An Ode to the Open Air

If we can learn anything from monarchies and autocracies, not to mention the worship of corporate executives, it is that many people – perhaps most people – are comforted by the thought that someone (generally someone else) is in control of things. That means the rest of us can relax somewhat, since someone else can be counted on to keep things on track, or make corrections when they leave the tracks. The world is a big, complicated place, and since most people can’t even balance their chequebooks anymore – assuming they still have chequebooks, those artifacts from the past – it’s nice to know that somebody else is in charge.

This is why gods are so comforting – whether singular or plural – since, in addition to helping us explain why things are the way they are, and helping us make choices through the various scriptures that are purported to reflect their will, not to mention the prospect of punishing those we don’t like, deities reassure us that things happen for a reason but everything will be all right in the end. They offer ultimate security and certain benchmarks in an often-uncertain world.

“God is our refuge and strength,” proclaims Psalm 46, “a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.” There is a sense of comfort in these words. Or later, in Psalm 107: “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad because they had quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven.” It is interesting how often the psalms invoke nature.

These may be comforting thoughts in the springtime, when the river reaches flood stage, or in the summer, when torrential storms bring tornadoes, or during the forest fires of autumn, or in the midst of the fierce blizzards of winter. Many look naturally to the heavens in the face of death, seek divine inspiration in the depths of despair, or welcome an unseen hand when the burdens of everyday life overwhelm them. Who doesn’t want a friend in life’s difficult moments? Even an invisible friend?

But what if life’s trials and tribulations simply flow from the same natural laws that bring us our blessings and bounty? What if the natural worlds in which “we live and move and have our being” is all that there is – the sum total of existence? Well, for some, that is enough. 

“I have opened my mind to the open air of the universe, to things as they are,” affirmed naturalist John Burroughs more than a century ago. “Our life depends from moment to moment upon the air we breathe, yet its winds and tempests may destroy us; it depends from day to day upon the water we drink, yet its floods may sweep us away. We walk, climb, work, and move mountains using gravity and yet gravity may break every bone in our bodies.  We spread our sails to the winds and they become our faithful servitors, yet the winds may drive us into the jaws of the breakers.  How our lives are bound up and identified with the merciless forces that surround us!” 

The faith of a naturalist accepts the world as it is, grateful for how nature nourishes us – celebrating the improbable gift of life itself – without the need for supernatural explanations or justifications, recognizing that nature’s blessings and blows, possibilities and perils, are woven together in the interconnected web of existence. That’s not to say that religious naturalists accept society as it is, for society is the result of human action, both individual and collective, and it is well within our power to change it for the better. We may even feel called to do so.

“In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing,” observed Carl Sagan. “But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed.”

When the Unitarian Universalist Association adopted our beloved Seven Principles in 1985, it was no accident that they concluded with “respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part,” which arguably marked a landmark in how we speak about the metaphysical – language that could be accepted by both the theists and atheists among us. (Well, in one sense it was something of an accident, since the Seventh Principle, as it came to be known, was almost an afterthought – not only the last one to appear, but also the last one to be proposed after those crafting the statement had more or less settled on six.) Beginning with an affirmation of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” and concluding with the “web of existence,” which is not so much a metaphor as a vivid description of how we see the universe, the principles were arranged from the most particular to the most universal. The Seventh Principle reflected the shift of Unitarian and Universalist thinking over the course of two centuries from the theological to the cosmological, from a faith devoted to the worship of God to one that acknowledged Nature itself as the source of our existence. It reflected a new consensus in Unitarian Universalism. What we call the interconnected web of existence marks the zenith of religious naturalism among us. In the midst an “impersonal universe,” the interdependent web displaced what Burroughs called “our petty anthropomorphic views of things.” 

Religious naturalism rebels against a worldview that sets both God and humankind apart from Nature, instead affirming a monistic view of the oneness of creation. Some might embrace Spinoza’s God, which understood divinity and nature as one, but that’s more a semantic assertion than a theological one, while others would affirm that Nature alone is enough. Some use the poetry of theological language when talking about nature, while others content themselves with using scientific language.

