The Theology of Manure: SERMON and Readings for 3/14/2011 by W. Howarth

As I mentioned in my last blog installation, tomorrow is Sunday and the long-awaited Manure service!

I'm psyched.  This is my first time in the pulpit.  For those of you just tuning in... no, don't worry, I have not traded in my academic tassels (and mortar board) for a stole and white collar!  I've been invited to lead the service tomorrow as a member of the Unitarian Universalist Worship & Music committee at my church/fellowship.  It is a one time deal, I'm pretty sure.  But I may be so drunk on the evangelical power, I may refuse to come down!

I thought it would be fun to do a sermon on transcendentalism, then it GREW into something more personal.  I began reading about Margaret Fuller and then about Brook Farm.  This of course brought me to the Blithesdale Romance  and good old Nathaniel Hawthorne who had quite a time with his transcendental, back the earth, community living experience (as a side note, Hawthorne actually died in Plymouth, NH on his way to hang out in the White Mountains with former President Franklin Pierce).  The more I read about Nate and the ideas of 19th century transcendentalists (I've been playing with Thoreau now for sometime, as you know), the more connections I was able to make to my own experience living in community at Sadhana Forest, India this past January.

What else could tie all this together but MANURE?  Strange theme, I know... but you'll see, it actually works.  At least, I think so.   The big picture here is spiritual ecology, interconnectedness, and living in community.  It is the culmination of ideas I've been having throughout this BLOG so here it goes...

1st Reading: (From the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins)

Naturalchemy:

In a sense, we have a universe above us and one below us.  The one above us can be seen in the heavens at night, but the one below us is invisible without a magnifying lens.  Our ancestors had little understanding of the vast, invisible world which surrounded them, a world of countless creatures so small as to be quite beyond the range of human sight.  And yet, some of those microscopic creatures were already doing work for humanity in the production of foods such as beer, wine, cheese and bread…  Composting is one means by which the microorganisms can be utilized for the betterment of mankind.

…Organic refuse contains stored solar energy.  Every apple core or potato peel holds a tiny amount of heat and light, just like a piece of firewood. 

Perhaps S. Sides of the Mother Earth News  states it best:

“Plants convert solar energy into food for animals (ourselves included). Then the [refuse] from these animals along with dead plant and animal bodies, ‘lie down in the dung heap’ are composted, and ‘rise again in the corn.’  This cycle of light is the central reason why composting is such an important link in organic food production.  It returns solar energy to the soil.  In this context such common compost ingredients including onion skins, hair trimmings, eggshells… and even burnt toast are no longer seen as garbage, but as sunlight on the move from one form to another.”

2^nd Reading:

In a passionate love-letter dated April 13^th 1841, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about his troubles with manure to his fiancee, Sophia.  In this excerpt, the ‘gold mine’ he refers to is 320 wagonloads of manure that needed to be spread in the fields:

Very Dearest, I have been too busy to write thee a long letter by this opportunity; for I think this present life of mine gives me an antipathy to pen and ink… I could not live without the idea of thee, nor without spiritual communion with thee; but, in the midst of toil, or after a hard day’s work in the gold mine, my soul obstinately refuses to be poured out on paper.  That abominable gold mine!  Thank God, we anticipate getting rid of its treasures, in the course of two or three days.  It is my opinion, dearest that man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap or in a furrow of field, just as well as under a pile of money… meantime, my health is perfect, my spirits buoyant, even in the gold mine.

Sophia Peabody, 

Sermon:

The theology of manure: sacred mystery, magical compost or mess? by Whitney Howarth

Nathaniel Hawthorne was 37 years old when he wrote the letter we just heard to his beloved Sophia.  He had just arrived the day before to Brook Farm, a transcendentalist Utopian community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. He would live and work here for the next eight months of his life.  Brook Farm was started by Boston Unitarian-scholar minister, George Ripley, as an experiment in social reform.  Both Hawthornee and Ripley were attracted to idea of living in a community of like-minded persons inspired by the hopeful dream of a better world.

