“I don’t feel connected to my ancestors,” Wendy said. “My grandparents all died before I was born, I’m an only child, never married, never had kids. No one will miss me when I die. I’m invisible. There’s so much disturbing news in the world today, and I feel powerless to change any of it. I can’t just say ‘La la la la’ and tune it out by sitting under a tree and connecting to nature, so I haven’t been doing that. I feel alone. I feel as though my life doesn’t matter and doesn’t make a difference.”
This year I’ve been taking an online course called Seminary of the Wild Earth, in which we spend time in nature connecting to the Divine through trees, birds, deer, water—whatever invites us into relationship. Then we talk about it in our Zoom meetings. On this particular day, we were invited to consider how we are connecting to the ancestors—genealogical ancestors, ancestors in our faith tradition, more-than-human ancestors such as orca whales or cedar—however we understood “ancestors.” And what might those ancestors say to us?
We divided into breakout rooms of three people each so that we could share with each other. I talked about some of my ancestors who were loggers in Vermont, Montana, and Washington. They cut down the old-growth forests, milled the wood, sold it. And as I imagined what they might say to me, I heard, “Don’t judge. We were of our time. And the trees we cut became houses that people still live in—just like your house today. But you can be a planter of trees.”
The second woman in our breakout room, who lives on the East Coast but speaks with a British accent, talked about her ancestors back in London.
And then Wendy spoke about how disconnected she felt—how powerless, invisible, and alone, how overwhelmed she was by world events. And she’s not wrong: world events are indeed overwhelming, and we are powerless to fix them. I feel that weight on my soul as well, and I know you do, too. We can’t open the Strait of Hormuz. We can’t heal everyone who has Ebola. We can’t convince Russia to make peace with Ukraine, or tell the U.S. government, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran to stop blowing each other up. We can’t stop climate change. We can’t magically cure everyone of their addictions or cancer or mental illness. We can’t find housing for all the people living on the streets. It is indeed overwhelming, and sitting under a tree to connect to our ancestor cedar might feel like a copout, or like we’re putting our fingers in our ears and just wishing it all away.
And yet collectively disconnecting from God’s Creation gets us where we are today: focused on fossil fuels that burn the planet, focused on getting rich and powerful at the cost of the poor and the environment. Nearly 20 years ago, Wendell Berry put it this way in his “Sabbath Poem: 2008, XII,” which starts with this verse from the prophet Hosea:
My people are destroyed
for lack of knowledge…
Hosea 4:6
We forget the land we stand on
and live from. We set ourselves
free in an economy founded
on nothing, on greed verified
by fantasy, on which we entirely
depend. We depend on fire
that consumes the world without
lighting it. To this dark blaze
driving the inert metal
of our most high desire
we offer our land as fuel,
thus offering ourselves at last
to be burned. This is our riddle
to which the answer is a life
that none of us has lived.
["Sabbath Poem: 2008, XII," by Wendell Berry]
In our scripture reading today we read the first creation story, the one in which God creates everything in seven days, and every day God calls it good. (The second creation story follows in Genesis 2, with Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden.) If you’ve ever read creation stories from other religions or cultures, you may have noticed how violent they can be. This story, by contrast, celebrates the goodness and abundance of creation and calls all of us humans to have dominion over it, meaning to love it, take care of it, live in harmony with it. Unfortunately, as we know, “dominion” is usually understood more as “domination, rape, and pillage.” When God makes Creation, calls it good, and hands it off to humans, clearly God does not have in mind for humans to destroy it. “Take care of it.” That’s what God is saying to us.
Wendell Berry suggests we have not spent enough time leaning against trees or sitting by creeks or meandering through meadows. “We forget the land we stand on / and live from,” he says. We would rather sacrifice the land to the burning of fossil fuels and the ceaseless striving for money. “This is our riddle /” he writes, “to which the answer is a life / that none of us has lived.”
What might that life look like? It could be a life that includes time sitting under a cedar tree, or growing vegetables in the garden, or savoring the beauty and aroma of a jasmine plant blooming on your balcony, or stopping to appreciate every sunset. It could mean inviting your neighbors over for tea or going caroling with them through the neighborhood in December or having a block party so people can get to know each other. It could mean taking them tuna hotdish when they’ve been in the hospital or suffered a loss. It can mean voting and communicating with our legislators about matters of social and climate justice, because when we don’t do these things, we make ourselves voiceless and powerless and invisible.
A life of connection with Creation and with each other could look like fourth graders in Hamilton, Montana, who hatched trout eggs in a tank in their classroom, learned how to check the water quality, and five months later finally released the young trout into a pond a few miles away. Student Auggie Rohrbach said, “Well, it’s a really amazing program because it was really fun to see the fish, and it was really fun to see them as eggs and see them hatch and all the tiny, tiny—they were so tiny.”
Trout fishing in Montana is a billion-dollar industry. The hope is that these kids will love these trout and understand what is required to take care of them and their ecosystems so that they continue to survive and thrive. Because if the trout have a healthy ecosystem, then we do, too. [How Trout in the Classroom program brings hands-on ecology directly to students : NPR]
A life of connection with Creation and with each other could look like the Lummi tribe caring for the salmon and the orca pods of the Salish Sea, because the orcas depend on healthy salmon populations to survive. The Lummi consider the salmon and the orcas to be their ancestors, their elders. Scientists who study orca whales have learned that each pod has its own dialect. In 1970, dozens of orcas were rounded up in Penn Cove, off Whidbey Island. Some died that day in the nets. Others were sent off to sea aquariums around the country. Within five years, all had died except for one, who was called Lolita. She just died a few years ago. For the rest of her life, over 50 years, as she swam around her little tank, she called for her pod in her dialect.
Hosea says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Humans destroyed the whales’ family structures. We didn’t know in 1970 that whales talked to each other, that they had matrilineal family structures, that they grieved. To this day, the whales do not go to Penn Cove, the site of their trauma.
Lummi member Jay Julius and his daughter were headed out on the water in Puget Sound recently. His daughter had a particular orca that she felt close to. Neither Jay nor his daughter had seen this orca in a while, but his daughter said, “We will see her today.” They saw whale-spotting tour boats off in the distance suddenly turn around, so they suspected that a pod was nearby. And then several whales appeared right under the bow of Jay Julius’s boat, where his daughter was sitting. And the one that Jay’s daughter felt connected to, that whale turned and looked up at her, held her gaze for a minute. [Chris Morgan, “The Wild,” KUOW, May 30, 2026.]
Perhaps you have had such a moment with another creature—a deer or a seal or a goose or a robin. And perhaps you realized that there is so much more to life than what’s happening in the news, so much that we do not understand but that we might understand better if we paid attention to the more-than-humans all around us.
Sitting under a cedar tree or by a creek, meeting eye to eye with a deer or orca—this is not about tuning out the world; it’s about tuning in. It is not retreat or denial; it is grounding ourselves in the moment as well as the big picture. It is falling in love with Creation so that we can care for it with open eyes and open hearts.
God continues to create and to call it very good. Do not be discouraged. Do not let the news overwhelm you or get you down. You are not voiceless or powerless or invisible or alone. Connect to all that is life-giving, and from that grounded place do what you are empowered to do to love freely and care generously. Your own thriving and the thriving of the world depend on it. Amen.