Sermon: Mother Earth

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Mother Earth

By Charles Rush

April 22, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 6.5Mb) ]

tching television recently, I got to thinking about my childhood. In 6th grade, I believe, we had two teachers in my Middle School who were dismissed for attending the War Moratorium in Washington setting a bad example for our student population. Then in 7th grade, living in Chicago, I witnessed the Democratic National Convention, when the police clashed with the hippies violently. Also, during that time generally, the papers carried the trial of the Chicago 7 -- Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and who could forget Bobby Seale tied to that chair and gagged. The next year, I sat in a basement, listening to the older brothers of a classmate tell us about being at Woodstock and the whole mood of leaving the city behind and getting back to the land.

Joni Mitchell's song from that era "I came upon a child of God/He was walking down the road/And I asked where was he going in and this he told me/Said I'm going down to Yasgur's farm/Gonna join in a rock and roll band/Gonna get back to the land and set my soul free".

The next year, my brother and I had a chance to see this first hand, when our family moved to the East Coast for the first time. It is an image I'll never forget. Checking out our new environs, the two of us ended up at the reservoirs in Wilton, Connecticut. Skipping past the 'Do Not Enter' signs, we followed the path, we were told about, and there beyond the bend, we looked out to an island in the middle of the reservoir, populated by about 100 high school kids, in various states of dress, frolicking in the water, doing the hippie thing. My brother was a gape. He finally said, "My people". We thought we were in heaven, all these people cavorting with nature, and we were desperately hoping they would also cavort with us.

I hadn't thought about that image in a couple decades, until I was watching television recently. It was an advertisement for a high end SUV. The Ad features a young mother buckling in her toddlers, getting them out of the elements. The doors all pop open remotely to make security happen as fast as possible. And the SUV will plow through any kind of inclement weather, flooding rain, hip deep snow. Indeed, the children are featured sleeping through this torrent outside. The message is that our SUV provides us a kind of inviolable protection from the elements and it juxtaposes this man-made safety with the wiles of nature, and subtly suggests that nature itself is part of a wider fearful reality.

I'm sitting there wondering just how it is that the hippie generation that wanted to "get back to the land" evolved into the very guys at the Advertising agency that said, "Let's sell the next generation on the idea that we have a car that inoculates them from nature." What happened?

I had one of those personal "Oh boy" moments a couple months ago, teaching my granddaughter how to walk. She was cruising around pretty good in the living room, so I decided to take this into the fresh air out of doors. She strode right up the front sidewalk, came to the grass, put one toe down on it, grimaced and turned back for the house. Admittedly at 13 months, almost all children prefer those flat, smooth surfaces. But just for a moment, I worried that this might just be the first of many such episodes and that one day when I'm old and infirm, she'll be pushing me around the Mall in a wheelchair, encouraging me to enjoy the faux waterfall that runs next to the escalator that is kind of like nature, only not so messy. Chinese water torture… This is Short Hills water torture.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this concern. Richard Louv has written a book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder".[i] He describes a broad generational phenomenon of unintended consequences.

It is not that the rising generation lacks understanding or empathy for nature. Indeed, they are exposed to more information on nature than any generation in history with the Animal Channel and a fairly thorough curriculum of environmental education.

What they lack is actual contact. Neil Figler is a Cubmaster in Golden's Bridge, New York. Naturally, he is committed to getting his boys outdoors to teach the important skills of starting fires, whittling, and the many virtues of hiking and camping. But he notes that in the past years, the number of actual camping trips have become fewer and fewer and the ones that their troop takes are more and more controlled. Adult supervision has increased as the opportunities for kids to simply encounter the wild by themselves has decreased. Moreover, he says, "My kids want to finish their homework so they can play video games."[ii] And, he notes, this trend is the norm rather than the exception.

Nintendo, Game cube, play station III, Game boy- all of them are defining the recreational activity of our boys way, way more than we would like to admit. It starts young, as it should, but I'm now beginning to realize that it just might grow old with this generation as well.

I was amused to read an article in Esquire magazine this month on the top ten reason men are not getting as much sexual action from their partners as they would like. # 8 on the list is 'Because you played X-box all evening long and you're 30 years old'. You might want to send that on to your adult sons.

Dr. Donald Shifirin, a pediatrician in Washington state, says that we are raising a generation of 'mobile couch potatoes'. He refers to the phenomenon of driving our children from one scheduled sports program to music lessons, and then home to the computer or video games. So we have this structure, structure, structure and then veg, veg, veg… The difference in the generations is actually measurable. He points out that he treats far fewer broken bones from falling out of trees than before. [How many adults here have broken an arm or a wrist or a leg?] And, he treats a whole new set of carpel tunnel issues from using hand held games, phones, and computers that have never existed.

A large part of this is the unintended consequence of keeping our children programmed in so many scheduled activities such that there is not really any time for unstructured play. And part of it is the unintended consequence of a rising standard of living that allows us to provide so many more enrichment opportunities than previously.

The upshot is that the generation has never really done anything unstructured in the woods to speak of. Almost everyone my age remembers their own childhood as playing pick up baseball and basketball games as the norm in the afternoons. I know that when I went to see my Grandparents in the summers in Mississippi, we spent most of the time at the fishing camp. That meant that most every morning, we were up an hour before dawn, putting a boat in the water somewhere, and watching the sun rise over the rivers and swamps, freezing to death and holding on to my grandmother for dear life.

