A Grounded Life That Touches the Ground
Sermon by Steve Edington
March 18, 2007
With our annual Service Auction slightly less than two weeks away I figure it's high time I deliver on the sermon topic I offered for bid last year before this year's auction rolls around. It never ceases to amaze me how the bidding gets going so vigorously on this thing. I notice that the "sermon of your choice" item isn't offered until we're pretty well into the evening - and the wine is pretty well consumed. Whether that has anything to do with it or not, it's a little strange to watch people bidding against each other just to get a sermon topic out of me. But "whatever keeps the church solvent," I say.
Actually I'm pleased to do this, and was especially grateful this year when Harry Purkhiser - the winning bidder for 2006 - introduced me to a writer whose work I'd not previously known. Harry handed me a couple of books - back in the fall, I think - and asked if I would work up a sermon on their author's life and work. The man is Scott Russell Sanders, a Professor of English at Harry's alma mater of Indiana University in Bloomington. Dr. Sanders is also an ardent environmentalist. Five of his nineteen books have been published by our Unitarian Universalist Association's Beacon Press, and the religious and spiritual content of his writings on nature, earth, and the environment have a pronounced Unitarian Universalist flavor to them. There's a very strong and vibrant UU congregation in Bloomington that draws much of its membership from the Indiana University community. I don't know if Dr. Sanders is a member there or not, but with his views on religion and spirituality he'd fit right in.
I was also struck by how so much of what Scott Sanders writes about resonates with the sermons I've done over just these past two weeks. A lot of his work is about the necessity of human beings developing a true relationship of mind and spirit to the natural world. And while Sanders mode of writing is non-fiction prose, it has much of the same flavor, tone, and quality as does the poetry of Gary Snyder - whose life and work I touched on last Sunday. Also, Sanders views on what he calls "The Spirit" (with a capital 'S') strongly echoes some of what I was saying two weeks ago about naturalistic theology, in critiquing Dr. Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion. In that sermon I spoke of my need and desire to get past what I consider to be a tired debate on the existence or non-existence of the Supernatural Supreme Being. Much of Sanders' writings point to that "get past it" region that I'm reaching for. So I will be tying some of his work this morning to some of what I've been saying over the past couple of weeks.
As I learned about Sanders life I was struck by how similar our life paths have been. We were born in the same year of 1945. He was raised in a rural area of Ohio, that sounds very much like the rural part of Ohio where I spent my summers with my grandfather as I was growing up in southern West Virginia. We were both raised in decidedly conservative Christian settings, where we were deeply inculcated with the Bible - its stories and its teachings - and we retain our familiarity with them as well as our appreciation for many of them. Each of our fathers, whose respective legacies he and I both still struggle to come to terms with, had family ties that reached in to the rural South of the early 1950s. A major difference in our upbringing, however, is that my father was an absolute teetotaler, while Mr. Sanders' father had a life-long struggle with alcohol which he largely managed to keep hidden.
Mr. Sanders and I left our respective places of origin and came East for at least some portion of our higher education. And we both began our careers, in the fall of 1971, after our respective periods graduate study, on a university campus in southern Indiana. For me it was a small Methodist school called DePauw University, where I was the campus minister. For Dr. Sanders it was, as already noted, as a Professor of English at Indiana University in Bloomington, about 40 miles south of where I landed in the little town of Greencastle.
But, and here's a point where our paths part, I only lasted three years in Indiana. Mr. Sanders is still there. And I do mean there. If his writings are any indication he's about as rooted in southern Indiana as anyone can be anywhere, while still having a rather cosmopolitan view of the world. He did his undergraduate work at Brown University in Rhode Island, and got his doctorate in Cambridge - Cambridge, England, that is at Oxford University. He has a strong Midwestern identity which he wears as a badge of honor, and has some fun with it by pointing to the ways he in which was stereotyped by some of the supposedly more sophisticated types he met when he first encountered Ivy League culture at Brown:
"I never thought of myself as a Midwesterner until I left Ohio for college in Rhode Island. The people I met there, who came mostly from cities bordering the Atlantic or Pacific, claimed they could hear the rustle of cornstalks in my voice, could see the roll of glacial plains in my work, could detect in my matters and politics the domes of county courthouses. I doubt that my origins showed quite so plainly but my fellow students, on hearing where I was from, saw what they expected to see.
