The Other Sacred Text (May 12, 2013)

The first time I ever rented an apartment with a patch of yard, I was so excited to put in my very own garden. I went to the garden store and bought one of each of my favorite plants and put them in rows in the plot of soil I had prepared. They did not thrive, and I couldn’t understand why. What was thriving in that yard was a massive calla lily. Around here, the dramatic calla lily is an expensive flower you buy at the florists. But the in my new backyard in California it had clearly been growing there for many years, because it had grown into a big clump almost as tall as me.  Why was this Calla Lily thriving despite years of neglect, while my carefully planted garden struggled despite my best efforts?

After moving 3-4 times I finally realized that what I was really doing was flower arranging, not gardening. None of my favorite east-coast plants were really going to be happy in the semi-arid climate of the San Francisco Bay Area.  And while May is a great time to plant seedlings here in the southern tier, this is not the right time to be starting a garden in California because it is the very end of the rainy season, and the beginning of the dormant season, when the grasses on the hills become “golden”, when forest fire season begin.

When we moved to Ithaca, I planted the calla lily my mom gave me as a housewarming right in the center of my garden.  As the fall turned cold, the calla lily bulb turned to mush. You cannot grow calla lilies in Ithaca. My mom, who grew up in the south, always told me “don’t even bother with Tulips, they never do well.” But here in Ithaca the tulips a previous owner planted still come back with annual clockwork. 

 The main thing I have learned in 20 years and 9 different gardens, is that place matters. If you find the right group of plants for a place, they will be unstoppable. But if you try to grow a cala lilies in Ithaca, you are just asking for struggle and disappointment.

Unitarian Universalists are  people who claim as a source of our living tradition “the Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.”  With this widely drawn circle we include earth-centered traditions from all over the world.  Every place has such traditions which grew organically out of the relationship between a particular place and the people who live there. These include the Shinto traditions of  Japan, the Celtic traditions of Ireland, the Vodun traditions of the African West Coast, and the spiritual traditions of the Cayuga which developed closest to the lands we all share today. These traditions are older that Judaism, older than Islam, older than Buddhism. Unitarian Universalists affirm that earth -centered are not only legitimate religious traditions, but that we need them. They are part of our bedrock, and we want them to be among the moral and spiritual wisdom traditions that guide our future.

Here’s the tricky thing about earth centered traditions. When we say “earth centered” we mean not earth-- the blue marble viewed from space-- but the earth that women and men experience and live from each day. If we really embrace and want to learn from earth-centered traditions, we need to start from the foundational point that the earth itself is sacred, not in the abstract, not in general—but the very earth that you walk each day, that feeds you, that you share with your very particular neighbors.  You cannot even begin to engage with indigenous traditions, as I understand in my limited way, without that sacred connection to place.

Anyone engaged in a deep and authentic spiritual search, is changed by that search. And so when you engage with a particular patch of land as a sacred place, as a place that has something to teach you, you may realize you are being changed by that search.  If we allow the wisdom if this place, of this community of living things into our hearts and minds, it may change how we live in the world. If instead of thinking of gardening, for example, as a monologue, in which I express my vision in my garden, perhaps I might start thinking of it as a dialogue between myself and a complex ecosystem (more complex than even our smartest, most committed scientists have even begun to understand). It might change my relationship to this place.  If you are really listening to the place where you belong, it may tell you that it’s time to give up planting calla lilies.

One of our greatest Judeo-Christian mis-understandings of the people indigenous to this land is the fact that place matters.  Our Judeo-Christian tradition is a tradition of the diaspora. We learned to collect all our stories, all our histories and laws into one book that we could take with us whenever we left our homelands, as the pilgrims took their bibles on their ocean voyage to America. When we drove the first nations peoples from these lands, we didn’t understand that this was a place that peoples have lived for tens of thousands of years, a place that has a particular wisdom to teach. We must face the possibility that the impact of ejecting people from their ancestral lands means something fundamentally different than  what selling my home in California and moving to Ithaca meant to me. Says cultural ecologist David Abram “…the deep attunement to place characteristic of so many oral people emerges only after several generations in one general terrain.” [i]  If your land is your sacred text, if you lose your lands you lose your religion.  When the indigenous people of these lands were driven away they “suddenly found themselves in a world where their ritual gestures, their prayers, and their stories seemed to lose all meaning, where the shapes of the landforms lacked coherence, where nothing seemed to make sense”