George Ripley (1802-1880)

But despite lofty ambitions, this was, after all, a farm.  And a farm needed sweat and manure.  Hawthorn, a reclusive, well-educated, soft handed chap who had studied Latin at Bowdoin was little prepared for the physical exertions that the life at Brook Farm demanded of him.  His hope that the farm would provide a place of security for his future family, and a peaceful setting for his literary efforts, were soon dashed by the hard work of life in community.

When Hawthorne arrived at Brook Farm in 1841, he wasn’t famous yet and he didn’t have steady income.  He was secretly engaged to Sophia, partially because they feared her family’s disapproval.  He wouldn’t write his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, for nearly a decade (1850).  And it wouldn’t be until 1852 that he’d publish The Blithedale Romance, a novel based upon his experiences at Brook Farm.   For the manual work he did there during his stay, primarily milking cows and shoveling manure, he received room and board.  As a founding member, Hawthorne invested $1000 in the farm as a shareholder in the community project which would, at its peak, be home to about one hundred people.

Brook Farm

  Hawthorne had hoped to secure a home at Brook Farm for Sophia and himself.  However, he couldn’t endure the physical labor or the life in community. He left dissatisfied by the experiment and disappointed in himself.  A shy man, he found he did not care for the company of the zealous social reformers (larger than life personalities, plenty of big egos) and, he admitted, he was too exhausted by the work to find time to write.  His letters to Sophi suggest that his emotions swung between regret and ambivalence.  He went from idealizing the experiment as the epitome of social & spiritual progress to despising it as an unrealistic, impossible sham.   Eventually, Brook Farm went bankrupt and after an outbreak of small pox and a devastating fire, closed in doors in 1846.

Despite its failure as a Utopian community, Brook Farm had hosted some of the most brilliant thinkers, writers, social reformers, and Unitarians in the century:

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to name just a few.

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888)

Nathaniel kept good company!  He was not alone in imagining a better world where people would come together, regardless of class, theology, or gender to create a model community by the sweat of their brow and the unity of their labor -  a place where all members might realize a higher consciousness, a deeper connectedness, to one another and to the earth. 

Just a short time ago, I traveled to India and entered into a similar experiment in community living with 10 students from Plymouth State University at an ashram devoted to sustainable living in Sadhana Forest, Tamil Nadu.  For three weeks, we joined 100 like-minded persons devoted to making the world a better place.  Like the residents of Brook Farm, we devoted ourselves to physical labor and radical simplicity.  We worked the land and shoveled tons of compost.  We rose at dawn to work in the forest and in the gardens, slept and ate in communal spaces, prepared food together in a community kitchen, and held workshops and discussion circles about ways each of us could change the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1883)

At Brook Farm, the late night discussions at the hearth focused on temperance, slavery, and prison reform (topics hot on the social reformers agenda in the late 19^th century).  Margaret Fuller showed up to lecture on transcendentalism and feminism.  Ralph Water Emerson stopped by to discuss his writings on “Nature” and the doctrine of labor.  At Sadhana, Monday nights we gathered around a blazing fire to sing African folks songs and raise our voices in devotional chant.  We had discussions about petroleum dependency, solar energy, permaculture, environmental sustainability and non-violent communication.

  

Dr. Thirunarayanan came to speak to us about Sacred Groves and Siddha medicine, a 10,000 year old  traditional healing system still practiced in South India today.  

A young man named Tim, spoke to us about the half dozen or so eco-villages he had visited in the last year travelling around the world on a Watson scholarship.  

Tim

We talked about why consumer capitalism and industrial agriculture had failed us, and imagined alternative, healthier, more fulfilling lifestyles.

  

We worked hard in the mornings.  Then we spent some afternoons visiting various faith religious sites.  One place we visited was Auroville, an experimental community founded by Aurobindo’s disciples.  Auroville is a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The self-stated purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity. 

The experiment has been on-going for over 40 years.  Today, Auroville is the home to 2,000 residents from over 40 different countries, a third of the residents are from India.  People are employed in agricultural enterprises, research, education, construction, information technology, small businesses and handicraft production.  Most members of the community subscribe to the idea of Karma Yoga; the idea that physical labor is a spiritual practice.  Work is holy. At Auroville they say “to work for the Divine is to pray with the body.” 