"Who else but a Midwesterner, they asked me, would refuse to drink alcohol, smoke dope, or sleep with a willing girl, refuse even to swear? I was considered a bit odd back home as well, I answered; but they were not listening. Where else but in the Midwest, they wanted to know, could one find the garish, baggy shirts I wore? My mother had sewn those shirts, I answered. There, you see, who else but a Midwesterner would wear shirts his mother had made? I was as square, my new friends assured me, as the wheat fields they had spied from airplanes while zooming over the vast, vague, lonesome land that separated the Allegheny Mountains from the Rockies."
During my brief Indiana days I had a very close friend, and seminary classmate, who lived and worked in Bloomington, after choosing a career other than the ministry and returning to his home there. We spent a lot of time together in the early 1970s, and I got a good feel for the southern Indiana terrain, about which Sanders writes so devotedly.
The book from which I read a passage earlier is called Writing from the Center. Sanders means it in two ways, both figurative and literal. He means writing from the center of your being; from whatever your personal, and centered focus, is. And it he means it in a geographically literal sense as well, writing from the center of America - from the Midwest where he was raised, and which he has deeply internalized. If I were to boil down the message of this book, as well as the other writings of his with which I've managed to familiarize myself, it would be his admonition to his readers to know where you've come from and to know where you are - which are very simple words with a lot of not-so-simple matters behind them.
About knowing where you've come from: As I read some of Sanders accounts of his early years in rural Ohio and their lasting impact upon him, I recalled some words by a Universalist minister and educator, and a one-time Dean at St. Lawrence University, Rev. Angus MacLean. MacLean held that in order to be at peace with one's past you need to go through a process of what he called "some appreciation, some understanding, and some forgiveness." You may not - and may very well not be able - to do all three, but the path MacLean sets forth is a good one; and one that Sanders is clearly walking (whether he'd ever heard of Angus MacLean or not) in much of his writings.
Sanders' connection, his spiritual ties to the land upon which he was raised is clearly appreciated and loved. He writes of how he's experienced the growth of both the crops and the wild foliage the land brought forth, and the animals who were fed by it, and who in turn provided food for human beings. He has a deep love of family, which carried through a generation to the letters he writes to the son and daughter he and his wife Ruth have, upon their marriages. He appreciates the faith he was raised in even as his religious and spiritual journey took him in a different direction and to a different place; and he understands the positive impact the religion of his youth had on some of those who embraced it, even though he no longer can.
He has a deep love for all his father taught him about how to truly see and relate to the world of nature, as well as for all he learned about self-sufficiency at the hands of his handy-man father. Sanders' father was raised in rural Mississippi in the earlier decades of the 20th century; and in writing of his early family visits back to that area Sanders is able to understand how his many father's views were shaped by his upbringing. Sanders is no apologist for some of his father's perspectives and views of life, but he does gain a measure of peace with his own past by an understanding of his father came to see the world - his world - in the way he did.
This is a process I've had to work through myself, even though my father has been gone for nearly 30 years. I felt very close to this man whom I've never met when he wrote of the struggle it created with his deeply patriotic father when he, Scott, declared his opposition to the Vietnam war and his pacifism. While I have not embraced pacifism at the level Sanders does, I recall going some similar rounds with my father. It is in dealing with his father's legacy as well that Sanders reaches for forgiveness. He obviously cannot appreciate, and it's a struggle for him to understand his father's alcoholism, but he is able to forgive him for the impact his father's struggle had on his own life. Appreciation, understanding, and forgiveness - these are the themes that play out as Sanders writes about knowing, really knowing, where he has come from.
