This weekend is not the official start of summer - that is yet to come later in June - but to many of us, Memorial Day is summer’s birthday. The pools are now open, the picnic lunches are prepared, and the wheels of our cars are pointed away from the cities - even away from church! The temperature’s right and the Trip-Tiks are arriving.
I’m ready! In fact, I’ll be starting the first part of my summer vacation tomorrow and won’t see you all till the last week in June. That time away includes a week in Nashville, Tennessee, where quite a few of us will be going to enjoy the annual meeting of the UUA. Three to four thousand UUs from across the nation, the continent, and even an international smattering, will assemble in the shadow of the Grand Ol’ Opry. We’ll tell you all about our trip to the “GA” on July 8.
But, I AM ready for summer - right now! And, like many of you, I have a longing to be by the water; and, even more specifically, at the shore; at the edge of the sea.
The strong desire to speak about the sea came to me when I was attending a conference at Yale University earlier this month. It was titled, “The Good in Nature and Humanity – Connecting Science, Religion, and the Natural World.” I wrote about it briefly in my column in this current newsletter which is probably lying in a very large pile of mail in your homes right now!
The conference speakers and attendees were scientists, academics, environmentalists, and, as they put it, “spiritual leaders.” A lofty mix! Fine, fine talks! I felt as if I were in a small community of BIG ideas, rich and fascinating information, and deep moral passions.
I have read some books and magazine articles, and have followed news and feature reporting in the field of nature, ecology, and environmental issues. I’ve always been a great fan of the science and religion interface. I have even preached a few times on the subject of respect for the earth. My message - not original with me by a long shot - has been to encourage our growing realization of the responsibility and consequences of the knowledge that we are radically a part of the earth eco-system and not separate from it.
BUT ..... having participated in that conference for four days brought both my understanding and concern to a new level, -- and also my sense of reverence and wonder for the vast complexities and interdependence of life.
There is more - so much more - to all of this around us than most of us know or pay attention to - that I felt I must say something to you; to share my heightened understanding, concern, and wonder, even, to urge you to pay greater attention to our natural world this summer.
On Saturday evening of the conference, while in a park, gathered under a tent, we were treated to a program called, “A Celebration of Spirit, Science, and Nature.” It was at the conclusion of the program, when the Paul Winter Consort, known for original compositions incorporating nature sounds, was playing a song inspired by the Colorado River, that a strong thunderstorm engulfed us. There was great cheering in the tent as Mother Nature decided to celebrate with us.
But, before the deluge began, we were treated to a dramatic performance, portraying the life of Rachel Carson. A playwright and actress named Kaiulani Lee, researched and wrote the script. She also acted the part of the famous marine biologist and author, Rachel Carson, whose book, The Silent Spring, awakened us, in 1960, to profound concerns about how we are contributing to the destruction of our natural environment. The modern environmental movement could be attributed to the eye-opening effect her books had on so many of us.
But, Rachel Carson’s deepest passion was for the sea. When I got home I added quite a few new books to my library, and among them were Carson’s The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea. They are, in one sense, Field Guides, of course - wonderful to have with you - in their new editions - this summer when you head out on your beach vacations.
And, in addition to being beautiful and useful field guides, Rachel Carson’s life, her books, and the wonderful writing of other naturalists like Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez, are also theology. Theology being a comprehensive system or statement or story of the meaning of life.
There is poetry in the naturalist’s descriptions of rock and wave, tidal pools, the Humboldt Current, and fiddler crabs. They convey an intense sacred experience in the meeting of a receptive human being with any larger or smaller living member of the natural world. They say to us – Everything matters!
Rachel Carson, in The Edge of the Sea writes, “Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance. It is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden. It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life; and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear.
She also writes, “The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings.”
Not many of us go to the beach for theology, although I would recommend it. We go for the rays and the relaxation; for time away and time down. And because the scenery is beautiful to our eyes. The fresh sea air, the warmth, and the steady rhythm of the waves lulls us, caresses us, feeds us with serenity. Surely what else is needed?
When I was a kid in New York City, we used to go to Brighton Beach. When we lived in New Jersey, you didn’t call it the beach - it was the shore - and we took day or weekend or week-long trips to the shore most summers - Sandy Hook and Wildwood and Long Beach Island. We went up to Maine - from Kennebunk and Ferry Beach up to Acadia National Park, and out to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachussetts. I was always a little afraid of being in a boat, but I really loved and longed to be at the shore.
Once, when living in Kansas in the mid-eighties, I drove back to New Jersey to visit family and friends left behind, and went off for a weekend alone at Stone Harbor on the Jersey shore. I walked back and forth on the boardwalk, and back and forth at the edge of the sea, thought my life out, and soaked in the life-giving sea that I missed so much. I wasn’t even terribly aware of the complex life at the waters edge then, but the sea drew me with the power of its tides to worship at its edges for some glimpse of meaning, some comfort, some message of hope. I didn’t know I was meditating. I was just there because the sea calls to me. I was receiving great sustenance.
But, you know, I think it may be time to take the seashore out of the category of scenery and make it theology; make it come alive - as Rachel Carson did.
