Sermon by Rev. Clare Butterfield
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
May 30, 2004
I’m not sure I’ve ever told
you that I grew up on what was essentially a farm in central Illinois. Our 40
acres were planted in the 9,000 trees my father decided were a good and
necessary thing. I grew up thinking that the desire to plant 9,000 trees was
perfectly normal. Even at five I planted some myself. So there we were, this
college professor’s family living on our little patch of land surrounded by
farms and farmers. And every year we bought a hog from my favorite neighbors,
Dean and Ruth, whom I called Uncle and Aunt and loved better than any real
ones. And every year my parents invited the entire computer science department,
all the foreign students, the families who were part of the ongoing exchange
between the University of Illinois and the National University of Mexico in
Mexico City and our neighbors who farmed hogs and cattle and corn and soybeans.
The hog was the main event, but there were always chickens too, for the Orthodox
Jewish family in the department and the Muslim family. And everyone generally
showed up.
Early in the day my Uncle Dean would come down and help my
father to get the fire started in the indoor riding ring in the back part of our
barn. Yes, I did say an indoor riding ring. I was brought up riding horses
too. I do not even attempt to explain any of this. Uncle Dean was one of the
few men who could tease my father (who could be alternately extremely charming
and explosively ugly).
When we first moved on to this property I was a tiny girl
and the prairie then was up over my head. And there was a little drainage ditch
that ran down the middle of our plot, down the rise from the house and the
barn. Barely four inches deep in the dry times, and maybe a foot and a half
wide, but it still needed a bridge built over it to get a tractor out to the
tree field. So my father first put down a couple of planks. When those washed
away in an early flood and the slightly more solid next bridge too, he finally
sank a couple of telephone poles deep into the bank on either side and built the
structure that is still there. Which my Uncle Dean came down to inaugurate
wearing a pair of hip waders to demonstrate his complete lack of confidence in
my father’s bridge-building abilities.
For years after that my father and Dean swapped elaborate
practical jokes on each other, but they never went past the barrier of
kindness. Because my father was at his best with Dean, I got to see him at his
best when they were together.
We had another neighbor, Art, who was also a favorite. He
had been a paratrooper in World War II (Uncle Dean had been a tail gunner) and
after that he led mule trips down the Grand Canyon. Art was a funny guy. When
my parents built our barn, which was a mammoth structure because of the indoor
riding ring, the neighbors just marveled that such a building was coming into
being to house, at the time, one horse. Art used to say, “Dan would like to
have another horse, but he can’t afford another barn.” On himself, Art would
tell about his own curiosity to know what it was like to drive a 20-mule team.
Over years, he collected mules. One at a time, all of them roaming in his rocky
pasture. Finally the great day came. The twentieth mule was acquired, and, as
he had so long dreamed, Art somehow hooked them all up into harness in pairs.
He cracked the whip, they took off in twenty different directions, he
unharnessed them and that was the end of that. Curiosity satisfied. He only
kept one or two. I used to wake up to the sound of them.
On the day that I most particularly remember, Dean and my
father started the roasting early in the morning, and it started to rain. It
rained all day.
Now a few weeks ago I spoke to you from up here about
shame. About the sense of existential shame that we feel from being in the
world. From knowing that our lives are conducted at the expense of other life,
and that we cannot avoid this tension unless we decide not to go on living.
These ideas were sparked by a book I read recently and by some conversations
I’ve been having with its author. The book is called The Sunflower Forest
and it was written by Bill Jordan.
The Sunflower Forest is Bill’s description of the
action of ecological restoration. Some of you took part in that a couple of
weeks ago in Thatcher Woods, I believe, as part of a Faith in Place activity. I
was at a couple of other Faith in Place activities that day, but I’ve done my
share of cutting buckthorn and pulling wild garlic mustard from the restoration
areas in our local forest preserves. What Bill is saying in the book is that
ecological restoration is more than the pulling of non-native invasive species.