Karma Yoga inspired our work at Sadhana Forest, too. As we tried to build a community and grow a forest, we realized this spiritual practice wasn’t easy.

Work as sadhana (spiritual practice) was an idea we struggled with during our stay.  As Hawthorne had struggled with bodily fatigue and the discipline of daily labor on Brook Farm, so too did some of the students with whom I lived at Sadhana. Many found the conditions very rustic (thin mattresses on coconut rope beds, mice in the huts), the food too simple (a vegan diet, little spice and no sugar) and the physical work challenging.   As a result, for some, it was hard to connect spiritual practice with work. 

I struggled more with the challenges in living in community than I did with the physical conditions or the hard work.  Having lived in India before, I was accustomed to living in less than pristine conditions.  Being constantly dirty and sweaty didn’t upset me.  What I did find difficult was sharing work.  Particularly, sharing work with people who seemed less motivated and less invested than I was.  Some people were just plain lazy.  Some seemed to always sign up for jobs that were fun and quick.  Some people gave up on jobs that demanded too much effort or, sometimes, forgot to show up at all.  I found myself doing other people’s work and resenting it.  I bit my tongue, a lot, and tried to convince myself that doing more work, more energetically, was winning me more “spirituality bonus points”!  I discovered it wasn’t easy living so closely or so interdependently, no matter how like-minded we claimed to be as spiritual seekers. 

 The greatest spiritual lesson I may have learned at Sadhana was also my greatest ecological lesson. 

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED – EVERYTHING IS A PART OF THE WEB OF LIFE. 

We are all interconnected by the choices we make, by the things we produce, by that which we consume, by the waste we create and excrete.  This sublime and challenging interconnectedness was never more evident to me and my fellow seekers there in Sadhana, living closely in community, in simplicity, without the modern conveniences and far from my ordinary life -- my life more idle, sedentary, and sanitary.

And nowhere was the interconnectedness of our choices and our communal efforts more apparent than in the composting toilets of Sadhana.  It was there that I discovered the theology of poo, the sacredness of manure and the mystery of muck. 

 Our poo was a constant theme of discussion at Sadhana, a running joke and a serious concern.  Keeping a group of 100 backpackers and spiritual transients living in communion with the forest healthy for weeks and months at a time is no small feat.  And for many of us, ill at ease with a purely vegetarian diet, supplemented by occasional trips to less-than-hygienic  Indian cafes and street stalls, we found our tummies uncooperative and our poo ample. 

Complimenting these realities was the fact that the composting toilets at Sadhana were squat toilets – two holes in the ground per stall – one for wet and one for dry. Use of toilet paper was heavily discouraged.  Indians don’t use it, it is un-environmental, it slows down the composting process.  Instead, water buckets were provided with small tin mugs for washing.  Large tubs of sawdust with their own mugs also sat nearby for composting.  Complex demonstrations were given each week by veteran staffers who had mastered the art.  In the toilets, poo was mixed with sawdust and allowed to ‘cook’ for about a month once the hole filled up.  The ever vigilant ‘hygiene teams’ came around once day to mix, scoop-out, and transport massive quantities of humanure to the large piles at the periphery of the ashram. There the compost cooked for about another year before it was hauled off in large buckets by volunteers to the forest, the orchards, and the gardens for use. 

Maintaining a vegan diet was a spiritual practice asked of us at Sadhana Forest.  Vegan here meant not eating any animal products (milk, cheese, or honey) but also not using animals or their manure for our own purposes.  Veganism as a spiritual practice meant that the intimate interconnectedness of our consumption and our waste was made clear to us in remarkable ways.  The energy we put in our bodies, what we ate from the gardens, was nourished by the energy that came out of us at the other end. 

Every act of eating, therefore, was a spiritual act because it not only provided energy for the transformation of our consciousness; it also fed the physical body that needed to labor in the forests and gardens.  The cycle was one of choice and consequence.  It was a new way of looking at consumption and waste – and realizing that nothing need be wasted at all.  Even our urine was used in combination with charcoal from the fire as an organic nitrate for the flower beds.  We had separate systems for collecting raw food compost (from the kitchen or from leftover salads) and collecting cooked food for compost (scraps and scrapings from the bottom of the pot).  Everything was used to make the earth grow and to keep us growing too.