For all of his positive writings about having a sense of place and embracing the places of one's past, however, Sanders is not one to romanticize regionalism. He can administer a bite when it's called for as these words demonstrate:
"Clearly we are well rid of some old regional markers, such as those 'Colored' and 'White' signs over toilets [as I saw in my youth in Mississippi], or black jockeys faithfully holding lanterns beside front doors, or cigar store Indians; and we are well rid of the accompanying bigotry, boosterism, and smarm. We could get along fine without the phony regionalism symbolized by Confederate flags, by squinty eyed cowboys peddling cigarettes from bill boards...and by souvenir shoppes with gen-u-ine trinkets that have been mass-produced in Third World sweatshops...better to leave the map of our country blank than to smear it with lies."
But it is this very same "blank map" that concerns Sanders the most. At one point he makes the rueful observation that a person could get in a car at one end of the country, roll up the windows, keep the climate controlled, set up a stack of CDs to play; and eat in chain restaurants, stay in chain motels; and get clear to the other end of the country without having any idea as to where you've been or what you've seen. Admitting that he's exaggerating in making such a charge - Sanders notes that it's exaggeration for the sake of an honest point; and that point is that it is becoming increasingly difficult and challenging to know where it is that we truly live. Where we live, that is to say, when it comes to our particular spot on this earth - and when it comes to knowing the earth itself as our home as well. Hear his words again:
"If we are to live responsibly on earth, we will have to recognize that our true address Is not the one listed in the phone book, but the one defined by the movement of water, the lay of the land, the dirt and air, the animals and plants, as well as by the patterns of human occupation, the buildings and crops, the language and lore. To discover our true address, we will have to stay off the interstates, avoid the friendly franchises, climb out of our cars, hunt up guides who have lived heedfully in the place, and we will have to walk around with eyes and ears open to the neighborhoods."
That last line, "walk around with eyes and ears open to the neighborhoods" is a pretty apt description of how Sanders has lived his live in and around Bloomington and southern Indiana. Much of his writing is about what his open eyes and open ears have revealed to him as he explores the neighborhood, so to speak, that makes up the part of the world that he inhabits. In seeing that particular neighborhood he senses the greater neighborhood in which he lives as well:
"The limestone beneath the foundations of my house here in Indiana was formed by a great inland sea that stretched from what is now Pennsylvania across the Great Plains. The honeysuckle that blooms in my backyard is a wild offspring of plants brought to this country by Asia. The swifts that nest in my chimney spend their winters in the Amazon basin. And the mulberry, one of our neighborhood trees, flourishes in Massachusetts to Florida, from Minnesota to Oklahoma." The challenge Dr. Sanders is presenting to his readers without having to expressly say it, is to know what your address really is, and how that address of yours connects you to the greater neighborhood in which we all live.
But in addition to knowing where you've come from, and knowing where you are, or what you actual address is, still another - and possibly most powerful - aspect of Sanders work is about knowing, and sensing how you are related, in the deepest and most far-reaching sense of the work, to where you are. For me to even note my more superficial address, which is the number of the house on the street where I live - even that bespeaks a relationship, when it comes to how I live there with my family, the things I - and we - do, and the pieces of my life that are invested in that house. Even a street address denotes a relationship. So what kind of relationship, then, does our earth-based address call us into? This is the theme of Sanders' book The Force of Spirit which I have read, and of his most recent work, that I've not read, called A Private History of Awe.
What Sanders is pursuing in both of these books is one of my ongoing pursuits as well, which is how do we create a language of reverence and awe and wonder that will allow us to speak to, and better understand and grasp, our relationship to our planetary address. In an interview following the publication of A Private History of Awe Sanders states: "I (want) to help recover the original meaning of the word (awe) which signifies a two-sided emotion. On one side are wonder and emotion, and on the other are terror and dread. The wonder and emotion are evoked by the great size, age, complexity, elegance, and mystery of the universe; the terror and dread arise from our awareness of being tiny, fleeting creatures in this vast and unfathomable cosmos...To feel awe, one has to look beyond the miniscule realm where humans can pretend to control things...pretending that Earth is a spaceship and we are the captains."