It is an act, an imaginative ritual, that, like the great religious rituals,
helps to restore the balance to our relationship with the rest of life.
There is shame in that cost, and there is pain in the
shame. The shame can be paralyzing and if we don’t have an imaginative system
to address it we can simply shut ourselves off from the larger world that
produces it, create a world of distractions and barriers, like material goods
and meaningless but unceasing activity, that help us to not see the things that
come closest to our hearts.
Restoration, like real religious faith, is an act of
hopefulness. It is a way of giving back to the world that gave us life an act
that recognizes the value of that gift and recognizes that we can never give
back enough to erase our debt. Restoration is a way for an ecologist to
redescribe the human/non-human relationship in positive terms. It is a
necessarily human act that can give back the pre-human environment, or at least
set it back in motion toward self-restoration.
Bill is a biologist who has worked on a number of prairie
restoration sites for many years. He has a depth of expertise in that
area, but in this book he is speaking symbolically. It doesn’t have to be
restoration of prairie – what he is talking about is the value of the ritual of
action in restoring a quality of relationship. The imaginative act that
steps into the liminal space of shame and fear – that acknowledges the cost of
our existence and says that shame need not have the final word.
But let’s go back to the day of the hog roast and the
rain. The guests started to arrive that afternoon. I mentioned the ongoing
exchange between my father’s department and the department at the National
University in Mexico City. We took turns going back and forth, I spent a fair
amount of time in Mexico City growing up, but in this year there were a lot of
Mexican graduate students and several families of professors in Illinois.
As it turned out this was one of those days that ends up
getting called the Hundred Year Flood. Now I’m only 43 and I’ve lived through a
number of Hundred Year Floods so you can see that the terminology is only
approximate, but it rained in right earnest and it rained all day. The little
drainage ditch on our property flooded fairly often. It wasn’t that deep to
begin with, and the banks weren’t very high. If it hit 18 inches it would
spread out over the lip of the bank and could be several feet wide in a wet
spring. This day it hit the 18 inch mark early, and the rain kept coming.
I told you that Art and Dean were World War II veterans. I
think about that in the whole context of existential shame, and I think about it
in the context of these weeks when the news from Iraq grows worse and worse and
our sense of who we are as humans feels mightily derailed, as if those of us who
have spoken up for a God-given grace were wrong, and the darker view of the
Devil’s influence, which this church strove to wipe out 100 years ago or so were
the right one after all. There are costs to our existence. Uncle Dean and Art
were called up into that war, they saw the costs but their participation seemed
to them a necessary evil, so they went, they did whatever they did, and when
they got back they set about being cheerful neighbors, good and generous people,
and they never spoke about their experiences. The idea of photographs, for
example, would never have occurred to them. They never said a word. This
Memorial Day weekend it feels right to me to honor that, to remember it, to
respect the sacrifices they made.
There are different levels of cost that we can inflict on
life. The more aware we are, it seems to me, of cost at the most existential
level, the more we will work to keep that cost down. A lack of awareness, the
noise we create to shut out the shame of the harm we are doing simply by being
here, has an anesthetizing effect, and, sadly, allows us to do even more harm.
In those dim moments when the curtain lifts a little bit and we see the cost
magnified and growing, the shame that washes over us might lead us to those
unimaginative responses – rationalizations and angry explanations that only
serve to ratchet up the level of harm and destruction. We can see this at work
in the world right now. Abu Ghraib is a lot of things and one of them is a
failure of imagination. The pornographic imagination we have seen displayed
there is a small, dark and ugly thing that has the ability to imagine ways to
hurt people without the ability to imagine that it is wrong to do so. The
objectification of the other is an imaginative act, but the refusal to do it is
a far greater one. Perhaps that sense of existential shame is, itself, a result
of imagination, and by dulling ours, paving over them with stuff, with the
detritus of our consumer culture, we lose the ability to distinguish between
wrong and right and to know that these distinctions hold up in the most terrible
circumstances. A wrong thing does not become a right thing in a wrong context.
