How Then Shall I Live?
“This New Year needs us all, all our hopes all our good wishes, all our smiles and all our gestures of forgiveness. I wish everybody a happy New Year!” ~ Maya Angelou
READING “New Year” (adapted) in Life Tides, Meditations by Elizabeth Tarbox. Boston: Skinner House Books,1993
It’s strange to talk of New Year’s resolutions when so little can ever be resolved. Resolving suggests to me completion, packaging, the tying up of loose ends. I’m lucky if I resolve the laundry or tonight’s supper, I can never hope to resolve my feelings or my behavior.
……..
I experience joy in the wonder of nature and excitement in creativity …..
My appreciation of this exquisite planet brings with it the weight of knowing I am contributing to its ill health with my consumption of its resources and my inattention to its endangered species. Unresolved feelings, prayers which cannot be answered to my satisfaction without breaking the very laws of nature that the Creator took such care to establish.
This year I’m not making resolutions, or asking God to resolve things for me.
This year, as I take my self-inventory, I’m aiming for the continued willingness
to keep the doors of my feelings open,
to participate in life as well as to observe it,
to contribute more to the solutions and less to the problems,
and to wish everyone, with all my heart,
a happy and healthy new year.
READING from Erosion, Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams . 2019. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Whatever I know as a woman about spirituality I have learned from my body encountering Earth. Soul and soil are not separate. Neither are wind and spirit, nor water and tears. We are eroding and evolving, at once, like the red rock landscape before me. Our grief is our love. Our love will be our undoing as we quietly disengage from the collective madness of the patriarchal mind that says aggression is the way forward.
There is no sanctuary from the warming Earth; there is only change and an eroding future where we are twirling-twirling-twirling and collapsing into finely honed humans who dare to fall and fail in the name of love.
SERMON
"How shall I live? I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to posses a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars. What is time? Sacred time, but the exhilaration of consciousness.
…
Once upon a time when women were birds there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten- the world is meant to be celebrated." -Terry Tempest Williams - from her book, "When Women Were Birds"[1]
We are at the beginning of a new year. Not just any year, year zero of a new decade. The 2020s. If you’re like me, it brings a full pause. What will this decade be like? How will I make my way through the 2020s?
Am I optimistic about the 2020s? - Sometimes. We’ve lived through some tough times and come through to better days.
Am I full of hope, or have I lost all hope? Yes. and No.
Whatever comes this year, isn’t our deepest and most basic desire to live as we are meant to live; to be the people we are meant to be and want to be? We want to love and be loved. We want to live with dignity and integrity.
Parker Palmer, author, educator, and activist says, “Integrity requires that I discern what is integral to my selfhood, what fits and what does not-and that I choose life-giving ways of relating to the forces that converge within me: Do I welcome them or fear them, embrace them or reject them, move with them or against them? By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.”[2]
“This year, as I take my self-inventory, I’m aiming for the continued willingness to keep the doors of my feelings open, to participate in life as well as to observe it, to contribute more to the solutions and less to the problems … “ wisdom from Elizabeth Tarbox – written in the early 1990s and still relevant today.
And this, from my colleague, David Miller in a meditation he posted on New Year’s Day: , “… I will continue to ask ‘what is the most loving thing I can do right now.’”
This year is already shaping up to be a year of extremes.
In my disquiet and in my quiet, given all that will come, I ask:
How then shall I live?
This is the question we are called by our best selves to ask every day.
It is the question that is born from the womb of integrity, emerging into our consciousness as the hunger of a good life that must be satisfied.
Terry Tempest Williams says– "How shall I live? I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to posses a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.” Oh how I want that too!
I spent the week immersed in Terry Tempest Williams’ latest book, Erosion, Essays of Undoing. I can recommend without qualification that you do the same. She writes of our wild places, our sacred landscapes, our interconnected, inseparable existence with all of creation.
Running throughout her work are three themes: wilderness; politics; and spirituality. They intertwine, they overlap, they co-exist. As she says, everything about us is eroding and evolving together. The process is mysterious and magnificent.
But, when human beings motivated by greed, the lust for power, fear, or ignorance influence life and nature with agendas that work against the natural processes, we can literally watch erosion speed up and devastate lands, institutions, and our human spirit. It is crushing. It is devastating. I think you all know what I mean.
Earth’s climate is collapsing. Our democracy is cracking. Our public lands are being sold for their extraction value rther than being placed under monitored conservation for future generations of life. Our spirituality, both personal and collective, is stressed under the pressure of so much devastation of human and planetary integrity.
When we think about the challenges we face right now, we can become hopeless, overwhelmed, immobilized.