Sanders is aware that he's reaching for some sort of religious language, even as he shies away from it: "Most of the religious language we hear nowadays from televangelists, politicians, and other pundits (is) lacking in reverence. When someone claims to know what God wants, or whom God hates - as so many public figures do these days - that seem to me the height of arrogance. No human being can speak on behalf of the power that created and sustains the universe."
And yet, that is just what Sanders is attempting to do in The Force of Spirit. Or, to be more fair to him, he's trying to deal with the paradox that while, as he puts it, "no human being can speak on behalf of the power that created and sustains the universe," we still much search for ways of speaking about such a power if we are to understand it and appreciate, and live in harmony with it rather that work against it. This power, of which Sanders speaks, is something present in the natural world and not a Being or Entity who exists apart from it.
The term for such power that he finally comes up with is simply "Spirit," which he also calls "the fire at the heart of matter." If I may go one more round with his own words, this is from the Introduction to The Force of Spirit: "In trying to show what binds together the seeming scatter of things, I find myself pointing to an elusive energy...and when I glimpse it, I can do little more than cry, 'There it is!' All the names we use for the fire at the heart of matter are risky - God, Yahweh, Allah, Manitou, among countless others - for each comes freighted with a long and compromising history. For all the possible names I favor spirit, because the word seems to catch the lightness, radiance, and wind-like subtlety of the power that I seek." He closes on this note: "I cannot predict when this force will visit me, anymore than I can predict when the red-tailed hawk that hunts from the ridge behind our cabin will kite across the sky. I can only watch and wait..."
It is this kind of religious writing and thinking and life stance that I find myself most drawn to these days. This was the point I attempted to make two weeks ago in discussing Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion in which he devotes 400 pages to debunking belief in a Supernatural Supreme Being. You'll recall - those who were here - that I said I was in basic agreement with most, if not all, of Dawkins arguments; and I see value in the kind of debunking he does. But this kind of debate is simply not the kind of conversation I'm terribly interested in at this point in my life. If I had a choice between spending an evening with Dawkins listening to him hold forth for the non-existence of a Supreme Being; or with Scott Sanders exploring how we as human beings can better cultivate a sense of awe, mystery, wonder, and reverence for our world and universe - and how we find ways of speaking to that sense - well, that a no brainer for me. I'm with the guy from Indiana. And the guy from Indiana, by the way, is as science friendly as Dawkins, having initially trained to be a physicist before switching to Literature and writing.
I'll end on this - first by thanking Harry Purkhiser for introducing me to someone I feel a good personal connection with by way of his writing. He can put himself into his work in some very moving ways: From writing of his family and places of origin - in writing in some very poignant ways of dealing with the deaths of his parents as well as those of his wife - and of how he and his wife helped launch their son and their daughter into lives of their own.
I can also see how people reading his work would want to travel to southern Indiana to see the land that Scott Sanders feels such a connection to - to see all that he sees in it. I can say from personal experience that southern Indiana is beautiful country, not in an overwhelming, knock-you-down kind of way that I find, say, Big Sur country to be. But it's a more subtle kind of beauty that does reveal itself if you look closely enough and long enough. I think Harry would tell you that as well.
For those who might wish to go to the environs of Bloomington, Indiana to see the land that Sanders portrays with his wonderful gift of language - well, I don't believe he'd tell you not to come. He's too polite and decent and homey of a Midwesterner to do that. But he probably would say that if you are coming here to see what I describe, then you're not quite getting it.
I'm looking as closely and deeply as I can at the world that surrounds me, I think he'd say, in the hope that you will do the same wherever you happen to be - and whatever your address is. For it is when we learn to look, touch, sense, and feel the land around us in the way that this Indiana guy does - and that so many others are now learning to do - that we just might save this land and this earth for ourselves and for all the life that lives in and on it.
Stephen D. Edington
March 18, 2007
