Welcome to Advent, the season of waiting for the arrival of Mary’s “little stranger,” the Baby Jesus. During this season, we will explore ways in which to welcome other strangers into our midst: homeless, unwed mothers, like Mary; immigrants, like the Holy Family when they fled to Egypt; people whose worldviews differ significantly from our own; and today we welcome Creation.
You may think it odd to welcome Creation. After all, we ourselves—our hands, eyes, nerves, skin—we are part of God’s Creation. How can we welcome something that we are already, that is always with us?
And yet, as we all know, modern American society has become estranged from Creation, and the ripple effects are killing us, both individually and as a planet. We depend on fossil fuels pumped up from underground and burned in massive quantities to move us from place to place, heat some of our homes, make our plastics, and so much more. This is the way of doing things that was handed to us at birth and that provides the lifestyle that we know. Likewise, we depend on lumber to build our houses. We cut down whole forests to meet the demand. And we need metals to build skyscrapers, precious metals to power our phones and computers. These require mining, which can have terrible lasting impacts on a landscape and those who live there, both human and more-than-human. Our food may be grown using vast quantities of pesticides and herbicides, which kill the insects and weeds but also kill the soil and run off into the streams and rivers, where they kill all the aquatic life. And then we put this sprayed food into our bodies, where we are assured it will not kill us. And those of us who eat meat may be taking in the antibiotics that were given to the animals that lived in concentrated animal feed lots. When we stop to consider the question “What could possibly go wrong?” regarding ingesting this food, we can think of a few things.
Only by turning away from the realities of these impacts can we keep living the way we do. We don’t see the mines and their tailings, the mountainsides stripped of their trees and eroding down into the silty streams. Our current administration decided recently to yank funding for numerous climate change adaptation projects. The administration open up protected lands and waters for fossil fuel extraction: pristine wilderness in northern Alaska where caribou live, areas off the coasts. We can’t see any of these places. Maybe it will be okay, we say hopefully. What could possibly go wrong? We want to believe there won’t be accidents, or that burning all those fossil fuels won’t overheat the planet, at least in our lifetimes.
But this lifestyle trashes Creation. Since we are part of Creation, when we break Creation, we break our own souls, too. We soil our nest, the planet—the only planet we have. Mary Oliver writes of her grief at this destruction:
From This River, When I Was a Child, I Used to Drink
But when I came back I found
that the body of the river was dying.
“Did it speak?”
Yes, it sang out the old songs, but faintly.
“What will you do?”
I will grieve of course, but that’s nothing.
“What, precisely, will you grieve for?”
For the river. For myself, my lost
joyfulness. For the children who will not
know what a river can be—a friend, a
companion, a hint of heaven.
“Isn’t this somewhat overplayed?”
I said: it can be a friend. A companion. A
hint of heaven.
[Mary Oliver, Red Bird, p. 44.]
I am taking a course this year called Seminary of the Wild Earth, which looks for the sacred—the hint of heaven—in reconnecting with Creation. As a child, Mary Oliver found the sacred in this river. She grieves to see it dying. Perhaps you can recall some river or forest or even a single tree that was your friend and companion and hint of heaven when you were a kid. Maybe such a companion is part of your life now.
I remember trees: the apple tree I used to climb at my grandmother’s house, the dogwood in our backyard when I was 10 that had a view of Elliott Bay and offered a getaway from family dynamics when I needed it. There is a cedar down in my woods now that I am visiting on a regular basis. There are two large stones near its base, as if it is offering seating. But often I just lean into the trunk and feel its strength, its steadfastness, its longer sense of the passage of time. The branches form an umbrella of sorts, so I don’t even get very wet when it’s raining. I feel my pulse slow and steady, my breathing relax, and my senses open to the sounds and sights and smells and feels of the forest.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Traditional teachings recount that the power of cedars is so great and so fluid that it can flow into a worthy person who leans back into the embrace of her trunk.” [Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 279.] I don’t know anything about being worthy, but I am comforted and steadied by being in the presence of this tree.
So how do we welcome the stranger that is Creation? How do we connect? How do we look squarely at the damage being done in our names and say, We’re going to do something about this?
