There is countercultural wisdom in this church! 

I know it is so, because countercultural wisdom has structured my ministerial work among you. You’ve built sabbatical time into it. For every year of usual work, you have granted me a month of sabbatical leave which is not vacation time but, instead, work in a different key. Different from usual. Extended time for scholarship. Extended time for writing. Dedicated time for professional and personal development. Sharpening the saw, as they say, so when I return I’m refreshed and ready to begin a new chapter in my ministry here. 

Details about this are included in the Sabbatical pamphlet in your order of service, and after services we will meet here in the Sanctuary to discuss things further and answer any questions you may have. 

But the main point is that it all reflects countercultural wisdom. I wish everyone had jobs structured like this, acknowledging the wisdom of natural rhythms and cycles. Acknowledging for anyone’s work life the truth that nothing in nature blooms all year long. 

Acknowledging this with humility. 

Such humility is also encouraged by the tradition of the siesta in Spain and in quite a few other countries. The tradition acknowledges the natural energy cycle that people experience over a 24-hour period. High-level human functioning, it says, doesn’t bloom over the course of even one single day, forget about all year long. Therefore, the midday nap.

It’s countercultural. Countercultural wisdom.  

I keep calling it countercultural because the American dominant culture way of doing things resists rhythms and cycles. It shows utter incredulity and disdain for the siesta, to begin with. It insists that workers must bloom all day long, all year long and over the passage of multiple years without interruption, without end–which is impossible. It is an impossible ask. The proverbial saw gets so dull that, in the end, it can no longer hold an edge and there is no other recourse but to throw it away. 

But that’s the American dominant culture way of doing things. Use something completely up, then throw it away. It’s the American Dream fantasy of endless and relentless productivity and growth. It’s an “onward and upward forever” mindset which can dominate our imaginations. 

For sure it has dominated our economy, leading to our exhausted earth, overheated climate, and increasing wealth gaps among the world’s nations. Among other impacts. 

The ultimate irony is that the accumulated stress and exhaustion of this pursuit of limitlessness only stifles creativity. The stated goal of growth is only stymied. 

No room is given for much, if not most, of our lives as they are honestly and truly lived. Which means, in other words, that we become alienated from others and from our very own selves. 

With regard to our work lives–with regard to every aspect of our lives–we must say NO to the dominant culture American dream of limitless growth as both unrealistic and dehumanizing.

Let there be more of the countercultural-type wisdom in our lives instead. 

That’s what I want to dive deeply into right now: the far healthier wisdom of natural cycles and seasons. “For everything there is a season and a purpose under heaven,” says the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible, and he writes from thousands of years ago. And then, closer to our time, we have Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and all our other Transcendentalist spiritual ancestors who read “the book of nature” as if it were itself a kind of Bible. 

Does that make sense to you, by the way? “Reading the book of nature”? 

The great William Shakespeare, in his play As You Like It, spoke of finding “sermons in stones.” 

Much more recently, you have Quaker teacher and activist Parker Palmer who, in his beautiful book entitled Let Your Life Speak, says, “We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community.”  “We can,” he says, “and we must—if we want our sciences to be humane, our institutions to be sustaining, our healings to be deep, our lives to be true.”  

For the sake of humanity, sustainability, healing, and truth, then, we now go to the wisdom of nature and its turning seasons, to seek guidance. 

​​

Start with the one we are about to enter this September 22 and extending through December 20: Autumn. This season, like the others, will inevitably bring to mind personal associations for some that will not be there for others. We know this. Yet we can still recognize broad themes that will be valid for everyone in the same climate zone. With Autumn comes the harvest and then decline; with Autumn the days grow shorter, and the green growth of summer changes and begins to decay. 

It is a unique pivot point. All the strivings of previous seasons culminate in the abundance of the harvest, and it is a golden time meant for celebration and thanksgiving. But not clung to with a vise-like grip. Not gripped so tightly that you won’t let go. Because side-by-side with this golden time is the reality of change.

“Nature’s first green is gold,” says poet Robert Frost, 

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

From the perspective of the dominant culture American Dream of endlessness and limitlessness, if something can’t stay it’s not gold. It’s unworthy if it’s not permanent. 

But Autumn exposes this attitude as artificial and unnatural. Abundance is fleeting and yet it is still abundance. It is even more precious in its abundance exactly because it’s fleeting. Autumn leaves burst upon us in reds and yellows and oranges and it is breathtaking; but before you know it, they’re gone. So we must learn how to “kiss joy as it flies” and thereby “live in eternity’s sunrise.” 

