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Dialogue With Nature
Rev. Sharon K. Dittmar
June 8, 2003

(Note:  From the '*' forward, the sermon was preached extemporaneously.  I have included the quotes and some notes I used after this point.  The audio recording in the bookcase outside the minister's study contains the full text.)

I might have entered ministry because a field of grass talked to me.  It was the summer of 1989.  I was walking down Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts and a field of grass spoke to me.  I stopped and smiled because I was not alone.  And no, I was not under the influence of any mind-altering substances.

In his 1836 book, Nature, writer, lecturer, Unitarian minister, and co-founder of the Transcendentalist movement in America, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.  I am not alone and unacknowledged.  They nod to me, and I to them.  The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old.  It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown.  Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me.[1] 

Emerson's words are the best description I have ever read of what I experienced that day in 1989.  How do you tell people you think that a field of grass spoke to you?  It is one thing when sage, revered Emerson suggests it, another thing entirely when you are well, average.  I remember my emotions of that day, such delight, connection, goodwill, and peace.

If we weren't so afraid of sounding of silly, of being accused of weak logic, imagination, New Age gibberish, or some such derogatory category, I am sure that most of us could name an incident when we were mesmerized, entranced, connected by nature.  These moments are hard to describe, words get in the way.  It seems we will be laughed at if we speak of them, but maybe in our embarrassed silences we have separated ourselves from our sacred connections to the natural world. 

I remember another day driving in a wooded area of western Massachusetts with Peter. I looked out my window and a black bear was down a side road, staring back at me.  Peter never saw the bear and by the time we turned around it was gone.  To this day I believe that the bear was staring at me and that this encounter marked me.  In an instant we both became more important, connected to one another, and I've not been able to forget these thoughts and feelings.

These are my some of my memorable (transformative?) experiences with nature, yet I have a hard time engages with "the environment" and environmental issues - soil and beach erosion, loss of habitat, toxic waste sights, and oil spills.  I know that something vital is being discussed, but somehow I feel that the most important parts of all, emotion, touch, identity, memory, connection, separation, mortality, mystery, redemption are never discussed, or only in technical, legal or scientific terms.  Rarely in personal or religious terms. 

If you had to sit down and explain to your best friend why you like the world, what would you say?  What does the world mean to you, the sky?  The flower in your hands?  The breeze, the stars?  Who are we with the natural world?  Who would we be without parts of it?

Two months ago, I had the opportunity to discuss nature with Kentucky poet, farmer, writer, and teacher, Wendell Berry.  If the word "environment" was never used again, it would not be too soon for Wendell Berry.  Berry said to us "The environment is not out there.  It is in our lungs, our guts, and if we have any sense, our minds.  Call "environment" by the given name of the place or home, like Port Royal.  Calling things by their right name is a discipline, my sense of what the liberation movement is about."

As Berry explained it, his frustration with the word "environment" is that it creates the false notion that nature, our world, the air, animals, land, is separate from you and I.   Berry's dislike for the word "environment" resonates with me.  "Environment" is impersonal, somehow separated from the enormity of creation and our relationship to all living things.  A single viewing of the film Erin Brokovich, a true story of contaminated ground water that steadily and tragically injured and killed nearby residents, is enough to remind us how profoundly we are connected to our world.  The environment is not out there.  It is intimately in and with us. 

Berry noted that industry (as in the case of Erin Brokovich) has defined our relationship to the land, and that the industrial approach is a monologue (here is what you will do and must accept), not a dialogue, like a marriage.  Yet as Berry noted, "If you plow your hillside, and it rains hard and there is a gully, you better start a dialogue and not accept a statement of soil loss."  Our human relationship with the world lacks proportion and appropriate communication.

Emerson writes "The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye . . . The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself."[2]   In America our initial greed and disconnection began with our European fore-bearers who willed to us a land conquered and decimated under the assumptions of manifest destiny, a Christian idea taken from biblical passages that reference man's dominion over the land. 

In the very first chapter of Genesis, God creates man and woman saying "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Genesis, 1:28).  Subdue the land and have dominion over it.  And that was just the sixth day.  A modern day Christian ecologist refers to this as the "dark side" of the Judeo-Christian tradition.[3]

But not all Biblical texts are as starkly controlling.  In The Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus says:

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.  But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you (Matthew, 6:28-30).

On the one hand, Jesus tells us not worry about this life because faith will insure us our salvation in the next.  In many ways this passage almost neglects nature because humans are just passing through it on their way to a better place.  However, Jesus also infers that nature knows how to provide and live within itself.  According to Jesus, there is no point to anxiety and ambition to attain things beyond which nature already provides.  While this passage isn't a manifesto about the liberation of nature, there is no talk about subjugation or domination, and there is clear respect for the natural cycles of life and their connection to God.  The lilies are clothed better than Solomon, and God cares for them too.

Christianity certainly has a mixed relationship with nature, but even indigenous populations, those people we think of living in harmony with the land, experience conflict with nature in times of population growth, illness, or limited resources.  There always has been and always will be a tension between humans and the natural world of which we are a part.  This unwelcome realization disturbs me.

The story of nature is the story of the incomplete, unfinished human.  A pressing existential question is whether or not human consciousness can evolve to understand the ruin and the blank in our eyes, the profound fullness of our interdependence and limits of scale.  I do not know if we can reach this place.  I do know that we get flashes of knowledge when the grass speaks, the bear stares.  These moments are doorways when we can fully consider what it means to be human and inhumane.

Nature also cuts to our very identity (which is perhaps why we feel such tension with it).  Nature is our unbidden, unforgiving mirror.  Nature regularly tells us how far we have come and far we have to go, if we will listen.