I had an aversion to snakes, water snakes in particular, as they used to fall out of the trees hidden in the Spanish moss in the swamps of Mississippi. One of my uncles was fond of grabbing them so that we could pet them and get over this fear- it was the way men showed the love back in the old days.

I've gone back since and thought… 'Man what a nasty place and we thought it was great'. But what I took away from that other than a good ability to pull fishing line out of trees, is the sense of mystery. Fish mostly bite at dawn and dusk. We spent most of our time watching the sun come up or set together. And swamps are creepy, not your environment. And they require some special knowledge, lest you get et by something. But it was mostly the mystery of the world waking up, your senses just accentuated.

And I still crave that spiritually. The last few years, I've had the opportunity to get to a very different remote area than the swamps, usually out in Montana. Last year, I saw my first Bald Eagle in the wild. That was a moment. And several times, I've had an encounter with a Coyote. Ranchers shoot them in Montana but for me it is a simple boundary experience. Usually, it is the end of the day and they are several hundred yards away. I'll catch a glimpse of them, watch them disappear, and suddenly they will turn, look back at me for just a moment. It feels like the edge of civilization and usually I'm 20 or 30 miles from the nearest farm and human. The world is deafeningly quiet and has been most of the day. For me, that is the natural sanctuary, and there is something spiritually centering and sobering about watching the sun disappear over the Big Horn mountains, walking back to the truck through the grasses with the dogs, looking out over miles of open expanse, occasional barbed wire fences the only discernable human artifice, the skies changing from blue and orange to purple.

I get this slightly giddy feeling like you get at the top of the roller coaster, looking out on the emerging night sky. The cosmos is so vast. The hills around me are so old that my life span in their presence is like a gnat to me. I say to myself that line from Psalm 8, 'Who am I, O God, that you would take notice of me?' There is an intrinsic spirituality that is immediate and accessible.

I think that is very important spiritually and the present generation is losing this primary contact. My brother-in-law has a camp in the Mountains of North Carolina. He tells me that in the past decade his campers have begun to voice increasing discomfort with bugs. Bugs really scare kids these days at camp. Why? They live in very controlled suburban environments where bugs are not part of their lived life either around their home or around their sports fields. And this is too bad because bugs, as it turns out, are a regular feature of almost all boundary areas between civilization and the wild.

Mr. Louv says that the other reason our kids aren't experiencing nature is fear. Somehow or another, my generation, which was raised with very few rules, very little structure, and no safety belts, feels like they aren't being parents unless they guard against every conceivable threat and contingency that could arise.

We are worried that our children could get hurt. We are worried that they could be abducted. I suspect that an objective assessment of our country would suggest that actual crime statistics are down or even from this generation to the last but it doesn't appear that we are responding to the factual situation so much as what we feel we need to do in order to be relevant in our children's lives. Hal Espen, the editor at Outside Magazine in Santa Fe says that we are living through 'a lot of social zoning to go along with urban zoning'. These are things that we just won't do because of the social stigma of letting children play in tree houses where they might fall or exploring in the suburban woods where they might be exposed to deer ticks. And since we can't supervise activity in the woods very easily, it is just being dropped as part of the regular world.

These trends are happening at precisely the time that we need the rising generation to be concerned about environmental conservation as never before. The question that we have to ask ourselves is whether or not we are raising our children in such a way that they will existentially want to be involved with nature? Are they able to see themselves as part of a larger system in the natural order and understand how they must cooperate in order for us all to thrive?

A generation ago, environmentalism was largely the purview of progressives and the left. No longer. Nowadays, when I talk to our Confirmands and our Youth about leadership in the future, environmental challenges are simply fundamental for their generation whether they want them to be or not. Nowadays, environmentalism is just common sense for every one.

Thomas Friedman's articles last week in the New York Times magazine and this week are largely on target. He says that Green is the new 'red, white, and blue'. As you know, he believes that we need to extricate our energy dependence from the very people that want to destroy us. We are coming to a better understanding of how we have created toxic environments for ourselves and how we need to live in the future to develop a healthy environment for our grandchildren. These are simply given to the future generation to deal with and host of other issues that I won't mention here because they are too familiar to all of us.

But, we need to teach our children more than this spiritually. What we hope for is that they develop a spiritual love affair with nature. We hope that they craft their world and tend it like a Japanese garden that is both beautiful and balanced. We hope that they participate in nature in such a way that they internalize the rhythms of nature and work in harmony with their world. We hope that they experience the wilderness and work collectively to restrict development so that wilderness areas are simply part of our balanced world.

This is our only future. But, we won't get there unless we have a conversion of the soul and realize the inherent beauty and sensibility of living a balanced life. Let's start building this in to our worship, our communal life together, and with our children and their children. I don't want to run into any of you being pushed in a wheel chair to enjoy the waterfall at the Mall… Amen.

[i] This comes from an article that sat on my desk for a very long time. Bradford McKee wrote it for the New York Times on April 28, 2005. You can find it on-line at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/garden/28kids.html?ex=1272340800&en=f0988c8058f2763d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss.

[ii] Ibid. What follows is simply a summarization of Mr. McKee's article.