Sermon: First Comes Love

First Comes Love

Ana Levy-Lyons

June 7, 2015

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

 

When I was a little kid, I didn’t have just one imaginary friend, I had an entire jungle’s worth of imaginary animals. They would follow me around wherever I went – gazelles and elephants and chipmunks and opossums and snakes and lions and of course some dogs and cats. I always had a mouse on my shoulder and maybe a bird or two on my head. I loved them and saw it as my job to protect them. My friends soon figured out that they could use my menagerie to manipulate me – if they wanted me to come into a different room, they’d say, “Quick, come here! Someone’s stepping on your armadillo’s tail!” And I’d come running. Other friends were a little more cynical and would say things like, “A real bear would eat you, you know.” But no, I didn’t know. I felt like I had a special connection to animals.

 

As I got older, I started to spend a lot of time in the Nature Center in my suburban New Jersey town. It was a little patch of woods with a pond and I would wander around and look for real wildlife. I loved the toads on the lily pads and sometimes I saw deer. I was into Wiccan spirituality at the time – a Goddess-centered and nature-oriented kind of spirituality. I felt like I could see the face of the Goddess in the trees and the glassy surface of the pond. And I’ll always remember the first time I went camping with my friends in high school. The concept itself just blew my mind. “You mean, you can come to the woods and actually sleep here?” It was canoe camping down the Delaware River, pulling our canoes onto the shore and pitching our tents in the evening, cooking over a campfire, and talking long into the night, staring at the coals. I remember the sweetness of the cool, clean air, the night sounds, and the stars above. It’s been a long time since I’ve slept outside and I miss it.

 

Why am I telling you all this? This is part of my “eco-autobiography” – the story of my relationship with the natural world. We all have such a story, whether it’s a story of connection or disconnection, or, in most cases, both. I want to invite you to think about yours. A lot of the stories, like mine, are a journey from greater connection as a child to less connection as an adult. Some of them are stories of salvation and ecstasy. Some of our stories have a violent edge to them when that natural place, the secret spot we may have loved as a child is now ruined or gone. It’s replaced by a housing development or bisected by a highway. The stream is dry, fertilizer runoff has choked the marsh, the forest has been logged, the field is now a mall. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. How much do we let ourselves cry about that? How much should we let ourselves cry?

 

Henry David Thoreau, who considered himself a Unitarian, spent two years living in a cabin he built by Walden Pond in Massachusetts. The simplicity of that life transformed him. His book, Walden, is a kind of eco-autobiography. He writes, “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of …simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” From his perch in nature, he also takes snarky jabs at civilization: “Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour …If we do not …forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, …who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season?” Thoreau bemoaned our lack of connection to nature.

 

Of course to talk about our lack of connection to nature isn’t exactly accurate. We’re all inextricably connected, inescapably embedded in nature. We inhale what the trees exhale and all that. It’s not that we’re not connected to nature, it’s that we don’t often feel the connection. It isn’t that we aren’t dependent on our ecosystems, it’s that we don’t feel our dependence. We’re insulated from it by our modern world. We don’t feel the gratitude. Most importantly, we don’t feel the love. At least not often. In theory, we know that we are all connected to the natural world at least through the food that we eat. But even our food is often so reconfigured that it’s barely recognizable as plant or animal.

 

Take ice cream. What’s ice cream? If you were telling a Martian: ice cream is a cold treat that comes in many colors and flavors, with or without sprinkles (don’t ask what a “sprinkle” is), with or without chocolate chips (don’t ask where the chocolate comes from). Ice cream is delicious; it’s a ritual of childhood and adulthood; it’s sold from trucks in the summer; entire pints may be consumed solo after a breakup. Ice cream as we know it and eat it is completely removed from what it actually is at heart: warm milk from a mother cow, intended by nature for her use in feeding her calves. We don’t know what kind of life the particular cow leads who made the milk for any given cookie dough ice cream on a waffle cone, but we can guess that it’s not pretty. But we don’t think about that.

 

You could say that we know the natural world because we see it around us. But that’s deceptive too. We often don’t know that a highway has bisected the patch of forest that some kid used to love because we are usually only seeing the forest from 70 miles an hour on that very highway. And we’re maybe thinking, “What a nice forest,” not realizing the impact caused by the very means of our ability to see it. The list of all the ways we are alienated from nature could take the rest of this sermon and many more. It’s like we’re walking in a dream world, quite literally not in touch with reality, not realizing in our guts and in our hearts what’s actually going on.

 

This is part of our collective American eco-biography. It’s a grim tale, as you know. But literally before the early 60’s, most Americans had no idea that there was any problem. Even nice religious liberals like us. The first version of the Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles, written in 1961, actually had only six principles. If you look in your Order of Service, you’ll see that it’s the 7^th one – the last one – that calls for “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” That was added in 1983. A lot had happened in those intervening 20 years. Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, came out and rocked the country. Suddenly everyone was hearing reports of species extinction, pollution, the hole in the ozone layer. There was a growing consciousness that “the environment” was in trouble.

 

“The environment” is such a funny term. For most of us, there was some point in our lives, whether we were aware of it or not, when “the environment,” instead of just referring to that which is around us, as the word sounds, became an “ism.” Environmentalism. It became an issue that you could have different opinions about. You could be an “environmental-ist” or not. The word environment comes from the Old French word “environer” that meant, “to surround, encircle, or encompass.” I think that’s the best way to understand it still today. We all live inside the bubble of our environment. It surrounds, encircles, and encompasses us. Completely. There is no “outside.”

