Chalice Reflection & Tending the Garden

Chalice Reflection
of
Penny Myles
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Earth Day Sunday – April 26, 2009
“Gifted Promise”

When Art and I went to New Orleans last October we brought with us our fifty dollar Gifted Promise envelope. We hoped that we would find a way to spend it while we worked for Habitat for Humanity. Our job, during the week we were there, was to finish the exterior of a house in St. Bernard Parish, one of the areas hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina. The owner of our house was Miss Bernice, an elderly woman who had lived her whole life in St. Bernard Parish. On the days when the weather was warm, she would sit outside in a chair and quietly watch our progress, nodding in approval and offering a smile as she saw her home come to life again.

The first few days some of us spent completing the installation of siding while others caulked and sanded in preparation for painting. Our group worked well together and we were soon ready to apply the exterior paint. We really wanted to be able to complete the project before we packed up to go home. When our Americore volunteers arrived with painting supplies we were disheartened. The brushes were awkward and old. We had no equipment for attaching buckets to ladders and other basic supplies that would help facilitate our effort were missing.

On the way back to our hotel that evening Art, and two other members of the group, persuaded our bus driver to take them to the local Home Depot. The three filled a shopping cart with rollers, buckets, caulk and foam and returned to the Holiday Inn triumphant. With our new supplies in hand our group eagerly arrived at work the next morning and managed to apply two coats of paint to three of the four sides in two days. It was frustrating to leave before the front of the house had its second coat, too but we knew that we were helping the volunteers who came after us by leaving our improved painting supplies behind.

The devastation of Katrina is still painfully evident. Helping Habitat this past fall is something we will remember for a lifetime. Hopefully our Gifted Promise donation will continue to make finishing New Orleans homes easier and faster allowing more individuals the opportunity to come home again.

Penny and Art Myles

“Tending the Garden”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
Earth Day Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
April 26, 2009

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2)

In the story of Creation told through the biblical book of Genesis, heaven and earth came first. Yet the earth that was created was formless—a “something” described as “nothing.” It was in a mode unrecognizable to humankind, and clearly we humans were not there to witness it whatever its mode.

Our scientific knowledge affirms that an earth about which we know so little moved in space billions of years before humans entered the picture. Our presence here consumes a mere heartbeat in the geological eras that mark the age of this planet we share with so many other species, and countless species have appeared and disappeared since the earth’s beginning. In eras to come, we may well be among the disappearing kind.

The earth gave rise to us, not the other way around. The Ashanti, from the Western African nation of Ghana, speak truth in their grace to the earth:

“Earth, when I am about to die
I lean upon you.
Earth, while I am alive
I depend upon you.”

With the appearance of the earliest forms of humankind, we as a species toiled in sweat and imagination to cultivate the earth so that we might endure. Our raw materials? Soil, air, fire, and water, all basics for sustainability, all elemental to the earth that has given birth to us.

Not surprisingly, we refer to Mother Nature. Not surprisingly, creation stories across cultures expand on this understanding of earth as our birth mother. As children who have barely emerged from the womb of this planet, we are wise to tread lightly. Such is the counsel embodied in the Creation story of the Okanagan Nation of North America.

Legend goes that the earth was once a human being. The Creator, called “Old One,” made her out of a woman and declared to her, ‘You will be the Mother of all people.’ While this Earth woman is still alive, she has changed much. When we walk on the soil, we tread on her flesh. When we sit on a rock, we adorn her bones. When the wind cools us, we feel her breath. When we lie in the grass, we nest in her hair. If she moves abruptly, we reel from an earthquake.

After transforming this unsuspecting woman into the earth, Old One shaped her flesh into forms that became the inhabitants of the early world. They were people and animals both, but all could speak and had greater powers than just animals or people. Then Old One formed people and animals as we recognize them and blew into them the breath of life. They were, we are told, the most helpless of creatures. It was in this way that “all living beings came from the earth. When we look around, we see our Mother everywhere.”

To treat earth’s life as sacred—not just on Earth Day or Earth Day Sunday, but every day of our fragile lives—is to honor our mother from whom we came. We are of her flesh, the soil from whose roots we were nurtured and formed, the soil to which we all shall return. To honor the earth is to honor ourselves, and in this common ground, all selves dissolve.

