The Blessings of Stubborn Rock
Our interactions with nature inspire various strategies for meeting the obstacles that come into our individual and collective lives. The title for this sermon comes from “Hymn to Matter” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This sermon was given to the Unitarian Universalists of Fallston on May 15, 2011.
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Miles and miles of salt flats baked in the sun on either side of the car. A few flashes of green blipped by on the side of the road as we drove through Utah on our way to see extended family.
“This is actually really green for the desert,” Dad said. “It has been a wet year. Not as wet as that one year, though.” He didn’t wait for us to ask for the story. “The water level on the Great Salt Lake was rising so high, people were getting worried. The state passed a law that the lake couldn’t rise above a certain level. It didn’t matter, of course, the water doesn’t follow laws. But at least they could say they were doing something.”
I don’t know if that story really happened or not. It does seem like something we humans would do when forces beyond our control loom large in our concerns. We are part of an interdependent web. Our relationship with the natural world challenges us and provides metaphors for dealing with challenge.
Rising water levels and severe weather patterns are overwhelming. We can’t shout back the tide. There are so many factors, some of them within our influence, some of them beyond our understanding. It’s understandable to want to throw up our hands and declare the problem is solved so that we can ignore it. On our better days, we do our best to follow all of the lines of cause and effect in the interdependent web. We look to our relationships with the earth and each other to figure out how to meet the challenges of our times, how to change our strategies or ourselves or both.
Similarly in our individual lives and in the societies we form, some of the obstacles that come up seem as implacable as the ocean. We have problems to solve together. Just like the larger ecosystem of which we are a part, human relationships are interdependent, a great tapestry of love, pain, memory, and hope.
Knowing that our challenges and our solutions arise from a web of contributing factors, metaphors from the natural world provide some models for facing obstacles. I’ve been thinking of these approaches as the way of stone, the way of water, and the way of the thicket.
The Way of Stone
The first approach, the way of stone, meets a challenge by standing ground. In the way of stones being faced with an obstacle may help us finally find direction as we push back. French philosopher and geologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) wrote in “Hymn to Matter” (From Hymn of the Universe, published posthumously in 1961, English translation 1965) about the starkness of this approach:
Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat.
‘Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us.
‘Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.
‘Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.
I think what Teilhard de Chardin is saying here is that the blessing of stubborn rock is that working with it grounds us in the particular. We can’t perceive the vastness of the interdependent web as a big picture from the get-go. The way of stone offers a place to start, something to brace against while we find a new perspective.
I got to see the world from a new direction the one and only time I went rappelling with some friends. There I was, buckled into a climbing harness, looking up at the sky as I walked backward down the sheer face of a rock. This was a beginner’s climb, so the whole thing took maybe five minutes. As I descended down the rock face, my friends at the top disappeared from view, leaving only a cloudless sky in my field of vision. I could hear other friends and instructors behind/below me. I tensed my abdominal muscles, trying to stand perpendicular to the rock. Sideways was the new down, and I didn’t want to lose hold of it.
When I got to the bottom and down became down again, I breathed a big lungful of air. One of my friends who was an experienced rappeller told me discretely that I should have relaxed and remembered that there were people helping me from above and below. None of us climbed alone.
Stones often symbolize obstacles: little ones in our shoes, big ones blocking the road. That time, the rock gave me a place to stand. There was a clear action plan, going from top to bottom. Stone defined my path rather than stopping it.
For many of us, the rocks in our spiritual journey provide this kind of definition. Pushing against what we don’t want or don’t believe helps to turn us sideways. We find ourselves looking in unexpected directions, setting new goals. Eventually, we can move from defining our journey based on what we don’t believe anymore to setting our compass to the unfolding possibilities ahead.
When the stubborn rock is a social problem, the way of stones means defining goals for change. Can we break this rock up? Can we dig it out? What kind of leverage do we have?
