HUU Sermon Archives

Thank Heavens for Mother Earth!

by Elizabeth Ihle
12 January 2003

(See readings at the end of the sermon.)

One of the places that it's pretty easy to realize that we are sleeping on God's couch is at the UU retreat The Mountain in Highlands, NC, where last fall Elinor Mondale and I had the privilege of attending the UU Womenspirit Fall Conference, a semiannual gathering of UU women who celebrate the Divine Feminine in many forms. It came to me there that I'd like to present four services about the elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water honored by much of the pagan and earth based community. Although the Unitarian Universalist Association recognizes the spiritual tradition of earth centered religion that celebrate the sacred circle of life and instructs us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature, many of us at the HUU are not well informed about it and maybe even think that some of the rituals of this tradition, when performed here, are a bit strange. I hope I can demystify some of those this morning.

So this sermon is the first of four spread out over a year, and this one focuses on the Earth, the element most closely associated with our winter season. I'm going to relate the earth based religious tradition to the state of our planet, most specifically the eastern United States.

Each Sunday morning we UUs light a chalice, a symbol of our search for truth and meaning at the beginning of our service. Perhaps in a sense it's the beginning of our corn dance, our opportunity to pause for a moment and appreciate being alive and privileged to live on this planet, "being God's houseguests" as Kingsolver puts it. The ritual of the "corn dance" for much of the earth based tradition would begin with an altar as I have constructed here. The center candle symbolizes sacred space. Around it are four other candles or other symbols of the four elements and four directions, North, South, East, and West. The South is connected with the summer and fire, the East with spring and air, the West with fall and water, and the North which we celebrate this morning with the winter and Earth. I've brought a stick of incense to represent air, a red candle to represent fire, seashells to represent water, and this rock to represent earth. Pick up rock. I found this rock near Madison Run in eastern Rockingham County. A geologist friend says it's Erwin Quartzite, and its reddish color is from iron. What makes this rock especially interesting is that on it you can see fossils millions of years old called scolithus tubes. You're welcome to examine this later if you want. (Keep holding the rock.)

So one of the attractions of earth centered religion is its connection to nature. It recognizes how important being in nature can be to both our physical and spiritual health. It's no wonder that outdoor meditation sites, like labyrinths, are constructed in beautiful, natural spots. Perhaps the reason that a walk in nature or an hour of work in our garden is so calming and spiritually restorative is that over the thousands of years of human development our genes are programmed to nature, rather than to the brick, asphalt, and concrete world in which most of us spend most of our time. Few of us take our vacations in big cities; instead we stream [pun intended] to beaches and to mountains. As the23rd psalmist says "He leadeth me beside still waters; he restoreth my soul." Or here's another "I will lift my eyes to the hills from which my strength comes." Folks have been looking for peace and help in nature for a long time because that's our genetic programming. Earth centered religion just recognizes this genetic need more than some other religious approaches. Perhaps as Jean Bolen reminds us, the roundness of the Earth, a symbol of the Feminine, since prehistoric times makes the earth centered tradition particularly appealing to women.

I treasure this rock as an excellent reminder that my lifetime in the Shenandoah Valley is insignificant compared to the overall age of the earth, and this morning it provides a good lead-in to my theme of appreciation for Mother Earth. The impact of human actions on the earth, especially by those of us in developed countries, can be far longer lasting today than ever before. As we celebrate Mother Earth this morning, let's think about the impact of more people and more development on our planet. (Put rock back on the altar.)

Harvard biologist Edmund O. Wilson tells us that today the human race is entering into an historical bottleneck consisting of the interaction between a still expanding human population and diminishing per capita resources in the world as a whole. As many as 10 million species or about 99% of wild global biodiversity (as opposed to cultivated and weedy species) are in precarious condition because of this bottleneck. Although it is true that on a worldwide basis, per capita production is rising, the cost of that increased production is the consumption of Earth's resource capital. We are like a family who lives at a higher level of consumption by using up its savings and selling its house.