In the very real presence of fear and despair, we can devolve into violence or anger. Can we begin to craft an adequate answer to the question: How shall I live?
Terry Tempest Williams asked Navajo elder Willie Greyeyes how he deals with his anger over the loss of sacred lands to oil, gas and mining leases and extreme blatant racism against him and all native people. He said, “Terry, it can no longer be about anger. It has to be about healing.”
“Terry, it has to be about healing.” This clear response from a Navajo elder plants the seed of our answer. I shall live in ways that are healing even when the pain is devastating and the fear is overwhelming.
How do we do that?
Engagement.
Engaging with what is eroding and evolving together is the antidote to anger and despair. It replaces the inertia of hopelessness with the possibility of change. Doing something positive and life affirming renews our spirit.
The need is great. The world is big. My reach is limited and my grasp is small. SO …. we pay attention to place and pace.
We find our dwelling place, and we begin our work there. To dwell means to have roots - physical, emotional, spiritual and ancestral.
For Willie Greyeyes, that place is Navajo Mountain where his family has lived for 2 thousand years; where his umbilical cord is buried. He is the land.
For Terry Tempest Williams, it is Utah; it is Bears Ears and Grand Staricase-Escalante and it is Castleton Tower. This is where her heart is, where her spirit lives, where her soul rests and finds peace. This is home. She is the land, not separate from it.
Where is the dwelling place of your heart? It may or may not be where you reside. Maybe it is Penobscot Bay or the Blue Hill Peninsula or Acadia National Park or Witherle Woods or 40 acres in Orland or Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument or simply, Maine. Maybe it is the English countryside or the French Riviera or the Scottish Highlands or the plains of Africa. For some of us, our dwelling place is the whole earth. When we know our dwelling place, we are home there – with the landscape and with the history and with the spirituality of that part of our earth. We are not separate from our dwelling place. There is an inter connection and an interdependence that gives and sustains life. We cannot save what we do not love. We begin with the places we love.
What I want to say about pace is really quite obvious and may still bear repeating. Pace yourselves, dear one. The road is long and there are many obstacles and delights along the way. You are not alone, find your companions. Follow the wisdom of your heart. I will share two sources of wisdom for me that you can find in our Singing the Living Tradition book.
I am only one
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
Edward Everett Hale
People say, what is the sense of our small effort.
They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.
A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.
Each one of our thoughts, words, and deeds is like that.
No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless.
There’s too much work to do.
Dorothy Day
Need concrete suggestions?
Volunteer, lead, strengthen yourself in one or more of the three domains running through Erosion – land, politics, spirit.
Blue Hill Land Trust
Maine Coast Heritage Trust
Great Pond Mountain Conservation
League of Women Voters
Maine Equal Justice
County Republicans or Democrats or Greens or whatever
Maine UU State Advocacy Network
Meditate
Yoga
Lead worship
You know, it's not that we don’t already know this and that all these activities and organizations need our support. It's more often that we fail to make the connection between the smaller efforts of our days and the enormity of the challenge. It matters. It all matters. We live our lives from one present moment to the next, often failing to allow the recognition of the consequences of what we do in those moments. To live intentionally and with integrity – Thoreau had something to say about that didn’t he?
How then shall I live? – in my best moments, I live with intention and integrity – knowing that what we need now is not anger but healing and that my efforts combine with those of a thousand others in a force for love.
This is how Terry Tempest Williams concludes Erosion:
There is only one moment in time
When it is essential to awaken
That moment is now.
—BUDDHA
This does not require belief, it requires engagement. How serious are we?
What I want to say to you this morning at the beginning of a year and a decade is that everything will be alright.
I want to tell you that Creator is still creating and life is still evolving and eroding together in a spiral dance of beauty and that all will be well.
I want to fold you in my arms and hold you as a mother cradles her newborn.
I want to sing away your fear and bring you the peace of wild places.
But, I cannot. And tempting as it may seem, you would not want it either.
What I can do and will endeavor to do to the best of my ability and invite you to do as well is to engage fully and authentically where I dwell and at a scale I can sustain. I will:
see the exquisite beauty of our world,
show up when a companion is wanted or needed or comforting,
see things as they are and face life honestly,
release anger and seek healing,
engage with with I believe in and want to see changed or preserved,
know that despite our differences and our divisions, we are more alike than we are different, and finally …
believe and live in the truth that we share One Light, One Life, One Love that will never let us go.
May it be so, today and everyday.
Blessed Be. I Love You. Amen.
[1] Terry Tempest Williams. When Women Were Birds. Sarah Crichton Books; 1st edition (April 10, 2012)
[2] Parker J. Palmer (2012). “The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life”, p.14, John Wiley & Sons