I’ve been reading about solving big social problems in the book Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, by Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, and was captivated by the story of Share Our Strength. When attacking a stubborn issue like hunger, the problem looms like a boulder, seemingly impervious. People might be tempted to ignore it, to go around it or walk away. Adaptation is necessary in order to cope with something that large. Share Our Strength didn’t stop pushing back against that boulder, they found new ways to include other people in the work, and they found new ways to break the problem down.
“We started to talk about the End Childhood Hunger in America strategy, and everyone got very excited,” says [co-founder Billy] Shore. Instead of rejecting the idea of advocacy, as some staff members had feared, the group’s corporate partners actually championed the move into the political arena. Shore recalls their response: “You’re telling us there’s a goal line and you know where it is, and you can get across it? We want to be part of it.”
Share Our Strength dramatically shifted its priorities as a result, starting with an effort to define how a single city like Washington, D.C., could eradicate childhood hunger. “We did it to make sure that we could actually end hunger (as opposed to just alleviate it), and we wanted to hold ourselves accountable for something more achievable than ending all hunger, worldwide,” says managing director [Pat] Nicklin.
Understanding this story in terms of our metaphor, hunger is a very big rock. Setting an ambitious but manageable goal was breaking that rock up into smaller pieces. Inviting corporate partners brought more people into the climbing team, increasing their capacity to over and through the obstacle instead of ignoring it.
The way of stone meets stubborn obstacles with equally stubborn resolve. Therein lies the blessing. By digging in, we may find strength we didn’t know we had. Perhaps we will be moved to connect with others in a new way. The matter right in front of us calls us to work. It is concrete. From that foothold, we may find ourselves climbing to a different perspective, revealing a new face of the divine.
The Way of Water
Pushing back in the way of stone can help us to define our goals and to find reserves of strength. Sometimes, though, this is a difficult strategy to maintain for the long term. The way of water offers another framework for sustaining energy as we meet challenges. The way of water is quietly confident, nurturing, and accepting while still being persistent.
I’ve been privileged to know people who exemplified this way of being. Many of them were pioneering Ministers of Religious Education, women and men whose love for people of all ages and whose insight into the wellsprings of Unitarian Universalism led them to work that would take generations to come to fruition. As many of you know first hand, being an educator is difficult. It takes patience, adaptability, and compassion. I listen carefully when I hear an experienced UU educator talk about a spirituality that can help a person sustain such a calling.
I heard one such role model speak once about her daily spiritual practice. If I remember correctly, she had a pitcher of water among the green plants in her home. Every morning, as she thought about the people in her life and the roads she planned to travel that day, she poured the water into a vase. Every evening, reviewing the blessings of the day, she poured the water back to rest in the pitcher.
Because she was a UU elder, her practice evoked the Water Communion ingathering that brings congregations like ours together every September. Water is a symbol that unites us from our many points of origin into an accepting community. Like water, we as a congregation move and change as we flow through the current times. Even the stubborn rocks soften in time under the steady influence of water. I am reminded of a verse from the Tao te Ching (excerpted from Verse 8, translated by John C. H. Wu, Shambala 1990 edition):
The highest form of goodness is like water.
Water knows how to benefit all things without striving with them.
It stays in places loathed by all men.
Therefore, it comes near the Tao.
In choosing your dwelling, know how to keep to the ground.
In cultivating your mind, know how to dive in the hidden deeps.
In dealing with others, know how to be gentle and kind.
When I imagine “being water” in the way this reading advises, I think about going where I’m needed without making a big deal about it. The Tao te Ching refers to the practice of “non-ado.” I imagine taking up as much space as I need to take up without apologies or defensiveness. Water fills the lake and that’s just how it is. I feel the possibility of becoming a human being rather than a human doing, of becoming part of a lasting way of life. Easier said than done, I think.