Autumn wants to teach us that. It is a master class in enlightenment. Autumn asks of you and me, What is golden in your world right now? What is the harvest in your life which represents the culmination of all the developments of previous seasons? Don’t just pass it on by to get to the next thing. Slow down. Stop. Acknowledge it. Name it. Kiss the joy, because it is already in flight, it is already passing on to something else, “nothing gold can stay.” 

For myself, I am kissing the joy of having served this congregation for more than five years now. We are in year six of my ministry. It’s hard to believe. So, let the weeks ahead of us–the rest of August and all of September–be a time of kissing the joy of our shared time together and all we have accomplished, before I begin Part 1 of the sabbatical in October. 

Kiss the joy as it flies, and we live in eternity’s sunrise. Autumn offers its wisdom gift to us, and so does the next season, Winter, which commences December 21 and ends March 19. Says Parker Palmer, “[Winter] is a season when death’s victory can seem supreme: few creatures stir, plants do not visibly grow, and nature feels like our enemy. And yet the rigors of winter, like the diminishments of autumn, are accompanied by amazing gifts.” 

One of them is clarity. Winter’s gift of utter clarity. How, as Parker Palmer says, “in winter one can walk into woods that had been opaque with summer only a few months earlier and see the trees clearly, singly and together, and see the ground they are rooted in. […] Winter,” he says, “clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being.” 

The teaching of Winter here is very much about simplifying. “Our life,” said Henry David Thoreau, “is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”

I remember going to Walden Pond, outside of Concord, Massachusetts, many years ago. All that’s left of Thoreau’s cabin is a pile of stones. Also, this sign: 

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” 

Our Unitarian Universalist ancestor Henry David Thoreau created for himself a Winter-like experience through his Walden Pond experiment. And many people have followed his example. But no one has to do anything special to be reminded of the value of simplifying. Winter will come, every year, and the leafless trees and the snow-covered world embody the lesson. A clearing away of the clutter. A revelation of what has true enduring value and what is of true importance. An urging that you and I learn how to live more deliberately. 

Ask yourself, “How do I spend my time? Can I spend less time doing certain things, and more time on other, better things? What can I say no to, so that I can create more room for the things I want to say yes to?” And so on. All great Winter-wisdom questions. Questions which I for sure will be taking with me into my sabbatical. 

There is yet something else to mention about Winter. That it is a reminder that times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things. One’s saw cannot be perpetually sharp; regularly it must be removed from active use to be sharpened and prepared for the next round of work. This is a law of living. 

From the perspective of the American Dream of perpetual production, the dormancy of Winter will seem useless. Perhaps a travesty of wasted space. Certainly a loss of revenue. 

But listen again to something which J. R. R. Tolkien in that epic fantasy Lord of the Rings has to say, which touches on this issue of dormancy: “Not all who wander are lost.” Wandering is a kind of dormancy. When you wander you may not have a certain destination in mind. Wandering is more about the pleasure of moving than it is about going somewhere. The paradox is that, through wandering, one becomes relaxed. One gets back into the flow of life. Wandering actually becomes a way to the knowledge of where one ought to go. It is for sure ill-suited to the American Dream fantasy of unlimited straight line progress and achievement; yet how often in your own life has wandering of some kind or another relaxed you and allowed your creative process to truly flow? 

If you are feeling stuck in your life, how might a time of dormancy (rather than the usual running to stand still) be exactly what the doctor ordered? Could you allow the wandering to loosen your world up, open space up for something different and better? 

I promise you, there’s going to be a lot of wandering for me during my sabbatical. 

But now we turn the wheel of the year, and we move on to Spring, which reigns March 20 to the 19 of June. But the turning of Winter to Spring is not like the flipping of a light switch from off to on. It’s a process, and I like how poet William Carlos Williams paints a scene of this: as a  

waste of broad, muddy fields 

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water

the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

stuff of bushes and small trees

with dead, brown leaves under them

leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

dazed spring approaches—

This is the turning of winter into spring, as William Carlos Williams describes it, and the point is: it’s not necessarily pretty. Winter can be stubborn. By February the cold can feel so intractable and deep that it seems it won’t ever go away. And then it does. Yet there is no leaping straight to late Spring when the gift awaiting us there is a world in full bloom, flowers blazing in yellows and reds, and love is in the air. You just can’t get to pretty until you go through the valley of messy and ugly first. 

Early Spring–when what has been frozen thaws–is messy and ugly. “I have walked in early Spring,” Parker Palmer says, “through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful that it makes you yearn for a return of ice.” 

Yet even this has a gift in it for us. “Though Spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to [be touching]. The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again.” “Spring teaches me,” Parker Palmer says, “to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.” 

