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Being and Thinking
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Rev. Clare Butterfield

Reading:
From Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver

On a cool October day in the oak-forested hills of Lorena Province in Iran, a lost child was saved in an inconceivable way. The news of it came to me as a parable that I keep turning over in my mind, a message from some gentler universe than this one. I carry it like a treasure map while I look for the place where I'll understand its meaning.

I picture it happening this way: The story begins with a wife and husband, nomads of the Lori tribe near Kayhan, walking home from their morning's work in their wheat. I imagine them content, moving slowly, the husband teasing his wife as she pulls her shawl across her face, laughing, and then suddenly they're stopped cold by the sight of a slender figure moving toward them: the teenage girls who was left in charge of the babies. In tears…she runs to meet the parents coming home on the road, to tell them in frightened pieces of sentences that he's disappeared, she has already looked everywhere, but he's gone.

And that is how two parents searched in Lorena province. First their own village, turning every box upside down, turning the neighbors out in a party of panic and reassurances, but as they begin to scatter over the rocky outskirts it grows dark, then cold, then hopeless. He is nowhere. … Someone is sent to the next village, and larger parties are organized to comb the stony hills. They venture closer and closer to the caves and oak woods of the mountainside.

Another nightfall, another day, and some begin to give up….

At the mouth of the next cave they enter --the fourth or the hundredth, nobody will know this detail because forever after it will be the first and the last -- they hear a voice. Definitely it's a cry, a child. Cautiously they look into the darkness, and ominously, they smell bear. But the boy is in there, crying, alive. They move into the half-light inside the cave, stand still and wait while the smell gets danker…And then they see the child. The bear is curled around him protecting him from these fierce-smelling intruders in her cave.

I don't know what happened next. I hope they didn't kill the bear but instead simply reached for the child, quietly took him up, praised Allah and this strange mother who had worked His will, and swiftly left the cave. …This is not a mistake or a hoax, this happened. The baby was found with the bear in her den. He was alive, unscarred, and perfectly well after three days -- and well fed, smelling of milk. The bear was nursing the child.

Sermon:
In Islam there is an idea of the Real. It is one of the 99 names for God, and it means to say that there is something realer than the reality we see every day. I think that the intuition that this is so is part of what brings people here on Sunday. The idea that there must be something larger than ourselves and the minutia of our lives that is also, as it were, more real. The Sufi talk about leaving the real to find it. And this other, deeper reality has a fluidity to it, a shifting quality. As if we were all floating on a wave of grace. And because the old year is going out and the new one coming in I was thinking about the flow of the real as the flow of time reflects it. I was thinking about how our faith in the real can influence the world we see.

The working title of this sermon, when I first used it some years back, was a sort of a joke to myself. While I ended up with Being and Thinking, the original working title was "your brain is not an impermeable barrier." What I meant was that the things you imagine on the inside of your brain can come into being in the world on the outside of your brain. That there is some direct molecular relationship between your thoughts, which are, among other things, chemical process in your brain matter, and the rest of what we might loosely call material reality, which exists in molecular continuity with the stuff inside your head.

Nature abhors a vacuum after all. There is no empty space between the inside of your head and the world outside of it, and thick as our skulls can sometimes be, and sometimes gratefully so, they are not impermeable barriers.

That's just sort of a playful and mind-bending thing to amuse ourselves with on this Sunday morning in the early spring. But it is also deadly earnest. Inside, outside, the connection from one to the other is much greater than it appears. Whatever is inside you in some way creates the world. The state of your heart is transmitted onto the stage of the visible. As we look around we can see a range of things, some wonderful and some unspeakable, and we know that they are there because someone thought them and brought them into being. Some of the people doing the transmitting, it seems to me, are the wrong people for the job. So in this time of transition and flow, we might ask ourselves - what kind of world are we making? Where do we intersect with what is visible and what is real, and what comes into being as a consequence? If your heart were the world, what kind of world would it be?

Could you have imagined the world in which the lost child would be taken in and fed by a mother bear? But that world exists. Could you have imagined the world in which political division and thoughtless exhaustion of resources combine to threaten millions of the world's children with imminent starvation? But that world exists too.

