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For the Earth Forever Turning The Reverend Becky Edmiston-Lange, April 21, 2002 Out of her we come and into her we return. Our whole lives are lived in her embrace. The salt of her seas flows in our veins and the breath of her springtimes inflates our lungs. From her rich loam comes forth the flower and from the flower the seed which becomes our daily bread. From roots that tunnel and burrow inside her breast, the trees reach up to a dream of sky and become our shelter, our refuge from the storm. Her cape of clouds becomes the rains that water the arid reaches of our lives. The blood and plasma of her deep core becomes our fuel for warmth, for movement, for discovery. Steeped in beauty we walk upon her back, and ride upon the cosmic highway of the stars. Images of her loveliness and form give shape to our visions of goodness and right. Her landscapes are echoed in the landscape of our minds. All things proceed from her. She gives us food to eat and air to breathe and she provides sustenance for our soul. We take ourselves to her mountains and to her shores and there our timid hearts find courage, our weary spirits, rest. There is no life apart from her. And so we call her Mother, acknowledging our kinship with all things. The earth is our mother. And, oh, how we rejoice in her beauty, how we give thanks for her life-giving ways. And yet we also weep for her. So much is being lost, so much of her richness and natural beauty which our children will never experience; so much has been disrupted, despoiled. We hold our hands out over her breast and intone the litany of woes we know so well: her air and streams polluted, her mantle of ozone diminishing, her frozen reaches shrinking, her rain forests slashed and burned. Acid rain falls upon her shoulders and the deep wells of her resources are being depleted, the diversity of her flora and fauna are being lost, and everywhere she grows too warm. All is not right with her, our mother, the earth. This we know. And so our celebration and praise is conjoined with lamentation. Our help is in the mountains, the psalmist said, and yet where shall we go when the very mountains accuse? Where is our hope, our healing, then? Time was when we, at least those in the western world, believed that she was an it and ours to use. “Then God said, ‘I will make man in my image and let him have dominion over all the creatures of the earth. And God created them and blessed them, saying, ‘be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, be masters of all the living things that move on earth.’ And so we went forth and bent nature to our will, believing there would always be more—more land to be explored and exploited, more wealth to be dug out of the ground, more “free” reservoirs of air and water to absorb our waste. And we believed as well that we were the crown of creation, that our human uniqueness meant our superiority, our God-given, or, if not our God-given, then our evolution-given, right. And we did multiply and we were blessed with abundance—at least some of us were. But always there were voices which counseled other ways. Ancient wisdom from peoples who saw the animating spirit in all the “ten thousand things,” who called the source of all, who strove to imitate her rhythms in the rhythms of their lives. Prophetic wisdom from people who reminded us that the biblical idea of dominion cannot be understood apart from the biblical idea of the covenant of all being, who called for a loving and careful stewardship of the things of earth’s bounty. Eastern wisdom that spoke of the interrelatedness of all life forms, that all life is deserving of reverence. And, closer to home, our own religious forebears, who repudiated the dualism which divided the world into sacred and profane, natural and supernatural, body and mind. Teachers, such as Emerson and Thoreau and Fuller, who saw the natural world as redolent of the divine, who praised the days as gods. And scientists who came to know that, in the inmost heart of the atom, all matter is of the same substance. And, always, poets and artists and conservationists who were drawn to the natural world as the muse of all that was worthy of contemplation and study, who felt no higher communion than that with “all that is.” And always, people, unsung, ordinary people, who plunged their hands into her soil and lifted their eyes to her hills and walked in the shade of her trees and who knew with nameless wonder and certain, if inarticulate, intuition, that she, this earth, is our home—that we belong to her, not she to us. Always there were those other voices. Always there were those who took their strength, their hope from the earth herself. And as we learned more, as our modern communications made our world smaller—or, rather, as our human perception of the world grew larger—we realized the world’s interdependence. We began to see that what we plant or cut down or use up or drain into one place, has repercussions in another place. We began to see that there is no “away” to throw things to, that there is no place to leave behind, no place to escape to—that the earth is all we shall know of paradise or wasteland. We began to realize that, though we are part of nature, we are unique in our power to destroy, to alter the course of evolution itself. And so we began to listen again to those other voices. And we began to make changes. We began to clean the air and the water. We planted trees. We began to recycle. We began to think of “sustainable development.” We sought to discover renewable sources of energy. We, even the faceless corporations, began to factor, in their planning, generations-to-come. We held world conferences on global climate change and on bio-diversity. There are reasons for hope. What was never given a second thought thirty years ago has now become part of the world body politic. So much has changed in just the last thirty years. The James River that ran through the landscape of my youth, black and fetid and foul, now runs clear and bright, and fish sparkle in its shallows. Tall, verdant trees and lush wildflower meadows grace Canaan Valley, West Virginia which, when I first saw it as a teenager, was as stripped and scarred from mining as a lunar landscape. All of us have similar stories of reclamation to share. We have made changes and we are listening to other voices. And in those voices and in those changes there is cause for hope. Yes, there is still too much to lament. There is still too much “hastening into the sea of nonbeing.” But there also is so much in bud, so much cause for hope. And, yes, we shrink at the complexities, at our new-found knowledge of the enormity of the interlocking systems. And yes, we will disagree about strategies and priorities, argue about culpability and complicity, disagree even about the earth’s ability to heal herself apart from anything we do. But more and more we agree, the world’s people agree, that the earth itself makes claims upon us. No matter the language in which we express it, there is an emerging spiritual consciousness, that we and the earth are one. That the earth’s destiny and our destiny as a human race are inextricably linked. That there is no future for us, for our children, apart from her we call “mother earth.” And in that consciousness lies our hope, our salvation. |
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