Sermon given by Zan Spaihts-Mohns, April 21, 2024.
One day this week, I went out into my back yard, and discovered that there was an invasion underway. The invaders came armed, and they had gained a lot of ground while I wasn’t looking.
You see, last summer I noticed there was a thistle growing in a corner of my yard—one of the big invasive ones that are nearly as tall as I am and are covered, on every inch of leaf and stem, with spikes an inch or two long. Do you know the ones I mean? I know those spikes. They’ll go right through my gloves, even the heavy leather ones for pruning roses. It was going to be a beast to remove, and probably painful, and I wasn’t really suited up for it right then, so I told myself I’d come back out for it in a day or two.
…but it was summertime, and we were traveling to see family for a couple of weeks. And then we went to Plug Pond a lot, or worked on projects in the house, or in the driveway. But I didn’t spend a lot of time in my back yard. The thistle, tucked into a corner out of sight from my windows, faded from my mind. But it did not fade from the back yard.
Do you ever have things like this? Tasks that you know the importance of, activities you really, genuinely want to do more of, causes you truly value—but they exist outside of the flow of your day to day life, and they tend to just kind of slip from mind? It’s easy to do.
Well, this particular lapse, small as it seemed in the grand scheme of things, has resulted in dozens of baby spikemonsters sprouting all over my back lawn. One thorny problem, now multiplied many times over because it was mostly out of my sight.
I am not someone who uses the word God, or Goddess, very often. I’m not a theist, in the traditional sense. Even the idea of God as a name for the Love, as many UUs use it, never quite fit the sacred as I perceive it. A little too soft, not quite raw enough. But the Goddess, the way Starhawk describes her in The Earth Path, that is something different.
“…the Goddess is the name we put on the great process of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that underlie the living world. The Goddess is the presence of consciousness in all living beings… What we call Goddess or God was the face and voice that people gave to the way the land spoke to them.”
That, to me, is as close to the heart of the sacred as anything I have heard put into words. The living whole of the earth and its creatures, interwoven.
I love the Neo-pagan traditions and holidays, the rituals. I love the wheel of year that marks the darkness of the winter solstice, the first fruits in the spring, the first bread from the new year’s wheat crop in the summer, the full harvest in the fall. But if I am completely honest, I love these things almost more symbolically than truly. It feels almost a little quaint, harkening back to a time in days of yore when people actually noticed the state of the harvest. Reverence given for good fortune that I largely take for granted.
I notice the darkness of the winter months mostly as a curiosity, safe indoors with my electric lights. I cannot tell last year’s flour from this year’s, and my access to bread never wavers with the seasons; indeed, I have, most years, absolutely no idea how this year’s harvest went, relative to other years.
Unless you are a farmer or an avid vegetable gardener—and I know some of you are—I’m guessing you have a similar experience. As a society, we have created this far-flung food web, so big we can’t see the edges of it, almost—hauling produce thousands of miles to supply urban centers far from temperate growing centers.
The result is something our ancestors would have found miraculous — Oranges in Massachusetts in January, fresh apples in April, spices like cinnamon from the other side of the world sitting there easy on the shelf and they’re not even very expensive. If we have the funds—and for many in our communities, that is a big if—we can get just about any food we want at any time.
It is not just food, of course. We are comfortable beyond our ancestors’ dreams. If we are housed, we have dry shelter, full of light at any hour, clean water from the tap all year round, even in a drought. Many of us can keep our homes as warm or as cool as we wish, regardless of the season. There are reasons we want these things! I don’t ever mean to minimize this. Comfort feels like a nicety, but people who have access to all these things survive calamities in ways that people who do not have access may not. This stability is survival. The drive for comfort is powerful.
But it does come with a cost. Unless we are farmers, we may hardly notice the timing of the frosts, the heights of the summer heat, the rain, or the lack of it, as much more than inconveniences. Even a bad year for a crop might register only as a higher price at the store. It would have to get really, really bad before we felt it, personally.
Our comfort comes precisely from being insulated from the ups and downs of the natural world. The distance is intrinsic to the stability. This is what I call the comfort paradox: the very system that keeps us comfortable also disconnects us from the source of our comfort.
But of course, the dependence on the natural world is still there, as real and visceral as it ever was. We just don’t see it, don’t feel it directly, from day to day.