“Amid the decay of creeds, love of nature has high religious value,” declared John Burroughs. “This has saved many persons in this world …  It has made them contented and at home wherever they are in nature – in the house not made with hands. This house is their church, the rocks and the hills are the altars, the creed is written in the leaves of the trees, in the flowers of the field and in the sands of the shore. A new creed every day, new preachers and holy days all the week through. Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth. There are no heretics in Nature’s church; all are believers, all are communicants. The beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time; you do not have to seek it far off in myths and legends, in catacombs, garbled texts, miracles of dead saints or wine-bibbing friars. It is of today, now and here; it is everywhere.” 

Burroughs’ temple was in the great outdoors, where the towering trees offer as majestic a setting as any great cathedral, where all that is essential is expressed in the rocks and hills, streams and flowers. Nature has its own stories to tell and its own truths to reveal. “Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious court?,” asked the duke when he and his men arrived at the forest of Arden Shakespeare’s As You Like It. “And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” For the religious naturalist, Nature offers as much mystery and meaning, beauty and inspiration, as any sacred text or religious creed.

“We separate ourselves from Nature and flatter ourselves that we belong to another and higher order; that we alone are of divine origin, and not involved in the fate of the rest of Creation,” observed Burroughs, while noting that we are composed of the same minerals, or elements, that constitute the physical universe, deriving our lives from the same “cosmic dust and solar radiations” that make up every other species of life on Earth. “Why should we put on superior airs when no one atom of matter will turn aside for us, not one law of physics cease to operate to save us from destruction?” he asked. 

On balance, Nature has been favourable towards us as a species, one might even say kind – as favourable and as kind as any beneficent deity can be said to have been. Some may invoke deities and demons to explain why things sometimes go awry, in order to explain life’s disappointments and disasters in the face of our experience that life is generally good to us. Even most of our bad days are pretty good, once we get over our complainte du jour. Most human beings seem to prefer to believe that ill fortune is a punishment rather than concede that our lives are filled with random events over which even the gods have no control, that an element of chance defines of our existence when it comes to our individual lives, even as we see the magnificent order of Nature all around us.

We need to believe that our lives have a purpose external to ourselves, rather than accept the terrible responsibility to shape the meaning of our own lives, when we can scarcely explain why we hold the values and beliefs that we do, the preferences and tastes, the urges and instinct. So we separate ourselves from Nature, rather than embracing our place within it, and we create mythologies and theologies to explain why we fancy ourselves to be something more than the intelligent dust of the universe. We look for a plan where there is only natural law; we look for a creator rather than acknowledge that the universe is self-creating and self-perpetuating. There is a comfort in anthropomorphizing Nature since doing so tames the natural world, explaining its apparent affections and tempers, domesticating it in human terms, making it more relatable and seemingly more controllable. Many find comfort in a deity with a human face, who has created us in their image, as preferable to an impersonal collection of forces and laws, and I wouldn’t deny them this comfort. But for me, Nature is enough – the Earth is my everlasting home – and I am content to rest in its bosom. An infinite and eternal universe is as satisfying to me as an infinite and eternal deity – as Carl Sagan noted, its saves me a step – an in theology, as in life, my capacity for laziness knows no bounds. Yes, let me rest in Nature’s bosom.

“But we are here, the world is beautiful, life is worth living,” Burroughs proclaimed. The world is beautiful. Life is worth the living. “Nature serves us when we know how to use her; when we plant and sow wisely. More things have been for us than have been against us; more winds have blown our barks into safe harbors than have dashed us upon the rocks. There are more refreshing showers than devastating tornadoes; more sunshine than forked lightening; more fertile land upon upon the earth than parched deserts; a broader belt of genial climates than of frigid zones. … Nature as it is; the chances of life have been in our favor; the stream makes its own channel; the waters find their way to the sea; they do not stagnate on the way.” 

So, whether you still draw your faith from ancient scriptures, and well-worn and time-tested traditions, or whether you seek “sermons in stones, words in the babbling brooks” – either way, may you, from time to time, take your faith out into the open air, to test it against the refreshing breezes of the natural world, and see if the winds might not bring you something that refreshes you, that rejuvenates you, that reminds you our lives are worth the living.

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.

Works Cited

John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe: Essays in Naturalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920; repr. Moore Haven, Florida: Rainbow Books, 1987).

Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (New York: Random House, 1979).

Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980).

Rise Again!

