First Parish Unitarian UniversalistLike a Tree
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
April 6, 2008
Over my ten years here as your minister, I’ve had the fine pleasure of visiting elder members of the congregation, some of whom have since died. I remember those people with great fondness, grateful for all I learned from and experienced with them. One of them, Joy Sabatini, inspired this sermon about Trees.
But, I also remember Pat and Harry Gould. Harry was hale and hearty then, evidenced by the fact that he was on the Search Committee that called me as your minister, not a job for those who tire easily! But Pat wasn’t that well. I remember that she invited me to visit her within a few months of my arrival here, saying she didn’t want the minister at her memorial service to have to say, “I never knew her, but…”
I remember we sat in her dining room, with the blinds drawn because the light was hard on her eyes. She told me she was an atheist, and didn’t know what “spirituality” was, and wasn’t sure she liked it, so could I please define it!
That very question was raised at the Committee on Ministry meeting this past week. One member read aloud a definition jotted down during a worship service on the back of their check register, “Spirituality is the energy by which one lives and which links one's world view to one's lifestyle" by Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a feminist Christian theologian from Ghana. But for another COM member, that definition was too utilitarian. That person thinks of it as the experience of something ineffable that is within and beyond and connects all humans, all living things, the universe—not a deity, though others might think of it that way. And the third member admitted to not knowing the definition, but finding it (whatever it is) here on Sunday mornings.
Many of us might say we find spirituality in nature, and some of us specifically, in regard to trees, as you will soon hear. One of the first times I visited Joy Sabatini, she showed me her favorite book, an anthology of poetry, and opened it to one of her favorite poems, saying she just loved trees. She remembered walking as a child two miles through the loveliest woods from where she lived in Leeds to get to her Unitarian church in Florence, in western Massachusetts, and how very proud she was to have been a life-long Unitarian. And how much she loved the trees in those woods.
The poem was, of course, “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer.
I think that I shall never seeA parody was written in 1933 by the poet Ogden Nash, who was roughly Joy’s contemporary, which he called (in parody of Whitman, I imagine) Song of the Open Road:
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
I think that I shall never see
A billboard as lovely as a tree.
Perhaps unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.
Early Spring is a good time to sing the praises of trees. The buds on some trees are already bursting into tiny lime green catkins, preparing the way for real leaves to come soon, and willows in the distance have shown off their yellow-green for weeks by now. The birds are out on the branches singing their welcome to the sunshine and the rain and all the little insects coming out of their winter hiding places that are so much tastier than birdseed!
Of course, it’s okay to not be a tree hugger; not everyone is, I know. And, also, of course, it must be said that trees can cause havoc. Not that long ago, the Seaman family had one fall on their house. Fortunately, no family members were hurt, only the roof was damaged, the repair of which came at no little cost, of course.
In response to my request for your stories about trees, I heard of a tree that is about to fall in Elaine Lowry’s yard and another in Larry Cotton’s that almost did fall, on February 5, 2000 to be exact, nearly crushing the new addition being built to his childhood home in Norwood so that his aging parents could live all on one level. The experience was such that he wrote about the falling of this majestic oak tree in his journal, and this week he shared the entry with me. He is out of town this weekend.
As a kid, I spent many hours huddled in the embrace of its trunk and limbs. There were branches just close enough to the ground for me to hoist myself up in a sort of backward somersault and sit up on the lowest one. From there I could easily climb up through the limbs and perch at any desired height.
In the summertime, the foliage was so thick that my presence in the tree could not be detected from the ground. This worked to my advantage a lot when trying to avoid my brother or my folks.
But it was more than a place to hide. It was a place of solitude where I could sit and ponder, as best a boy can, the mysteries of the world.
I remember several years ago, long after I had grown and left home, a day when I discovered that my father had, for some reason known only to him, cut off the lower branches. Although I was taller then, even the now lowest branches on the tree were beyond my reach. Despite having had no desire to ascend the oak in many years, I now felt shut out from my sanctuary. I never again felt the same way about that tree. Until today.”
On that day, the family decided that the tree had to come down because the new addition was really too close to it for comfort. His brother Donald, “a Paul Bunyan wannabe,” leaped at the opportunity to take it down. What ensued is a hilarious scene, right out of the Three Stooges (but there were only two, Larry and Donald), involving a poorly placed chain saw cut. “In theory, the tree will slowly lean forward [away from the house], and then topple under its own weight.” BUT.