The narrative of the self is a narrative that we are loath to question. Autonomy, independence, self-actualization; all are constructs that we as Americans and most definitely as Unitarians have been bred to value, even to hallow. Yet we lean into our Universalist understanding and concede that we are intrinsically connected, that we are part of the interdependent web of all being.

Is the self illusion altogether? Are we not, as the Okanogan myth indicates, the most helpless of all creatures, leaning as we do on the bosom of Mother Nature? Are we not, as the Ashanti indicate, the most dependent of all creatures, relying wholly on her for birth, for life, and even for death?

The self and our commonality with this earth form a tension that plays out in stories and myths and theologies biblical and literary, theological and mythical, psychological and sociological. One of the hardest lessons, as we develop from infancy into adulthood, is that of mutuality, mutuality with one another and mutuality with our environment—that is, the earth. Yet this theme plays out across Creation stories.

In the Genesis narrative, the first habitat of humankind was a garden.

“And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (Genesis 2:8-9)

Now this is where it gets sticky for those of us who are Unitarian Universalists, not to mention anyone who ascribes to a scientific AND egalitarian world view. How woman is said to have come into being was secondary in the Genesis narrative. How this first couple is said to have inhabited their garden suggests that to do nothing was paradise and to know nothing was the will of the Creator and to be enticed by a lowly serpent—a snake in the grass—was to give in to some perilous desire to know and taste and perhaps even tend this garden. My long ago Sunday school taught that Eden was Paradise—no demands, no work, no clothes, no schools, no questions. The Genesis narrative was definitely not set forth as one in which earth as Mother had expectations, even a list of tasks for every member of her household.

The story unfolds that the woman succumbed to the temptation to taste of forbidden fruit and became immediately self-conscious, embarrassed, ashamed, and vulnerable to want and pain and toil. And the man went with her, right down Eden’s drain into the fields of work and sweat.

The commonality that emerges from the Genesis story AND the legends of earth as mother is the expectation that earth is not simply here as grist for our laziness, even though that’s what Eden seemed to be in original form. If earth is to flourish as a garden, we must now tend it. And we’re still learning. We’re still learning how. We’re still learning that our Mother’s not kidding around.

……………………………………….

When we tend it well and thoughtfully and in measured pace and patience, the garden thrives. When we ravage its resources, when we mine its limited riches as if they are forever, when we lop of mountain tops for cheap fuel and plug up river beds with our leftovers, there’s a price to be paid.

Gardening takes time. I grew up with a slower pace amid gardens so big they were called farms. I grew up accustomed to waiting for fruits and vegetables to be “in season.” No strawberries in the chill of January, unless they were preserved the previous summer. No cherry pies for December dinners unless those cherries were canned in the heat of July and August. My grandmothers couldn’t have been more different. One lived on a farm, the other in a town. One donned a well-worn apron at sunrise; the other stepped into her day in a full-length mink—no exaggeration! What could they possibly have in common, except me of course? They both tended gardens. In fact, my “town grandmother” had an immense garden. Even when she and my grandfather moved into an apartment, they kept that plot of land that was garden ready and every summer paid daily visits to turn the soil, plant the seeds, weed and water and nurture those seedlings into produce for the most memorable and elegant family dinners.

My mother too tended a garden; sometimes I even helped her. Together we would sit on the back steps shelling peas, snapping beans, peeling potatoes. There was no question about where food came from. And on summer vacations, we commonly headed north to Minnesota and cast our fishing lines into one of the proverbial 10,000 lakes of that state to reel in an evening’s dinner.

Yet I couldn’t imagine a career as a farmer. I couldn’t believe it when a friend of mine aspired to a career in agriculture! Agriculture! How boring! How dreadfully boring! But I’d love to know where she is now and what she’s doing and how she’s dealt with the harsh transition from family-owned farms into massively scaled agribusinesses. If ever there were an Eden lost, the depleted soil of agribusiness is baked into its headstone.

Earth as mother surely rises symbolically, hands on hips, shaking her head at how badly we have spent our generous allowance, finite as it is.

Environmental lawyer and writer Claire Hope Cummings has thought long and hard about these matters.