Throughout these past 400 years of wars and treaties and legal battles, I suspect that when we of Judeo-Christian roots heard the phrase “sacred place” and we thought of a place like this one, our fellowship building. We would be very sad if someone bulldozed this building  and we had to build a new home somewhere else. But what  if  place were not only our home, not only the land that gave us food and the river that gave us our livelihood…what if this land were also our scripture,  our teacher and the dwelling place of the holy?  What if this particular place were the source of our religion, our moral teacher, the grounding of our ethics, when we left we would be stripped of all that is important, all that is meaningful, all that connects us to the web of life? If we start to listen to the earth, to the water, to the places where we put down roots as a source of our living tradition, we would have to humbly acknowledge that we are beginners in this land, and there is much we do not know or understand.

So where does that leave us? Those of us who have moved from place to place, whose religious stories come from all around the world, instead of here in the southern tier? We need to start at the beginning. We need to go to the source: the Chemung River and all the creeks that feed it, the hills and valleys,  the trees and the grasshoppers in your own back yard. Just as some of us were taught as children to read and re-read our holy book, just as our neighbors can quote chapter and verse by heart, we must read and re-read this land until we know it by heart.

One of the simplest ways you can do this is to choose a spot near your own home to visit regularly. A spot close enough that it fits easily in your daily life- perhaps a place in your own yard, or on your walk to work.  Take a moment to quietly there and just observe, listen, journal, sketch. Visit this place over the full cycle of seasons to see how it changes as the seasons change. Visit it over the course of years until it becomes a “home base”  in your life. Or if you prefer moving to sitting still, you can find a path to walk. One of my friends  took on the practice of walking the same path day after day through all the seasons, even in the rain, even in the bitter cold, and each time we met would tell us what was happening on her walk as the seasons visited her on her path.

If you are really paying attention, you will begin to have questions. What is that flower called? Why did that tree grow in such a funny shape? Where does that creek go, and where does it come from? Who were the first people to live on this land? What were their lives like? There are plenty of folks here in this area- [maybe over at the Tanglewood nature center, or the Friends of the Chemung River Watershed for example]  the  who would love to help answer your questions as they emerge. Also be curious about yourself. Who am I today?  How am I changing with the seasons and the years? How does this place work on me?[ii]

The most important thing as we sit or walk is to open our senses, to open ourselves so that we are receptive. Let us approach our very particular patch of earth with the open mind of a student, and with the open heart and spirit of a seeker in meditation or prayer.  Many of you who garden or hike or climb or boat have secretly suspected that it is a spiritual practice.  As Unitarian Universalists whose living tradition is drawn from Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions, I propose that those teachings are valuable because they show us how to listen deeply to the earth. This very

place can be our text, our teacher and guide if we listen with an attentive and receptive spirit. Not the land in abstract but this very place right here can make all the difference.

---

[i] David Abram Spell of the Sensuous p. 269

[ii] Starhawk’s “The Earth Path” is a wonderful resource for how to begin such a practice.

Observing Grief (April 28, 2013)

The classic Buddhist tale we heard during our lesson for all ages, “The Mustard Seed” reminds us that each and every person on this earth has experienced loss. And like the heartbroken mother in our story, we may think some times when grief comes over us that we are alone in our grief, that the smiling chatty folks around us, the folks doing the work of living day to day don’t know…but of course they do. Not everyone knows the excruciating grief of losing a child, as Kisa Gotami did, but being alive in this mortal world means knowing loss.

And grief, grief is the process by which we heal those holes ripped in our life through relocation, through divorce, through death. We mammals are designed to feel acutely the loss of one we love; it is a survival mechanism that binds parent to child, that binds together family group and tribe. The more we bring people into our hearts, the deeper the hole they leave if they are taken from us.

