While traveling the highways and byways of South Carolina this past week, I was struck by how the stark, barren landscape of winter reveals the reality of what many persons now understand to be our relationship with the Earth. A hardwood tree here and there dots the horizon, decaying structures are everywhere and roadside trash abounds. We realize that we plunder and rape the Earth for our own purposes and fail to live in partnership with it. If we are to live in sacred community with the Earth, we have to rethink how we use the natural resources which we have been given.
Often these days of winter reveal the landscape of our souls, also. Lifeless and barren, we give no evidence of new growth and our spiritual life seems dead. Then comes Lent and we have the opportunity to be in a season of reflection and new life. Through study, worship and prayerful discernment we can reclaim faithful living and know that we are part of a sacred community with the Earth. We can restore that which we have wasted and neglected and the Earth and its peoples can flourish.
Refer to First UMC’s Lenten calendar for guidance.
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The separate realities of the seasons are the separate realities that all of us project onto our individual world views. They are manifested as the collection of our biased defense mechanisms that allow us to continue to shape our environment to our will. Separate realities are incomplete representations of the physical universe as perceived with limited sensory input and even more limited judgment. Our ability to create separate realities is the rationale that allows us to pursue self-serving interests that we interpret with extreme prejudice as "the right thing to do". Separate realities result in sins of commission and omission.
Reality on a spiritual plane is less vulnerable to the greed that contaminates our personal interpretations of material reality, and, thus, is probably a better and more simple foundation to build our models of actual REALITY upon. The reality of Creation is that it comes with rules and laws. As individuals we never break the law of gravity because we simply lack the individual power and/or knowledge to do so, but we get up early and stay up late to break the laws of stewardship.
Winter realities exaggerate the shame and horror of a nation dotted with the ghosts of small towns that very recently fell victim to one of the 21st century plagues, the plague of Wal-Marts, the plague of small farm foreclosures, and the plague of alluring development on the fringes of our precious wetlands and bays. When there is a nation with thousands of communities complete with existing houses and businesses lying fallow, there is no housing shortage. There is no need for more development. The reality is that the only need is to entice others to think that they need. Bingo! When both parties agree on an illusion, a separate reality is born. That does not make it real or true or right. The only thing that resembles beauty about a separate reality is that it is in the eye of the beholder.
We can never truly know what our Earth looks like or what its real function is because our sensory input mechanisms are so limited. We can see only within a limited range of the visible light spectrum. Reality exists in infra-red and gamma ray and x-ray and at the subatomic level. We will never see it. We will never taste the chemical catalysts that could produce uncontrollable chain reactions in the phosphate bonds of the very stuff of life, but they are part of reality. We will never hear a particle or wave moving at nearly the speed of light and capable of passing straight through the earth without touching another particle,. But, they are part of reality and they pass through daily. We will never smell the odorless lethal gas that can emanate from a deep subterranean chamber, but that too is reality. We will notice its effects however, if we accidentally drill into it looking deep to provide water for a city in the desert that we never really needed to begin with.
Our separate realities are capable of seriously affecting and destroying actual REALITY without the knowledge of the catastrophe registering in our limited senses until we can no longer survive actual REALITY.
We need only one thing to live. We need better communion with the Creator to understand REALITY.
My mother used to say that South Carolina was at its ugliest in winter. She complained of the brown grass and stark, cold swamps where barren hardwoods shivered like bones. I always liked winter because it offered a coziness and a closeness that summer with its heat will not allow. There is something of winter, of a cold, shiny day, that invites introspection, maybe from the warmth of a quilt made by the hads of a long dead ancestor. I wonder what the one who made the quilt would think of how I turned out, and what the one who made me thinks of how I turned out. In the shelter winter demands, I draw closer to my maker.
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