We were asked not to consume processed, greasy, sugared, caffeinated or highly spicy foods and drinks.  We were encouraged to try the ‘hygiene team’ as part of our work so that we might get over our aversion to our own poo and have a deeper connection to that part of ourselves we often just avoid, flush and ignore.  By being more mindful of the product, the process, and the use of our humanure, we were also being asked to be more mindful of our consumption choices.  We were made conscious of the cycle of life.

In this way, we became more interconnected and more aware of the spiritual task involved in Karma Yoga.  Stirring, scooping and lifting buckets of humanure for multiple hours everyday in the hot Indian sun, weeks at a time, is not work for the feint of heart. 

To be honest, I didn’t do this job.  But two of my students did and they were proud of this work. We talked about why.  For them, it felt special.  They were moving beyond the restrictions of their own social conditioning which said: poo was bad, dirty and undesirable.  In fact, their work helped them to appreciate poo – to see it as something desirable.  Poo became central to the good work we were doing because it gave life to the trees and flowers and the veggies and the fruits we loved so much.

Thinking of manure as sacred may sound profane to those among you who haven’t worked a lot with manure but I’m sure it isn’t so shocking to the gardeners listening.  Manure and especially manure that has been composted is GOLD for gardeners.  Hawthorne may have been writing tongue-in-cheek to Sophia when he described his work on the dung heap as slaving away in the gold mine – but it was true!

My first encounter with manure came last summer when I found myself, like Hawthorne, shoveling the rich, black goodness for hours.  We bought yards and yards of it from a neighboring cow farm.  We spread it into the garden Michael and I share with Belinda in Thornton.  It was my first fore into serious gardening and it was my first exposure to animal excrement.  I remember being squeamish around the stuff at first, and then, after spending weeks shoveling and mixing it with our dry, clay soil, coming to actually love it.  As I learned to plant seeds and fertilize, to nurture and coax my baby veggie plants, I realized that my manure was magical.  It was life giving.  It was sacred mystery.  My peas popped, my beans climbed the poles, my squash squirted forth from the earth.  It was all a miracle. 

my beans

I am not the first person to recognize the miracle of manure.  Manure is actually mentioned quite a bit in the Bible.  Theologian Eugene Heideman has written about biblical manure and its life affirming capacity in his article ‘BEYOND DUNG: The Theology of Manure.”  Heideman claims that in the New Testament a sense of joy and gratitude surrounds references to the biological as a means of communion with God.  Manure, he says, and even death, have a place in the goodness of this biological world.  Manure enriches the life of plants, just as the plants feed animals and humans.  God’s creatures excrete waste products not only to maintain their biological equilibrium but also to ensure that vital nutrients are returned to the biosphere to sustain new life.

Heideman asks what does it mean for us, spiritually, that we modern Westerners flush away our nourishing waste and agribusinesses prefer Chemical fertilizers?    

It is sad that we dismiss manure as a four letter obscenity that has to be dealt with as a health/sanitation problem rather than the source of nourishment for other living things.  We may also be exporting our attitudes to the third world by exporting techniques (agriculture/sanitation) that make manure both unnecessary and unwanted. 

It is easy enough to thank God for a glorious sunset or the sweet taste of an apple.  When is the last time you gave thanks for manure?

I think there is a lesson to learn from all this.  There are lessons to learn from the writings of the nature adoring transcendentalists, like Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau – there are lessons in the Forest at Sadhana, in the fields of Brook Farm, and on the ashram of Auroville – there are lessons from theologians like Heideman and from gardeners amidst their happy heaps… 

The lesson is that we have the capacity to love and embrace ourselves; all parts of ourselves.   We can make the choice to love ourselves! To love those parts of ourselves that are both of the earth and return to the earth in one blessed cycle.

The lesson I have learned is that each of us has the capacity to love our selves fully; to love that glorious, magical, messy, mysterious connectedness we all share with the Divine.

The Theology of Manure: Sacred mystery, magical compost, or mess?

