Reverend Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

February 11, 1996

This winter we have had several chances to become well acquainted with the forces of nature. Just one week ago we were in the midst of an ice storm that kept many, though certainly not all of us, from getting to church. Since then we've experienced several inches of rain over several days and warm weather that melted not only the ice but much of the snow cap and consequently led to the devastating floods and mudslides that we have witnessed in recent days.

Somebody joked last week that the only thing left to experience were plagues of locusts. At times this winter it has indeed felt that way as we have seen ice and wind and snow and floods.

For those most affected, of course, this is nothing to joke about. This winter has been, more than most winters here, a time to realize the power of nature. It is been a time to realize nature's ability to slow down, if not actually to bring our activity to a halt. It has been a humbling time.

In the past few days we've seen images of many people who went down to see the rivers rising. They expressed an awe about what was happening. They spoke of it as something to see, something to remember. They described the flooding and mudslides as awesome, scary, amazing, unbelievable, even fun.

The flooding of recent days was the kind we only experience every few years -- perhaps only every few decades. It is the kind of natural event that stops what we're doing and changes our patterns of living. It is mesmerizing, perhaps because of the power it has. It makes us aware of how little control we have over the forces of nature. This also makes it scary.

Perhaps we don't get as many chances to see nature at work as our foremothers and forefathers did. We are in a society where we have cars and trucks and airplanes get us to where we want to go. Just a few generations ago, people coming to this place would have had to get here by rough rivers, over mountains, all at great risk. We have highways and vehicles that cut through all that, we control it.

We have dams that harness the power of rivers, and bridges to span vast waterways. Because of this and other inventions, we don't get as many opportunities to see nature in action. We can, perhaps take nature for granted, thinking we're in control. This winter we have seen more than we're used to. We've learned that we're not immune from nature. Indeed, we learn again that we can't do much about it. We've learned that it can do much to interfere with our lives. Perhaps this flies in the face of some assumptions we've come to have.

The writer Wendell Berry talks about our relationship to the land and how we have come to think of it as tamed. He talks of how we've transformed wilderness into scenery, how we want to make nature a statistic. The height of a mountain is compared to the height of a skyscraper. Trying to quantify the feeling that comes from the view from a mountain is not possible, and yet we want to do that. Berry says: "We are invited to "see seven states from atop Lookout Mountain," as if our political boundaries had been drawn in red on the third morning of Creation."

Even the flood is something we want to quantify - the reports of the number of feet above flood stage, and comparisons to past floods and detailed maps of where the water would go when it came. Some of these things were helpful to viewers, but there was also something kind of strange about all the figures as the river kept rising - something out of our control - and yet the figures that kept quantifying it, making it into something seemingly more controllable.

In this process, nature comes to be a wild beast to be harnessed. All we need is the right engineering. Today as we watch the flood on TV, as we drive by the land on freeways in vehicles, we really don't have much contact with the place we live, we don't get out hands in the dirt. We are here but really don't know the place we are in. It is more common these days for us not to be from the places we live. We are not as rooted as previous generations. We don't know our climates and our ecosystems as well as previous generations. I visited with a friend in California last month who grew up in the Northwest. She was telling me the flowers to expect in Portland in early February, which trees would be doing what. She has a connection to this place having grown up here that it will take me a long time to develop. It will take time and intentionality.

An example of lost connection to the land comes from Scott Russell Sanders, in a recent book entitled Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, published by Beacon Press. He cites the example of inability to reestablish bighorn sheep in the desert regions of the west. Time and again a goodly sized herd has been released into an area where bighorns once flourished, but then, year by year, their numbers dwindle away. The problem, it turns out, is that the sheep don't know how to move between their summer range and winter range, and so they starve. Humans can do many things for the sheep, but they cannot teach them migration patterns. That is something bighorns can only learn from other bighorns.

And perhaps we too have forgotten our own migration patterns, ways to live with the land and to understand the land and its forces, the patterns of nature and how they operate in our lives. The knowing that comes from being in a place and paying attention to it. Knowing the birds that share the space. The plants and when they bloom and when they fade.

I think we have a native instinct for this as children, a connection to the place we are in. Perhaps we have them early and then learn to filter them out as we encounter more distractions.

When I look back to some of my earliest memories, I think of this basic instinctual urge to be connected to the world around me. Perhaps my earliest memory is laying in tall green grass as a child and looking up at puffy white clouds against a rich blue sky and feeling lost in the world. I remember seeing the clouds float by and wondering where they were going, and also knowing that somehow, I was connected to them. I knew I was part of something larger that included them. I remember the sense of floating with the clouds and the tickle of the green grass on my face, and an insect or two climbing around. I remember the warm sun on my face and the sense that all was well with the world.

Annie Dillard, in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek talks about children in nature: "When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our senses. Only children can hear the song of the male house mouse. Only children keep their eyes open. The only thing they have got is sense; they have highly developed "input systems," admitting all data indiscriminately. Matt Spireng has collected thousands of arrowheads and spearheads; he says that if you really want to find arrowheads, you must walk with a child - a child will pick up everything.