You can probably think of lots of ways. Maybe you work in your garden, or go to a park regularly to sit on a bench by your favorite tree. Maybe you plant redwoods, as some of us did on my farm, to help them migrate north to more favorable growing conditions. Maybe you try to buy more organic or locally grown food, as your budget allows, or you participate in a community-supported agriculture endeavor, or CSA. Maybe you donate to groups that are doing good environmental work or talk to your legislators about protecting endangered species. If you grew up around here, you may remember a time when Lake Washington was too polluted to swim in. The City cleaned it up. The lake is healed. The Duwamish River is another ongoing cleanup project that industries such as Boeing and the Duwamish Tribe are working on together. Gas Works Park took a toxic gas works, remediated the soil, and turned the space into a park on prime real estate for all to enjoy. We can be healers of the land—as individuals, as city, county, region, and beyond. We have the technology, the skills, the resources. Sometimes we just need the will.
Our scripture reading today describes a river that is a source of life to all who experience it. In contrast to the river in Mary Oliver’s poem, this one is healthy and alive. Fruit trees grow in abundance along both banks. Fish thrive in its waters. When it joins the Dead Sea, it brings those waters back to life, too. All this in a part of the world that, both then and now, lives on the edge of desert, that has years of drought and famine, and that takes every drop of water as precious. Imagine this vision of such abundant water. What a dream!
Healing Creation is possible. I have talked before about how taking down the Elwha Dam and another dam on the same river on the Olympic Peninsula allowed salmon to return way up the river, a century’s worth of silt to flow out and create a new beach delta, and the ecosystem to restore a balance it hadn’t known in all those decades. We don’t have to be cast in the role of destroyers of the planet. We can be healers, too—or enablers of healing.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about Franz Dolp. Decades ago, when his marriage and life were falling apart and everything felt broken, Franz bought Shotpouch Creek, 40 acres in the Oregon Coastal Range, and started the arduous work of restoring it to forest. It had been logged and logged again. The tree stumps couldn’t hold the soil on the slopes. Blackberries set up camp in the newly sunny terrain. Alder and maples moved in to hold the soil and create some initial shade. [Information about Franz Dolp all comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, in the chapter called “Old-Growth Children.”]
Franz just started paying attention. He read everything he could find about the native plants for that area, and he made note of what seemed to grow well near creeks, or out in full sun, or in shadier areas. Then he planted those things. He made plenty of mistakes and kept learning along the way. As he paid attention to the land and the plants and animals, they taught him what to do. It turned out that the cedars he planted along the creeks were the favorite snacks of beavers, who mowed them all down. He planted more cedars and fenced them; and he planted willows, which the beavers liked even better than cedar.
Over the years, he and his new partner planted 13,000 trees, mostly cedar, hemlock, and fir. He created ways for the public to visit and participate in healing this land. As he and his helpers healed the land, he experienced healing, too. Kimmerer writes,
Outside the door of [Franz’s] cabin, the circle of young cedars look like women in green shawls, beaded with raindrops catching the light, graceful dancers in feathery fringe that sways with their steps. They spread their branches wide, opening the circle, inviting us to be part of the dance of regeneration. Clumsy at first, from generations of sitting on the sidelines, we stumble until we find the rhythm. We know these steps from deep memory, handed down from Skywoman, reclaiming our responsibility as cocreators. Here in a homemade forest, poets, writers, scientists, foresters, shovels, seeds, elk, and alder join in the circle with Mother Cedar, dancing the old-growth children into being. We’re all invited. Pick up a shovel and join the dance. [Kimmerer, ibid., 292.]
The river flowing out of the temple in Ezekiel’s vision is literally healing the landscape, but it also speaks of God’s power to send healing waters flowing through our souls. As we welcome Creation and seek to heal the land, plants, and animals around us, our own souls become whole as well. We know ourselves to be not destroyers of Creation but partners in its thriving.
Once again, Mary Oliver gives us an example of welcoming Creation in her poem “Making the House Ready for the Lord”:
Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but
still nothing is as shining as it should be
for you. Under the sink, for example, is an
uproar of mice—it is the season of their
many children. What shall I do? And under the eaves
and through the walls the squirrels
have gnawed their ragged entrances—but it is the season
when they need shelter, so what shall I do? And
the raccoon limps into the kitchen and opens the cupboard
while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow;
what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling
in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly
up the path, to the door. And still I believe you will
come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox,
the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea-goose,
know that really I am speaking to you whenever I say,
as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in, Come in.
May this Advent season provide you with opportunities to welcome Creation and in the process to welcome the Divine into your own healing and wholeness. Amen.