Around 170 years ago, our Unitarian Universalist spiritual ancestor Henry David Thoreau spoke about wildness. “Our village life would stagnate,” he said, “if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness […] We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks… We need to witness our own limits transgressed…”

I would argue that in the past several months this need has been amply met. I would call the four tornadoes that ripped through the Cleveland area this past August and left millions without power for days a transgression of human limits. 

I would call the fact that this year has seen the most tornadoes on record in Ohio a transgression. 

And then, just in the past few days, we’ve seen the strongest hurricane in history to make landfall in the Big Bend of Florida, Hurricane Helene, with its devastating floodwaters; power knocked out for millions of people; and impacts all up the Eastern United States including people canoeing down water-logged Atlanta streets and mudslides in the North Carolina mountains of Appalachia. 

Our own human limits are like a red stop sign standing atop a slender metal pole—and the gale force winds just shred it apart.

This is what we are witnessing.

Thoreau our spiritual ancestor is trying to tell us something, from all of 170 years ago. That we stagnate as human beings when we get overly sentimental or saccharine about nature. That nature is not just walks in the woods and garden flowers. Nature is also tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and wildfires. And, when we respect this fact to the point where we feel fear mixed-in with awe, it is like a “tonic” to us, meaning that it comes as healing medicine. And thereby, says Thoreau, we are “refreshed,” or brought back to a state that is truer to our humanity.

That’s what I want to talk about today. Being more fully human, to the degree we respect wildness and recognize it as a vital dimension of our earth home.

It is the same sort of respect you sense in the famous artwork of Hokusai entitled The Great Wave off Kanagawa 

The waterscape is the real star of the show, and humans are but small parts of the larger natural vastness: frigid ocean, enormous waves, Mount Fuji untouchable in the distance, immense skies. Not people first, but the earth first, and people a small part of the larger whole.

Respect. You hear it in the words of the former President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, in his 1995 Harvard commencement address: “We must divest ourselves of our egotistical anthropocentrism, our habit of seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever [we want]. We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality. Our respect for other people, for other nations, and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are part of it, that we share in it…”

Respect heals us. Respect returns us to our full humanity and truly makes of nature a home for us.

“I do not know if the air remembers September or if the night remembers the moon,” writes the Rev. Burton Carley in his wonderful poem entitled “September Meditation.” “I do not know if the seasons remember their history or if the days and nights by which we count time remember their own passing. I do not know if the oak tree remembers its planting or if the pine remembers its slow climb toward sun and stars. I do not know if the squirrel remembers last fall’s gathering or if the bluejay remembers the meaning of snow.”

To all of these poetic stanzas, perhaps we should add some new ones, “I do not know if the earth remembers the wildfires of Canada which, this year alone, burned 13.1 million acres of forest, together with a third of the famous tourist town of Jasper Alberta. I do not know if the earth remembers, or if the trees remember their immolation as orange flames licked at them and transformed their flesh into charcoal gray smoke.” Perhaps we should add that–and add other stanzas, too, in a similar vein.

And then there is the beautiful Carl Sandburg, his poem where he says “There is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes…” “There is a fox in me, there is a hog in me, there is a fish in me,” and on and on. Maybe in all fairness we should add, “There is a hurricane in me, there is a famine in me, there is an earthquake in me…”

Respect is about telling the whole story, and facing it fully.

Respect is simply being clear. Climate change intensifies nature’s pre-existing wildness. Climate change is a force multiplier. There have always been storms and winds and surges. But climate change makes them increasingly bigger and damaging and expensive. As carbon dioxide from human activity continues warming up the planet, storms will deliver more rain, higher winds, and greater storm surges.

Respect this, truly, and it means that we take it seriously. Nature is not just walks in the woods and garden flowers. It has wildness to it, and if we keep provoking it, worse things are around the corner.

Very interestingly, at one and the same time, nature in the form of evolution has put tendencies in our minds that actually make it hard to grasp the danger. It’s been called our “frog-in-the-kettle” tendency, where we ignore gradual changes even as we’re slowly being taken to an end point which is our doom. There is also the tendency to value the concrete over the abstract. Research has shown that the particular weather outside a person’s front door can play a huge role in whether they believe (or don’t believe) in climate change—even though the one is a very poor indicator of the other.

These tendencies are nothing less than part of our evolutionary heritage.

No doubt such tendencies help anchor what Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone in their book Active Hope call the Business as Usual story that too many people are telling themselves these days. “With Business as Usual,” they say, “the defining assumption is that there is little need to change the way we live. Economic growth is regarded as essential for prosperity, and the central plot is about getting ahead,  

without any longer-range consideration about where this approach is taking us.” “Periodic disasters are … only temporary interruptions.” “There’s no point in worrying about the distant future, as we’ll be dead by then.”  

People, we need to get over Business as Usual. 

Perhaps fear mixed-in with awe can do that. In 2023, the U.S. experienced 28 separate weather and climate disasters each costing at least 1 billion dollars. That number puts 2023 into first place for the highest number of billion-dollar disasters in a calendar year, adding up to a whopping total of 92.9 billion dollars. 

Perhaps this IS a time to gorge on pictures and videos of natural disaster after natural disaster after natural disaster. 

