All Saints by the Lake
October 8, 2023
It’s been a hot (and then rainy) week, and a bizarre summer, locally and globally. It’s getting harder and harder for anyone to argue that climate change isn’t here right now.
It occurred to me recently that I don’t actually talk about environmental issues much from the pulpit. Part of that, I think, is because I don’t think many of you really need convincing on that front. This parish has been eco-conscious and forward-looking since long before I got here, and if we have disagreements, it’s about the relative merits of reusable versus compostable dishes at potlucks. Nobody is arguing for styrofoam.
And sometimes I think, “it’s all so depressing, I don’t want to get up there and recite yet another list of terrifying statistics that everyone already knows.”
And yet, as with so many other potentially depressing topics, if we don’t talk about it in church, where should we talk about it? Church is, or at least should be, where we can come with all our messiest, most confusing, most intractable problems, and receive sympathy and support in our efforts to make meaning out of the overwhelming.
So here we are, on Harvest Thanksgiving at a time when the very foundations of our biological life are shifting. We can no longer trust the air, water, and soil to behave the way we’re used to. And it is, simultaneously, our fault (as a species) and entirely beyond our control (as individuals). Former generations sang “Now thank we all our God” in face of plague and war, but never in the face of a crisis like this. How do we give thanks in the age of climate disaster?
It brings to mind a poem by W. S. Merwin:
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
(“Thanks,” 2005)
Christians have always given thanks in the face of disaster; our faith was born at a time when the earliest converts believed that Jesus’ resurrection signaled the imminent end of the world. And though we have had two thousand years to settle down and figure out how to inhabit a world that was not ending, we have a faith that names and claims hope in the face of despair, that leans into irresolvable paradoxes, instead of expecting life to make sense.
When I had a near-suicidal breakdown in my early twenties over climate change and the loss of the happy, secure future that I had imagined for myself and the world, the way I managed to reconstruct my faith and my hope in God was through what I call the “theology of compost”. In the twenty years since then, I’ve seen the term popping up in more and more places; it clearly speaks to the spiritual hungers of our times.
The theology of compost asserts that things only work if what is spoiled, rotten, and dead is allowed to break down and turn into something new and rich and lifegiving. This requires air, moisture, movement, and time. A compost pile will only turn into good soil if it has oxygen, a good balance of wet and dry elements, and if it’s mixed and turned over properly.
The more you think about it, the more you realize this is true on every level: the individual psyche; our closest relationships; our institutions (the church is desperately overdue for a good weeding and turning of the compost pile); and the earth itself. We got into this mess by wanting everything fast and safe and cheap and abundant and tidy, and not acknowledging until it was too late that the jet engines and the electric lights and the antibacterial chemicals and the endless plastics came with a terrible cost. And the only way out is with not just literal compost – treating the soil and its nutrients with the respect they deserve – but metaphorical compost, throwing the old assumptions and expectations, the outworn habits and ideas that no longer serve us, into the pile, and aerating and turning them until they become something new.
Because we are, of course, at the most basic level, a faith of resurrection. Nothing that we love, nothing that we have lost or given away, nothing for which we are moved to give thanks, nothing that God has made and continues to cherish, will ever be truly lost. We may – we almost certainly will – suffer terrible griefs as the world convulses in the coming decades. But our care and our cherishing, the way that our hearts lift at the sight of the beauty of an autumn hillside and break at the idea that autumn will never be the same, are not in vain. The only true tragedy would be to stop caring.
Let us give thanks for what God has given us, even as we mourn the ways it is changing. Let us tend our compost piles of broken hopes, cruel losses, and fears for the future. And out of the rich new soil that results, let us raise a crop of action, justice, and love.
We are always mourning and always rejoicing, always conscious of the loss that surrounds us and always giving thanks for abundance. As we chanted at yesterday’s funeral, “weeping over the grave, we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”
I conclude with another poem, this one from Mary Oliver:
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
(“Blackwater Woods,” 1983)
And then, when we have let it go, it will be raised up and made new.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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