I can tell you that I believe that at the base of all reality is a loving presence that permeates all things, enlivens all things, underlies all things. And I believe that we serve that love by what we do and say, by our way of being in the world, and that each of us makes that underlying love visible here in the overlayment to a greater or lesser degree. And we are responsible for that. The work of a life is to reveal that underlying love and grace, to ourselves and to those around us - most especially to our children, but fundamentally to all our brothers and sisters on this earth. Including our sister the bear.

And though I am as disheartened by much of what goes on in this world, by five years of war, and more, as ever a weary person could be, I still believe that the flow of the real could bring something quite different into being. From our minds to God's ear. From the hungry child to the milk-filled bear.

I believe in a world of deep interconnection. I have believed in it since before I could talk, I believed in it growing up in the country of east central Illinois, where I could see it on the landscape. And when I went to seminary and started reading the great religious texts in a serious way for the first time I learned the descriptions of it that many others have written. But I didn't learn of it from those descriptions, I recognized it in them, based on what I had already seen in the way that light moves across a room, in the way that water slips away from the bank of a stream, in the faces of my children and those who are dearest to me, in the crazy abundance of a garden.

I hold to the truth of that underlying love because it's real, and because without it I'd be hiding under the covers. And I've seen everything you've seen in these trying times, and I still believe in it.

Because in spite of all of our futile and furious attempts at militant linearity, the world of my creator retains a more liquid quality. A flow, a fluidity, in which a mother bear in a cave in Afghanistan could take in a child and keep him well. This may not be the world we see when we look out the window at these tidy streets, but it is the world that we live in. The Real flows in here, and there.

Maybe something I read about DNA can help us bend our minds around this idea a bit. There is a wonderful book by an ethnobotanist named Jeremy Narby. It's called the Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. I will admit to having a weakness for Amazonian ethnobotany. Call it a hobby. But I only read about it, unlike the writers of these books who seem to find it an essential part of their research to try the highly questionable substances that the shamans cook up and offer to them. Dr. Narby did, with ayahuasca, and I'm grateful to him. And here is the particularly weird thing he learned from so doing that he talks about in the book. The ayahuasceros have, of course, an incredible, encyclopedic knowledge of the plants of the Amazon. And when Dr. Narby asked them how they came to understand which plants were which and how to use them, the ayahuasceros explained to him that while they are in their hallucinogenic states, the plants themselves communicate, and explain to the shamans what their uses are.

Curare is a good example, because there are 40 types of it in the Amazon, made from 70 plants. Several plants must be combined for any of the variants and boiled together for at least 3 days, avoiding the toxic fumes until the end. "The final product," as Narby says [pg. 40] is a paste that is inactive unless injected under the skin. If swallowed, it has no effect. It is difficult to see how anybody could have stumbled on this recipe by chance experimentation." Difficult indeed. Unless the plants tell them.

Darby goes on to pose a theory based on a vision of a double serpent that he had while under the influence of ayahuasca. This vision is very common in shamanic descriptions as are visions of ladders, and a general belief that while in that altered condition one can receive information from animate spirits which are otherwise not able to communicate with humans, or which humans are not otherwise able to understand. What Darby finally concludes is that the DNA inside our heads is able to communicate with the DNA outside our heads - that ayahuasca opens up our brain receptors for direct DNA to DNA transfer - genetic memory to genetic memory.

Literally true or not, Darby's theory is a diagram of the permeable boundary of the skull of your head, and the flow of the real from one thing to another. On that level I simply choose to believe that he's right because the world is so much more fun if he is. I want to believe that humans and plants could actually speak to one another if humans were to take the right brain-altering chemicals so that we could give precedence in our brains to the receptors that take in plant-speak.

For a life-long gardener none of this is particularly hard to accept anyway. I've always talked to my plants and they've always talked right back to me. I don't mean human out-loud verbal, but I know they tell me things.

The flow of the real permeates us and circles all around us. What one breathes out the next breathes in. The molecules cycle round endlessly, a star becomes a stone becomes a sea becomes blue-green algae becomes a bird an ape a human. What evaporates here rains there. And yet we try to live as if this weren't so. And in the struggle to retain the barrier between the manner of our lives and this most fundamental truth we are wrecked. But the barrier is permeable, as all barriers are on this Earth and the Real flows in even over the wreckage.