Wilson goes on to say that the developing nations, which are home to 80% of the world's population and almost all of its growth, are striving to improve their quality of life to the level of the developed countries, but they will not succeed. The reason can best be explained by the concept of the ecological footprint: the amount of productive land needed to sustain the existing quality of life for an average person in a given country or region. The ecological footprint is the land consumed for food and water production, waste management, habitation, and other necessities. Pieces of the footprint come not just from land around the personal home but from all around the world: a bit of Costa Rica for coffee, a piece of Kuwait for petroleum, some of California and a half-dozen other states for a personal computer, etc. The ecological footprint of an average person in developing countries is about an acre. In the United States it is 12 acres. If the entire world population were to achieve the standard of living of the United States, we would require two more planet Earths. Simply put, we Americans are consuming more than our share.

I'd like to narrow our focus to the United States. There is little doubt that humans have essentially reconfigured the American landscape. Today, more than 85% of the virgin forests of the United States have been logged, 90% of the tall grass prairies have been plowed or paved, and 98% of the streams and rivers have been dammed, diverted, or developed. In the process, hundreds of species have vanished completely, many others have declined to the point of endangerment, and still others are drastically reduced in number.

Yet, despite all these changes, the United States is far from a biological wasteland. The news isn't all bad. David S. Wilcove, a Senior Ecologist at the Environmental Defense Fund and author of The Condor's Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America, a book on which I'm relying heavily this morning, writes that there are more acres of forest in the East today than there were at the beginning of the twentieth century, and many of our lakes and rivers are cleaner now than they were just 25 years ago. Some species that teetered on the edge of extinction less than a century ago have rebounded spectacularly. Indeed the vast majority of species that graced this nation 100 or even 1000 years ago are still with us, and new species arrive almost daily. A few of these newcomers are natural colonists, flying, swimming, or crawling to this continent on their own. Most, however, are transported and released by people, either intentionally for economic or aesthetic reasons or accidentally, as stowaways aboard ships planes, and trucks.

Virtually all the forests that now exist in New England were at one time or another cut down by loggers or turned into farmland. The woods we see today tend to be much younger than those encountered by the Pilgrims, and in most cases they lack the complexity and diversity of the virgin forests. But they are forests nonetheless, doing most of the things we expect forests to do: cleansing the air, producing timber, sustaining wildlife. Their presence is a testament to the ability of some species and ecosystems to rebound from intensive exploitation by people. However, that is not true of other ecosystems, like Hawaii's for example.

One result of this reforestation is an increase in the numbers and distribution of forest dwelling animals. At the beginning of the twentieth century, white-tailed deer, beaver, black bear, and wild turkey were gone from much of the East. All have staged spectacular comebacks, regaining most or all of their original ranges. Strict hunting limits have helped with their comeback too. All four species also benefited from intensive, hands-on reintroduction efforts. Far more remarkable than these recoveries is the fact that one can hike into a forest in Massachusetts, Maryland, Georgia, or Kentucky and see nearly all of the animals large and small that would have occurred there at the time of Columbus. With the reintroduction of big animals, little ones like black and white warblers, pygmy shrews, and spotted salamanders come too.

However, the balance that Kingsolver refers to has not yet been achieved. For example, the absence of large predators is contributing to an overabundance of white-tailed deer, turning growing numbers of farmers, homeowners, and biologists against an animal that has long symbolized all that is gentle and graceful in nature. With wolves and mountain lions long gone, hunting is now the principal check on deer numbers. Hunters annually kill 2 to 3 million whitetails in the United States, and automobile collisions claim at least another half million. Yet these losses have not stifled the growth of the nation's whitetail population. From city parks to national parks, deer are everywhere. They have rebounded from less than a half a million individuals in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century to between 18 and 25 million today. They create ecological damage to native plant species such as purple fringed orchids, hemlocks and yews, and other herbaceous plants. The problem is that open space has been dramatically reduced, but deer numbers have grown. Squeezing a larger number of deer into a smaller amount of predator-free habitat has produced a host of ecological imbalances.