Shame is still shame, even if it smiles for the camera.
Bill Jordan tells a story, borrowed from the writing of
Konrad Lorenz, and his observations on the greylag goose. Jordan writes that
the greylag goose is “a territorial species in which the drive to mate conflicts
with the equally fundamental need to defend a territory from other members of
the species. Torn between these conflicting drives, courting geese adopt the
remarkable strategy of inventing a third, imaginary goose toward
which each directs its more hostile energy in the courtship ritual. In the
ritual the two rivals join forces to drive away the imaginary third goose, and
this exercise – or performance – apparently serves as a way of resolving inner
tensions that cannot be resolved in purely literal terms."1
Jordan goes on to theorize that “both personality and
personal love apparently evolved as a ritualized response to the xenophobic
hostility characteristic of territorial species."2
That we are a xenophobic and territorial species there can
be no doubt. Just look around. But if we open our imagination to the
existential act, the imaginative ritual that allows us to take down the barrier,
the reward is personal love. Perhaps this is true of the barrier between
us and God as well as all the barriers between us and each other and us and
non-human life. Perhaps it is fear that keeps those barriers up and
perhaps it is the inability to imagine the possibility of personal love emerging
from the other side. And perhaps that is because of the sense that we have
of shame at the cost of our existence – “you could not love me because I have
harmed you.” It is a shame that does not imagine, for example, the
capacity of each of us to forgive harm. We need something other than a
literal act to loosen the imagination – we need the rituals of faith and the
work of our hands in the world.
By afternoon on the day of the hog roast the little creek
was well beyond its banks. The food that we and the neighbors had been getting
ready for days, Aunt Ruthie’s southern coleslaw, my mother’s sheet cakes (a
recipe from Farm Journal), the chickens and the pork, were covered in plastic
and rushed into the barn out of the rain. Food enough for the usual 80, and
about 30 came. The farmers who came early enough that they could still get
through before the water covered the bridge on the road to the north of us, and
the ones, like Art, who never let the little matter of weather keep them from
doing what they wanted to do. Or the ones who knew one of the four or six mile
detours that could still get them from their farms to ours around the roads that
were closed by water. Some of the faculty and graduate students who were hungry
enough to brave the weather. And the Mexican families who didn’t know that this
was anything to worry about, who just enjoyed standing in the barn with the back
door open watching the willows toss their head along the creek and the
cottonwoods bow almost down to the ground in the wind.
The water rose and rose. By the time the last of the
guests arrived our little creek was sixty feet across and lapping up the small
rise that the barn stood on. My family stood in the midst of this, thinking of
this as another normal day, and trying to be discreet as we peeked out the back
door of the barn in case the water came high enough to cut us off from the
house, or the burden of host required us to advise our guests to bolt for their
cars immediately, and flee to the mountains. Because there were so few of us,
and because there was just the small world of the barn and the river rising, we
sat there far into the night. The Mexican students had brought their guitars
and we sang all the songs any few of us could find in common. The rain stopped
and the river crested, a few feet below the barn, and our songs rose toward the
rafters with the last of the smoke.
Growing up in the midst of this is probably why I am
exactly where I am now. In a gathering of Christians, Muslims and Jews,
Mexicans, Americans, computer scientists and farmers, with the water lapping its
way up the hill. Later my Uncle Dean got cancer. There is almost no doubt that
he got this from applying pesticides to the food he grew year after year, food
he shared with me. He was a man I never heard a harsh or angry word from all
his life, he knew something about existential cost and he kept his as low as he
could. Even with what he thought was arthritis, what turned out to be the
cancer that killed him, on one visit he put my then young son in a wagon and
pulled him around by a tractor mower to their perfect, mutual delight. I
remember both their faces radiating laughter, though every bump must have cost
him something.
