Part I

I spent some time this summer with the poetry of Mary Oliver. Oliver, a Pulitzer winning poet, resonates deeply with me because she draws most of her metaphors from the natural world. And I, like many Unitarian Universalists, find the natural world to be a primary source of spiritual nurture. Many of Oliver’s poems evince a profound sense of wonder, gratitude and even transporting amazement at the things of this earth. One particular line from one of her poems took up residence in my soul this summer. The line was: The only question is how to love this world? That question, how to love this world, began to echo through my days and it took on something of the flavor of a spiritual manifesto. Increasingly I have come to believe that the most pressing moral imperative for our time is how to save our imperiled planet. It does seem to me that the essential question now facing us as human beings is how to love this world—how to love it in such a way that is redemptive of the earth. I think we simply must change our ways, our habits, our very attitudes toward the earth. We need to learn to live in communion with the earth. We need to develop earth consciousness.

And so I thought what better place to start this sermon than with that line from Mary Oliver and the poem from which it came, hoping to use the poem to express something of that deep connection with the natural world which I feel can be a prime motivator for the kind of changes I think we need to make. But when I went back to the poem from which the line came, I discovered that though I had remembered the line, I had forgotten the poem and it wasn’t quite what I had in mind. Listen for yourself:

A bear? With her black fists and tongue like fire, sharpening her claws, baring her white teeth? This wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Why couldn’t the line have been in another of Oliver’s poems, I wondered, one more evocative of that ecstatic communion one can experience in the presence of nature’s beauty. Why couldn’t it have been in her poem about oh, say—peonies—you know the one in which she portrays herself running half-dressed and barefoot into the garden, exclaiming, filling her arms with their white and pink flowers?

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart as the sun rises,
. . . and they open—pools of lace,---
and all day . . . . under the shifty wind, as in a dance to the great wedding, bend their bright bodies, and tip their fragrance to the air, and rise,
their red stems holding all that dampness and recklessness gladly and lightly, . . .
blazing open. . . . with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
Do you,( too), love this world? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden?

Yes, peonies would have been much more useful for my purposes, much more easily embraceable. But the first poem called me back, like a rebuke, saying, isn’t that how it is with you human beings—oh, yes, you love the earth but on your own terms. And isn’t that exactly where the problem lies? Isn’t that exactly the attitude which has brought human beings to this precarious moment in time?

Oh, yes we love the easily beautiful—the groaning flowers, the rhapsodic colors of autumn, the expansive mountain vistas and the seascapes stretching to the horizon. But do we love that which could kill us in an instant with one swipe of that black fisted claw? Do we love the violent, the dark, even the ugly or perverse, like the digger wasps which lay their eggs in captured insects which have been paralyzed by the wasps’ toxins? When the larva hatch they eat their host alive.

We human beings tend to romanticize the natural world, see it only for its beauty and grace. And much of nature poetry suffers as a result. But Oliver’s poems call us back to truly pay attention, to pay attention to even what might, from a human reference, seem cruel or destructive. And by so doing, she seems to be saying—look, yes, but see the whole.

Yes, we celebrate the earth, find mystic reverie in its elements—when it yields to our easy embrace, but if we are to truly love the earth we must take it whole, we must take it as it presents itself to us, not as object of our desire, but as a gestalt with a superseding reality and desire all its own, a reality and desire which subsumes the human.

We have too long believed that the earth was given to us for our, human, use. Western theologies expressed it in the language of dominion. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves upon the earth." This theology of dominion shows its most rapacious side in Christian millenialists who believe that in the glorious future when Christ returns, the earth and everything on it will be destroyed. And so what need is there to take care of the earth? But it is not only Christians who are captive to this theology of dominion. Jewish and Muslim scriptures also speak in these terms. Indeed western secular culture is permeated by this metaphysic, the view of the earth as a separate object from which we human subjects stand apart. And it is that view which has allowed us to use and abuse and exploit and to take and take without a thought of giving back and to ignore for too long the effects of our disregard for the earth’s integrity.

And so we stand at this juncture in human history when the wilderness has all but disappeared, as many as three species a day become extinct, land is degraded by pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, toxic organic chemicals reside in the adipose tissue of Arctic penguins, an island of non-biodegradable plastic trash the size of Texas floats in the North Pacific, the polar ice caps are melting, and global temperatures are disastrously rising. If we could approach the earth not on our terms but on its terms—if we could come to the earth, not as an object of our desire but as a superseding reality with a desire all its own, if we could come to the earth prepared to see it whole—and not only see, but touch and feel and hear—would we not become conscious of the earth’s lament?