Tomorrow I'll be leading the service at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Plymouth.  The theme is Manure!  Or rather, how we're all connected by the choices we make, that which we consume, all that we waste and the earth.  Manure reminds us of the interconnectedness of spiritual ecology -- we are one with the Divine through the choices and consequences of our actions.   I've wrapped in some 19th century transcendentalism in there, a story about Hawthorne's time at the Utopian agrarian community Brook Farm, my time at Sadhana Forest, eating as spiritual practice, and recognizing we are all connected to the Divine through our labor and love.  It is a lovin' spoonful, to say the least!

We've an amazing group of people helping out with music (Scarborough Fair, 'Tis a Gift to Be Simple and Here comes the sun!) including my dearly beloved, Michael, performing on his dobro (guitar) for the first time in public after almost 30 years.  I'm so proud of him.  His fingers are pulsating blisters but he can finger pick George Harrison's SUN SUN SUN like nobody's business.  Thanks, Bunkie.

I'm pretty excited about the sermon and readings, too.   I'll post them in the next blog installment. The Order of Service is here below.   I finally got my sermon down below 3000 words.  Tricky to say what I want about spiritual ecology and share my heart in less than 20 min.  But I think it's pretty good.

I thought I'd post everything here for those of you who can't join us.  I'd love your feedback and thoughts.
I'll add some photos later but for now, here is the Order of Service I've put together.

It is based on a typical UU service -- but I've selected the hymns, unison response text, songs, prayers, opening/closing words, readings and chalice lighting words.  I also came up with the idea of having a BASIL COMMUNION -- not something we UU's do, mind you.  But I thought it went with the theme (and songs).

Michael is strumming on his guitar now after a day of replanting the holy basil (tulsi), basil, and sage seedlings he's been growing under the grow lights this week.  Several little fast growing sprouts have popped up through the vermiculite and are being transplanted into little 2 ounce peat pots full of GRADE A COW MANURE! There's a 30 pound sack of manure sitting on our dining room table.  He is in heaven and all is well with the world.

Wish us luck!

STARR KING UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST FELLOWSHIP
SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2011


Order of Service:

Gathering Music 

Prelude (Scarborough Fair)

Opening Words: “Children of the earth and sky” by Alice Berry

Children of the earth and sky, we are nurtured, sustained, given warmth and light from above and below. 

Supported by earth's strong, firm crust, we build our homes, till the fields, plant our gardens and orchards. 

When we turn from self and seek to be aware, we will find holy light in human faces, in blossom, birdsong, and sky. 

Then earth is truly our home, and we are one with all earth's creatures, Parents of earth's children yet to be.

*Opening Hymn:       #44 "We Sing of Golden Mornings"

Welcome

We welcome you! You are invited to explore our principles and purposes while we honor your freedom of conscience. Our congregation celebrates the presence and participation of all, regardless of spiritual beliefs, age, gender, abilities, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, or gender identity. If you are looking for a rational, thoughtful, ethical, spiritual and free approach to religion, we invite you to join us.

       

Lighting of the Chalice

Unison Response:

The element of fire represents passion, veracity, authenticity, and vitality. If the chalice is the supporting structure of Unitarian Universalism, then we are the flame. We are the flame, fanned strong by our passion for freedom, our yearning for truth-telling, our daring to be authentic with one another, and the vitality we sustain in our meeting together. In all of this there is love.

Candles of Celebration and Concern

1^st Reading: “Naturalchemy” from the Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure by Joseph Jenkins

Testimonial

Offering

Prayer and Silent Meditation on Hands  by Christine Robinson

I invite you into a space of quiet and peace, to ground yourself by noticing your contact with chair and floor, by sitting straight, by becoming aware of your breathing.

Look at your hands. They've been through a lot, those hands … they have strengths, scars, beauty…. I invite you to remember that it is your hands that do the work of love in the world. These hands may hold another's hands. These hands may type emails to politicians, sign cards of consolation and congratulation. These hands may patiently teach, quilt works of beauty or write words urging peace. These hands may bathe children, feed elders, nurse the ill, work the earth, organize communities. These hands clasp in prayer, open in release, grasp in solidarity, clench in righteous anger. These hands are God's hands, your hands, our hands; a great mystery of flesh and intention, a great potential of embodied love. 