This is where I learned both about what the human could be
and about a way of interacting with nature, planting trees in a disturbed field,
putting something back for what had been taken, not trying to manage too
closely, but watching with appreciation for what it could do. In a dry season,
Dean would go and stand outside in the rain. He needed to feel it on his skin
in sympathy with the fields he cared for. In a dry season I find myself doing
the same thing now. It restores my soul. Pulling the garlic mustard restores
my soul. Working across difference of culture, religion, race, economics, point
of view, that does the same, these rituals of ecology and care.
The probability on any of this is remote. The probability
on that night coming off at all, at those men returning reasonably whole from
that war, to become my neighbors and to compensate for the cost by being
generous and gentle to little girls. You wonder why this community ministry,
this is why. It may not make sense but now that you know it is sort of obvious
in its non-obvious way, yes?
This is what I learned from that night. Anything is
possible. Rituals and acts, shared meals, surrender to the power of the natural
world, apology for the costs we have inflicted, love of the other, these are how
we keep our souls alive in this soul-deadening world. The restoration of
prairie, the care for the smallest part of our local ecology is a magnification
of the value of life. It allows us to go on, and to go on in possession of our
souls in a culture that really doesn’t want us to retain possession of our
souls. The work that I do is not about a particular eco-system, a particular
non-native invasive species, a particular faith or a particular tribe. It is
about the quality of our relationships as we move on the Earth. Cultivating
gardens reminds me of this. Working with the children in From the Ground Up
reminds me of this. Pulling the garlic mustard and cutting the buckthorn so
that the trout lilies can come back to the understory, where their seeds have
lain dormant for years or decades, reminds me that any soul no matter how fallen
away, can be restored to the knowledge of the Grace of God. This is hard work,
this business of restoring souls. Hard, and look at the world, so necessary.
And so I am retiring from social mission chair in the
coming year in order to be able to devote more of my time to the ministry of
Faith in Place. And so I will be asking you for more and more support in the
coming years, and I mean support of every kind. Financial, time, talent,
leadership in the community in convening other congregations, understanding that
you have purchased wind power and why and asking others to do the same.
Understanding that the memory of men like the ones I grew up with requires that
we develop real alternatives to fighting over the last few dregs of fossil
fuels, that we never again put ourselves in the shameful and dishonest position
of a war like this one over resources that are only scarce because we lack the
imagination to live without them. We have only the imagination to destroy one
another until every last gallon is gone, along with every last vestige of shame
and of soul. We will never again make men like that by fighting wars like this
one. And we will only restore the souls of these lost children, by restoring
first our own, and the soul of this nation.
When I ask you to come and restore a local eco-system this
is what I am asking you to do. To rediscover your own agency in the
interdependent web, to recognize your relationship with all the life around
you. To acknowledge that if we are at all awake, we feel a sense of shame at
all we cost by being here and how little we have done to restore it, and to act
in a sense of hope that while we can never repay what we owe, this debt of life
itself, we may be forgiven if we work to restore what we can, to love what we
can. The burden of being alive and awake and American grows more terrible all
the time. If we are honest about it we will say so. We will admit that our own
souls have been damaged by what we have seen in our lifetimes and the last weeks
and months. It’s not time to give up yet. If my life has taught me anything it
is that the possibility of restoration, of the land, of the people, of my own
weary soul, lies latent in the weave of the universe in every moment. We are
standing in the barn and the river is rising, but there is every reason to
believe that it will stop short of the door. There is every reason to believe
that we will walk out of even these days into the soft, dark night, with stars
overhead and the rain ended, with some shredded vestige of our souls intact and
the possibility for greater restoration still before us.
May it be so.
1Jordan III, William, The Sunflower Forest: Ecological
Restoration and the New Communion With Nature (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press 2003) at 142.
2Ibid. at 143.
© Copyright 2004 Clare
Butterfield, All Rights Reserved.
