|
Sermon by Elisabeth Hathaway
What is spring? What words and images come to your mind when you think of spring? For me it is a clear yellowy-greenness of new sprouts, a sweet cool freshness in the breezy air, that mulchy-earthy-squishy smell and feel of the ground, the lightness and humor of a bubbling brook, the quick tenderness of a new bursting bud, and my response to these. Spring is a sensual point in time, a season in the year, a phase in our lives known for growth, life, brightness, hope, excitement, exhilaration. It has particular connotations regarding the nature of it, and is known-loved and cherished really-for the nature in it. Think of the awe and pageantry that has surrounded the coming of spring in cultures throughout history. The poets display raptures over Spring: Emily Dickenson called Spring "the Period Express from God," Henry Brooks Adams called spring "young and beautiful as ever, shocking in its display of reckless maternity," Allen Tate called it a season of the soul, infusing "combustible juice" into "the burning breast," Wallace Stevens deemed it a "time abhorrent to the nihilist/or searcher for the fecund minimum," Reginald Heber says Spring "unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil." And Henry David Thoreau averred "As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age." Religious and spiritual traditions throughout history have heralded and revered the fact of spring: pre-Christian cultures recognized the Spirit of vegetation, the spirit of the tree, responding to the cycles of life, its sheer vital force. Anthropologists call these cultures animistic, we can say they recognized and honored anima, the spirit that animates life. In some cultures the rituals of spring enact triumph over death, a celebration that vigorous life has renewed. Spring is felt as the exuberant resurfacing of life that will lead us to a fruitful and plentiful harvest. It is life, and it is life-sustaining. Ancient rituals can be seen to have structured the work year of some agricultural cultures, representing the understandings people used to make sense of their existence, both concretely in terms of the organic functioning of their lives and livelihoods, as well as symbolically in terms of the conception of divine reality and their relation to the larger which contained them. The rituals of spring have to do with trees, corn and grain, the detailed steps of its growth and reaping, and the parallel in human spirit, fertility and sexuality that is supported by it. Each emphasizes life, and the flora and fauna that are personifications of the cycle of life, embodying the patterns of divine imagination, the season of what Gerard Manly Hopkins called a time of "growth in everything." What is this for the human animal? DH Lawrence wrote: "They felt the rush of the sap in the spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the unborn on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth." In 'A Spring Afternoon' Anne Sexton is more coy, but her message is no less pointed: "Surely spring will allow/a girl without a stitch on/to turn softly in her sunlight/and not be afraid of her bed." The cycles of seasons, with spring as symbolic rebirth, illustrate in living color the basic cycles of life and death in our human continuum of existence, our cycles and passages, personally, in our families through generations, in our communities and culture as a species. This is the constant of life. Many have felt a spiritual message in a larger pattern, a continuity of life's energy as it moves in a dialectic of opposites: dry and wet, light and dark, birth and death. This fundamental imagery of waxing and waning is a part of our very consciousness, the metaphor written into our language, and a thread of assumed truth throughout centuries of mythologies, eastern and western, ancient and modern, Celtic, Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese, Greek and Roman, Native American. Whole cosmologies have been written and lived around the dramas of the annual cycles, with the goddesses and gods, and hapless eager mortals caught up in the web. The Ode to Demeter, with the re-emergence of her daughter Persephone from the underworld each spring tells the psychology of the earthly and divine influences which persist. Like a symbolic hologram, these layers of reality have been understood through time to connect us to the natural world, as well as to the more anthropomorphic world of birth and rebirth, joy and mourning, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, toil and harvest. So how do we feel this now, so far removed from our agricultural roots, many of us so far removed from daily contact with soil and plants and our own life cycle? There is a sterile complacency in post-modern sophistication. Many profess to believe in a scientific paradigm, an understanding which assures us-barring catastrophe by or own or climactic (certainly not celestial) making-the sun will come round the edge of the earth each morning and disappear around the other side each evening, the tides will rise and fall, the earth will turn, and indeed the spring will follow the winter, regardless of our efforts to assist or even recognize its achievement. Do we live in relation to our Earth? Wendell Berry in "The Springs" offers this:
