Something in us hungers to be reconnected to the Earth like Black Elk was. Something in us yearns to find the "living presence," to feel enveloped by it, empowered by it, loved by it. And maybe it's this very presence that calls us to be gardeners, but not just in outer gardens. We haven't really been talking this morning just about corn and tomatoes and dahlias and delphiniums. The outer garden is a symbol, a rich metphor for what it takes to care about something, to help it come alive and grow and flower, and then in the full circle to allow it to die. So you may not raise cauliflowers or roses, but if you have a spouse, you have a garden. If you have a child, you have a garden. If you have a friend that's unique to you in all the world, you have a garden. Anyone you care for is your garden. And each and every one of these gardens demands of you hard work, patience, trust, humility, dignity, and reverence.
But even if you were a hermit way up there in the Himalayas alone in your cave, this would still hold true because you'd be working in your inner garden. Consider this--you are not only the gardener; you are the garden. The power and the presence of which you are the servant when you love another is the very power and presence in your own heart, in the very soul of you, in the very soil of you. Think of it--you are the seed; you are the sprouting; you are the growing into fullness; and you aare the flowering. "A single immense miracle of a flower" is a line from one of May Sarton's poems. You yourself are a single immense miracle, and then after the flowering you are the dying. But from your death springs new life from a new seed, and the dance goes on.
from "The Stupendous Journey":
Bill Moyers asked Joseph Campbell shortly before he died if he still believed we are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit, and Campbell's response was "the greatest ever." And what gave him such confidence was to see in the Gaia principle that I mentioned--the sense of the whole planet as a living presence--the rise of a new mythology that can save us. And in that spellbinding picture of Earth as seen from the moon he sees the fitting symbol for this new mythology. Isn't it a hopeful dream to imagine the nation-states of the Earth trading in their flags for the flag of Gaia?
At last we have in the story science has labored for centuries to present to us a cosmic creation story accepted by people around the globe--not only of a common origin but of a common destiny. If the life-systems of our fragile jewel of a planet go, we all go. We can no longer afford a myopic arrogant humanism that pursues its own comforts at the expense of the larger life community. We can no longer afford an exploitive militaristic patriarchal value system. We can no longer afford millennial expectations of salvation from the Sky God if we're serious about healing Earth and all her children.
from "Anniversaries of the Spirit":
Everybody starts off with what can be called an environmental self which simply means there is no way we cannot be shaped profoundly by the environment we begin our lives in. All sorts of values, biases, and doctrines seep in before we are able even to begin to sort them all out. Our sense of self then is not so much our own as borrowed. This is not a bad thing, by the way, it's just the way things are.
The spiritual task of life, it seems to me, is to brave the rigors of a long journey in order to find one's real self which means, in a nutshell, there are going to have to be painful partings of the way--painful because to question and sometimes go beyond the prevailing culture predictably evokes at least puzzlement, if not wrath, from that culture. So what I'm suggesting as you reflect back on and jot down your spiritual steppingstones is to pay attention especially to the partings, to the difficult times in your unfolding history when, for the sake of your emerging real self calling you to be true to the voice within, you took the path less traveled.
Those, I suggest, were breakthroughs of the spirit for you and can therefore become anniversaries of spirit. It may be the time when it dawned on you that to be white, or any other color, is not a mark of superiority, that to believe such, and then to act on that belief, creates abominations. It may be when the realization thundered home that to consider America or any other nation as favored by God, as somehow closer to God, is not only ridiculous but dangerous. It may be when the church of your childhood no longer felt wide enough to sustain and bless your quest, when you paid the price and moved on. Try, as you are remembering these partings, to remember the time when they occurred, not only the year and month but even the day. The goal in all this, remember, is to create your own holy days in the year's turning, your own anniversaries of spirit.
from "What Was New About the Teaching of Jesus?":
Is it conceivable that someone could speak with such passion of forgiveness, make it the cornerstone of his message for its vital link to love, without having experienced. it? Traditional theology balks here. To justify its position that Jesus had a divine nature, the early church made it a dogma that he could never have sinned, that he was like us in all respects, sin alone excepted. I'm asking you here to consult your own mind and heart. How could Jesus have spoken so movingly, so forcefully, of the great joy of a lost sheep or coin or son being found unless he considered himself lost and found? Stretch yourself here and imagine "Amazing Grace," that stirring song written by an ex-slaveship captain that so touches our hearts for knowing we too have been blind and lost, sung from the heart by Jesus. Maybe the rest of the story of the prodigal son was what we have come to call the public ministry of Jesus!