         

Anthem:  ’Tis a Gift to Be Simple   Shaker song by J. Brackett (1848)

2^nd Reading: ‘Letter to Sophia’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1841)

Sermon: The Theology of Manure: Sacred mystery, magic compost or mess?

         

Basil Communion

We have come now to the part of our service where we will partake in communion.  Communion is derived from Latin communio (sharing in common). 

We share in common the love of the earth, a profound appreciation for regeneration and life.  In that spirit, let us embrace the life giving power of manure and seed, of plant and sunlight, the work of hands and hearts. 

Helpers will begin passing out the holy basil and sage seedlings.  Please take one and pass it along until everyone in your row has one.  If you want to take yours home, please do.  If you’d like to hand them back in after the service for us to grow, return them to the table in the fellowship hall at coffee hour.  Margaret Salt and the garden committee will be planting these basil and sage plants in the spring once the snows melt.  They will be for all our use, open to all of us in a community of sharing.  The work of our hands, the joy of our love.

*Closing Hymn:        #77 "Seek Not Afar for Beauty"

*Closing Words:        by Marjorie Newlin Learning

Remembering that the universe is so much larger than our ability to comprehend, let us go forth from this time together with the resolve to stop trying to reduce the incomprehensible to our own petty expectations, so that wonder -- that sense of what is sacred -- can find space to open up our minds and illumine our lives

Namaste

please great your neighbor in silence with a simple folding of hands together before your heart, a smile and a slight bow.  This NAMASTE means “The Divine Light in me Honors the Divine Light in You”

Postlude -- Here comes the Sun!

(see next blog for full readings and the Sermon!)

The Blithedale Romance

Sacred Grove at Sadhana Forest

So, I've been away from blogging for a few weeks now and feeling a bit guilty about that.  


I know part of the reason for my absence has been because I've been thinking about a big complicated scholarly blog that I want to write about sacred groves and their cultural meaning.  This would be infused with my experience at the sacred grove in Sadhana, and the information I learned while there from a fascinating Tamil doctor of Siddha medicine who gave us a bio-heritage talk about sacred groves.  Dr. Thirunarayanan (say that 3 times fast) left me with his power point and pages of notes I took  during his enthralling lecture on the topic!  And all that's a little intimidating.  I mean, I can do it but I know to do it the way I want to do it (right) this will take hours.  


Since I've jumped with both feet back into my semester at PSU and am finding my non-teaching moments swamped with committee and planning meetings, this hasn't happened.  Weekends have been full of re-connecting with Michael, my mother, friends.  I guess I'm just not good at setting aside blog time, I confess.  Still, I love it and I miss it.  I WILL get to the sacred groves... just not this week, or the next.  But I am still thinking about FORESTS and INDIA, a lot.  Amidst other topics.  And I miss the simplicity of that life -- despite LOVING my job and all the good stuff I get to do!   Just to give you an idea...


This week I taught courses on Hinduism & Wife Burning in India (Sati), the Spanish Conquest of the Aztecs (Medieval Catholicism and Mexica cosmology), and on "How we teach values in the social studies classroom" (to my methods kids).  I gave a public talk on the history of Egpyt (focusing a lot on the Crusades from the Muslim perspective).  I taught a Sunday School class about Joshua Tumbling the Walls of Jericho ("is it right to kill in God's name?") and watched a movie about the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in the 19th century by American fruit robber barons (Damn Dole!).  I attended a great lecture on the White Mountain School, notions of the sublime in art, and health tourism. I spent hours emailing/planning a program to kick-off Women's History Month March 1st: a public reading of African American Women's Words (so I've been reading/researching poems and essays). I lectured on the non-carnal and cosmic spirituality of erotic temple sculpture and the advent of vernacular print capitalism in Uttar Pradesh (focusing on mass media, pornography and advertisements related aphrodisiacs).  This is alongside spending 5+ hours work for a new faculty search committee I'm on, or the other 6+ hours in other committee meetings and with students conferencing about their papers for my Sex and Empire class.  Topics there are interesting too, ranging from topics on British vs. Indian colonial concepts of obscenity, legislation concerning Age of Consent, prostitution, and conjugal rights, to the historic analysis of the Kamasutra and Victorian/Hindu views on homosexuality in late 19th century. WOW.  This is, by the way, a pretty typical week for me.

