CAN NATURE SAVE US?
A Sermon by Rev. Wayne Arnason
WestShore UU Church, Rocky RiverOH February 24, 2008
Reading from “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau
"AS I CAME home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good."
….Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them."
SERMON:
What we have just heard is not an oft-quoted paragraph from Thoreau’s Walden.
Henry David Thoreau’s attraction to the woods and ponds of his neighborhood, over against the town, his meditative reveries within the natural world, his keen eye of observation, and his eloquent writing about the mystery and majesty of nature is what we think of first when we are told we will have a reading from Walden. As Thoreau has become a kind of patron saint of the modern environmental movement, his well-documented associations with Unitarian history and his friendships with the great Transcendentalist philosophers have made him an important religious figure to us. Indeed, as we talked about this service, Dan Stock was tempted to announce our Thoreau reading Walden citing Chapter and Verse, as if it held the place of scripture among us.
There is no doubt that spiritual wonder and joy in the presence of the natural world is an important part of the religious lives of most Unitarian Universalists of otherwise diverse theologies. We may disagree on how the universe came to be, and whether the spiral of the Nautilus shell is evidence of an intelligent creator or simply an inherent intelligence in our universe. But we can all agree that the shell is an amazing thing of beauty, and that the spiral of the nautilus and the spiral of galaxy, two wholly different realities in our universe, touch us with their patterned beauty in ways we can hardly begin to describe. We are attracted to Emerson’s astonishing claim that the laws of nature and the laws of human morality can be seen as one.
Many of us find the experience of beauty, wonder, and peace that we experience in nature to be a saving grace in our lives. All month, we have been considering what it might mean for people who hold a free faith to be saved. We have explored the traditional doctrines of salvation, and why our spiritual ancestors found them wanting. We have asked the question: “Saved from What?” We have looked at the Universalist answer to the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination and tried to understand what it means to say that “God is Love”, and how those meanings can be applied to our day and age. We have devoted services to three of the most important liberal religious answers to the question: “How Can I Be Saved? “ – these answers being “We Are Saved by Character”,
”We Are Saved by Good Works” and in today’s service “We Are Saved by Nature”.
But when we say we are saved by nature, I doubt that many of us brought to mind Henry David Thoreau ranging through the woods trying to chase down a deer or pouncing upon a woodchuck and devouring him raw. Our religious view of how nature saves us is most often a romantic view. We are the heirs of the 19th century romantic nature poet Wordsworth who wrote: To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears – and we reject the legacy of 16th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who described nature as a state of “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man (within that nature) solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Any thoughtful reflection on the many layers of the ecosystems in which we live will recognize that what we call nature is both astonishingly beautiful and intelligent and at the same time profoundly brutal and cruel. The tiger enjoyed and admired for its beauty on the other side of the zoo fence is terrifying in its fury when provoked into escape and attack. Thunder and lightning are awe inspiring until the lightning hits your house. Nature regenerates and grows but nature also destroys and decays.
There is a classic Buddhist visualization taught in certain traditions to accompany meditation, and the visualization is of the death and decay of one’s own body. The purpose of the visualization is to watch something in your imagination that it is very hard not to identify with, your own body, gradually crumble away into dust, and in doing so, expand the sense of what the “self” might mean.
I was reminded of this practice when I came upon a fascinating expression of the same kind of exercise in a secular context within the the work of the environmental journalist Alan Weisman, who has written a book and created a web site called “The World Without Us”. “The World Without Us” considers the fate of the earth if human beings were to suddenly all disappear.
The web site has a lovely video meditation on impermanence which everyone who owns a home or has been involved in home repair and maintenance can appreciate. The animation is presented in response to the question : “What is the easiest way to tear down a house?” The answer is: “Cut an 18 inch hole in the roof, and then just sit back and watch.” You need to have some time available to watch, because it will take a while. But within a hundred years, all the parts of your house that are not metal and brick and plastic will have collapsed into the earth, and within three hundred years the metal and brick parts will have mostly degrarded and rusted. The petroleum based components of your house will last the longest in a recognizable form, but even they are not permanent, and a thousand years or so is not that much time in the life of the planet as a whole.