What is our bondage to the ground? What is your ground? And what if our current world is one in which the romantic imagery of the poets or the lively antics of the gods and goddesses sound too idealistic, too frivolous, too contained, too safe. What is spring in a time of uncertainty, grief, conflict…in a time of war. Emerson, one of the Unitarians poet laureates, wrote:
Can we still feel hope in spring? Can spring reassure us of the larger cycles which can endure and perhaps repair, all loss? Thoreau, another Unitarian poet laureate, assured us that "In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return." There are darkly pragmatic cycles of life: out of the earth grow the corn and fruits which nourish, into the earth go the decay and mulch and nourishment which creates the eventual fruit and maize. Death is the shadow side of spring. We are innocent-albeit sometimes greedy and ill advised-beneficiaries and participants in the food chain. We are not in control-Nature bats last indeed, as we heard recently. Perhaps a subtle accomplishment of Spring, with the judicious equinox as reassurance, is that she holds the dark and light in joyous balance. Which we emphasize most, when each demands equivalent attention, can be a painful choice. How do we reconcile this fearful inspiring reality of Nature, life energy, and our own small claims to agency, outcome and volition? The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, a psychological seeker of spiritual meanings, would say these symbols are pregnant with vital significance, that Spring is archetypal, that each member of our human family responds unconsciously to the powerfully cultural and more deeply personal meanings of a human reality such as Spring. It is laden, potent, pregnant. He underscored our cultural connection between psychology and spirituality, interpreting many symbols of the spirit in psychological language. Especially for those who value a conceptual or intellectual interpretation, these can be more palatable, seem more True, than a dogmatic and concrete religious language like the Christian rebirth of Easter. Jung emphasized the imago of the mother, earth, life, and its unconscious connection with cycles of psychological growth. Some believe-either sincerely or cynically-that psychology answers religious yearnings in an essentially godless era. What can this look like in our conversation about spring? How can the burgeoning spring have personal and collective meaning? Nietzsche wrote "You must await your thirst and allow it to become complete: otherwise you will never discover your spring, which can never be anyone else's!" And Chekhov had this insight: "The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring." Our ability to be present to beauty, to have a sense of connection with our individual and human internal spring of life, to be, says much of the quality of our lives and the ways in which we live it. Thoreau concluded thus:
So today we have a ritual of Spring. Let us address this Season of our lives. How does Spring meet you, how do you meet her? What are your hopes and attitudes, with what meaning do you note her blooming? What comes to life after our barren months, what is created in our potent days, what are the harvests of our life's efforts. Some years have more plentiful symbolic rain than others, in some we suffer through drought. Some years exhibit a welling up of exuberant life from our personal mountain springs of fresh clear water, some seem to provide only the faintest trickle of tainted seepage. What is your Spring? We have a planting ritual. The historical legacy of the ancient spring rituals include us and offer us guidance today. These seasonal customs, designed around the cycles of spring and harvest, have been noted to have specific features, the most important of which for us gathered as Unitarians being that the rites are magical not propitiatory, which is to say they honor by example, not by praise, sacrifice or prayer. These are rituals of doing, to parallel human life with the life that surrounds her; as we do, so do we intend the earth to respond in kind. All who want may circle the table set in the front, take a seed from those provided in the bowl, and plant it in a pot with soil-as in life we plant with intention and may not know exactly what will bloom. Please do so in a spirit of reverence for spring. There will be a time for all who wish to speak to his or her spring once the planting is complete, with all remaining standing in the circle. For those who want to sit as the ritual is conducted, there are chairs set up for you encircling. A rainstorm will close the ritual, and then we will move back to the chairs in rows. Please join us in our ritual of Spring! Silence, planting. I plant a seed for a Sequoia of Trust  |