Think of the Tree

July 24, 2022
by Linda Dove

Good morning, my dear UU community and friends. Are you in love? Have you ever been in love? It’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it? But today I share with you, my feelings of intense grief and loss. Love and loss, of course, are yin and yang and so grief stares at me in the mirror these days. Lately, grief, even horror, have worn down my resilience and sense of connectedness. So today connectedness is my theme.

I grieve about the contemporary absence of global connectedness, connecting with one another as humans and with all the natural world of which we’re a part. I love summer and I usually perk up once winter is over. But this year, grief interferes. I grieve at the harm humankind is doing to itself in conflict and war and our harm to all other life in our neglect of climate change. I also grieve for our precious HUU community and our own struggle for survival.

Living amidst a lot of house construction at Preston Lake, the destruction of life is on my doorstep. Daily, I witness the building industry’s lack of concern for nature in the materials it uses, its construction methods, and its polluting trash, waste, and noise.

A few stanzas of my true-story poem about my grief.

Again, my theme today is “Connectedness” and I rely on the words of wisdom teachers and sages (with a little paraphrasing) to express things much better than I can.

Annie voices Melody Anderson, born in 1955, an actor, social worker and public speaker.

Beliefs work like blinders on a race horse. They keep you focused in a specific direction. This can be great as long as you have a destination in mind. But what good are blinders when you’re grazing in a beautiful meadow on a crisp, clear, spring day? I wore my blinders so long I forgot I had them on! Ah, spacious meadows. What a wonder!

Anderson tells us to abandon rigid beliefs and attachments to let flexibility and expansiveness in. I personally do feel a little connectedness most often when I allow myself time in nature just to open my heart, whether to the spirit of the robin, the redwood, the marigold, the mountain, the raindrop or the river.

You’ll know the book Braiding Sweet Grass. Robin Wall Kimmerer points out how we contemporary people, with our cities and industries, have lost connection with nature and, in her words, have stopped paying attention to it. Thus, we’re in a state of alienation, losing our sense of compassion and affinity for the land. Kimmerer studies indigenous people’s rituals that connect with living beings of the non-human, natural, and spiritual world. Paying attention with open eyes and open hearts, she says, allows us to receive nature’s gift-giving and reciprocate with love.

Rich now tells us what, just last year, the scientist Gus Seth says.

I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that, with 30 years of good science, we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy. And to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation—and we scientists don’t know how to do that.

It’s truths like this that make me yearn for consolation. Elizabeth Bishop expresses my feelings in her poem from the chaotic early-20^th century. Chris and Robin perform part of the poem for us.

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream-flushed to glow!

Dee will now lead us in Hymn 86: “Blessed Spirit of My Life.”

Our hymn helps me turn to the sunlight. Soygal Rinpoche, the Buddhist sage, offers me a glimmer of light. Martha reads Rinpoche.

Think of a tree. When you think of a tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object. But when you look at it more closely, you will see that it has no independent existence. When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that stretch across the universe. The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the soil that nourishes and sustains it: all form part of the tree. As you think about the tree, you will discover that everything in the universe helps make the tree what it is—that it cannot be isolated from anything else, and at every moment its nature is subtly changing.

The tree, of course, is a living symbol of connectedness. Teilhard de Chardin offers a way forward on the same theme. A respected scientist and Jesuit priest, he has a vision of how connectedness permeates the universe. And after his lifetime, evidence from quantum physics has backed him up.

Barbara summarizesTeilhard’s vision.

Mankind and all living beings are still evolving their own unique consciousnesses. We must pay attention to evolving our human consciousness. This is our prime responsibility and destiny. We have a choice; to pay attention to our own evolution in consciousness, or to destroy the living planet, and ourselves. He sees our destiny as the Omega point, where, ultimately, through the optimally evolved conscious world, the Divine will become fully aware of itself. In this, Teilhard goes beyond hard science into the spiritual dimension.

Karen Armstrong’s new book Sacred Nature dwells on how we can learn from eastern spirituality about acting with harmlessness and bonding with all natural life.