The impact of the human presence on earth has become so widespread that it is hard to find places on the planet any more that do not show some evidence of us being here. Perhaps the opening sequences in the recent feature film “I am Legend “ were inspired by Alan Weisman’s work in “World Without Us”, because the directors of that fillm were able to capture some astonishing images of Manhattan with only one person living in it, gradually returning to a wild state.
If you didn’t see the movie, I have slides of some artwork that was prepared for “The World Without Us” , created to demonstrate the findings in the book about how long it would take for a wild world absent of human presence to reassert its old territory. Here’s some of the timetable, offered with this visual meditation on the impermanence of something that looks pretty solid to us most of the time: ManhattanIsland. (First slide) The first thing that would happen in Manhattan in a world without us is that within a week the subway tunnels would start to flood because the electricity that powers the pumps that keep the subways dry would fail. Electricity all over the world would stop as maintenance tasks were left undone and as the reserve fuel supply that circulates cooling water to the world’s online nuclear reactors ran out. The reactors would melt down within a matter of weeks.
(Second slide) With no heat, pipes in cold and temperate zones would burst, and buildings would weaken as joints expanded and contracted and weakened and collapsed. Within twenty years Lexington Avenue in Manhattan would be a river as the roads collapsed into the flooded subway tunnels.
(Third slide) Fires would be started by lightning or by ignited fuels and those fires would burn themselves out with no one to fight them. The cities not laid low by fire would be the coastal and delta cities (Fourth Slide) which would ultimately wash away within a few hundred years. It would take 500 years (Fifth Slide) for our cities and our suburbs to gradually be reclaimed by the forest, and the evidence that we were here at all in the suburbs without any tall ruined buildings would mostly be aluminum dishwasher parts, stainless steel cookware, bathroom tiles, and plastic. (Sixth slide) As we get past a thousand years, the possibility of another Ice Age comes into play and we can imagine Manhattan scraped clean by glaciers. Some underground tunnels remain. But on the surface of the city, the last pieces of evidence of material evidence (Seventh slide) of who we were and what we were like would be slipping into oblivion. It would take a million years for microbes to evolve that might be capable of breaking down the human legacy of plastics.
So that’s the world without us, and that’s the world of nature taking over after us. There’s a saying that “time heals all wounds”. Nature is both a destroyer and a healer in our world . I found myself drawn to this book and the web site because I find that contemplating these spans of time is a saving antidote to the small scale within which I live my life and lick my wounds. We so easily slip into thinking that human civilization as it has existed on this planet for the past four thousand years or so is the pinnacle and the summation of the universe.
But what if the universe is not about us, or perhaps I should say, not just about us.
I am too much of a humanist myself to want to sneer at human consciousness and human achievement. There is something very poignant and very disturbing in these images we have seen – great cathedrals and bridges covered in vegetation, and the head of the Statue of Liberty, representing that uniquely human value and yearning for freedom, slipping underneath glacial ice. All of them sadden me at the same time they fascinate me.
What is the human place and role in this universe? Our fate has become so intertwined with that of the whole planet that we are at one and the same time both savior and saved. We have a responsibility not just as planetary stewards to curb our impact on the various ecological systems that we are degrading, but as an inseparable part of all that is, our responsibility is also to our selves and those who will come after us. Realizing, making real, our Unitarian Universalist seventh priciple, that we are part of an interdependent web of all existence, has the power to save us not only physically from a more circumscribed and even Hobbesian quality of life, but also to save us spiritually from a life cut off from our true identity as part of this larger whole.
The best liberal religious theologians and poets who have articulated why it is that nature can save us from despair, and from meaninglessness, have not done so purely through describing the world of nature as something apart from us. They insist we are saved by the natural world because of the relarionship we have with it. In the final two sections of my sermon today, I want to draw on two of most widely respected and read Unitarian Universalist theologians who in different ways speak very personally about being saved by nature, because nature invites us into relationship with a world that is not “me”, but also because it invites us into relationship with each other.