It is a form of Thoreau’s tonic that tastes terrible all the way down but in the end saves us. Scares us straight. Scares us into our humanity, because we are most definitely NOT masters of the universe who can do whatever they want.

I completely agree with New York Times writer David Leonhardt, who, in recent years, has called for a Manhattan Project for alternative energy or a national effort to reduce carbon emissions. But despite the terrifying potential damages that climate change will encourage, we aren’t stirred to action.

We gotta get over that.

We must do better.

Which means, at the very least, that we avoid getting sidetracked.

One way of getting sidetracked is to interpret nature’s wildness as a mere ploy. I’ll never forget something that talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said, back in 2017, that the problem is not so much climate change as it is an illusion of something dangerous created by the liberal media. News stations, he says, “use graphics to make it look like the ocean’s having an exorcism, just getting rid of the devil here in the form of this hurricane, this bright red stuff.” Why, asks Limbaugh? To scare people into believing in climate change and to line the pockets of businesses that sell emergency-related goods like batteries.

I hasten to add that this did not stop Rush Limbaugh from fleeing Florida like most everyone else in 2017, when Hurricane Irma cut through the state like a hot knife through butter and left no less than 70% of the homes there without electricity. 

No Houstonian or Floridian in their right mind could ever believe what Rush Limbaugh said, but what about all those folks far away from the coasts, whose weather right outside their doors in no way contradicted the trash that Limbaugh was talking?

Let them see the pictures and the videos. Let them take in some of Thoreau’s tonic, to regain respect for nature’s wildness that is absolutely no ploy.

But this can lead, very quickly, to another way of getting sidetracked. This other way of getting sidetracked is in becoming overwhelmed. Feeling powerless. 

Take a moment now. Let me ask you a fill-in-the-blank question: “When I consider the state of the world today, I feel _____.”

What words would you fill-in-the-blank with? 

It is no stretch of logic for Joanna Macy to say that feelings of uncertainty and despair are the “pivotal psychological reality of our time.” We (you and I in this space) are no doubt feeling high levels of alarm about the future we are headed into. 

Admitting this, however, can be a challenge. Who wants to be a Debbie Downer? 

And then, if you do admit feelings of uncertainty and despair, often enough the response confirms the Debbie Downer fear. “Don’t go there,” people can say, “it’s too depressing.” “Don’t dwell on the negative,” people can say. 

The problem with this approach, says Joanna Macy, “is that it closes down our conversations and our thinking. How can we even begin to tackle the mess we’re in if we consider it too depressing to think about? Yet when we do face the mess, when we do let in the dreadful news of multiple tragedies unfolding in our world, it can feel overwhelming. We may wonder whether we can do anything about it anyway.”

This is the pivotal psychological reality of our time. 

And there has got to be a better way through. 

And that is what our year-long worship series is all about, which we’re kicking off this morning. It’s about the Active Hope way. It’s about finding a better way through the wilderness that we are feeling all around us. 

It begins with clarity about that little thing with feathers, as poet Emily Dickinson once described it: HOPE. 

Hope, as you know, can be passive, in the sense that only if our preferred outcome is likely to happen (and we know that up front), only then will we act. Such a kind of hope is useless to us. 

But then there is another kind of hope, one that is more about our desire for what we want the world to be like, and we act upon this desire without needing any up-front guarantees. 

Passive hope is about waiting for external agencies to guarantee the result, and only then do we act. But active hope is that feeling deep within you that you are alive, and that in this particular time and place, the only thing you need to concern yourself with is what you do next. Refusing to prejudge. Not needing to know the effects of your actions up front. Just get out there. Just keep showing up and showing up and showing up no matter what. 

In much of this sermon so far, we’ve been exploring respect for nature. But at this point, as we consider the kind of hope that’s active, we need to see how this is a matter of reclaiming our self-respect. Passivity and helplessness, ultimately, reflect a lack of respect towards what humans are capable of. How many times, after all, when the worst has happened to you, you’ve surprised yourself with unexpected strength? “In a process known as adversity activated development,” says Joanna Macy, “our very act of facing the mess we’re in can help us discover a more enlivening sense of what our lives are about, what we’re here to do, and what we’re truly capable of.” 

“The dance,” says writer Ursula Le Guin, “is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.”

Reality wants us to dance, right now. No hollow place, no dance. 

163 years ago, Henry David Thoreau published Walden and told the world what it meant for him to conduct his experiment in sustainable living. “I went to the woods,” he says, “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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear….”

If he was alive today, I would ask him to also write,

I went to northern Kerala in India, to witness the massive landslides following an extreme monsoon downpour this July 30, because I wished to live deliberately;

I went to the Canadian wildfires, to front only the essential facts of life;

I went to Ishikawa Japan, to see if I could learn what the deadly January 1, 2024 earthquake there had to teach;

I went to Cleveland Ohio to witness the aftermath of the tornadoes, to make sure I was not living what was not life, living is so dear. 

Because this is how we learn what it means to be human. Not just from walks in the woods and garden flowers.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed.

We need to take the medicinal tonic, and be healed of our self-importance, and discover active hope. 

We need to respect the wildness and go in fear of it–in awe of it–if we are to truly find in nature a home.