This doesn’t only apply to our physical comfort, by the way. It’s also true of social comfort. If you have ever lived with many roommates, or in dense apartment buildings, you know that you soon know everyone’s business, and everyone knows yours. But many of us, especially those with privilege, now regularly share living space only with those closest to us, and the more financially comfortable we grow, the more physically distant we often are from our neighbors.
This brings the pleasures of quiet and privacy, the ability to set up our homes just as we wish without fraught negotiations. But the cost is that we may never see other people unless we go out of our way to seek them out, and our neighbors could be in crisis and we might never know. I’ve seen that happen. It can be lonely and disconnected, for all its comfort.
That’s part of why we come here, isn’t it? To see one another. And I know that it is still uncomfortable at times. I bet there are some of you who dread the greeting time at the beginning of service, or coffee your at the end. I hear you. It is awkward! What do I say, are we just waving? Oh, wait, we’re shaking hands. Was that enough, do I say something more or do I turn to someone else now—
But as so often true, the alternative to discomfort is disconnection. We have to weather the awkwardness of uncertain interaction, the occasional discomforts of one another’s foibles, if we ever want to bridge the distance. Because we humans do need community, even if we sometimes would kind of rather not.
Why does it matter, though, ultimately, this disconnection? In the big picture, because we give our time and our energy to the things we connect to.
Just take one of my favorite Forbes headlines: “Rich People Donate More When they Actually See Poor People, Study Suggests.”
It has long been noted that the very wealthy tend to donate their wealth primarily to cultural institutions like the opera, or museums, that are frequently patronized by the wealthy. This is sometimes derided as a sign of narcissism, but I think it’s something simpler—these are places they go, things they connect to. They see a need, right in front of them—because theaters and museums are often tight on funds—and they answer it. But the vast comfort of the very wealthy also comes with vast disconnection, and many may go months without really seeing and interacting with people who are genuinely needy. One study I found years ago found that simply asking multi-millionaires to spend a little time, regularly, in the same spaces as people who are struggling, with no further expectation, led to a surge in giving to the kinds of charities that directly assist people in need.
We give our time and energy to the things we connect to. But comfort comes from disconnection.
And so I circle back to the Goddess, to that beautiful interconnected web of life that is our world: she is struggling, too.
I have spoken here before about climate change. I won’t rehash it all now, but I hope that you know in your bones that our earth is profoundly and immediately in need of our assistance. But it is difficult to get people really riled up it and sustain that, to get really riled up about a catastrophe in slow motion, one that unfolds over decades. And I think that it is especially hard when we are so… comfortable. We mostly don’t feel the changes in our day to day lives. And so, when we are choosing where to give our energy, where to give our time and our funds, this crisis rarely seems like the most pressing, the most immediate to us, personally, even if it is the biggest one of all.
So what do we do?
In The Earth Path, Starhawk suggests that the first step is to re-connect with nature. She describes a full practice of mindfulness meditation taken in nature, with your eyes open, and sometimes your feet in motion. Finding a place close to you that is at least a little natural—your yard if you have one, a park nearby, a vacant lot—and going there regularly. It doesn’t have to be for a long time, just a few minutes of sitting or standing and observing, so that you begin to connect, to see the changes, to hear the creatures, to get to know it as a kind of being: that interconnected web.
She suggests doing it at all seasons. And I will be honest, I have struggled to keep this practice. Because it’s cold, or wet, or hot, or full of bugs, out there. It’s not comfortable, not all the time. But it is a way of connecting, choosing to weather the discomfort, to make connection.
So I ask you, is there something in your life that you want to feel more connected to? Something that you want to feel closer to, or more concerned about than currently you do?
And are there ways that you can shift the movement of you life to shorten the distance a little? So that in the natural flow of things, you will feel the bumps, will feel the way things change, and find yourself relating, even in little moments? Whether that’s a person in your life, a community that you want to be a part of, or the natural world under your feet.
This is another part of what church is for. It’s an opportunity to pause and reflect, and choose to change a little how our path is going. So I invite you to take a moment, if you can, to think of one thing that you’ve been wishing you did more. Is there a way that you can tighten the connection? Just a little way, even if it makes you a little bit uncomfortable. You don’t have to force yourself to make a big gesture; the most sustainable changes aren’t like that anyway. Just find small ways to put what you care most about in your way. Go out in the yard, and just look, for five minutes. (There might be a thistle out there, after all.) And if that’s a little uncomfortable, greet that discomfort as a friend, a sign that you are bridging a distance.
Start with connection. The rest flows from there.