Dr. John Young                                                                                                          3/15/09

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Nature: a Focus of Spirituality

Charles Darwin wrote in the conclusion of The Origin of Species: “It is interesting to contemplate any tiny corner of the natural world and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us….There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

            In the current UU World, my friend Bill Murray, who has spoken at UUCJ, has an article about “Natural Faith: How Darwinian evolution has transformed liberal religion.” Murray says, in summary:

“The theory of evolution by natural selection has resulted in a radical naturalization both in our self-understanding and our understanding of the world….We are simply the most highly evolved animal that natural selection has produced [so far as we know]….We are of great worth precisely because we are highly evolved, because of our abilities to love, do justice, live ethically, and because of what we have created….Our conception of deity changes to a natural theism in which God is a power within the natural universe, a power of persuasion rather than coercion, like a magnet that draws us toward love and goodness. Generally, UUs are naturalists, whether theists or non-theists, we do not believe in the supernatural, and that is one of the things that make us unique among Western religions. The great epic of cosmic and biological evolution is central to our sacred story; we are part of a great living system. As Carl Sagan suggested, a faith like ours, is able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”

Joyful Singers: For the Beauty of the Earth

EE Cummings wrote:

“O sweet spontaneous earth

How often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers

Pinched and poked thee, Has the naughty thumb of science

Prodded thy beauty, how often have religions taken thee upon

Their scraggy knees, squeezing and buffeting thee

That thou mightest conceive gods

But true to the incomparable couch of death

Thy rhythmic lover

Thou answersest them only with spring.”

            We recently heard in the news about a pet chimpanzee who took off a lady’s face, reminding us that even those primates most genetically like us can still be dangerous beasts. The news every day reminds us that no human being ever becomes incapable of savagery. Some people and sub-cultures have come so far, but we never lose the temptations of savagery. A companion article in the current UU World, “Our Inner Ape” by Anthony David discusses aggression’s naturalness and contrasts two classic views, one that we are inevitably killer apes, and the other, which he catches in the movie African Queen voice of Katharine Hepburn, that “Nature is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

            Anthony David uses current primate studies to remind us that what humans are is a mixture of both compassionate lover and potential murderer and that as human nature contains both, that our job is to choose wisely which impulses to drawn on. He argues that our current knowledge of science helps us to realize that our job is not to rise above nature but rather to bring to fuller expression the most positive aspects of our inner ape in order to make a better world. Bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas manifest kindness and empathy, capacities for peacemaking and reconciliation, creativity and freedom, not only for themselves but sacrificially for others. The best of our humanness is also grounded in the social instincts we share with other animals. David Anthony concludes that present knowledge means that “we don’t have to be afraid of ourselves. It means we can replace a feeling of dread with a feeling of wonder. It means that we belong to creation. Unitarian Universalism is real. Our commitment to healthy relationships of trust and compassion is realistic.”

Joyful Singers: Sweet Spontaneous Earth

            My wife, Kathleen, received a lovely book from a hiking buddy which is a collection of the writings of John Muir called In Nature’s Heart. I want to share some of its passages with you.

“Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blending and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life. [75]

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn as the round earth rolls. [83]

Everything is flowing—going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks….While the stars go streaming through space pushed on and on forever like blood…in Nature’s warm heart. [80]

By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs—now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life….Nothing goes unrecorded. Every word of leaf and snowflake and particle of dew…as well as earthquake and avalanche, is written down in Nature’s book. [48]

One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature —inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing form use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty…its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last….every day opens and closes like a flower, noiseless, effortless. Divine peace glows on all the majestic landscape, like the silent enthusiastic joy that sometimes transfigures a noble human face.” [69]

Joyful Singers A Festival of Peace

            Now, I want to share with you a group of six poems that I have chosen from a book called Art and Nature, edited by Kate Farrell. The first poem is by the Russian Yevgeny Yevtushenko and is entitled “Perfection”

“The wind blows gently, fresh and cool, The porch is fragrant with damp pine. A duck stretches its wings wide, having just laid an egg. And it looks like a faultless girl, having laid in God’s design, a perfection of white roundness on an altar of straw.

And above the muddy, thawing road, above the moldering roofs of huts the perfection of the disk of fire rises slowly in the sky.

The perfection of the woods in spring, all shot through by the dawn, almost disembodied, shimmers in mist like the breath of the earth, all over the earth.

Not in the frantic shapes of new fashions, not in shapes borrowed from others—perfection is simply being natural, perfection is the breath of the earth.

Don’t torment yourself that art is secondary, destined only to reflect, that it remains so limited and lean, compared with nature itself. Without acting a part looking to yourself for the source of art, and quietly and uniquely reproduce yourself just as you are.

Be reflected, as a creation of nature bending over a well draws the reflection of its face up from the ice-ringed depths.”

The second is American Wendell Berry and is entitled “The Peace of Wild Things:”

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

The third poem is Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare:

“That time of year thou mayest in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon the boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all the rest.

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

            Probably my pre-eminent spiritual symbol is the waterfall.

To stop by a waterfall during a mountain hike is for me almost instantly to go into a meditative state, to feel connect with the infinite and eternal. So a poet new to me, David Wagoner’s poem

“Waterfall,” was just too great an opportunity to pass up.

“It plunges into itself, stone-white, mottled with emerald, And finished falling forever, it goes on falling, half rain, to a pool In bedrock and turns, extravagantly fallen, to recover Its broken channel through maple and maidenhair But always falling

Again, again, the same water, having been meanwhile everywhere under the moon, salted and frozen, Thawed and upraised Into its cloudy mother-of-pearl feathers to gather Against the mountains, forgetting its own And streaming once more To fall as it must far at the verge of understanding In a roaring downpour as strange as this very moment Swept over and over.”

            The fifth poem is entitled “God’s Grandeur” by Englishman Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins used a phrase I did not understand; so, I looked it up, and I will share what I found out with you before reciting the poem. Hopkins asks why men do not “Reck God’s Rod?” This means to care for the divine staff, metaphorically why are humanity not taking appropriate care of God’s creation?

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things And through the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs—Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Finally, “Wild Geese” by UU friend Mary Oliver:

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”