No Garden
a sermon given by the Rev. Claire Feingold Thoryn
on Earth Day Sunday, April 20, 2008
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
First Reading: Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn”
Thoreau spent most of life near his childhood home—as he described perhaps proudly or ironically at the beginning of Walden, he “had travelled a great deal in Concord.” He did manage to leave home long enough to visit the White Mountains and Maine and was moved by the experience. In this piece he uses a vocabulary word that has fallen out of use: unhandseled, which essentially means untouched, unmolded. He writes:
Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever, —to be the dwelling of man, we say, —so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,—not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, —no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, —the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man.
Second Reading: selections from Job
Humanity’s relationship with the Earth often finds biblical basis in the book of Genesis, when God give Adam and Eve “dominion” over the earth and its creatures, right before he casts them out of the Garden of Eden. Some argue that dominion is still ours to claim; some argue that our right to dominion was taken away when Eden was taken away. The latter claim is supported in the book of Job. Job is a good man, but he has found his life falling into ruins. In despair, he cries out his anger and rage to God, and questions God’s wisdom. Angered, God responds. God’s rhetorical questions to Job ring of irony, even sarcasm. In Job 38, God thunders:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? […]
“Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place…? …Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you…? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this. Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home? Surely you know, for you were born then, and the number of your days is great!”
It probably does not feel good to be on the receiving end of God’s sarcasm. Job apologizes for questioning God’s wisdom and God forgives and blesses him.
Thoreau said: “This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandseled globe.”
God thundered to Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
There is a lovely, singable hymn with an Earth Day theme that I did not choose for this service. It begins, “Earth was given as a garden, cradle for humanity.” Cradle for humanity—a sweet, safe, soft nest for us to sleep in? A garden of easy pathways and tended flowers? No. Here is no man’s garden.
Earth was not given as a garden. We were not here when God laid the foundation of the earth. I don’t think you need a laundry list from me of ways to be green. I know we are all doing what we can to help the environment, that we are educating ourselves and trying to make good choices. On this Earth Sunday, I call us to stand humbled and grateful before the “savage and awful, though beautiful” power of the Earth.
In the novel Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver, the character Codi is talking with her friend Loyd, a Native American, about the Indians’ corn dance. She thinks the dance is like making a deal with the spirits, but Loyd tells her it is more like the spirits have made a deal with them, and they dance to keep things “in balance.” Loyd says:
“[The deal is that] 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 deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, and we’ll try to be good guests.”
Codi asks, “Like a note you’d send somebody after you stayed in their house?”
Loyd says, “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.”
Codi thinks she understands “in balance”—it’s like “keeping the peace” or “remembering your place.” She says, “It’s a good idea, especially since we’re still here sleeping on God’s couch. We’re permanent houseguests.”
“Yep, we are,” says Loyd. “Better remember to put everything back how we found it.”
Houseguests—dwellers—stewards of this “savage and awful, though beautiful” earth. This is no man’s garden.
The Earth is so often romanticized in books, poems, and songs. The ocean is beautiful. Mountains are beautiful. Snow is beautiful. But in their beauty they hold an immense power that human beings with our many comforts often forget to be humbled by. When we feel small in the face of the endless sky, the shadow of a cloud, the height of an oak, we have reminded ourselves of our roles as guests here in this amazing creation. Stewards, not owners. Caretakers, not kings.
A Hasidic story tells of a rabbi whose son loves to wander in the woods. At first his father lets him wander, but after a while he becomes worried. The woods are dangerous, who knows what lurks there. The rabbi asks his child, “I have noticed that each day you walk into the woods. I wonder, why do you go there?”
The boy says to his father, “I go there to find God.”
“That is a very good thing,” the father replied gently. “I am glad you are searching for God. But, my child, don’t you know that God is the same everywhere?”
“Yes,” the boy replied, “but I’m not.”1
We are changed in the presence of nature, of wilderness. We feel our smallness, we find humility. Like the Rabbi’s son, a young man named Christopher McCandless walked into the wild in search of God, in search of himself. He was memorialized in the 1996 book by Jon Krakauer and the recent movie called Into the Wild. As the book begins:
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. …He had given 25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America is search of raw, transcendent experience. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska.
I love Krakauer’s writing but I had put off reading this book for a long time. Without knowing much about Chris, I found myself agreeing with what so many Alaskans and trained wilderness experts had expressed: to quote Krakauer, that he was “a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity.” But as I learned more about Chris McCandless’ journey into the wild, I came to a more complex understanding. McCandless “entertained no illusions that he was trekking into a land of milk and honey; peril, adversity, and Tolstoyan renunciation were precisely what he was seeking. And that is what he found, in abundance.”2 Some people have wondered if McCandless was suicidal, trekking into the woods as he did without a map or proper supplies. Krakauer compares Chris’s youthful exuberance to his own youth climbing mountains and risking death: he was filled with hubris and “appalling innocence” but this “heedlessness,” this “agitation of the soul” was life-seeking rather than death-seeking.3 Like the Rabbi’s son, Chris McCandless “went into the wilderness…to explore the inner country of his own soul.”4
McCandless almost pulled it off. A few mistakes killed him, but he managed to last, alone, with nothing but his wits, a botany guide, and a 10 pound bag of rice, in the Alaskan wilderness for about four months. Krakauer describes how people seem to despise Chris McCandless because he seemed naïve and arrogant, yes, but also because he died.