 

When we humans harm the environment, we harm that of which there is no outside. In slow motion we are destroying literally everything that matters to us. With this understanding, it’s hard to see how anybody could not be an environmental-ist. It’s hard to imagine how anything could be more important than reversing that harm and beginning the healing of the earth. I care tremendously about our human social issues – I want people to be free from poverty and hunger and violence and to gain civil rights and equality. But if we don’t get things right with the environment in which all those people live, we are all doomed, starting with the poorest, least powerful, and most vulnerable. All our good social justice work will have been, in retrospect, literally rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Am I saying that therefore we should not do social justice work? No. But we can no longer afford to see environmentalism as an “issue,” parallel to other issues. We need to shift our thinking from “issue” to “ethic.” Environmentalism, meaning the nurturing of the environment as a whole, has to infuse and guide all the other work that we do on behalf of any of its constituent parts. From top to bottom, in every domain and dimension of our work and play, it has to become the ethic by which we live our lives.

 

But ultimately, there are no statistics dire enough, no news reports dramatic enough, no preaching passionate enough by me or anyone else that is going to convince us to really do this. First has to come love. First, we need to find a way to ignite our love for the natural world – for all its creatures, from the polar bears to the plankton, from the bees to the cacti. We need to find within us awe at the grandeur of it all – the way the chain of life is balanced so delicately, with every element serving its essential function. We need to understand how blood runs through the veins of the cougar just like it runs through our own veins. We need to know how a mother bear will risk her life to protect her child, just like we would for our children. We need to hear the flute sound of an owl and see how light filters through the summer leaves swaying high in the trees. We need to remember how much it used to snow when we were kids and the pure joy we felt as it fell. We need to know the food we eat – how it was grown and, if it was an animal, what kind of life it led and what kind of death it died. Because we can’t love something we don’t know. We need to attach our hearts to the interconnected web of all life so that we feel it when it tugs.

 

At this service last year, those of you who were here made what we called “dharma flags,” which are now hanging in our environment here in the sanctuary.  On these strips of cloth, you wrote what at that moment, you understood to be your dharma – your own soul’s mission statement. It’s been a blessing to have them up on our walls all year. With this idea in mind of the ethic of environmentalism pervading everything we do, I want to invite all of you, in your own minds and hearts, to add something on to your dharma statements. (Kind of like those of us who like to open a fortune cookie and append the words “in bed” to the end of the fortune.) In this case, with our dharma flags, I’d like us to append something like, “with love for all the creatures of the earth.” (If you weren’t here last year, that’s okay – you can make the whole thing up from scratch.) Here are some examples from our current dharma flags:

• “To make food that makes people happy …with love for all the creatures of the earth.”
• To generate new ideas to help all of us live our fullest …with love for all the creatures of the earth.”
• “To heal through my musical gifts …with love for all the creatures of the earth.”

 

The key word here is “love.” Our work for the health of the environment has got to come out of a place of love. And so, as we take a break from our more formal services and go our separate ways for the summer, I have homework assignments for you. Three of them. You can do any or preferably all of them.

 

1. Find a way this summer to spend some time in nature. It doesn’t have to be an exotic adventure to a far away place. You can spend time in Prospect Park. Or those of you who are walking home with me today, we can get a head start on this one by walking up through Central Park. If those parks are too far, find a tree on your own block and get to know it. Try actually hugging it. I dare you. Put your belly up against it. Practice not giving a damn what other people think. If you can get really quiet with it, you’ll be surprised by the feeling of energy and life that comes from it.

 

1. Assignment #2: Wherever you go this summer, bring back a tiny container of water. (Unless you go to California.) There’s a tradition in many Unitarian Universalist congregations to share a water ritual at the beginning of the program year. I know we’ve done this here before too. Everyone brings water back and we pour it into a common bowl. It can be ocean water, it can be tap water, it can be pond water with an algae bloom, it can be water from Niagara Falls. Water that has some meaning to you for whatever reason that we will connect back together with the universal water that is our bodies and our sustenance.

 

1. And, last assignment, start writing your eco-autobiography. It can be just a few paragraphs or longer. Maybe do it stream of consciousness, recalling the feelings you’ve had as your relationship with the natural world has changed over the years. What are the moments that stand out to you? Have you had blissful moments? Have you had sad moments? If you’ve had neither, write about that. Trace the history and maybe formulate an intention for what you want the rest of your story to be, going forward. If you want to share your words with this community, send them to me and we’ll find a way to share them. If you want to keep it private, that is completely fine as well.

 

Thoreau writes in Walden, “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.” So we have these three summer assignments to help awaken us: spend time in nature, bring back water, and start your eco-autobiography.

 

As for me, my imaginary menagerie has been replaced by one real dog. And she gets me outside more than I would go otherwise and that’s a good thing. But I hope that over time my eco-autobiography will recount a return to a more intimate connection with nature. I pray that my love will deepen and that I can transmit that love to my children. And I pray that when they are grown and if I am lucky enough to have grandchildren, that I will be able to honestly say to them that, fueled by that love, I did everything I could to nurture and heal this gorgeous earth. Love comes first. May we love, and with the power of that love, may we turn the world around.