The point is, I think, that I've been putting off blogging (not only because like everyone else I meet these days, I'm busy) BUT because I've got 'performance anxiety' and I think I'm putting too much pressure on myself to blog.  So I've been avoiding.  Maybe even blocking. Who the heck knows, probably even PROJECTING... and an assortment of other unhealthy and unproductive things that psychologists have recently named in the last few decades! I'm doing them.


So instead of writing a long blog or a terribly interesting blog, I've decided to keep it (relatively) short and just check in about some things I've been thinking about.  Just in case anyone out there is still following this crazy blog thing I've kept since late December 2010, I want you to know I'm still here.  Originally, the purpose of this blog, of course, was to reflect on the WOODS and the idea of LIVING SIMPLY as I was preparing to take a group of my college students to India to live in the forest on a sustainability ashram.  Before departing, I was inspired by Thoreau and his Walden experience, but Sadhana was anything but silence and solitude.  We went, we lived, we came back -- overwhelmed and grateful for the indescribably intense experience.  There in the Indian forest, we were learning about permaculture and living in radical simplicity while exploring Indian culture, Hinduism and ideas related to spiritual ecology (which we had studied for a semester before).  We lived in community with 100 other seekers and we realized the challenges to that.  We visited temples and sacred groves and village shrines.  The trip went well -- more or less -- and last week my students gave a presentation to the campus that confirmed that indeed they had learned a lot and it was a worthy experience for them.  I should get a copy of the power point to post here (somehow) and share it with you.  They made me kinda proud!

Now, technically, I'm off the blogging hook, I guess.  The trip  is over. But, the thing is, I'm kinda hooked! I mean, I like having a platform to share my ideas about the sacred and the spiritual.  I like blogging.  And these ideas are still whirling around as I process what happened there and what it means for my own development (something I didn't get to focus a lot when I was 'supervising' everyone else's experience).  I like having a place to talk about nature and what the forest means to me.  With only 16 followers on this blog, I imagine that these topics might not be too hot or high priority to others but for some reason, the blog remains important to me.  Also, oddly enough, I see that since December 26th this blog has been viewed 792 times!  OH MY.


Now that's not so impressive to the REAL BLOGGERS but to me, that was sort of a delightful surprise. Okay, so at least half of those views are mine and 1/3 of those left over 'views' are thanks to Michael, my partner... but that leaves a few hundred views unaccounted for.  So I thank my 'followers' and the occasional good-times, fair-weather friends who check on me.  And I send out my love and gratitude.  
I guess I'll keep going, why not?


One reason to continue is that I'm trying to put together a lot of jumbled thoughts about transcendentalism, nature, and eco-spirituality for a service I'm facilitating at my "church" March 13th.  Providentally, I've been invited to coordinate the whole service on that Sunday, soup to nuts, as they say.  I even get to pick the theme/message and I am elated.  Not so much nervous as excited.  This is something I've wanted to do for a long time.  Heck, it is why I joined the Worship and Music committee, in large part.  And here it is.  My chance to say something meaningful and inspire other spiritual seekers.  Whoa.


And while I'm pretty excited about pursuing this theme of transcendentalism and eco-spirituality, I'm looking for ideas for music and readings and sermon topics so if you read this and you have some, email me! PRONTO.

Just to give you a little context for my service, I should explain that I attend a Unitarian Universalist fellowship in Plymouth, NH.  Ever heard of the UU's?  Don't call them, YoYo's, they get peevish.  Also, we say Fellowship, we don't say Church, 'cuz it isn't just Christians.  Everyone is welcome to seek their own truth and worship with us.  We've got guiding principals, for sure, but we avoid the dogma thing.  We don't try telling people what type of relationship they need to have with the Divine.  We don't write rule books, call people sinners or ask for confessions.  That's between you and the cosmos.  I guess that's one reason it appeals to a broad spectrum of spiritual people, and I dig it.