Music A Song for the Earth Jim Scott

Part II

How are we to love the earth? How are we to live in communion with the earth so that we might begin to repair the damage we have caused? Where shall we turn for spiritual guidance?

The earth itself must of necessity be our first teacher. And for many the answer lies in a return to those ancient wisdom traditions that centered around the earth and sought to live in harmony with earth’s rhythms—ancient wisdom traditions which called earth Mother and knew the human arose from her dark depths. Ancient wisdom traditions which knew that everything proceeds from her and all things return to her, that all that is participates in the one living, breathing organism which is our mother earth.

Yes, there is instructive wisdom there because it teaches us that every part of the whole is sacred, and that, in the words of Chief Seattle, the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth. And there are times when, if we come to the natural world with eyes to see and ears to hear, we can again recapture for a moment that participation mystique, experience anew that mystic connection. That kind of experience is sustaining, does motivate us to care. And yet I fear that ancient wisdom is only a partial answer. For we have long ago left the primal paradise. There is too much hurt that we have caused, too much responsibility we bear, too much accountability we have yet to own. The situation of our time does not allow us to rest in that participation mystique. We human beings, uniquely among earth’s creatures, impact the whole by virtue of the choices we make and we must choose, we must act. We cannot simply rest in her who gave us birth. Nor do I believe that dominion theology can be redeemed even when it is recast with the best of intentions into a theology of stewardship, of care-taking of the earth. For that perpetuates the sensibility of earth as other, as solely an object of human agency.

No, what we need is a theology which both recognizes the earth’s reality as preexistent to and transcendent of the human and, at the same time, recognizes the unique role of human consciousness and our singular capacity to cause harm to the whole. Where might we to find the resources for such a theology?

At the risk of hubris, I believe that Unitarian Universalists have a rich resource within our very own Transcendentalist tradition. One of the enduring themes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, preeminent among the Transcendentalists and for whom this church is named, was the necessity of approaching the world on its own terms. Emerson called upon human beings to cultivate an original relationship with the world, unfiltered by doctrines or isms of old. Yes, of course, he said, the received wisdom can be instructive—and indeed he was himself a great student of the human compendium of knowledge—but, he said, the received wisdom can also create blinders to the reality that the earth flings at us everyday. To Emerson there was an elemental correspondence between the human senses and that which is to be sensed. To Emerson, we, human beings, are made of this world—and because we are made of this world we are well equipped to see it, hear it, experience it in its elemental reality. Another way of putting that might be to say that the language of the earth is our native tongue.

Do you remember that famous passage from Emerson’s essay Nature? Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of . . universal being circulate through me.”

Emerson is here celebrating a primary encounter with nature in which he experiences a feeling of being part of a central, all pervading consciousness which both transcends the ego and yet affirms the self. “I am nothing; (yet) I see all; the universal circulates through me.” Here is a beginning for the development of a modern earth consciousness—because, for the purposes of our time, what claims could be more universal than the claims of the earth?

What I am advocating here is a paradigm shift—a new maturity in our understanding of the role of human consciousness and agency. Again, human beings are unique among earth’s creatures in both possessing consciousness and having the power to subvert the good of the whole. The problem in our relationship with the earth arose not because our consciousness was itself perverse but because our use of it has been narcissistic. We assumed that human consciousness belonged to us. We never once stopped to consider that human consciousness belongs to the earth from which it derives.

What do I mean? Let me use an analogy with the development of the human person. In the very early stages of the human infant, there is no separation between self and object. We live in a primal state of un-differentiation where our needs and desires seem to be automatically met without effort or agency on our part. But as the ego begins to emerge from that primal state of identification, we move into a narcissistic state where we realize there is an other out there separate from ourselves and yet we believe that other exists solely to satisfy our needs and desires. As a child we believe that the world and all the principles in it revolve around us. But as we mature we come to understand that the world does not revolve around us, that were are only one among many. And when we enter into a mature love relationship we understand that we no longer exist for our self alone but for the other and that what we have is no longer ours alone. We subsume our own needs and desires because the needs of the relationship have come to transcend our own.

We are now at the stage of development as a species where we must claim our maturity and enter into a mature love relationship with the earth. The earth’s purposes must come to supersede our individual needs and desires. We must come to understand that the earth does not exist to serve us, but we exist to serve the whole. Human consciousness is not ours. No, human consciousness belongs to the earth.