Interfaith Climate Vigil – Meditation from the Rev. Claire Keene
November 18, 2018 at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church, Knoxville
Last summer I went with my brother to Scotland, where our Scots-Irish ancestors hailed from before moving to Ulster and then to the colonies. We walked on hillsides and valleys, watched the wind blow rain, fog, and clouds across our group and the landscape we had come to explore.
We visited sites that had meant much to many peoples, across millennia—ley lines of earth energy, standing stones aligned for equinoxes and solstices. We trudged to Celtic high crosses and prehistoric cairns, entered ancient caves, ferried to the wind-hewn, stony shores of Iona where history lingers in the stone cut ages ago to create monastery and church. We trekked through sheep pastures that pushed almost up to the tree line and walked beside creeks clear enough for whiskey-making. We climbed tall hills where castles had been amassed in large stone stacks to house the temporary rulers of all they surveyed.
Our family’s ancestors were poor farmers, earthy folks. They didn’t know about nuclear physics or binary code or hybrid cars. They had never heard a radio broadcast, much less watched television or streamed movies when they sailed to the New World in the 18th century. But they could navigate via the stars, the tides, and the winds. They could calculate the longest and shortest days of the year. They knew when to plant and when to harvest. They knew how important rain and sunshine were for raising oats. They knew how to harvest peat for heating their homes, how to raise sheep, spin wool, and weave it into clothes. It was good for us 21st century internet addicts to be reminded of just how glorious and how essential earth, air, wind, water, and fire have been for all human life.
All that tromping around in the wilds of Scotland shifted our awareness toward the ancient glory of the world and our short-lived mortality. When we got home, my brother—our family genealogist—decided to reserve a burial plot for himself. He began to compose the epitaph he wanted be carved on his headstone as his word to future generations:
Wonder is the beginning of awe,
And awe is the beginning of wisdom.
I’m pretty sure he is right about that. Maybe wonder and awe are the spiritual response that re-tunes our wills to joyful care of our world. Think about Moses wondering and awe-struck before the burning bush. How could anything less have shocked him deeply enough to send him back to the dangers of Egypt, from which he had fled for his life? How could he have heard God’s commission to rescue a people from slavery if he had not first been turned aside by wonder and made humble and obedient by awe? Think about Elijah hiding out in a cave at Mount Horeb: would he ever have heard God’s still small voice if he had not first noticed the rock-splitting wind, shuddered with the earthquake, or been transfixed by fire?
Wonder was the beginning of his awe,
And his awe was the beginning of his wisdom.
Awe and wonder—we sometimes meet them through apt words or startling ideas, I guess, by the theorems of physics and the incalculable immensities of astronomy. But we earth-creatures are most often struck with awe and wonder by the natural beauties and terrors of our world, by the surprises and mysteries we encounter with our senses.
Maybe we have grown so accustomed to our technology, our ideas, our extrapolations, our plans and schemes, that we forget how concretely dependent and vulnerable we earth-creatures are to the realities of the universe. We wander off into economic, theological, or political theory and forget just how demanding and joyful physicality is. We forget that our souls include our bodies, always have.
Just think about the wonder of how we arrive here—the sweat and sinew power it takes to push a new generation of human life out of our bodies is awesome. Isn’t it amazing that we are the means for delivering utterly unique strangers to this planet, and that they begin immediately to inhale and exhale all the atmospheric gases created and used by eons of life? And when a dear one stops breathing and dies, then grief bends us over double in dry heaves and our tears fall like rain in December. We are stunned at how that one physical event leaves us lost, steals the North Star from our map.
Simpler wonders shape us, too. In the summer darkness we can be struck dumb just by the chorus of katydids announcing their existence so emphatically. And who wouldn’t turn aside with wonder when the northern lights fingering the night skies over our Great Lakes? Talk about learning reverence. Talk about being called out by grandeur.
Who hasn’t been surprised by the first night swim, when the water feels warmer than we thought, more like a caress than a dare? And have you ever seen a thunderstorm move like high tide across an Ohio wheat field, making the grain ripple like a flood of gold? It makes you want to flee to higher ground.
Do you remember your first step into the ocean, when you were so young that the first wave knocked you down? Have you turned aside to see a cardinal defending territory against his own reflection, pecking again, again, again at a sunny pane of glass and thought, “That’s me, that’s us”?
Do you remember your first sip of wine, your first bite of bread, your first kiss, your last kiss? Wasn’t that a feast made in heaven? Or maybe a fierce lightning, thunder, and rain taught you humility and focus one summer afternoon as you floated on an inner tube down a cold mountain stream?
Wonder is the beginning of awe,
And awe is the beginning of wisdom.
May that not be just an epitaph, nor our children’s epitaph. May it be our hope.
May we remember all the lessons that the earth still teaches us, night by night and morning by morning, those essential human lessons about wildness, humility, finitude, and wonder. May we shake off our shoes regularly because this planet is holy ground. Here is the place where we meet the God who created us, blessed us, and commissioned us to care for our place, in our time. May we notice enough to wonder. May we begin to be wise.