Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

This Day on the Earth

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
April 20, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

Wherever you are is home
And the earth is paradise.
— Wilfred Pelletier & Ted Poole

 

To get to the Pegasus bookstore in Oakland where my daughter, Caitlin, works part-time, I had to park two blocks away. Walking along those streets on that gloriously sunny, yet somewhat hazy, day last week, the air was cool, the sun warm, and the streets alive with people. I was walking and asking. I was walking and asking myself, but actually far more than myself … I was asking the Earth to show me how to celebrate, to show me how to speak words to tell its story here, today, in a sermon. I particularly wanted to talk about beauty and majesty and vastness.

It was good to turn my focus onto the beauty and the glory of it all. It was good to give my self full permission to take the outrageous beauty of the Earth as my guide knowing full well that Earth Day, which comes up on Tuesday, and which inspired this sermon, Earth Day was born because the pressures of environmental problems at its inception were roiling their way into public awareness. Scholars of the on-line encyclopedia named Wikipedia have written about it this way:

Each year, the April 22 Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Among other things, 1970 in the United States brought with it the Kent State shootings, the advent of fiber optics, [the Simon and Garfunkle song] “Bridge over Troubled Water,” Apollo 13, the Beatles’ last album, the death of Jimi Hendrix, and the meltdown of fuel rods in the Savannah River nuclear plant near Aiken, South Carolina — an incident not acknowledged for 18 years. At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. Environment was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news. But Earth Day 1970 turned that all around.

On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment. Denis Hayes, the national coordinator, and his youthful staff organized massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Earth Day was the public inception of a profound acknowledgement that the precious, irreplaceable Earth was in jeopardy, and that concerted, coordinated, connective action needed to be taken.

As I walked along the Rockridge streets on my way to see my daughter, I was opening my heart/mind not just to find words to lift up this incredible paradise, this Planet Earth — I hoped to find a way to frame my words so that the Earth vision I offered would somehow be richly launched out of a place of realism familiarity and depth that was not forced by my expectations of exactly how that should be done. Once at the store, while talking with Caitlin, my eye was drawn to an attractive printed page of card stock with two poems on it that was displayed on the counter. And, as I read them, I realized the Earth was speaking to me freshly and unexpectedly.

I’m sharing this with you, not to inform you about how I write sermons, but about how I am learning to experience the world — and (in terms of theology or, more accurately, cosmology), how I am becoming convinced that the world works for we conscious, reality encountering animals.

It has to do with the openness of unknowing, and also intention. There is something that happens when I set my intention openly into motion without any expectations, that joins with a larger pattern of events beyond my control and awareness, that brings into my human field of awareness lovely, fitting, powerful possibilities all directly tied to the original intention. What am I saying here?

I am saying that when I set my intention to write a sermon (with a sense of open receptiveness that is without expectations), things happen for me. Ideas I had never considered before pop up in my mind; people who know things I need to know show up with information for me, and, in this case, writings appear unexpectedly that literally yank me around and give me ways to see and express a message that needs to be spoken.

Furthermore …

There is the additional living fact that a sermon does need to be written for you all, you all who arrive here on Sunday morning (and, for this particular Sunday, it needed to be written about the Earth). We, here, have set that up, through the structure of the “liturgical” week of this congregation: Each Sunday, some kind of ritual takes place here that is good for the human heart — and most often during that ritual, there is a talk, a sermon. There is some probability that if such a sermon comes to truthful fruition, it will do some of you (and the writer of the sermon) some good — which means that it would immediately be good for the Earth, since you are, and the writer is, its children. Furthermore, it might also lead to your being supported to take some direct action that would be helpful in further ways for the Earth: You might be inspired, for example, to join in some legislative action to save the Pacific Salmon … or you might get really serious about recycling in your own home … or you might be supportive of bringing solar power to this church as a demonstration to the Palo Alto community, and particularly its faith communities, that this congregation is willing to make some immediate small scale sacrifices that would have long term environmental benefits.

I cannot stress to you enough how real I believe this process is; actually how rational it is, and also how intuitive, and how consistently it works. This process of things I need for the sermon showing up outside of my immediate knowledge, the process of the need you all bring lubricating the arrival of possibilities and information that I can use to craft a sensical sermon.

So … what does this have to do with lifting up praises for the Earth? If you’ll indulge me by returning with me to the bookstore where I stood holding the nicely designed card of two poems. A quick read of the English poem — the two were actually the same poem, one version was in English and the other in Spanish — a quick read brought with it a flash and a sense of delightful recognition. “This is just what I need,” I said to my daughter.

What was even more cool was that I had not been thinking about the sermon while I was there at the bookstore at all.

Let me read the poems to you, and we’ll go from there. They were written jointly by Michelle Diaz Garza age 9 and Rosa Baum, also age 9, who attend the Linscott Charter School in Watsonville, California.

There is a dark river		Hay un rîo oscuro
in the gutter of the street		En la alcantarilla de la calle
In front of my school.		En frente de me escuela.
It was born in the rain		Nacîo de la lluvia
And isn’t flowing anymore.		Y ya no corre mås.
It’s sort of sad		Se queda triste
With drops of gasoline		Con gotas de gasolina
And a red wrapper		Y un papel rojo
Some kid tossed		Que Tiro un niño
After eating a candy.		Después de comer un dulce.
But although it’s sad and filthy		Pero aun triste y sucio
It carries the shadow of my face		Lleva la sombra de mi cara
The tattered clouds		Las nubes andrajosas
And in white and black		Y en blanco y negro
The whole sky.		Todo el cielo.