“At every step of the way,” she writes, “we have disconnected and dismembered the intricate relationships that form the web of life.”

“….The solution to all this severing and disconnection,” she suggests, “is re-membering, meaning ‘to put back together.’ This is the fundamental lesson traditional peoples keep trying to teach us. They often say that they are minding the rituals that hold the world together. They say that if we want to save the places, peoples, and plants we love, we have to remember their stories.”

Cummings finds hope in the directions taken by “young farmers, urban activists, cooks and chefs, teachers and students, community organizers, and faith groups [who] are bringing local organic food, seed saving, and sustainable work projects into the mix.”

One of those young farmers is Gailey R. Morgan III, a 34-year-old member of the Tesuque Pueblo and Meskwaki Nations. As a brand new father, Gailey was invited to participate in the work of a farm raising food for the Tesuque Pueblo peoples. He decided to try it out and has found a quality of life in accord with roots familial and earthbound. In Gailey’s words:

“Our people here have been farming for centuries. You always hear stories about how they’d go out and farm the land. It’s good to be out here taking care of the land, taking care of the water, taking care of the Mother Earth.”

Tending the garden that is this earth is honoring the mother recognized in the soil that we turn, in the garden whose timeline is patience, in the credible Eden forsaken and found.

Let’s return for a moment to the Judeo-Christian narrative of Genesis. In the writer’s attempt to explain humankind’s relationship with a Creator God and non-human creatures, we read that:

“God blessed [humankind], and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” (Genesis 1:28)

How easy it is to hear this as an all-out mandate for humankind to stand triumphant atop a grand hierarchy of earth’s flora, fauna, wildlife, and the elemental media that spawn them. Wallace Stegner, the late 20th-century writer and environmentalist, offers an alternative response to this passage from Genesis:

“Our sanction to be a weed species living at the expense of every other species and of the earth itself can be found in [this] injunction God gave to newly created Adam and Eve…. Whether or not God meant it in quite that way, and whether or not men translated Him correctly, many used these words as justification to make the earth serve human purposes alone. But what we are working toward, what with luck we may eventually attain to, is an outlook that was frequently and sometimes eloquently expressed by the first inhabitants of this continent…..[a focus on] the web of life, the interconnectedness of land and man and creature….”

“…living at the expense of every other species and of the earth itself” versus living with reverence for life is a choice with a timeline. It is a choice that hovers as the garden grows warm where it ought not to, as the air thickens and turns toxic where it once was clean and clear, as the waters churn with the stuff of “red tides” where they were so recently hospitable to their trusting populace. You and I can name countless ways in which we have violated our homeland—consuming as we do irreplaceable fossil fuels; tampering with the water table by losing our grip on nature’s bottom line; killing wildlife beyond our need for sustenance; dominating, subduing, and provoking the perilous consequences of our egos gone awry.

All the gardens I have known—tilled, storied, forgotten, tended—flow panoramically before me. There is a saying about childhood: “One childhood, no second chance.” So might it apply to this earth: One earth; no second chance. We belong to the earth, and that which we do to the earth we do to ourselves.

Reverence for life, a phrase coined by Albert Schweitzer, is a demeanor of humility and honor, a spiritual stance that translates into mindful behavior with regard to where we come from and who we are, earthlings to the core. Let go of a singular Earth Day. Let go of an annual Earth Day Sunday. Let’s commit instead to an every day, lifelong reverence for this precious planet as our mother who is teaching us to love and honor her through ways new and ancient.

Amen.


Sources:

Ashanti, Ghana grace in “A World of Grace: That Pause Before the Meal Inspires Us Across Cultures,” yes!, Spring 2009, 46-47.

Claire Hope Cummings, “The Good Food Revolution,” yes!, Spring 2009, 18-23.

The Book of Genesis in The Bible, Revised Standard Version.

“New Crop of Farmers,” Interview by Anna stern and Kim Nochi, yes!, Spring 2009, 34-35.

Okanogan Creation Story, in World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts, A Project of the International Religious Foundation, Paragon House, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1991, 207.

Wallace Stegner, T.H. Watkins (Afterword), “A Capsule History of Conservation,” in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, Random House, Inc., New York, 1992.