As cities grew and settlers spread westward to subdue the central plains and Rocky Mountains, marginal cropland in the East was abandoned, permitting forests to regrow. From the beginning of the twentieth century until quite recently, the amount of forest in the Northeast, central Atlantic region, and the South was increasing. By the late 1970s, the East had recovered approximately 60% of its original forest area.

However, in the most densely populated eastern states, forest cover has begun to decline again for the first time in almost a century as cities and suburbs spread into undeveloped areas. I don't have figures on Virginia, but Maryland, for example, is currently losing forests at a rate of approximately 10,000 acres per year. The Maryland Office of Planning predicted that the state would lose 330,000 acres of forest between 1988 and 2020. And unlike the conversions of forests to farm field in the past, these losses are destined to be more nearly permanent. I see the same thing in microcosm happening here, particularly along 33 East between Harrisonburg and Elkton. We are truly changing the face of Mother Earth.

So what can we do? I like that saying that's now almost trite about "Think globally, and act locally." Another good one is "Less is more." We can make our ecological footprint smaller by consuming less and recycling more. We can reduce the size of our cars and limit the trips we make in them. We can buy in bulk and ask for less packaging. Most importantly, we can limit our population and decrease the demand for new development. We can buy smaller houses, closer together, that preserves more open space. These actions are real character-builders for us Americans who probably love material possessions and can afford them more than any other people living on earth today. But being so privileged does not make us entitled.

As we leave this morning, let's remember that we are permanent houseguests, sleeping on Mother Earth's couch for a second while in the millions of years of earth's existence. Let's be good houseguests and make a greater effort to put things back the way we found them.

Nature as Spiritual Director

In Barbara Kingsolver novel Animal Dreams, Codi returns to her hometown of Grace, Arizona, to take care of her father. She begins a job teaching at the high school and resumes a relationship with Loyd, a Native American she dated as a teenager. Codi is trying to figure out what to do with her life and she suspects that what she does, especially in regard to her surroundings, will determine who she is. One day she is taking with Loyd about the Indians' corn dance.

"So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right."

After a minute he said, "No, it's not like that. It's not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance."

"In balance."

"Really, it's like the spirits have made a deal with us."

"And what is the deal?" I asked.

"We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deep we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."

"Like a not you'd send somebody after you staying in their house?"

"Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.'"

I laughed because I understood "in balance." I would have called it "keeping the peace," or maybe "remembering your place," but I liked it. "It's a good idea, I said. "Especially since we're still here sleeping on God's couch. We're permanent houseguests."

"Yep, we are. Better remember how to put everything back how we found it."

Jean Shinoda Bolen
Crossing to Avalon
pp. 255-57

The photo of the Earth taken from outer space may be the most significant image in the evolution of human consciousness in the twentieth century; it was a gift from Apollo-NASA's Apollo space missions. The Apollo astronauts saw the Earth from outer space for the first time. And through them, we could se the Earth as a holy island against a sea of blackness, a sunlit ocean-blue globe with swirls of clouds and glimpses of continents. This image of the Earth touched the heart and brought humanity into a planetary age, with the psychological awareness that we share the fate of the earth, which has finite resources.

The beautiful blue and white planet that is earth, a sphere flowing with light, silhouetted against the blackness of space, is a gorgeous sight. She is beautiful and vulnerable, and the only Mother Earth we have.

In photographs, Earth also has the shape of a mandala, a circle within a square, the symbol of what Jung called the Self, an image of wholeness and the archetype of meaning. The Self is whatever we experience that is greater than our small selves through which we know that there is something meaningful to our existence. The round or the circle is a feminine symbol that represented the Great Mother before humanity could know that the Earth is round. The Earth is the great Mother Goddess: she births us and breathes us and feeds us and holds us to her body with gravity, and we return to her in death.

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