 

Pero aun triste y sucio / Lleva la sombra de mi cara / Las nubes andrajosas / Y en blanco y negro / Todo el cielo.

But although it’s sad and filthy / It carries the shadow of my face / The tattered clouds / And in white and black / The whole sky.

 

What is beautiful here is that these children saw through to the beauty. These children, through their own innate, natural powers, saw how the water, stagnant and despoiled, still reflected the power and the beauty of the world, which is a microcosm of the macrocosm of the vast Universe itself.

Their words “the whole sky” is code language, code language for two things: that the blessed Earth and its powers reflects, is a child of, the vast and creative powers and processes of the Universe; and, second, that human beings’ consciousness is capable of participating in those powers, through apprehension and through joining in some process of parallel identification with the powers of what we call the natural world — which is nothing more than the world of our very beings because we are not separate from the world.

So on this Sunday, when we celebrate the day we set aside as the Earth’s day, I want to lift up six powers of creation in this amazing, beautiful and awesome life. I’ll rely on the book, The Universe Is A Green Dragon, by Cosmologist Brian Swimme.

The first creative power in the Universe Swimme identifies is Allurement. The extension of which, in the terminology of physics, is Gravity — and in human language terms, is Love. Swimme expressed it this way: “The excitement in our hand as it tears open a letter from a friend is the same dynamism that spins our vast Earth through the black night and into the rosy dawn.”

Allurement evokes creativity, being and life. Love is a word that points to this alluring activity throughout the cosmos.

The second power is Sensitivity. In Swimme’s words: “The history of life can be understood as the creation of ever more sensitive creatures in a universe where there is always another dimension of beauty to be felt and savored.”

The greater our sensitivity, the greater the forming-edge tension we must deal with. Therefore, sensitivity leads not only to the experience and creation of beauty, it also carries the challenge of destructiveness and addiction.

The third power is Memory. The cosmos remembers its own way. “The elements are,” Swimme says, “frozen memory. They present to us the work of supernovas billions of years ago. The elements show us the original form given them at their emergence into the universe.”

Further, when we lift our hands — do that now, just lift one of your hands off your lap, above your shoulders … when we do that we are lifting all the thousands of years of experimentation in the evolution of limbs: it is witness to the amazing biologic experimentation that is one of Earth’s deepest stories in creativity.

And memory is the way we, and the universe itself, are able to cherish creation. It is the way that the past works in the present — bearing it forward that it may be celebrated through skillful use.

The fourth power is Adventurous Play. One of the seeming paradoxes of life for we humans is death. According to Swimme, our creativity needs our awareness of death for its energy, just as our bodies need long and muscle-taxing workouts.

He asserts that the emergent task of we humans is to become the mind and heart of the planet; which means to live in an awareness that the powers that created the Earth reflect on themselves through us. We are the earth become conscious.

And then in one of his fine bursts of poetic imagery he says, “We are to live as alluring and remembering activity, as shimmering sensitivity. And this means the cosmic dynamic revealed by the life forms: surprise and adventure. Call it play; adventurous and surprising play. That’s what life reveals; that’s what life is.”

The fifth power is Unseen Shaping. Using the image of a candle flame, Swimme challenges us to define it: Is it the light given off in all directions? The wax as it combines with oxygen at the right temperature? The chemical products resulting from this combination? All of those things taken together?

All of these show the flame’s activity. But if you vary one of the elements, the entire display will alter, yet we will still recognize it as “flame.” “The flame,” he says, “organizes all these different materials into its own persisting process. A flame is an image of unseen organizing activity.”

So, too, is my precious self more an unseen organizing activity than a static and enduring entity. So, too, are these selves, these identities we so naively believe forge a personality of permanence. So, too, are we a vast display of energies and gifts from the wider alluvial wash of life’s streams. So, too, are we shaped and reshaped by the unseen shaping of forces grander and deeper than our egos.

The last power Swimme describes is Celebration. Turning the common and pessimistic definition of the second law of thermodynamics on its head, he argues not the gradual depletion of energy through equalization — but rather, linking it to the biologic realm, uses the observation of ethnologists who see what they call “‘dispersal behavior,’ where juveniles of a species are sent out in a programmed dispersal from the occupied territory of their ancestors.” In that dispersal Swimme sees exuberance — and expansion from a center with news of that center. When we’re joyous, we want to share it, spread it, offer it. “Being,” he says, “folds itself into concentrated fullness, then erupts in an explosion of joy. The artist sends forth her works; the parent lavishes care upon his children.” Celebration is an act of joyous generosity.

On this day, a precursor to the worldwide celebration by millions, perhaps billions, of our sisters and brothers of Earth Day, may we bring all those powers into fruition. And may they empower us to live in deeper harmony with each other and with the Blessed, Blessed Earth.

 

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

 

Reflection: Celebrating Planet Earth by Dave Weber