Finding our way back to the Garden
Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 9, 2021
John 15:9-17
One might say the same for every day, certainly every Sunday, but today is a day to celebrate love. The love that is ‘before us, behind us, under our feet. Love within us, love over us, let all around us be love.’
This is Mother’s Day: a day to celebrate and give thanks for the good mothering, the good loving that we have experienced in our loves. Acknowledging that good mothering need have nothing to do with gender. The caring, loving, protective nurturing that allows us to thrive whether from a mother, a father, a friend or a teacher. A parenting that is precious and will be treasured throughout our lives.
This is also Rogation Sunday, a day to celebrate and cherish our beautiful, mothering planet that sustains and nourishes our souls and bodies. A day when historically, English priests with their congregations would ‘beat the bounds’ of their parishes: walking around the edges of their villages, singing, giving thanks, and praying for a successful growing season.
While walking the fields may not be easy in San Francisco, we can take this opportunity to recognize and honor, love and respect this extraordinary world that we share with so many different species.
In my reading this week, I picked up Thich Nhat Hanh’s ‘Love Letter to the Earth’. He takes issue with our use of the word ‘environment’. When we use that word, we have immediately put the environment outside of ourselves rather than keeping ourselves integrated within the whole. We have separated from that which surrounds us.
I don’t believe that it’s accidental that our Original Sin happened in a garden: the Garden of Eden. Here is where humankind first broke the relationship with all that is. We thought we knew better, and we left.
Some of you will have heard the interview this week on Fresh Air with professor of forest ecology at British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry, Dr. Suzanne Simard here. She has a new book out called: Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.
I was fascinated by the interview, and devoured the book. She describes how she grew up as a happy dirt-eating child in a logging family in Western Canada. Dirt eating may sound revolting, and while it is true that every couple of months her mother had to de-worm her, but she was very discriminating. Her favorite treat was the sweet, chocolate-y loam found around the roots of birch trees.
Simard writes about her quest to understand the mechanisms of a healthy forest. She was convinced that the then government forestry policy, ironically called ‘Free to grow’, characterized by clear cutting and weed killers was dreadfully wrong. While her work was initially dismissed and ridiculed, her findings have now been recognized and are influencing forestry practices worldwide.
Her journey began with her fascination with the white mycelium, threading through healthy earth: the network of fine threads weaving through and connecting all plants, large and small. From the mycelium, she went on to discover the vital importance of the hundreds of species of Mycorrizal fungi living in the roots of the forest network: connecting plants, acquiring and transporting nutrients, even information. The reward for this work earns the fungi sugars, created by the photosynthesis of their connected plants, and they respond back with nutrient-rich water. Some mycorrizals are generalists, being useful to a large variety of plants while others are more specific. All the plants in a forest are connected by this tapestry of threads and fungi, all working together for the health of the whole, cooperatively not competitively. Lodge pole pine sharing nutrients and water with alder; likewise Paper birch with Douglas fir; the network of western red cedar, yews, ferns and trillium, humming with shared information. Just to mention a few.
Then there are the Mother Trees: although as Simard acknowledges, gender is a complicated issue in trees. Some are definitely male or female, but many produce both male and female flowers. She uses the term ‘Mother Tree’ to describe those large, ancient trees that have survived centuries, and are surrounded by younger trees and saplings: strong hubs for these interconnected networks not only when alive, but also during their long dying process as they steadily release their stored nutrients back into the network.
Simard writes:
Our modern societies have made the assumption that trees don’t have the same capacities as humans. They don’t have nurturing instincts. They don’t cure each other, don’t administer care. But now we know that Mother Trees can truly nurture their offspring. Douglas firs, it turns out, recognize their kin and distinguish them from other families and different species. They communicate and send carbon, the building block of life, not just to the mycorrhizas of their kin but to other members of the community. To help keep it whole. They appear to relate to their offspring as do mothers passing their best recipes to their daughters. Conveying their life energy, their wisdom, to carry life forward.
We non-indigenous humans with our ‘fragmented hearts’, from this morning’s collect, have a lot to learn from trees. Our disrespect of our bonds of connectedness, and our pursuit of what we can take has led us to this global crisis. Our careless abuse of our land, our water, our air, of our relationships have led us to the edge of the abyss.
Our task is to reconnect with creation. To humbly recognize its gifts and its equal importance to the whole. To acknowledge there is much we do not yet know about other species of living things. To quote Simard, seemingly inanimate species show that they can ‘cooperate, make decisions, learn, and remember – qualities we normally ascribe to sentience, wisdom, intelligence.’ Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to judge and dismiss.
We think we know so much about our planet, and yet there is so much about which we don’t have a clue. And we have so much to learn: perhaps most significantly that individualism is ultimately damaging to all. We are all deeply connected whether we recognize it or not. Our survival and well-being depends on our acting cooperatively rather than competitively, not just with other humans but with all of creation.
We who have wounded this planet so significantly with our greed, disrespect and ignorance, have work to do. Now we are beginning to recognize our mistakes, our disconnection, we can begin to play our part in the healing of our world. And it is work that has to abide, has to be rooted in love. It needs us to reconnect with life itself. It requires us to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God, to quote the prophet Micah.
This Rogation Sunday perhaps we might ‘consider beating the bounds’ of our neighborhoods. Imagining the invisible threads of connection linking all living things and finding our right place within it all.
We need to find our way back to the Garden.
That beautiful, incredibly complex tapestry of life, held together in love for the good of all creation.