I imagine that when your coffee kicks in sufficiently of a Sunday morning for you to notice that it's me up here, you sort of expect the Save the Earth sermon that I usually preach. One of the joys of being a community minister, actually, is that it matters a lot less if you only really have one or two things to say. But I know that this hasn't felt much like that sermon so far. Only it really is. Because the point of earth-saving is the point of everything else in the life of a truly religious person. We must live in right relationship with the rest of what lives. "Some days," as Barbara Kingsolver says in that essay, "you have to work hard to save the bear. Some days the bear will save you."

We sometimes have much too small an idea of what is possible. Kingsolver writes:

I began first grade in a segregated public school, …Time and again, the bear they had sworn would rip us limb from limb was begrudgingly allowed a place at the table, and behold, it used a fork and a spoon. The natural laws we have believed in and taught our children have sometimes been found to be not natural laws at all, but rather fearsome constructs of our own making, undermined by the evidence. …

With these startling honesties glinting up at us from history's broken mirror, it strikes me that this is worth shouting from the rooftops: We could be wrong this time, again. The enemy may not be exactly what we think. It may be a force that resides in many quarters, including inside our skin, in our very words, the questions we frame, the things we love most, the things we can't live without. Our greatest dread may be our salvation. We are in no position yet to declare the moral of our story.

The things we do in our daily lives to survive, or to maintain a certain sense of control feel real enough when we are doing them, and they would probably feel even more real if we failed to do them. But we know that the larger reality cannot depend on the embodied survival of any particular individual. It was all here when we arrived, and our departures will make barely a ripple when we go. We fall in and out of the world the way a year falls in and out of our lives. While at the same time every moment is charged with potential - every act sets off a chain of events that rolls down not only the year but the century - a chain of consequence without end.

However you might express this theologically, it gets at the holy order of the living world. That we are all in all, exist within one another, and can never truly be as independent as we seem. These boundaries that seem to mark the terminus of one body, the empty space between, the beginning of the next, or that mark in time the end of one hour and the start of the next, are simply ordering appearances to keep the tops from flying off our heads. We know the physical universe is much less orderly than it appears, and, simultaneously, much more. We know that we are far more fluid than we seem and that all are inhabited together by the enlivening spirit. Here is there and there is no other. Your skull is not an impermeable barrier. The DNA in the plant may speak to the DNA in my head once I take all the barriers down to hearing it. What is real flows into me all the time - I'm just making too much noise most of the time to hear it.

Jelaluddin Rumi, the great 13th century Sufi poet wrote it this way:

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,

and the falling away. What is,
and what isn't. You who know

Jelaluddin, You the one
in all, say who

I am. Say I
am You.

When the little hairless cub wandered into the she-bear's cave and instead of seeing dinner she saw her own and fed him, kept him warm, delivered him back, in some way to his people, that was what they said to one another: Say I am You.

Say I am you. This is what the plants say to the shamans when they drink the ayahuasca, endure the pain it brings and lie on the jungle floor with their minds completely open so that they can hear the language of greenness, the pulse of the universe.

Say I am You. You who know Jelaluddin, you who know me, Say I am you. There is an appearance of separateness on this shining earth, an appearance that we speak different languages, an appearance that rock is not water is not leaf is not skin is not skull or what pulses below skull. It is just an appearance. Leave what you see and enter the real and you know that all things are one thing. If I have an urgent good news to share with you in this turning season it is this, this flow of what is Real.

Believing in just this much, faithful to the flow that I see beneath what I see, I don't know how to live in the world except step by step, paying attention to the small miracles that surround us, that cushion our every footfall like little tiny angels dancing on the head of a pin. And so I wish us that, a step by step path into the spring. I don't know how to live in the world except gratefully for the grace that continues to hold, and so I wish us that. A sense of overwhelming gratitude at the abundance and the beauty that blesses us and showers down on us by a lavish but unseen hand. I don't know how to live in the world except in relationship, and so I wish us that. A sense of deep interconnection with everything around you that lives and breathes and is bound up with us in the body of God, in the flow of the Real.

Amen.