I would ask you to get to know this world; know all you can of it; climb it, touch it, smell it, observe and examine; learn its creatures and habitats, breathe it in (let it inspire). Worship at its roots and shores.
This summer, go to the ponds and forests, the peaks and plains, and definitely to the sea -- with Field Guides, and books by the naturalists; with jars and magnifying glasses, with pad and pencil - or laptop. Learn the details of natural life with lively curiosity and with passion. Learn as if you were on the threshold of ultimate wisdom. For you are. learn as if your life depended on it. For it does.
In a preface to a 1961 edition to The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson wrote, “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But, the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”
One antidote to this almost mindless threat to life, is for each of us to become intimate friends and neighbors with our natural world; to get to know what we can of it; to worship at its roots and shores. We will not destroy what we come to know and love.
We live with fear of environmental catastrophe. We are reading more and more about our environmental mistakes, and becoming more and more aware, respectful, and curious about our natural world. A recent growing phenomenon attests to this. It is Birding. Birding isn’t a new activity; but it has become a remarkably popular activity relatively recently. At that Yale Conference I attended, there were early morning Bird Walks offered. And, during our recent annual retreat for the new Board of Trustees (along with church officers and staff), there was always a sizable contingent going off at break times, with binoculars, along the Potomac, or in the woods, to watch the birds. The osprey nest on top of a look-out area at the end of the dock where we were meeting took almost as much of our attention as discussions about the Trustees’ mission and goals for the coming year.
This is good!
The New York Times Magazine from last Sunday had an interesting little article called “Birding at the End of Nature,” by Jonathan Rosen. “The End of Nature” refers to a book with that title written by Bill McKibben, in which the author says that “The exhaustible, self-renewing environment of our fantasies died with the Industrial Revolution, and unless we change our ways, rising temperatures, acid rain, and a host of other ills will carry off what’s left of the natural world.”
So, now, everyone’s birding! According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, somewhere between 42 million and 50 million Americans over the age of 16 watch birds, far more than the numbers of people who hunt and fish combined. It’s a new kind of hunting.
Just what is being hunted, or sought? Perhaps it is this - in Jonathan Rosen’s words: “Discovering these birds in the park where I played as a child was a revelation. I had not known at the time that nature was missing from my life, but this newfound connection to something wild made me feel, for lack of a better word, whole. It was as if I had never seen the stars and someone tapped me on the shoulder one night and told me to look up.”
The environmental movement of the 1960’s, which began thanks to Rachel Carson, left its imprint on everyone. Grown-up baby boomers with time on their hands are not simply discovering nature but returning to “something that touched them” when they were teenagers learning about the effects of DDT.
The great biologist Edward O. Wilson coined the term “biophilia” to describe an inborn need of human beings to affiliate with nature because as a species we evolved within the natural world. Conservation, then, is a form of self-interest. And bird-watching isn’t just a hobby; it’s a way of participating in the natural world that produced us.
Rosen then refers to Robert Frost’s poem, “The Oven Bird,” in which the poet made this small warbler with a stripe of orange down the middle of its head into a metaphor for the vanishing natural world. A line in the poem reads: “The question that he frames in all but words is what to make of a diminished thing.”
Rosen reflects on this and says, “What to make of a diminished thing? It will take a lifetime to figure that out. But for one brief, heart-stopping second, the bird itself seems answer enough.”
And, also, each individual wonderful creation in nature --- be it birds, or the strange and beautiful world that emerges at the edge of the sea --- if pursued with the magnified vision of curiosity, respect, and wonder. It is the place to start.....to set things right again.
It is the place to start to know our world, and to know ourselves. To know and to name; an intimacy worth the work of learning because it is there that the fullest dimensions of beauty and healing can emerge, as a gift, as Grace.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, during one brief summer vacation, wrote her thoughts about life, wound about the sea, a beach, and an island. They became her wonderful little book, Gift From the Sea, and I recommend you take this one along with you on vacation as well. Here is her first reflection from the book, called, “The Beach.”
“The beach is not the place to work, to read, write or think. I should have remembered that from other years. Too warm, too damp, too soft for any real mental discipline or sharp flights of spirit. One never learns. Hopefully one carries down the faded straw bag, lumpy with books, clean paper, long over-due unanswered letters, freshly sharpened pencils, lists ,and good intentions. The books remain unread, the pencils break their points, and the pads rest smooth and unblemished as the cloudless sky. No reading, no writing, no thoughts even – at least, not at first.
“At first, the tired body takes over completely. As on shipboard, one descends into a deck-chair apathy. One is forced against one’s mind, against all tidy resolutions, back into the primeval rhythms of the sea-shore. Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea, bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.
“And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense – no – but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind, what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut.
But it must not be sought for, or – heaven forbid! -- dug for. No, no dredging of the sea bottom here. That would defeat one’s purpose. The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.”
May these coming months be a time to be in your body; to be with the sensuous Earth and her rhythms. Give yourself to summer and to the sea.
Benediction
Deep peace of the running wave to you;
Deep peace of the flowing air to you;
Deep peace of the Great Earth to you;
Deep peace of the shining stars to you;
Deep peace to each of us gathered here today.
Blessed Be, Shalom, and Have a Great Summer!
