept, which we refer to in the Seventh Principle of our Unitarian Universalist faith, is similar to the ancient metaphor of Indra's net, which you heard about in our reading. Every one of us is a jewel on the net, as is every other part of creation. We each reflect each other, giving each other light and life, depth and beauty.

To see the world, the entire universe, through this lens enables us to approach our commitment to sustainability in a deeply spiritual way. It also empowers us to pursue this work from a perspective of abundance, rather than scarcity. Too often we tend to respond to environmental concerns with an attitude that there isn't enough to go around, that our resources are limited and dwindling, and that we must allocate these scarce resources more fairly across the planet. It's environmentalism as a zero-sum game. Your gain is my loss. Yet if we look at the underlying unity of our cosmos and our identity with it, we reject the "us versus them" approach and enter into the "we" of compassionate coexistence. In this theology, we find a unity of objective with our fellow earth-dwellers and a unity of existence with the earth itself. Degrading the earth becomes an act of self-degradation. Creating an environmental catastrophe is a form of suicide.

Cultivating this sense of identity with all that exists is a spiritual quest and a lifelong journey. It is a deeply religious pursuit. At its core lies the search for what it means to be human, to answer that singular question I posed at the outset. And because it is a spiritual odyssey, it takes time, practice and patience. And it is best pursued in community with each other, where we can support and encourage each other. Where we can celebrate our successes and forgive each other our defeats.

One day several years ago, Thomas Berry went to visit a high school to talk to the students about our role in the environmental crisis. He asked if anyone in the class could define what "autism" is. A student responded by saying that autism is when someone is so locked up in himself that no one and nothing else can get in. That, thought Berry, is exactly what has happened to the human community. He said, "We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual 'autism.' " To break that spiritual autism, Berry said, we need to restore our experiences of "amazement and enchantment." "Awe," he said, "is healing. A sense of wonder is the therapy for spiritual autism." ^[3]

And so I ask you this morning, from where do you get your experiences of amazement and enchantment? When are you in awe? What gives you a sense of wonder? As we engage in this journey of environmental stewardship together, I invite you to return to the mountains, or to the sea, or to the woods, wherever you go to overcome your spiritual autism, to feed your soul, and to rediscover your oneness with the miracle of everything. I invite you to remember, each and every day, the words of the Joni Mitchell song, "We are stardust/We are golden/We are billion year old carbon/And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden."

May it be so.

Closing Words by Father Thomas Berry:

^[1] From an interview published in Appalachian Voices
^[2] Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story, 38-40.
^[3] From the archives of NRC Online

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