Proverbs 8:1-4
The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, pages 8-9
I want to talk a bit about our summer project. It’s a project that begins with questions:
If we are saddened by the ways our world seems broken right now, what does it look like when the world is whole and well?
If people and nations are divided by ideas and interests, what does it look like when we form communities of respect and care for one another?
If we believe that we should live by values shaped by faith, what are those values and how do we put them into practice?
I’ve been working on this project for several months, collecting relevant bits of books and listening to people talk about how we are to respond to the current realities of our lives. Some of that ends up looking political, like the signs at yesterday’s protests. But it is more than that. Politics are, after all, the way people come together to shape a common life. They aren’t just about who we vote for. In fact, we can hold common values and vote differently about how to accomplish them. I’m convinced that we lack clarity about what matters most to us. We are inarticulate when we try to describe how we understand the world we are trying to create together. We need a clearer framework on which to build a common life. Some of that comes from our faith, the Judeo-Christian scriptures and thinkers over the centuries. We are also informed by the wider world. By Indigenous people, and Buddhist teachings. We gather pieces from scientists and economists and educators and grandparents. We learn from stories that touch our hearts and sometimes break our hearts and sometimes give us hope. The closer I come to actually making this project happen, the more elusive it becomes. I can’t see how it all falls together, but we will start anyway. We will make a beginning and see what happens. I hope you will add your wisdom, suggest resources that matter to you, and shape this as we go along.
Today we make a beginning with a few verses from Proverbs: Does not wisdom call and does not understanding raise her voice? Everywhere we turn, we see clues about how this life works best, what God’s vision for goodness might be. We are encouraged to pay attention. What is Earth telling us? What wisdom comes from scholars and children? Where do we see something holy moving among us?
Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is a botanist and a member of the Potawatami nation, has written about finding wisdom while she was picking serviceberries (or June berries to us). Her neighbors planted a big patch of berry bushes, and when they were ready with their first harvest, they invited everyone to come pick a pail or two – for free. It was advertising for a new you-pick enterprise, and it was a gift. A gift from the farmer and a gift from the bushes themselves. A gift of sunshine and rain and fertile soil. A gift of sweetness.
What if one of the gifts of wisdom we can see around us is the way Mother Earth provides for us. We are so used to thinking about how humans have wrestled a living from the world around us. We focus on our labor – the planting of crops, the manufacturing of products, the production of words for which people are paid. We say we MAKE a living. That is true. But it is also true that life and resources and everything we need is a gift. We had nothing to do with creating the raw materials of life; they are simply there, and we take them. For most of us we long ago stopped saying, “Thank you”
What if we recover a sense of gratitude for our very existence? What if we notice in new ways where our food comes from, who cleans our common spaces, who takes care of our children and our elders, whose unseen labor makes our days easier? It’s possible to see the foundation of life not in what we own, but in what is given to us. Not in how successful we are but in how generous Earth and circumstances have been. Of course our efforts matter, but it’s possible that we are not the center of the universe. Maybe the world is bigger than we are, and it’s a privilege to live in it.
Those who are truly grateful, are moved to share. Those blessings we receive, not because we have earned them, but because we are simply alive, do not belong to us. That which we have passes through our hands on its way to those who need it most. Of course we enjoy those blessings, but we aren’t meant to horde them. They belong to the community. Family of God is learning how to be a conduit for resources on their way to help those whose need is greater than our own. I think the privilege of being a steward to that aid is changing us. Maybe it’s helping us understand what it means that life is a gift and that everyone is meant to receive as needed. It’s leading us to think less about what’s “mine” and more about how what’s “ours” can best be used. Think of the berries that are best when eaten with a friend.
I’d like to try an experiment this summer to help us remember that the resources of Earth are meant to circulate and be shared. Robin Kimmerer talks about free garden tables in her neighborhood where excess produce is put out for the taking. I remember years ago a plate that made its way around a workplace so cookies and other treats could be shared friend to friend. Right now I have an abundance of daisies, so I’ve put a few on the table in the entryway today. If they call to you, please take some home and enjoy them. If you come across something you might share in the weeks ahead, feel free to add it to the table. It might be a book, or a poem, or part of a batch of cookies, or a tool you have three of. It’s okay to take without giving, and to give without taking. But it must be a free gift of your abundance and never a responsibility. It’s ok to watch others and not participate yourself. I wonder what will happen over the summer and if it will change us. I wonder what wisdom we’ll find along the way. That too will be a gift.