We know ourselves in part by the land we inhabit, the weather we feel, the animals we see - the crowded city blocks, the suburban developments, the big sky, the flat plains, the humid river valley, the cool and dry desert evening, the bats, the coyote, the trout, the bears.  People don’t just live near the ocean; they are different because of it.  Nature, in part, makes us who we are.

The spring 2003 issue of Nature Conservancy interviewed several members and asked them for their religious and ecological beliefs.  Unsatisfied with legal and scientific ways of knowing the natural world, Nature Conservancy went a different direction in order to begin a new dialogue on a worn and crucial topic.   They interviewed a variety of Conservancy members, Indigenous, Jewish, Agnostic, Christian, New Age, and Muslim.  In their own way each person spoke of their relationship with nature as a humbling connection with something greater than the individual.

In 1836 Emerson wrote "The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship."[4]  In 2003, Matt Miller, a Lutheran writes "In the woods I never felt alone.  There were all these other living beings there.  And I could feel, in a profound way, a higher power-something bigger than me.[5]  As members of a modern, Western culture that has become more technologically and scientifically adept than we can morally comprehend, nature can be the one place where we remember our appropriate scale, both our mortality and our interconnected relationship with all.  Interactions with nature are both humbling and awesome in the best possible sense. 

I spoke to several First Church members this week about their relationships with nature.  Pat Davis, speaking about the cranes that gather on the Platte River in Nebraska during every March migration season said "To see the cranes is a religious experience.  To realize there is a force that protects without words or civilization as we know it.  It seems like the non-humans can do a better job of adapting."  Cranes, humbling and awesome.

Another member, and crane preservationist, Allan Beach, explained to me that over 500,000 cranes gather on the Platte River in March.  Some of these cranes will go on as far as Siberia in their migration.  I asked Allan why he has been so interested in the natural world.  He said, "With it I have learned the order of the world and that wildlife is essential, part of diversity.  We talk about the benefits of human diversity, and wildlife is the same."  Both Pat and Allan speak of order and the enormity of creation, of which humans are one small part.  Although not a specifically religious man, Wendell Berry noted:

The purpose of religion is to get you in your right mind, to lose the self, to find the kingdom of God within yourself.  An Amish friend said to me 'We are not trying to find ourselves, we are trying to lose ourselves.'

How is that when the grass nods, the bear stares, the cranes fill the sky and river, that we are both lost in a greater power, and found by giving over our supposed primacy?  Somehow the connection is the greater fulfilling reality, the greater strength, even as it simultaneously diminishes our egos.  Maybe it is just a relief to let our egos go when they are out of scale. 

Rosita Scarborough-Owusu, a New Age follower from Kenya explains her familial relationship to animals, a relationship she learned in her childhood:

In my culture there is a lot of folklore about humans interacting with wildlife.  In these stories, there's really no distinction between man and wildlife.  My grandmother talked about them like brothers and sisters.  She'd say things like, "You have to be careful, because the bull elephants were out trampling so-and-so's garden.  So don't stray too far."[6]

A fine awareness that bull elephants recently trampled a neighbor's garden, diminishes our sense of power and control (in a healthy, don't take up too much space way), while at the same time honoring our interconnection with a diversity of wildlife.

*Unitarian Universalism has a long affinity with and respect for nature, mostly coming out of the Unitarian Transcendentalist movement co-founded by Emerson.  (Define Transcendentalism, - personal, immediate, mystical Protestant faith - uniquely positive connection between religion and nature (not hostile like "dominion" and "subjugation") Divinity School Address - spectral preacher and "real" snow - Nature becomes the sacred purveyor of experiences).

Today there is a new Seventh Principle Project, a grass roots UU movement inspired by our seventh principle, “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are all part."  The mission of the Seventh Principle Project is to “focus on the theological, spiritual, and ethical aspects of human activities that affect the health and sustainability of the living earth.”[7] 

The work on our ranch has been like a 50-year restoration project . . . There's something about it that feels like ministry, to use a church word.  Another word that comes to mind is redemption - that through our efforts we are participating in the redemption of the landscape, reconciliation between humans and the natural world.  Redemption literally means to buy back.  I think when the conservancy buys a piece of land, it's participating in the work of redemption.[8]

Each year, at the Feast of St. Francis at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, there is a "procession of creation" through the nave, under a dome tall enough to enclose the Statue of Liberty . . . The cathedral's 2-ton bronze doors, opened again only on Easter morning, let in city light, a view of a nursing home across the street and an elephant, a llama, a camel, an eagle, a python, a pony, a very big dog, a turtle, a sparrow, a tarantula, a flask of two trillion algae, a rain forest orchid, a meteorite, and - this is New York City, after all-a rat with garland and a cockroach in a bowl on a purple liturgical pillow.  What will be the reaction, organizers always wonder, as the procession comes into view: stampede, flashbulbs, cheers?  More than a few tears and a great silence year after year.  Why are the doors closed in the first place?  Fear of what's outside, fear of others, fear of life?  What are those tears?  Of loss, longing, joy, shame, reconciliation?  What is the silence?  Readiness to pause, draw on our deepest spiritual and moral resources, and ask once again what it must really mean to be here and to be human?  Readiness to wake up?[9]

It is hard to have a spiritual relationship with nature because if you do you are indeed transformed, and as the Amish man said, "lost" - lost to the better nature of the cosmos rather than one's own will.  Lost to awe, silence, tears, existential questions, and just maybe if we ever get it right, to reconciliation and redemption.

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