“In reality, the tree is weighted slightly more… toward the new addition… The saw binds. The tree leans ever so slightly toward the house. My heartbeat quickens. My breathing stops; as does the movement of the tree.”
More wedges, tools, ropes, knots and several hours later, he writes, “She’s coming down!”, I yell. While rushing to get out of its path, I slip and fall in the snow. I scramble up and lunge out of harm’s way. Don is making his own clumsy maneuvers to get out of the tree’s path.
In a matter of seconds the tree is down. I look up at the new construction and am elated that there is no apparent damage. I run up the hill to get a better look. Closer examination confirms that the house has escaped unscathed. My brother is still at the bottom of the hill whooping, laughing…..and relieved.
When I turn and look down the hill at the fallen oak I cannot believe my eyes. The tree lies fallen and shattered – making a surreal pattern in the snow… looking down from my perch upon its stump, at the sight of the crumbled remains of my former sanctuary, I wept.”
His former sanctuary lay shattered on the snowy ground, and he wept.
Like Larry, I had a tree for a sanctuary in my youth. One of the apple trees in our backyard was a great climbing tree. It was my refuge from chores and a perch from which my best friend Ginny and I could read our books, well-hidden from my mother’s call for help and my little sisters’ clamoring for inclusion. Those two apple trees were also the cause of our most hated chore and our best teachers of one of life’s hardest lessons. We sisters had to pick up the fallen and inedible apples come early autumn and if we procrastinated too long, the apples would be rotten enough to attract those mean little yellow jackets, who seemed to go after our fingers as readily as the fermenting apples!
Trees are often sanctuaries for our spirits. Elaine Lowry took me partway up the treed hillside behind her house to see where “her children made mazes between the trees with clippers and rakes,” and where she “walked several times through the years when she was troubled, for a few moments of solitude and calming thoughts before returning to whatever was going on in the house below.”
For Tom Hanold, too, the forest can be a sanctuary. He wrote in an email, “I first began to feel a deep reverence for the Norwegian pines of northern Minnesota during my junior high school years at summer camp, but it was during high school that I began a stretch of 7-8 years when I was in the North Woods every summer, canoeing in the Boundary Waters. There were still remote, first growth forests that had not been logged, where the pines towered straight into the sky, and the shade kept the undergrowth thin, and there was no place that was more of a sanctuary. The few colors [were] vivid in the crystal-clear northern air – red tree-trunks, green needles, gray rock on the lakeshore, and the deep blue of the sky and water. The wind gave voice to the forest and to the water on the shoreline rocks; and pardon me for saying so, but there is no better sermon or anthem.”
I take no umbrage at that, Tom!
For those of us who live in one place for a long time, the trees surrounding it may become our friends, like the maple tree that grows next to Amika Kemmler Ernst’s three-decker house, as she so lovingly sketched in line and in words (she agreed I could share it with you, see the insert in your order of worship).
Trees that are longtime friends may be mute witnesses to the passing of time, markers of the events of our lives. Sometimes, a certain tree in the yard comes to be associated with a person or event in our mind’s eye.
And, sometimes, we ourselves mark a death by planting a tree, the growth of which might transform that ending into some beginning. Elaine remembers the blossoming crab apple they planted in memory of their child, Glenn, who died as a baby, and she remembers how the tree had to be dug up and moved because it was in the way of progress: the town was putting in a sewer and it was in the way!
In her poem “All Day I Was With Trees,” May Sarton (who considered herself a Unitarian Universalist) conveys the comfort we may feel in the presence of trees:
Across wild country on solitary roads
Within a fugue of parting, I was consoled
By birches' sovereign whiteness in sad woods,
Dark glow of pines, a single elm's distinction--
I was consoled by trees.
For Sarton, and for many of us, the lifecycle of the tree provides a metaphor for how we want to cope with loss or trying times. This is from the second in May Sarton’s cycle of poems called "Autumn Sonnets."
If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange
(For love itself may need a time of sleep),
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure - if I can let you go.