Practicing compassionate persistence as we wear down the obstacles of life sounds great, but how do we sustain that way of being? The book Forces for Good (p. 248) has some advice for nonprofits that I think can be translated to our lives. For organizations, the advice basically boils down to acting like you want to stick around to pursue your mission for a long time: devote time and resources to keeping top-performing people, find reliable and steady streams of resources, and invest in the infrastructure you need to fulfill your purpose.
Forces for Good uses the example of Teach for America (p. 240-243), which started as a high-energy venture where everyone was underpaid and that had too many programs to manage. When that initial energy and funding burned out, they took the opportunity to transform, becoming more organized and attentive to gathering the resources they would need for the long haul. Part of the difference had to do with balancing the energy that went into urgent program needs with the energy needed to sustain their organization. They had to strengthen within in order to be their best.
In our own lives, I think the same thing applies: we are worthy of care. Our bodies and souls need our investment, the human communities and natural environments that support us need our investment, alongside others to whom we are connected. We practice concern for the interdependent web, including the part of the web closest to home. This is not to say we practice self-care to the exclusion of all else, simply that our respect for all beings applies also to ourselves. Individually and as a congregation, I believe this inclusive perspective on the interdependent web helps us to be patient and flexible, to have the longevity it takes to wear down the harsh stones blocking social progress with persistent streams of love.
The Way of the Thicket
I’ve talked so far about meeting obstacle stones with the firm resolve of stone and with the soft patience of water. Another way is one of growth and connection, building networks where we live and move and achieve shared goals. I’ll call this one the way of the thicket after a line from a poem by Marge Piercy (“The Seven of Pentacles,” excerpted as #568 in Singing the Living Tradition). I’ll quote just a bit of it. She writes:
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
I like the image of the thicket: weaving tendrils that dislodge stubborn rock by reaching for connection. Practicing the way of the thicket, we meet obstacles by surrounding them with networks determined to grow in the spirit of life.
Relationships are key to the impact this congregation makes on our lives and in the community. Our ability to make a difference is enhanced because of our partnerships in the community: our colleague congregations in The Sharing Table, our trusting relationship with the DSS and other agencies that refer clients to our Circle of Hope, our focus as the Grape Jelly Church in consultation with the Harford Food Pantry, and our longtime friendship with Halls Crossroads Elementary. We have woven real connections with real people who depend on us and we on them.
Similarly, the relationships within this congregation are what make this house of worship into a spiritual home. When we reach out to a friend we haven’t seen in church for awhile, we are interweaving our roots. When we offer the hospitality and warmth of this house to a newcomer, we are growing vines that will burrow directly through boulders of despair. As Piercy says, “reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.”
The way of the thicket, like the way of water, is slow, quiet, and effective. The hard part is gently guiding the vines. We want to leave openings for new growth. We want to tangle our way into solutions for the challenges we set for ourselves. We want to give back to the soil that nourishes the life we share.
Conclusion
The natural world offers many models for handling obstacles. I have outlined just a few. We can meet challenges with the hard-edged determination of stone, digging in as we define our mission, pushing back to find reserves of strength. The way of stone is concrete. It gives us a foothold in the struggle. With this blessing, may we rise up to perceive new dimensions of the interdependent web.
We can wear down obstacles with the sustained patience of water, opening up channels for renewal, replenishing the streams of kindness for ourselves as well as others. The way of water flows with quiet confidence that, wherever we are in between the wellspring of our origins and the open sea of fulfillment, we are worthy of care. May the strength of our compassion lead us to openness and flexibility.
We can break through our goals with the resilience of the thicket, becoming a network of many lives interwoven in the celebration of life. Relationships between people and alliances between this church and partner organizations create an irresistible force, growing open cracks in our obstacles until they turn into the soil of promise. May we train our sights on the kind of growth that renews and strengthens our web of relationships.
We are constantly using these ways and others in combination. Sometimes the situation calls for forceful opposition, sometimes it calls for a lifetime of subtle kindness. Let us join our ways together with reverence and love.
So be it. Blessed be. Amen.