But before we hear from them, let’s take some time to receive today’s offering., In taking these few moments to contribute our pledges or what cash we have available in our pockets today, we both tangibly and symbolically recognise that the free church is free in spirit but not in costs. We also recognize that generosity is a spiritual value we uphold and encourage through our gifts. So now the offering for the work of the church will we received.
SERMON PART 2:
In the first sermon in this series on Salvation: Neal Anderson quoted the president of his seminary, Starr King School, the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, who has written powerfully about a liberal religious theology of salvation. In a recent collection of her sermons and speeches, Rebecca has published a story I have often hear her tell, a story of how her life was saved, very literally one night, by nature, but not just by nature alone. Here’s how she tells the story: “It had been a year of grief, (which) deepened as days passed. At night, I couldn’t sleep. I’d rise, pace the halls of my emoty parsonage, and wail. My despair and isolation came to a crisis one night…In the depths of that sadness, I decided to stop pacing the hall. It was after midnight. I left my house and walked down the hill towards LakeUnion. The city was quiet. My face was wet with years as I set my course towards the water’s edge. I was determined to walk into the lake’s cold darkess and and find there the consolation I could not find within myself.
At the bottom of the hill, the street ended, and the lakeside park began. I walked towards the grass edge, and climbed the last rise before the final descent to the water’s edge. As I crested the rise, I discovered a dark line of objects between me and the shore, a barricade I was going to have to cross to get to the water.
I didn’t remember this barricade being there before, and it was so dark I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. But as I edged closer, I discovered it was a line of human beings, hunched over some strange looking spindly equipment. Telescopes. It was the Seattle Astronomy Club….a whole club of amateur scientists, up and alert in the middle of the night because the sky was clear and the planets were near.
To make my way to my death, I had to make my way past (one of these) enthusiasts… He assumed I had come to look at the stars. “Here, let me show you”, he said, and began to explain the star cluster his telescope was focused on. I had tgo brush the tears from my eyes to look through the telescope. There it was! A red orange spiral galaxy. Then he focused it on Jupiter, and I peered through to see a giant glowing planet.
I could not bring myself to continue my journey. In a world where people get up in the middle of the night to look at the stars, I could not end my life….My life was saved by the Seattle Astronomy Club.
What I love about this story is that Rebecca’s life was saved that night, not just by the awesome view of the spiral galaxy and the planet Jupiter, but because on that shining night, there was someone else there at just the right time who loved the stars and the planet Jupiter so much that he had to share it with somebody else. We think of our relationship with nature so often as a solitary enterprise; but most of what I leave learned and what I love about this world has come to me because others have taught me, or pointed me, or encouraged me to explore it for myself.
Rebecca Parker’s story tells us we are saved, not just by nature but because of how we love nature and share the love of nature with others. Without the Seattle Astronomy Club, Rebecca would never have looked up.
I meant to include in this order of service a little piece of musical transition at this point, and I would still like to invite you to sing with me a doxology verse appropriate to this story that I have put up on the wall behind me. We can sing loudly to the ancient hymn tune from the Geneva Psalter. The Old Hundredth. Let’s stand as willing and able, and David will give us a short introduction.
SERMON PART 3:
It is very rare that I am so moved and impressed by a colleague’s sermon that I share it with you from the pulpit verbatim. I worry that you would think that I was lazy this week, or that I was too busy and ran out of time. But I trust that you will trust me, and agree that there would be no better way to conclude these four weeks of reflection on how we in the free church find salvation than with these words from ForrestChurch. Forrest is Unitarian Universalism’s most prolific and widely known public theologian. He is the author of some twenty very accessible books of liberal religious reflection on our culture’s ideas about God and the devil, the role of the church, the separation of church and state, and the religious heritage of America. His motto is “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die”.