"May the fertility of silence give life and power to our words and deeds, O Lord, give us hope." Steven Chase includes this Lenten antiphon in his engaging and informative book: Nature as Spiritual Practice. Incrementally I am making my way through it this fall (and most likely winter, too.) It is both an extended theological meditation on what Scripture in the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches about nature, and, a collection of contemplative practices to lead us deeper into being in nature as an embodied prayer. "Throughout this book," Chase writes, "we will see how Scripture is saturated on virtually every page with the Creator's creation. Yet even people very familiar with Scripture often miss this central role that creation plays. (but) The earth/creation/nature is, in fact, a major character in the drama of God's people." (p. 13) An excerpt from the wisdom book of Job is illustrative:
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
Ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea and they will declare to you.
Job 12: 7-8
Creation rejoices and mourns - it teaches and evokes silence in our being - it opens our eyes to awe and overwhelms our senses with power. "Creation is inebriated with love, intoxicated with longing and joy, in constant praise for its Creator... it is also a place of mourning as Paul says in Romans 8, actively groaning, in bondage to decay. Perhaps," Chase asks carefully, "this is the very reason - that creation itself is so practiced in mourning - that enables nature to become a place of consolation that so willingly and without condition absorbs human grief, loss and pain." I know this to be true but have never considered that it is one of the intrinsic attributes of nature: God has infused it with a solidarity born of suffering. Certainly this is part of what Wendell Berry discerns in his poem, "The Peace of Wild Things." (Listen to the author read it here:https://onbeing.org/
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence
of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Yesterday, try as I might, I was only able to make a small dent in the debris of bracken: my old back just wouldn't/couldn't keep on lifting. So, with a measure of sad resignation, I accepted my limits for the day and called it quits. We hope to find some younger, stronger bodies able to handle the load over the next few weeks. Until then, however, I will chip away at the weeds, vines, rotten wood, and muck that needs to be cleared away. The magnitude of this task is a good mentor in the school of humility: I really do have limits - more and more as I ripen - and tenderness demands that I honor these limits. Chase frames this in a unique way:
Take a closer look around you: what is 'ripe for harvesting?' Another way to put this metaphor plainly is: what do you experience as sacred (ripe) now? How can you be present to creation in both her ecological and sacramental realities? (p. 15)
My friend the sugar maple, queen of the wetlands, continues to speak to me about ripening into the sacred as she matures this fall. In spring, she did the slow work of welcoming the warmth into her roots so that sap might patiently rise up her trunk and into her boughs. Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants that we can learn when a tree is starting to transition from a winter's rest into the slow work of spring by noticing when the snow has melted around the tree's base. This when the tree tells us spring is really coming. By May in these parts, new leaves have formed and the maple's skeleton is clothed in fine green splendor. Throughout the summer she welcomes our carbon dioxide and returns it with oxygen in a symbiotic relationship that we depend on. And then, after the exuberance of summer has passed, this sugar maple starts to slowly shut down: the sap calmly returns to the core, the leaves lose their chlorophyll, and as they die their true color is revealed. If I am not paying careful attention, I am startled by this dramatic truth as her vibrant yellows seem to show up overnight.
This year, since I have been photographing her for a while as one of my meditations, I've noticed the subtle changes: the sugar maple is showing me how to be fully present (although I have a LONG ways to go.) Here is what she has shared over the course of just one week.
With our tomato plants hanging upside down in the basement (in the hope that a modest sacred ripening will occur) and our herbs sheltered inside around the sun room, I am starting to practice part of this season's spiritual wisdom: sacred transition. I still must replant the gladiolas bulbs. And turn over the garden bed with a bit of compost. Now I need to walk around the house and plug up two small holes that just scream WELCOME to the field mice before tomorrow's storms. How right did Robert Frost get it when he crafted this poem?
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
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