“My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” (Song of Solomon 2:10-12)

This passage from the Song of Solomon speaks to us of rebirth and resurrection as surely as any passage from the Gospels that is likely to be read this morning in churches around the world. It is no accident, I think, that the Christian story of resurrection is set in the springtime, when the whole world conspires to burst forth in the renewal of life. It is, however, an accident of geography, I suppose, since this linkage of springtime and resurrection only works in the northern hemisphere. And it works best in those latitudes and years where the first buds and blossoms emerge right around the time of Easter itself, which is a variable celebration, occurring anywhere from March 22nd to April 25th, depending on the timing of the paschal full moon. (The range for Passover is nearly as long at 30 days.) This is what happens when theologians and astronomers hang out together and compromise: it’s scheduling chaos, or at least confusion. While the spring equinox has only varied by four days since the implementation of the Gregorian calendar, Easter can fall on any day over a five-week span of time, which is more or less one-third of a season, if you’re under the illusion that the seasons are of equal length this far north. So the warmth this day brings generally depends upon how late it falls.

Still, I can feel springtime in the air, and I sense that nature is rising again from its winter rest, although the Earth is never quite dormant – not even in winter. But the snow is melting, the air is warming, sap is surely beginning to rise in the trees, the birds are returning from their winter nesting grounds, and the first crocuses will soon lift their heads above the ground. The winter is not quite past, but it’s losing its grip on this part of the Earth and the weather seems increasingly fair.

“I will wax romantic about spring and its splendours in a moment,” wrote Parker Palmer, “but first there is a hard truth to be told: before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.”

Whatever else it may mean to is, springtime is the season of resurrection in both the popular imagination and the history of our religious culture, whether or not you believe the biblical account of the death and reputed resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Like springtime itself, the final days of Jesus were something of a “muddy mess” before they were a triumph. He sank as low as it was possible to sink before achieving victory, whether we consider the story history or folklore, literal fact or literary device. The power of familiar stories to inspire and motivate, to stir our hearts and minds, is not dependent on their historicity. Sometimes we abandon ourselves to imagination because our aspirations transcend everyday experience, whether at the cinema or in the church.

Christ is risen! say our dear neighbours, and so, too, our Universalist and Unitarian forbears. Earth is rising again! say most of us today. And we are rising, too. When we speak of resurrection, today, we do so as a dream, a possibility, an aspiration.

“To be [resurrected] in the noblest sense is to undergo that transformation of interests and loyalties by which one can live not only for the highest fulfillments of [their] own time, but for the highest fulfillments of all time,” wrote Henry Nelson Wieman and Regina Wescott Wieman in their landmark work, Normative Psychology of Religion. “It is that reorganization of the personality which enables one to live for those unexplored possibilities which transcend all time, but are nevertheless, real possibilities of existence …” They are real possibilities because we can approximate them, to greater or lesser degrees, as individuals and even as whole societies. In past centuries, this unrealized possibility was called the kingdom of God; in the twentieth century, advocates of the Social Gospel saw this realm of possibility as a redemption to be achieved in this world through human effort, some calling it the Cooperative Commonwealth while others named it the Good Society.

“Jesus stands out in human history preeminently as living for a realm of value called the kingdom of God,” declared the Wiemans. “It was highly impractical. His highest loyalty was given to values which cannot be actualized in any one particular form of existence or any one epoch of history, …  Nevertheless, the kingdom of love for which he lived was and is a possibility of existence in the sense that it can be approximated to some indefinite degree.”

Even though it may be quite impossible for us to accept the physical resurrection of Jesus as a fact of history, we may yet embrace the Easter myth as it has come down to us – a curious mix of pagan rites and Jewish festivals, Christian legends and folk traditions – as a reminder of the everyday resurrections we experience: the constant rebirth of the world and its creatures, the cycles of life which assure us of the unending possibilities for beginning anew, our daily rising above despair and defeat and, yes, even death.

There are countless when we may burst forth with a new sense of being alive following a period of difficulty, even despair. And while we commonly think of Ebenezer Scrooge as a character who belongs to Christmas, did his transformation at the end of A Christmas Carol not bear the marks of a resurrection? His encounters with spirits through a frightening dreamscape led him to become a new person, a restored soul, a man who transcended what he had become to emerge as someone else, someone better.

