For as long as we have it that is. Earth's beauty is in danger of disappearing, fast, and I am not just talking about the rain forest here. Did you happen to read the other day a very alarming article where it seems the majority of those scientists who study the climate agreed that global warming was not only a reality but that it was unlikely we could stop it in time? The reason given was simple: lack of political will. Unless we find that will the mean temperature of the earth could rise anywhere from three to eight degrees over the next century. That may not sound like much but ponder this: the last Ice Age was only about an average nine degrees colder than it is now.
We human beings are in the process of changing this planet, our only home, in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. Like a hungry child who doesn't know when to stop and gets sick from too much candy we continue to use Earth's resources, leaving litter everywhere, candy wrappers of global proportions.
We will likely go on doing this unless we have a deep change of heart, a conversion experience if you like and begin to realize what it is we are destroying. It is time to once again see this Earth as sacred, inviolate, beautiful, a balm for our souls, a place to listen to what our ancestors would call the voice of nature's God and today's modern pagans might call the voice of the Goddess. Earth can offer our souls healing and solace in communion with nature. And we are in a unique position religiously. There is an abundance of nature writings within Unitarian Universalism long before the term "earth centered" became a common word among us. Our seventh principle talks about honoring the interdependent web of all existence which we are only a part. Well we may have to do more than honor; we may have reweave and darn the holes already torn in that web like the hole in the earth's ozone layer. Besides we have a history of not giving up and working for solutions to seemingly impossible projects.
Like in this familiar story about the end of the world. Here is how it goes. Global warming has already happened, the oceans are rising and the news is that in 30 days the entire world will be covered under 60 feet of water. Well you can imagine the mood. All religious leaders are mobilized and prayer services and last minute conversions are happening around the clock. Mosques call out for prayer, Catholic Churches have 24-hour masses and Temple and Synagogues are full up with standing room only. The Baptist hope for the rapture before the flood and some have contacted their local zoos to see how large an Ark would be needed this time around. Anyone with the name Noah is in high demand and on all the late night talk shows.
Well the Unitarian Universalists naturally were deeply concerned. So they called a special emergency congregational meeting to discuss this situation. The president spoke: Well, she said, it is clear that the situation is very serious. We have to appoint several new committees and there is much work to be done. We only have 30 days left in which to learn how to breathe under water! Such scenarios aside this is an old theological controversy. Who or what should we adore, creation or the creator? Where is God's voice to be found?
William F. Schulz's answer is clear as he writes: "Most Western religions have answered back: Adore the Creator! And supplied an image (Zeus, Jehovah, Christ) to be adored. But our answer is far different. Whom should we adore? The Creation surely, for whatever there be of the Creator will be made manifest in her Handiwork."
"And this in turn is why we love the earth, honor the human body, and bless the stars. Religion is not a matter of Things Unseen. For us the Holy is not hidden but shows its face in the blush of the world's exuberance."
In these words Schultz echoes our history. For our honoring of nature began in this country with seeing God's handiwork in it, a view very different from the fear of the wilderness that also permeated early American history. Nature and Nature's God was part of the American Revolution and part of our early history as well. Professor Martin Marty speaks of America's two covenants. One covenant is biblical, mediated through Jewish and Christian resources, Puritans and Revivalists, Synagogue goers and churchgoers, Bible believers and Bible Readers. But the other covenant is enlightened, mediated through the Founders, the Constitution and our free institutions. Their God was the God of Nature and Reason, the God of many early Unitarians. This was in sharp contrast to the prevailing dualism, the idea that matter and spirit were separate and that the immaterial, the spirit was superior. Matter and with it, nature was seen as, at best lower than the spirit, at worst, especially when it came to matters of the flesh, as a mortal sin. The body was a prison for the ethereal soul, in this view. But the Deists saw God in nature. The grandeur of the early American landscape seemed to echo the new liberties. This coupling of reverence for nature and Democratic principles is still alive and well within our movement. My seminary professor Ron Engels wrote: "To awaken to the liberal democratic faith is to awaken to the spirit in nature. To doubt that the Spirit infuses Nature is to doubt that citizenship is possible. It is to reduce personal experience to an absurdity. It is to lapse into a world of isolated selves and to sever human experience from nature." William Ellery Channing perhaps our most famous theologian remembered his two "sacred" places. One was the Public Library, the other the beach. "No spot on earth has helped form me as much as that beach. There I lifted up my voice against the tempest. There softened by beauty I poured out my thanksgivings and my most contrite confession. There in reverential sympathy with the mighty power around men I became conscious of the power within. There struggling thoughts and emotion broke forth, as if moved to utterance by nature's eloquence of the winds and waves. There began a happiness surpassing all worldly pleasures, all gifts of fortune-the happiness of communing with the works of God."
But perhaps no one was as passionate about Nature as those poetic, intuitive, rebellious souls we call the transcendentalists.