"Treelike, stand unmoved before the change.” We imagine that these sentinels of strength last forever, but of course they don’t. Trees age. They die. As do we.
But while we live, in the harder times we face (as each we will), we each might conjure our self as a tree, with its roots sunk deep and wide, its trunk solid and strong, its branches open to life’s possibilities, and its leaves ever seeking the sunlight.
This, as you may recognize, is a Biblical image. The very first of the Psalms, in its opening lines, describes the righteous as being like trees: Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.
There’s another translation of Psalm One that I like, by the Rev. Mel White—who you may remember as the openly gay Christian who was previously the longtime evangelical TV and film producer and ghostwriter for Billy Graham, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who for 35 years was in the closet and struggling to "overcome" his homosexual orientation through prayer, fasting, various aversive therapies, exorcism, and even electric shock. In his autobiography, Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay And Christian In America, Mel announced, "I'm gay. I'm proud. And God loves me without reservation."
Here is Rev. Mel White’s version of Psalm One,
Freedom comes to those who love the Truth,
Not to those who follow half-truth, distortion and lies.
Truth is God's gift.
Somewhere in your heart, you know what is right and good and true.
Seek it. Find it. Act upon it. Let it set you free.
And you will be like a tree planted in good, rich soil by the river of life.
The hungry will be fed by your fruit.
The weak will sit in your shade and grow strong again.
And no storm will bend your trunk, and no gale will break your branches.
The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah echoes the Psalm One theme, saying “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green, in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit (Jer 17:7-8).
So, here in Psalm One and again in Jeremiah 17, we find the source of the text for the familiar freedom song, We Shall Not be Moved: “like a tree that standeth by the water, we shall not be moved.”
Except that it did not begin as a freedom song. It began as an African American spiritual in the singular first person, “I” rather than “we”: “I Shall Not be Moved.” Some of its verses are “When my cross is heavy, I shall not be moved” “The church of God is marching, I shall not be moved” “King Jesus is our captain …Come and join the army …Fighting sin and Satan …When my burden’s heavy …Don’t let the world deceive you …If my friends forsake me …Well lordy I shall not be, I shall not be moved.”
In the 1920’s African American textile workers in North Carolina adapted the words, transforming the song from an individual to a collective statement of empowerment, and a few decades later it was adopted by the civil rights movement, which was truly a singing movement, and to serve other struggles since.
When I first thought we might sing “We Shall Not Be Moved” for the closing hymn for this service about trees, I had the idea that I might write a new set of words for it, sparked by the sermon, and using the word “I” instead of “we.” I did not know then that originally it was a spiritual using the word “I.” Still, it seemed like a fun idea to come up with a new set of words anyway and I thank my spouse Don Milton for his help in doing so.
In closing, I also want to thank all who shared their tree stories with me, whether I was able to use them all or not. It was a privilege to come into the presence of your more intimate experiences. Of course, it’s perfectly fine to not be a “tree hugger,” but I hope this sermon has served to bring to your mind times and places when you have had (as we say in the first of our Unitarian Universalist sources) a “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder… which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”
If not, I hope it has opened you to the possibility that you might, one day, come into the presence of the holy because of a tree.
Amen. And please rise as you are able to sing this adaptation of “We Shall Not Be Moved.”
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
We shall not, we shall not be moved,
Just like a tree that's planted by the water.
We shall not be moved.
My roots go deep and wi-ide, I shall not be moved.
My roots go deep and wi-ide, I shall not be moved.
I am a tree that’s standing by the water.
I shall not be moved.
I stand tall and stro-ong, I shall not be moved.
I stand tall and stro-ong, I shall not be moved.
I am a tree that’s standing by the water.
I shall not be moved.
My branches open outward, I shall not be moved.
My branches open outward, I shall not be moved.
I am a tree that’s standing by the water.
I shall not be moved.
My le-eaves seek the sunlight, I shall not be moved.
My le-eaves seek the sunlight, I shall not be moved.
I am a tree that’s standing by the water.
I shall not be moved.
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
We shall not, we shall not be moved,
Just like a tree that's planted by the water.
We shall not be moved.
Tune: Black spiritual (“I Shall Not Be Moved”)
Words: Textile Workers (“We Shall Not be Moved”)
Adapted by Diane Teichert and Don Milton