Thoreau, one of America’s most beloved nature writers, has his detractors as well. First of all, they point out, he didn’t go into the wild, or even very deep into solitude. He built his cozy cabin within walking distance of his home and the center of Concord; he saw friends and family almost every day; it is often mentioned with some glee that his mother did his washing and mending. But Thoreau didn’t go to Walden to be alone, to fight the elements and risk death; he went to find time and space to write, and write he did—those were the most prolific writing periods of his life. And yet like Chris McCandless, some people despise Thoreau, not because he took too many risks and died, but because he took, they think, too few risks, and lived—all too comfortably. Where was the strain and the glory?
When we read other popular nature writing, like the works of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, or of James Fenimore Cooper, novelist of the American frontier, we get a sense of humanity conquering nature. Wrestling with nature and living to tell the tale. Communing with nature and emerging blessed and triumphant. Listening to nature and learning her secrets. Perhaps the reason there are more complicated reactions to the story of Chris McCandless, and the writing of Thoreau, is that neither of these two men “conquered” nature. Thoreau knew his limits and lived on the edge of wildness, an observer set apart. He didn’t battle nature, he simply watched and appreciated it. McCandless stripped himself of the human tools that would have helped him survive, and gave himself over to nature. He allowed himself to be overcome by wilderness.
Humans like stories where we WIN. There are, I remember English professors saying, only a few plots in all of literature: Man against self. Man against man. Man against empire. Man against nature. And in those plots, in our own life stories, we want to win. We want control. And the timidity of Thoreau and the recklessness of Chris McCandless reminds us that we are not in control. That even as we cut down forests for timber, even as we blow up the tops of mountains for coal, we cannot make this Earth bow to our whim. Storms, earthquakes, they tear away our human creations. Even as we climb the tallest mountains, even as we dam the biggest rivers, we are still just mammals. Not gods.
God asked Job: “Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place…?
To use the metaphor from Barbara Kingsolver’s characters, even as we raid God’s fridge and break God’s mugs, even as we push up the thermostat and create a mess, we didn’t make the house and we don’t own the house.
Ecophilosopher Thomas Berry wrote:
“If the Earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the Earth and its inhabitants, our sense of gratitude, our willingness to recognize the sacred character of our habitat, our capacity for the awesome, for the numinous quality of every earthly reality.”
We need to save the earth, save the environment not because the Earth will die if we don’t, but because humanity will die. Humanity does have the power to change the environment and Earth so that it no longer supports human life, and we do seem to be exercising that power. And after humanity dies, the Earth will still be here. In the plot of man against nature, nature will always win in the end. We cannot conquer the Earth. As Thoreau said: “Nature made it, and man may use it if he can.”
I visited Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial on the 60th anniversary of the bomb. After the bomb dropped, people said that nothing would grow there for 75 years. But soon after the blast, in the desolate emptiness of a city burned to the ground, oleander began to bloom. Now, the Exhibition Hall, with its once grand dome, still stands as a blasted out shell as a symbol of protest against war, and hope for peace. Nearby, oleander lines the walks and people breathe in the scent and beauty of blooming trees. Green leaves, green grass, is everywhere. The Earth lives and breathes and holds the quiet, reverent crowds of people. At the Peace Memorial, we can see for ourselves the resilience of the earth, the fragility and foolishness of humanity.
Here’s a story from a meditation guide. A man, walking on a beach, reaches down and picks up a pebble. Looking at the small stone in his hand, he feels very powerful and thinks of how with one stroke he has taken control of the stone. “How many years have you been here, and now I place you in my hand.” The pebble speaks to him, “Though to you, I am only a grain of sand in your hand, you, to me, are but a passing breeze.”5
And so on Earth Day, let us bow to the greatness of this Earth. Let us stand in awe of this savage and awful, though beautiful world. Let us take off our shoes and kneel in worship, for this—all of this—is holy ground.
As we leave here, to do our part in the great work of loving each other and cherishing the living Earth, the words we spoke together earlier can be our mantra. Chief Seattle said:
This we know. The earth does not belong to us.
We belong to the earth.
This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.
All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
And so may it be. Amen.
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1. Spiritual Literacy page 128
2. Into the Wild, Author’s note
3. Into the Wild 155
4. Into the Wild 183
5. Spiritual Literacy 149 (originally in Opening the Heart of Compassion)
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