In her book entitled A Transcendental Murder, Jane Langton describes what it is like to wake up one spring morning in New England. "Mary woke up on a Tuesday morning that was like the rest, clear and bright. Outside her bedroom window the fully globed maple trees stood glittering like jeweler's work. In the elm tree a hoarse throated bird had sprung a leak and was dripping rusty splashes of song on the lawn. Mary got out of bed and pulled on her clothes, reflecting. It was the combination of things, perhaps that had made it inevitable. Given a crop of young men with a classical education and given a succession of nurturing spring times how could New England not have produced a rash of transcendentalists? Or even so rare a flower as Thoreau? Perhaps you shouldn't wonder at genius. Sometimes maybe it grew as naturally as weeds."
Glorious weeds they were indeed and quiet hardy too.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau give us a transcendental trinity for unrepentant Unitarians. Emerson wrote quite movingly of the communion with nature but he could never quite liberate himself from some residual dualism. How could one know after all that nature existed outside the observer? How was one to know that it was not erroneous perception that kept one from the ideal, higher things?
"A noble doubt suggests itself, whether nature outwardly exists." He wrote in Nature. But in the same work we find this most famous exultation: "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 the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God." Emerson saw nature as all that is not I and thus set him apart from it even as his mystical experiences drew him closer. The problem with being a spectator, even as a transparent eyeball, is the inherent separateness. Perhaps it is even more of a problem in today's world were we are incessantly and aggressively bombarded with information, entertainment, images of all sorts all vying for our attention. How can we be a transparent eyeball, when we have to tune out so much unwanted input to keep some measure of sanity? How find life's meaning in a leaf? My computer has a screen saver called nature which consists of electronic images of leaves being consumed by electronic image of caterpillars. I wonder if real caterpillars and leaves will seem dull to our children in comparison? Can they learn to listen to the voices of the real, not virtual wilderness? Margaret Fuller wrote: "The heart which hopes and dares is also accessible to terror, and this falls upon it like a thunderbolt. It can never defend itself at the moment, it is so surprised. This is the dart within the heart, as well as I can tell it: At moments, the music of the Universe which daily I am upheld by hearing seems to stop. I fall like a bird when the sun is eclipsed, not looking for such darkness. The sense of my individual law - that lamp of life - flickers. I am repelled in what is most natural to me. I feel, as when a suffering child, I would go and lie with my face to the ground, to sob away my little life."
Healing for her is found by once again connecting with nature, by hearing once again the music of the Universe.
"I went out upon a lonely rock, which commands so delicious a panoramic view. A very mild breeze had sprung up after the extreme heat. A sunset of the melting kind was succeeded by a perfectly clear moonrise. Here I sat. I was drawn high up into the Heaven of beauty and the mists were dried from the white plumes of contemplation.
"Only by emotion do we know thee Nature. To lean upon thy heart, and feel it's pulses vibrate to our own; - that is knowledge, for that is love, the love of infinite beauty of infinite love. Thought alone will never make us born again."
It is tempting to long for what we think was a simpler time, a New England that probably never was. Thus the picture of the transcendentalist movement as a charming idyll in a pastoral America has become the stereotype. But in reality as Perry Miller: writes: "The transcendental movement is best defined as a religious demonstration. It is in a sense a protest of the human heart against emotional starvation." It was not unlike what is happening right now within our Unitarian Universalist denomination with its renewed emphasis upon spirituality. It was a protest against what Emerson called "corpse cold Unitarianism," a rational, liberal religion devoid of emotion, devoid of human passion. It was an effort to create a living religion. Did they succeed? Maybe not, but in the process they gave us much beauty. Christopher Pearse Cranch wrote: "The true Transcendentalism is that living and always new spirit of truth, which is ever going forth on it's conquests into the world." It is not after all either reason or emotion, humanism or spirituality but a balance of both.
The resurgence of Earth Centered Spirituality and so-called Pagan movements within our denomination is not new. We may say Goddess and talk of circles but the voices come from the same deep place reverence for life and for this earth and all its beauty. Starhawk writes: "The Earth Goddess is first of all earth, the dark nurturing mother who brings forth all life. She is the power of fertility and generation, the womb and also the receptive tomb, the power of death. All proceeds from her and returns to her. As earth she is also plant life: trees, the herbs and grains that sustain life. She is the body and the body is sacred." In this world view the body, matter has once again become imbued with the sacred. Death and birth are part of the natural cycle and the Creatrix is part of not separate from the Creation. It is at the same time an ancient archetype and a new creation. For me it is a beautiful symbolic image, a whole way of looking upon the world. As a metaphor we could do far worse.
Carol Hepokowski writes: "I used to think we need to save the earth. Now I think that maybe it is earth that is saving us. We need to let earth's waters wash over us. We cannot live if we are too far from the feel of earth beneath the sole of our feet. We need the sound of forest creatures and night birds. We need the smell of trees and their life sustaining breath. We need earth's waters renewing us again and again. It is from earth that we are born, to earth we will return, and it is there with earth that we live."
May we learn once again to listen to the voices of the wilderness and be faithful weaver of the web of life! Blessed be!