Most of us live through challenges and changes, difficulties and despair, disappointment and defeat, many times through the course of our lives – and more often than not, we emerge clearer, wiser, stronger than before. Sometimes the change in us is so dramatic, that we emerge on the other side feeling almost as if we had become a different person that the one whom we had been. Or perhaps we simply come to know how blessed we are for the experience, even if we wouldn’t have chosen it, and wouldn’t want to live through it again. What is true for individuals can be true for whole societies.

There is nothing quite like the experience of rising again after some great difficulty or disappointment. We have faced a trial, we have been tested, we have endured, and then we rise again. When the muck can no longer suck our boots off, or when we have developed the strength to resist it, we rise again and move forward.

In a documentary about the late Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers, One Warm Line, Robert Cusick, told the story of the sinking of the S.S. Marine Electric, a cargo ship that went down off the coast of Virginia in February of 1983. Cusick was the chief mate aboard the 605-foot vessel and one of only three out of 34 crew members to survive the disaster. Passing through a fierce storm, the crew noticed the vessel going down by the head and radioed for assistance. After a couple hours, the ship to broke up and rolled over. Hitting the four-degree water, Cusick swam had and fast to avoid the ship’s vortex, eventually reaching a swamped lifeboat. But even in the boat, he was far from safe. “As the night wore on, and the seas kept smashing down on top of me, and I finally got the feeling that I just couldn’t make it anymore. And I was just about ready to give up when all of a sudden the words came into my mind, ‘Rise again, rise again.” … He sang it and shouted it in between the waves that crashed over the lifeboat, this song by Stan Rogers that he had learned only the year before.

Rise again, rise again—

Though your heart it be broken
And life about to end;
No matter what you've lost,

Be it a home, a love, a friend:
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again. (Stan Rogers)

Bob Cusick later reflected, “I firmly believe that, if it wasn’t for that happening to me, I just was in a position where I couldn’t have come through. And that song made the difference in me living through that night. There isn’t any question in my mind whatsoever about it.”

Another Maritimes songwriter, Leon Dubinsky, captured the essence of the human triumph over adversity when he composed this morning’s anthem, “Rise Again,” for the Cape Breton Rise and Follies some four decades ago. Seeking “to inspire resilience and solidarity” during a period of economic upheaval that was faced by the people of Cape Breton Island. Dubinsky sought to remind folks, in his own words, of “the cycles of immigration, the economic insecurity of living in Cape Breton, the power of the ocean, the meaning of children, and the strength of home given to us by our families, our friends, and our music.” The song took on a life of its own beyond the Follies – and far beyond Nova Scotia. It became part of the repertoire of Anne Murray and Rita MacNeil, the Rankin Family and Men of the Deeps, and has circled the globe in its appeal to a remarkably diverse group of people.

If “The Mary Ellen Carter is a sailors’ song, then “Rise Again” drops us into the midst of nature and the cycle of the seasons, finding meaning in our children and companions, even in the face of stormy skies and the unrelenting forces of creation.

As sure as the sunrise,

As sure as the sea,

As sure as the wind in the trees. (Leon Dubinsky)

And this brings us back to springtime, the season of song and renewal, resurgence and resurrection, a reminder the life eternally begins anew and our lives are but a single generation within the sweep of time, all the more precious because we are each unique and unrepeatable.

“Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me,” wrote Parker Palmer. “The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again. The crocuses and snowdrops do not bloom for long. But their mere appearance, however brief, is always a harbinger of hope, and from those small beginnings, hope grows at a geometric rate. The days get longer, the winds get warmer, and the world grows green again.”

For us, the resurrection within is an everyday experience: as common as mud and as refreshing as a spring stream. And beyond our individual experiences of renewal, which can come to us at any time, we are best reminded of the resurgence and renewal of life each year in the springtime, when the green Earth returns following the winter and the great outdoors beckons us to leave our burroughs and our homes to venture forth into the world, embracing all that life has to offer. We rise again – day in, day out – in the renewal of our lives, and of life itself.

We rise again in the faces of our children;
We rise again in the voices of our song;
We rise again in the waves out on the ocean,
And then we rise again. (Leon Dubinsky)

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.

Works Cited

Leon Dubinsky, "Rise Again" (1985).

Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 2000).

Stan Rogers, "The Mary Ellen Carter" (1979).

Song of Solomon 2:10-12.

Henry Nelson Wieman and Regina Wescott Wieman, Normative Psychology of Religion (New York: Crowell, 1935).