The Muslim Professor of Divinity, Sayeed Hossein Nasr, also talks about sacredness. He says the alienation of modern societies comes from our being disconnected from sacredness. He says nature can connect us with that consciousness which is beyond our world of space and time.He complains that when scientists reduce everything to what can be proven they turn their backs on the possibility of the spiritual consciousness that connects all. For him, the sense of the sacred beyond what science can prove is faith [a truth we sense and believe in beyond the reach of empirical evidence].

Dee will now play us music that, for me, connects with nature’s flow: the theme from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”

Cameron Trimble challenges us in a similar way to Nasr but from an earthy, social science and management perspective. She’s an entrepreneur, human rights activist, faith leader, and advocate for abolishing systems and structures that stand in the way of cultural progress. In 2019, before Covid, she wrote Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight.

David voices Trimble’s challenge.

We have an opportunity. We can approach this time as survivors, desperately clinging to our structures and ways of being. Or, we can see ourselves as pioneers, setting out in the face of the unknown to discover new ways to live faith-filled lives. The inevitable decline of our structures gives us the chance to let go of whatever may be holding us back from that adventure. Why not architect the kind of faith movement we want to see 25 years from now? What do we have to lose?

Sister Ilia Delio, following Teilhard, says we have amazing opportunities today to greatly enhance our consciousness. As humans we are not finished products but in process, and we’ll soon have the chance to partner creatively with artificial intelligence. This is a daring vision of a co-creative, human-technological consciousness that we must use, she says, to enhance, not harm, the world.

Delio sees technology as offering us limitless stores of networked information and more emotional intelligence than we possess on our own. But Nicholas Carr’s 2020 book, Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, gives me many reasons to feeluncomfortable about fusing my awareness, even my soul, with artificial intelligence. And, for now, I’m personally more drawn to the importance of paying attention to the life of the natural world, and learning from its many, unique modes of consciousness, ways of being, ways of communicating, and ways of connecting.

Albert Einstein expresses something that gives me hope.

Anna voices Einstein.

My consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty and justice, has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a person can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavors in art and science. To sense that, behind anything that can be experienced, there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense, I am religious. To me, it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

Einstein acknowledges he can’t grasp the mystery of life, even with his brilliance. He rises above the empirical to the spiritual and says his only response to the beauty of life is wonder.

Grayson continues with some of Einstein’s words about compassion.

A human is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest. This is a delusion of our consciousness, a kind of prison restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Margaret Wheatley, born in 1944, creates organizations that foster community. She asks some practical questions.

Cathy poses them for us.

What if we were to be together and listen to each other’s comments with a willingness to expose rather than to confirm our own beliefs and opinions? What if we were to willingly listen to one another with the awareness that we each see the world in unique ways? And with the expectation that I could learn something new if I listen for the differences rather than the similarities? What might we see, what might we learn, what might we create together, if we become this kind of listener, one who enjoys the differences and welcomes in disturbance? I know we would be delightfully startled by how much difference there is. And then we would be wonderfully comforted by how much closer we became, because every time we listen well, we move towards one another.

So, today, I’ve shared with you how I constantly grieve over the imminent loss of the living world I’ve loved; and, too, how I try to hope that we humans will truly connect in love with one other and with all natural life within that Consciousness which is the substratum of all existence.

Finally, I turn to how St. Paul so resonantly expressed the need to abandon intellectualizing and rigid views and to open the sad, angry or grieving heart so as to worship the universal consciousness in which we all share, and which connects us too with all other living beings and, many of us would say, with the Divine.

Here are some of the familiar and powerful words of St. Paul read by Joni.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. . . . Love never fails. . . . And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.

Paul says love is the key. Love of all other people, love of the natural world, and love of the Divine. My question is what does that love look like in these alienating times: how do we—how do I—transform grief into the connecting love that could help move our human and natural world toward the Omega point of ultimate, optimal consciousness.

Thank you, all who have contributed today, and all who have listened with open hearts.

Namaste.

Hymn 10: “Immortal Love.”

If time, two questions:-

1. How do you find yourselves reacting, or responding, to your own horrors?

2. How do you transform your grief into connecting love?