Sermon given by Joanna Fortna, July 23, 2023

Close your eyes for a minute and imagine in your mind’s eye a place in the natural world that is special for you, a place in nature that restores you, calms you, brings you some peace. It could be your backyard, the small park behind this church, a place in the woods, by the lake, the river, the sea. Maybe it’s a place far away that you rarely see, or someplace you go to often. It doesn’t have to be more than a small patch of this good earth that provides us with much needed calmness and beauty.  Imagine yourself there and observe. Allow yourself to ask a question that starts with the words, “I wonder…” I wonder why that bird seems to return to the same branch in the morning to sing? I wonder how the ducks swim so smoothly? I wonder how that tree remains so strong during this powerful storm? I wonder why this rock I’m sitting on has this perfect indentation for a seat? I wonder!!

Now today, I wonder what it would be like if we had this service outside? Would it be too hot, too buggy, too bumpy, too humid, too rainy, too this or that or another thing?  I wonder if I and we have become too civilized to handle being outside like I used to when I was a kid and I didn’t worry about the bad things that could happening if I didn’t put on bug spray or sunblock or if it might rain again and again as it has a lot of this summer.  I wonder what it would be like if we gathered consistently by the waters of the lake?

Starhawk, an important leader in the permaculture movement, suggests to us in her book, The Earth Path, Grounding your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature, that we should all have a home base somewhere in nature to which we can return many times to observe.  She recommends nine ways of observing, the first of which is to ask questions beginning with the words, “I wonder…”  as I was just suggesting.  She encourages us to learn to “read the landscape.”

I like to think of myself as a nature lover, as I have always been drawn to the natural world, particularly to plants, and I love being outside.  Some of you who have known me for a while may have noticed that I often read books about the natural world during the summer, so unlike others who might grab the light beach read, I am diving deeply into a book about seeds or birds or trees or water. I might also be reading a book about our relationship with nature, like Starhawk’s book or John O’Donahue’s book, The Four Elements. My bookshelves are weighted with an accumulation books of nature books along with my favorite collections of poetry. Any trip to a bookstore would not be complete without a visit to the section of books about nature.  

One book that I’ve returned to many times since I first read it in 2013 is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. If you were at my service last summer, you might recall that a group of four of us were up front reading the 19 sections of the Thanksgiving Address as part of a service that focused on some of the more powerful lessons from that book. I returned to this same reading today because I think we all have a need to listen again to the significance of this reading on our hearts, minds, spirits, imaginations. 

Pause for a minute and think back to your experience of reading these words.  “Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one” How did you feel? What images came to your mind? Now imagine that in the tribal school that Kimmerer describes where the young children hear and speak this address every morning before starting the school day. How would it change your view of the world to recite a version of this to the entire school as a way to greet the day.   What are the weight of the words? What is the sum of the experience?

While this is not our ritual to use on a regular basis, as it belongs to the native people known as Haudenosaunee of upstate New York, I feel that Kimmerer, in her chapter titled, ‘Allegiance to Gratitude,” gives us permission to listen to the message, to ponder the significance of expressing thanks for all the facets of the world that we rely upon on a daily basis.  How does it challenge us to think differently about our beloved earth and all her inhabitants?  How does it challenge us to think about how we are all interconnected and we all are indebted to each other, fish, birds, mammals, trees, plants, and on and on? How does is inform our actions?  What spiritual practices can we change to embody respect and gratitude for this world that gives so much to us every day?

One of the effects this reading has on me is that sense of oneness with all living beings, and with those things that really matter.  It brings me closer to a sense I have always longed for, to be in the midst of the spirits that animate and inspire. Together we invoked a world that is inhabited by all that brings breath and life and hope. It invites us to speak out loud those things that we may have thought but would not say because it might make us feel foolish, that our western training would say was losing our objectivity, our superiority and distance from nature.  

Usually when choosing a reading for a service I would avoid a four-page reading, for fear of losing your interest, and your focus.  But I like the length because it forces us to lean into a space of listening and to feel the weight of gratitude that comes with naming and acknowledging all the things that we depend upon every day to live. I never would have thought to be grateful to the fish for instance, because I am not particularly drawn to fish as creatures, but we need all living beings and I am reminded that all creatures play their part in the complex ecosystems of land and sea. 

Another aspect of this reading is the sense that we as readers and listeners are in a relationship with nature. Nature is not an it, but rather a grandparent, a parent, a sister or brother, a child.  We are not floating above below or outside of nature, we are in the midst.

While I think of myself as “nature girl,” and I am fascinated by many things in the natural world, sometimes I find myself living in my safe bubble looking out at the “natural landscape.” While working on this homily I was sitting in my car at the lake, a mound of my nature books on the passenger seat of the  With my pen and pencil in my hand I viewed the outdoor scene through a rain-spattered windshield.  I had shut the door to keep nature out, the damp rain, the unwanted creatures like bugs and mice, the geese meandering the lawn with their young goslings in tow.  Ideally it would have been better for me to be sitting on my own rock, with my rain jacket on, my books in my backpack and pencil and pad in my lap with my body being reminded of this good earth when I got increasingly tired of sitting on the hardness of the stone seat.

This view of nature as out there, away from, below us has not served us well. As Starhawk states, “to become literate in nature’s idiom, we must challenge our ordinary perceptions and change our consciousness. We must, to some extent, withdraw from many of the underlying assumptions and preoccupations of our culture.” (8)  Kimmerer also challenges us to think about what she calls the “grammar of animacy. She states, “the arrogance of English is that the only way to animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human.” (57) She then asks, “wouldn’t things be different if nothing was an it?” The English language and even the language of science lacks the words to describe the world in a way to help us believe we are in nature and in relationship with all living things.  We are taught that to anthropomorphize the natural world is to be childlike or naïve.  We are taught that the earth is an it as well as the animals and plants.  What we say and how we define the world makes a profound difference in how we behave.  What if even my stone seat has animacy? 

This brings me to the poem by Nancy Wood, “My Help is in the Mountain”

My help is in the mountain
Where I take myself to heal
The earthly wounds
That people give to me.
I find a rock with sun on it
And a stream where the water runs gentle
And the trees which one by one
give me company.
So must I stay for a long time
Until I have grown from the rock
And the stream is running through me
And I cannot tell myself from one tall tree.
Then I know that nothing touches me
Nor makes me run away.
My help is in the mountain
That I take away with me

I wonder, what do you take away with you? In these troubled times when we know that our beloved earth is in trouble, and the weather extremes we have experienced, even this summer, remind us profoundly that we need to respond, to change, to do, to be in relationship with mother earth and all her living creatures like our lives depend on it, because they do. Live with gratitude, look for hope, find something you can do to make this world better and do it. So be it. 

Works Cited

Wood, Nancy. “My Help is in the Mountain”  published in Anderson, Lorraine. Sisters of the Earth: Women’s Prose and Poetry about Nature. Second edition., Vintage Books, 2003

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed, 2013. 

Starhawk. The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature.  Harper 2004.