This thought is most profound when you consider how people can freeze themselves and others in time. It can happen for all sorts of reasons. Someone hurt you and you can’t let go; your image of the person becomes tied to that hurt; they can never be anything else to you but someone who hurt you in a certain way. 

Or maybe you hurt yourself and you can’t forgive yourself. You won’t allow yourself to grow beyond your mistake. 

More positively, we can freeze people in time when we have enjoyed how they do a certain thing and, in the future, the only thing we want from them is more of the same. We don’t want them to move on to something else. Why should we want them to evolve when the thing we have going is already good? 

Whether it is hurt that drives freezing another (or yourself) in time, whether it is satisfaction, or whether it is something else, Spring comes as a threat. Green stems of new possibility break through the snow; they are revealed by the melt; and hopefully we can embrace that. Hopefully we can let go of resentment or complacency and accept the new green shoots, care for them, cultivate them. Even the worst of people can repent, and choose to be better. Even the most satisfying of artists can enter into a radical change of style mid-stream and be even better than before (like Taylor Swift, who was a great country artist who is now an even greater pop artist). The real question though is, Will we let them? Or will we stop their growth because we won’t stop freezing them in time? 

But say that we do acknowledge and honor the green stems of possibility. Instantly another question comes: Can we be patient with the growth process of something new (which can be very messy) as opposed to demanding instant results? 

Once upon a time in ancient China (goes an old Taoist story), there lived a farmer who planted a plot of rice. 

Everyday he went to the field to watch the seedlings grow. Finally, he saw young shoots breaking through the soil. Exciting! But this farmer happened to be impatient, and so, soon enough, he was wondering how he could speed up the growth process. Finally the idea came to him: to help the young plants grow faster, he would pull them up one by one by half an inch. This would be his way of helping them grow faster. The next morning, he put this new idea to work. One by one, by half an inch, he pulled up all the tiny seedlings. When he was done, he straightened up his back and felt such pride. He then returned home, where he saw his son. “Son, you’ll never believe the good idea your dad has had!” he said, and told him what he’d done. How disappointing, when his son expressed not enthusiasm but concern. “But dad, plants need time to grow. They can’t be rushed!” The next day, the farmer returned to his plot of rice, and now he understood his son’s concern. All the pulled up plants were withered and on their way to dying…..

That’s the story. I promise, when I return from Part 2 of my sabbatical (I will be breaking up the five months into chunks of 2 and 3), I won’t be impatient with the green shoots of possibility which have grown up here in my absence. I hope you’ll feel the same with the green shoots that have grown up in me. And we will nurture their growth patiently and faithfully, together.  

It is wonderful, how each season comes with its wisdom gift, guiding our personal lives into richness and wholeness. A richness and wholeness that utterly transcend the one-dimensional American fantasy dream of endless productivity.

So now we turn from Spring to the last season, Summer, beginning June 20 and ending September 21. If in Springtime we see small green shoots nosing their way out of the slushy snow and towards sunlight, in Summertime the plant has achieved its fullest expression. If in Springtime we witness the steady recovery of Winter’s lack of light, in Summertime the days are longest and the sunlight pours upon the earth in all fullness. 

Summer’s wisdom, then, can be seen as a generosity of being. Of being who you are in all fullness. It is the answer to the question Mary Oliver asks in her amazing poem entitled “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Summer’s answer is: be like the sun. Pour yourself out without hesitation. Trust yourself and what you have to offer. If “imposter syndrome” has you in its grip, well, fake it till you make it, because you will make it. Find your way to be of use. As poet Marge Piercy says, 

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

[…]

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

[…] 

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

That’s the poem. I love this poem because, for me, ministry is the pitcher and I have heard its cry since 1999 when I entered seminary and I have loved it because it is real, it is real work, it is a thing worth doing well. And, I have learned over the past 20+ years that this work is best done when it takes the form of a long-term ministry. That’s one of the biggest arguments in favor of a sabbatical. It supports longevity of ministry in one setting. Long ministries are like Summertime sunlight. The minister and the congregation have the opportunity to grow into the fullness of their potentials. 

It is a similar lesson for us all. Summertime says, everyone can radiate such energy. Everyone can hear the cry of some pitcher which calls them to the work that is real for them. But take care to find a way to do that authentically. Take care that your life energies are not traded in for work that delivers only a paycheck, that doesn’t have a shape that satisfies, that doesn’t tempt you to jump in headfirst. 

And now we have gone full circle. Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer. With each season comes a sermon. So, says Henry David Thoreau, “Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” 

May you find the meaning and the healing within each season. 

May we gather these natural teachings to ourselves, 

and from them learn to be more human. 

Resign yourself to the influence of the earth.