Greening

There are days, and weeks,
when I am in a groove, moving forward,
accomplishing things I want and need to do.
And there are days, and weeks,
when the world comes crashing down.

My purpose with you this morning
was to celebrate the “greening” going on all around us.
On this Earth Day, I wanted to remind us of the aching of the Earth,
and all the good and creative efforts being made
to heal the earthly damage we humans have caused,
and continue to cause every day.

I wanted to celebrate our “edible altar” project,
in which people are bringing growing things
from their yards and gardens to exchange with one another,
and I wanted to talk about other ways this church community
is paying attention, and taking actions,

I wanted to connect our efforts here with the lives
of our Unitarian partners in faraway Transylvania,
in the small agrarian village of Homorodujfalu.
I wanted to talk about how we enrich our relationships
with them, and invite us all, following this service,
to dedicate the new-to-us Hungarian Szekely Gate
north of the Terrace.

In anticipation, I wanted to do these things.
And then the world came crashing down.

Monday morning, in Blacksburg, Virginia
on the Virginia Tech campus,
32 students and teachers were shot and killed,
and seventeen others were wounded,
before the shooter killed himself.

It has been a week of grief, and endless analysis,
of how, and why, such things happen,
and what might be done to prevent such violence.

There is not agreement. The New York Times calls for more gun control, saying the Virginia Tech massacre was a “horrifying reminder that some of the gravest dangers Americans face come from killers at home armed with guns that are frighteningly easy to obtain.” [NYT, April 17]

While The Conservative Voice, quoting Larry Pratt, Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, wrote, “When will we learn that being defenseless is a bad defense?…All the school shootings that have ended abruptly in the last ten years were stopped because a law-abiding citizen — a potential victim — had a gun…The latest school shooting demands an immediate end to the gun-free zone law which leaves the nation's schools at the mercy of madmen.”
[The Conservative Voice, April 16]

There is disagreement,
And on the campus oval in Blacksburg,
and in homes across the nation,
beautiful, weeping, flowers of mourning
are piled, one on top of another
trying to stifle the disbelief,
and the shame,
and the responsibility we all hold for human violence.

It has been a week of grief.

Astute watchers of the world,
caring about human dignity,
notice in our deep grieving for Blacksburg
our unawareness —
or is it something else-
of the daily massacres
on even larger scales
more dead, more injured, more lives lost,
more hearts broken,
in distant Iraq.

And they ask,
“Where is the weeping, where is the mourning.”

It has been a week of grief.

Tuesday evening Barbara and I returned home
from a church meeting to hear a phone call message
saying that church and choir member Sandy Pastermack
had died in her sleep Monday night.

Sandy was a vibrant, full of life, smiling, laughing
fun-loving and deeply committed person.
A heart attack at age 70 has taken her away,
and, it has been a week of grief.

Hugs and hand holding,
knowing looks of disbelief,
tears and head-shaking…
Our friends and loved ones are
indispensable, irreplaceable.

And we go to bed at night,
and we wake up in the morning,
and we pile the beautiful, weeping flowers of mourning
one on top of another
not wanting to let go,
longing for another chance,
one more greeting,
one more clear, ringing chorus,
Alleluia,
May sun warm you.

It has been a week of grief,
and I wanted to talk with you of greening life,
of the human spirit,
that says, time and time again,
despite the violence, despite the loss,
despite our irresponsible, reckless human ways,
we still have time,
we can change,
we can offer lives of transformation, healing,
and possibility.

But, how can I, how can we
move from the grasp of grief to
genuine gratitude?
How can we step through the portal
from devastation and despair to
renewed hope, and commitment?

This afternoon at 2:30 we will celebrate the life of Valerie Wolf.
Valerie was born into this church,
and except for some years when she lived elsewhere,
she was an active member.

To know Valerie was to know determination.
She wasn’t one to turn away from a challenge.
When she learned a few years ago that she had a Parkinson’s-related disease, she was determined to live the rest of her life as fully as she could.
With the gracious help of her husband, her family, and her friends, she did so.

Valerie never lost her tenacious spirit.
As she became increasingly unable to speak,
she created new ways to communicate,
whispering,
pointing to letters to spell out words,
blinking an eye to answer a question,

“I will not let this illness keep me from being human!”

We move from grief to gratitude
from immobility to engagement,
each in our own way,
when we remember, and take into ourselves,
the determination of people like Valerie,
to live fully,
giving ourselves to the values and principles we embrace.