I think that we in this age have more trouble with the process of grieving, because we like to move through things quickly. In the classic Jewish tradition mourners take a week to sit quietly with family and friends and observe their grief. They are not to work, they have no other social obligations during this time. They cover the mirrors in their homes to relieve the responsibility, the anxiety about literally “keeping up appearances.” For the most acute losses they observe a period of mourning for a year, as a reminder to themselves and their community that grief ebbs and flows long after the religious services are over. My colleague Craig, out in Oneonta, described grief as an ocean, along whose shore we walk. At any time the waves may come in, wetting the bottoms of our feet and receding, or knocking us over with their power and pulling us under water. When those waves come it is challenge enough if we are in a safe place were we can surrender to our grief, but often times waves come while we are driving our car, at our job, at a dinner party, we are disoriented and confused and overwhelmed. We need some kind of anchor as we observe those waves of grief washing over us.

Grief takes many forms- it is as variable as humanity itself. Tears, sadness, we expect. But other emotions like anger? Or numbness? These often take us by surprise, and maybe go unrecognized as grief. We may even notice guilty feelings arising if we imagine we are not grieving the “right way,” for example the very common feeling of relief experienced by survivors when someone who has been struggling for a long time finally dies and has an end to their suffering. Sometimes we are surprised by anger at the person who has left us. Maybe we regret things done or left undone, said or left unsaid. But all these feelings are possible and important and real. Counselors during the peak of the aids crisis noticed that some folks were losing so many friends and loved ones that they had sort of a grief fatigue; they began to grow numb and felt incapable of grieving any more. Whether it takes the form of tears or irritability, or rage --whether you feel completely numb and empty --all of this is grief, and no one way of grieving is better than another.   

We grieve not only the relationships that gave us comfort and joy, but we also have to grieve the difficult relationships. When we grieve, for example, the loss of a friend or relative from whom we had drifted apart. We grieve not only the loss of what was, but also of what might have been. Perhaps we always assumed that some day we would reconnect, and now we have come to an ending with things still unsaid and undone. We grieve the loss of a future together.  We need to grieve even the loss of those who were abusive to us. Maybe we feel rage for how we were hurt, sadness for the healthy relationship we deserved, perhaps guilt that we had wished that person would finally leave our lives. This kind of compound grieving can be hard to navigate, hard to express, and still I think the best we can do is to observe it, to witness each facet as it is uncovered, as it washes over us.

When waves of grief come, however they come, I believe that the best wisdom of the Buddhist teachers is to simply observe it, not to struggle against the undertow, but to let the grief do its work. To let go. The Buddha taught that pain was inevitable, loss was inevitable, but suffering is optional.[1] By that he meant that it is the act of fighting against the current, the big waves, that causes suffering. By holding on to our grief, or by pushing it away, stuffing it down, ignoring it, these are what cause us to suffer. When the waves come, small or overwhelming, I encourage you to pay attention, to give it the time it needs. We don’t always have the luxury of saying “I’m taking the afternoon off because I need to grieve.” But pull over to the side of the road if you are driving. Stand up from your work and take a walk or find a place to sit undisturbed for a few moments, or a few hours. The pain of grief is not like the pain of getting your hand too close to the fire, which tells you to pull away, it is more like the pain of a wound healing which requires time.

Grief is the process of knitting back together those holes, those empty places where our loved ones used to be. We wove them so carefully into our lives, and now that they are gone we feel we may unravel without them. My theology professor told us, years after the death of his wife, that he experienced one of the most acute moments of grief as he was ready to leave a party, and was looking around for his wife as he had done at the end of every party for 40 years. That hole where our loved ones used to be causes us to stumble- to wonder how can we live each day without them. Loss creates a change in the terrain of our lives, and grief is the process of re-forming our lives, transforming our lives into a new wholeness. Even those waves that drag us under are helping us transform our lives. Those waves are part of the slow process of washing us clean of what is gone, of what we have lost. And so instinctively we struggle, because that pain binds us to what we have lost. Says Dr. Earl A. Grollman, one of the great teachers about death and loss:

“Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.”

Lest we be washed out to sea, we need anchors or touchstones to keep us tethered to all that is still alive and growing in this world. A favorite movie or poem or piece of music can be a touchstone to bring us back to ourselves. If walking in the woods or gardening restores your soul in ordinary times, when you are awash in grief, you need these things more than ever. For some work can be that anchor, but we must be careful not to use work as a way of blocking out or avoiding our grief. This is not the time for big ambitious projects, but the simple actions that pull you back to yourself, like putting your hands in the earth, or in a dishpan of soapy water. The key is not to expect that this time of grieving will be like other times, but to witness and notice- today I washed 2 dishes and even that was hard. Today I walked in the woods and everything reminded me of her.