I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago during the snowstorm. I watched children playing in the snow and was struck with the sense of wonderment they seemed to have as they played in it. They seemed spellbound watching and picking up the heavy snow. Growing up in a place like Wisconsin, which got a lot more snow, I remember that sense seemed to be reserved for the first snow and maybe is it was a really big snow. Over the years, though, it was it was greeted with the same nonchalance as a light rain is here. I do remember those first snows, the newness of it. The snow was accompanied by a wonder sense of magic.

This past week's floods brought back memories from my childhood of the river I lived by. I grew up next to a small stream that started with a spring a few yards away. I remember having an early image of how it was connected to the stream flowed into the river and how the river eventually made its way to the Mississippi which eventually made its way to the ocean. A sense of something larger. Something that was the world. I remember my family talking about the year the river flooded. Even though I don't remember I serious flood growing up, I remember knowing the potential because of the stories in the family. I remember a certain fear that came from those stories and consequently a respect I had for the river.

Those places are in my heart. And this past week, as the rivers here rose, I was aware of how I traveled back to those places.

We all hold places in our hearts. We all have those places that we have been to or currently go to that are important to us. Those places we have know from childhood, those places where we go in our current lives.

I would like to invite you to go to one of those places that is important to you. You may want to close your eyes to think of it. It may be a place you have gone in the past or one you go to everyday in your present life. Go to that place. What does it look like? What does it smell like. What time of day is it? Are there trees? Is there water? Is it a dry place? What season is it? Are you there alone? Are you with someone?

As you think about the place, think about the life that is there and the potential life. As you think about this place, what are the feelings that come to you? Is it a feeling of peace? Does it make you happy or sad? Is there tension? Does it make you think of another person, perhaps a person you have been in this place with?

If it is a place you have been to in the past, imagine what it may look like now, or what it will look like in the future. Will it be overgrown? Will it be changed by development? Will it stay much the same. Think about how your actions affect the place. How do you fit into the place?

Take a moment and think about your place.

We can't go back to places and experience them in exactly the same way we have in the past. But that is not only because the place changes but because we change. We are not the same. We don't know the place in the same way we did, but we know it in a different way. Just as we change, so do places, and the realization that we grow and change as they do makes us understand the life cycle that we are all a part of.

It puts things like floods and rain and ice into a context that is more understandable or at least into a pattern that is larger. They go from being images on television to being images from the world, images of life. They become places where we are and places we are in relationship with.

Being present in the places we inhabit is a way to be in our present life. To find those places in the places we live and to get to know them. To know where we are planted. To know that we are not somewhere else but here. We have been in places in the past and they define us, and the places we are at present will shape us as well.

Thoreau says, "The man who is often thinking that it is better to be somewhere else than where he is excommunicates himself." Scott Russell Sanders, commenting on Thoreau says, "It has taken me half a lifetime of searching to realize that the likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. I mean the land itself, with its creeks and rivers, its weather, seasons, stone outcroppings, and all the plants and animals that share it. I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one; I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place."

Because we are migratory not only by moving from location to location but also because we are busy moving from appointment to appointment, our lives can become disconnected from the world around us, we can lose touch with the world and with our lives in relation to that world. In the migratory process, we can get lost. Place becomes less meaningful for us and we forget how to get from our summer range to our winter range. Place has less meaning than us. And in the process we lose something. We miss out on much of what the world has to offer. It is important to remember that our lives take place in a context, that they happen in the midst of a creation.

In his book Staying Put, Scott Russell Sanders tells stories of people getting to know the lay of their land in an effort to preserve it. He says. "In telling the holy, we do not acquire power, as one might gather coins in one's purse, but we acknowledge it, join with it, dwell in the power."

As we are able to tell the story of our place, the animals and plants that are a part of it, its cycles, its history we will then take the steps to sustaining it in the future. We also take a step toward sustaining ourselves in this creation. Annie Dillard says: "When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come our and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you."

As we experience this power in nature, we come into our own capacity to have power. It comes from the same source that created the world around us, from the same source that gave the rivers their power. It comes from the ground that we are all a part of. Just as nature has the power to destroy, so do we. Just as nature has the power to grow, so do we. We must claim some of this power and we must use it wisely.

Wendell Berry says: "We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation if full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover a sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence."

The world is full of broken relationships. We have not been good stewards of our world and we are now able to see the results of that lack of stewardship. Recognizing it and our responsibility to our world perhaps is the starting point to solutions. Being with the things that we value, knowing where they come from, what they are, knowing what they are made of and how we are connected to them.

It is easy to forget. It is easy to be disconnected. And as we disconnect from the power and wonder of nature we forget our own power and the wonder we have at our fingertips. As we are able to connect with the world around us, we are able to start to recognize our interdependence and to start to solve some problems.

We must recognize that we need to be in right relationship. Recognizing this relationship, we are able to look at the damage we have done to our world and ways to heal that division. The fear is in the world, so is the solace, the beauty. It is all of a context. Just as the earth can scare us and put us in awe, it can also bring us joy, put it all into perspective, realize our place in the family of things.

In the next few days, go to the place you visualized earlier or to another place that is important to you. Look at it and see what is new there, what is growing. Recognize your place in the family of things.

Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.