In a way, Valerie is here with us today — Earth Day —
She’s here in the lemons brought by Eldon from their yard for our edible altar.

And she’s here with us in spirit as we dedicate the Szekely Gate.
Valerie and Eldon traveled in the year 2000
pilgrims to our Partner Church in Transylvania.
She stepped through gates like the one we dedicate today,
and she and Eldon donated a milk cow to the Harvest Hope Project there.

That’s what we can do in times of grief.
That’s what we can do when the world comes crashing down.
We can harvest hope.
We can harvest the hope we have planted and cultivated,
and then we share it with one another and the world.

That’s what greening our souls, greening our spirits,
greening our lives, is all about.

The Rev. Bill Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, wrote last week:

In this season of rebirth and renewal, I find my gratitude more intense and my anxiety more pervasive than in previous years. My spirit, perhaps like yours, was much in need of spring. But climate change and global warming seem to call into question even the predictability of the seasons. We know that changes are taking place in our environment with astonishing speed: glaciers receding, ice sheets thinning, species in trouble. Another "active" hurricane season is predicted to start soon in the warming Atlantic. What we cannot know is what these changes will ultimately mean for us, nor do we know yet whether we can gather the will to make a difference.∥

Bill reminds us that “Since the days of Emerson and Thoreau, our faith has claimed nature as a primary source of religious inspiration. We affirm our part in the interdependent web of existence.” With the deterioration of the atmosphere, the land and the seas, “ we are called to put our faith into action, to help insure that spring comes again.”

There is much we can do to put our faith into action. There are wonderful new resources available to help us ask insightful questions and make intelligent decisions.

One is called The UU Ministry for Earth. It is a non-profit organization affiliated with the UUA. It sponsors the Green Sanctuary Program, including certification for congregations seeking to create a sustainable life style for their members, as individuals, and as a faith community.∥

The recently-formed Green Committee of this congregation is following the steps of this program with the goal that we will be certified as a Green Sanctuary. One of their first steps is conducting an environmental audit, so that we know where we stand currently with respect to environmental practices.

They are looking at things like how and what we recycle, the cleaning supplies we use, our landscaping practices, what we teach ourselves and the children of the congregation about the environment, and how we integrate environmental concerns into worship and social action.

This review will be the basis for an Action Plan to improve our environmental practices in coming years. It will have helpful suggestions for us all for greening our lives.

Victoria Bowen and James Schinnerer are co-chairing the Green Committee. They would love to talk with you about all of this. The Green Committee will have a table in the Social Hall following upcoming Sunday Services (not today), and you can call the church office for contact information.

One of the projects the UU Ministry for Earth suggests is The Ten Tree Challenge. Congregations are asked to take responsibility for planting ten new trees every year, on church grounds or elsewhere. As we need to remove the beautiful Monterrey Pines around the church, now that they have reached their maturity and are a potential hazard from falling in high winds, let’s plant some native hard wood trees, and, perhaps, make it The Twenty Tree Challenge.

There is so much more we can do.

Our Solar Project Team is moving forward with plans to install panels on the roof of this building before the end of September. This will ensure a stable rate for electricity for years to come and we will be eliminating fossil fuels, with their pollution of the air, from the production of electricity for our use.

The response was great of people attending Easter services to our request for car-pooling, freeing up parking spaces, and reducing the exhaust we put into the atmosphere.

Can we make this an on-going environmental spiritual practice?

Isn’t this ultimately the question:

Can we make of our lives an on-going environmental spiritual practice?

In her poem, Mary Oliver says it this way:
Going to Walden
It isn’t very far as highways lie.
I might be back by night fall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.∥

The spiritual practice of Greening,
Going to Walden,
is the slow and difficult trick of living moment to moment,
present to the fullness of life,
open to new information and
new ways of living that tread lightly on the Earth,
that heal the earthly damage we humans have caused,
and continue to cause every day.

May our Greening, our Going to Walden
transform our grief into gratitude,
that when life around us comes crashing down
we can harvest the hope we have planted and cultivated
and then share it with one another and the world.

May our time on this great blue green living home
be filled with healthy edible altars,
nourishment from the Earth,
shared with love,
lemons turned into lemonade,
opening gates of gratitude
portals we may step through
and know as never before
the love that connects us,
one to another to another.

We still have time.
We can change.
We can offer lives of transformation, healing,
and possibility.

May it be so,
Today and in all the days to come.
Amen.