The most important touchstone, or anchor, is compassion -- compassion first for your self if you are grieving. When you are not as productive as you might normally be, or patient, or witty, or when you just have trouble putting words together, be compassionate, be kind to yourself, as you would to a dear friend who was grieving. Don’t let your grief come between you and the people who love you. It can be hard to connect with others when those waves come; it is easy to isolate yourself when you are grieving. Because truly, no one can really understand what you are feeling, no one can take your pain away. But no living being can survive in isolation. We need one another.

In his novel HannahCoulter about a small rural community experiencing the losses of World War 2, Wendell berry writes:

 “I need to tell about my people in their grief. I don’t think grief is something they get over or get away from. In a little community like this it is around us and in us all the time, and we know it. We know that every night, war or no war, there are people lying awake grieving, and every morning there are people waking up to absences that never will be filled. But we shut our mouths and go ahead. How we are is ‘Fine.’” [p. 61] 

I think we are blessed in this beloved community to know that if we say we are “fine” that folks around us will respect our solitude, our privacy, but we are also a congregation that speaks its joys and concerns out loud. Let our congregations be communities where we have the honor of being present to one another’s grief. Berry continues

“and yet the comfort somehow gets passed around: a few words that are never forgotten, a note in the mail, a look, a touch, a pat, a hug, a kind of waiting with, a kind of standing by, to the end.” [p. 62]

Whether we are the sort who is comforted by talking about our losses with someone we trust, or whether we feel more comfortable when we “shut our mouths and go ahead,” still we need on another, and comfort is somehow passed around.

Being with one another in grief is difficult. It is difficult because it may bring our own grief back to us in a fresh way. It is hard because we can never really ease the grief of another- only the miraculous restoration of the one lost could truly fill the hole in their lives. It is difficult because we know how tender the heart is when it is grieving, and sometimes we just say or do the wrong thing, maybe the very thing that would bring comfort to us is painful to our companions. A colleague once told me the cautionary tale of going into the hospital room of a young man dying of aids. She asked him “How are you?” and he replied in fury “how do you think I am! I’m dying!” The lesson my friend took from this moment is to never ask “how are you?”  but I took a different lesson from it -- if you ask how someone is, you must be ready to listen and stay present with however they really are, whether that is rage, or sadness, or despair, or a need for solitude.

I confess to you that despite the training I had in pastoral counseling, when I enter into a conversation with someone who is grieving, I am a little nervous, wondering if my presence will sooth or agitate, whether I will say the wrong thing, but I have made up my mind that I would much rather have a grieving person go away from our conversation saying “That minister is a bumbling idiot” than “Why does no one reach out to me when I need them the most? I feel so terribly alone.”

Any attempt to smooth over the loss will fail- must fail- “he’s in a better place now” or any variant on “it’s for the best” or “life goes on”  is an attempt to bring premature closure. It is not developmentally appropriate in acute grief. Usually it speaks more the well-wisher’s discomfort with the depth of grief. Our goal as supportive neighbors, family or friends is not to sooth, not to smooth over, but to be present with the truth of what is. To say simply to a neighbor or friend “I heard about your loss”  and “I’m sorry” gives the mourner a chance to speak about their loss if they choose, or just to know they can number you among those who will understand if you are not quite yourself. . As we are present with our own grief, so we can be present with the grief of another, “a note in the mail, a look, a touch, a pat, a hug, a kind of waiting with, a kind of standing by, to the end.”

I believe this is the most precious gift we can give to someone who is grieving, our simple presence. Without trying to fix the person, without offering advice,  without trying to talk them out of their difficult feelings, just to be a compassionate presence for them, however they are in that moment.

The message we often get from our society is to try not to show our grief to one another, to not “be a downer” to stay productive. Even as those waves wash over us we feel like we should stay “productive.” But remember Kisa Gotami walking with her grief cradled in her arms, comforted finally by not only the knowledge that grief is part of the fabric of every being’s life, but also that if we can acknowledge, share, observe grief, we will better remember that we are not alone. We grieve because we are creatures who connect, who love, and therefore, we know loss. Writes Wendell Berry: “Grief is not a force and has no power to hold you. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery” [p. 50]