Also, here in Plymouth, we have an incredible congregation of well-read, well-traveled, good- hearted folks from various faith traditions (Jewish, Buddhist, Catholic, Episco, pagan, athiest, etc.).  The congregation is, overall, highly conscientious and active when it comes to promoting issues related to social justice and the environment.  People are civicly minded and globally aware.  We quote scriptures from all over the world, from all times, and we recognize there were a lot of wise sages besides J.C. and the Boys.  We are a "welcoming congregation" that means we welcome everyone to worship regardless of gender (trans-included), socio-economic class, creed, race, ethnicity, and/or sexual orientation.  And we say that, really clearly, at the beginning of each service.  I love that.

UU symbol of faith: chalice with flame in the middle.  The flame can symbolize witness, sacrifice, testing, courage, and illumination.  It means different things to different beholders!

I grew up Episcopal but think I was always sort of UU (even when I was in love with Jesus) because I love the global, liberal, progressive way UU's think.  Jesus is a fine and beautiful being, maybe Divine, maybe not.  Who knows?  What is sacred is his message.  That being said, he isn't the only truth and his path is not the only path.  At least, that is what I've come to believe.  And I'm okay with others not believing that.  I don't think they'll burn in hell or suffer eternal damnation or be miserable forever.  Unitarian Universalism is so tolerant, open minded and highly inclusive.  It makes room for everyone, no matter where they are in their spiritual journey.  If you haven't checked it out, check out wikipedia for some basics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism

UU's are proud of the fact that their roots run deep in the New England soil.  We acknowledge the transcendalists as our intellectual/spiritual forefathers -- and being a lover of Thoreau, Emerson, and Fuller, this gives me warm fuzzies.  A lot of what I have been thinking about in the last few months has been wrapped up in ideas about transcendentalism and nature so I thought it might be best to do a Sunday service on all this jazz.  One might even say I feel called to do it.  But that's a whole other bucket of worms...


So I thought, why not channel this love of the wild and the spirit into a sermon?  I might use my recent experience/research on Indian ecological spirituality and combine my wisdom of Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, the Mother, and Sri Aurobindo?!  Why the heck not?

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) novelist, early feminist, transcendentalist

Questions still arise for me about what this stuff all means, even having read about the late 19th century in America for years.  What did they want? These young naturalists and idealists who waxed poetic about a life less driven by consumption and the evils of an industrial/materialist/capitalist society?  They dreamed of a UTOPIA where people didn't feel so alienated from their labor and from each other.  They asked important questions that we should still be asking today.  How do the choices we make about the lives we lead here in this temporal plane shape our spirituality?  What lessons, if any, can we learn from the sages who opted out of this rat race (for communes, or ashrams, or cooperative socialist experiments?) -- or from those who opted for a life less driven by individualism and hedonism?  Many sages in India, America and Britain were writing books, letters, essays and novels in that period that suggested we might escape the spell of this wicked world and transcend into a higher consciousness.  Sounds like a bargain -- or is it a pipe dream?


What does it mean to be transcendental?


What did the transcendentalists of the late 19th century (both in New England and India) seek?


Why didn't they find it?  Can anyone?


My buddy/colleague, Rebecca Noel, who is a US historian specializing in the 19th century (my favorite century), also attends the UU fellowship.  Her office is also next door to mine at the university and she has an amazing collection of books on the period and the T. movement.  Last week, she loaned me a slew of Margaret Fuller books and also Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Blithedal Romance (based on the Utopian community that existed at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, MA) to help me prepare.  I found out about Brook Farm last year when I did a performance at the UU fellowship as Maggy herself!  I also used to live in West Roxbury and never knew this community existed there in the 1840's.  


The edition Becky gave me of the Blithesdale Romance is impressive.  What I love about this version, the Bedford Cultural Edition, is that in addition to Hawthorne's Novel, the book has several essays from the period to give the story context.  Woot! I drink up Primary Sources.  There are essays by famous social reformers, abolitionists, spiritualists and thinkers in the period -- Karl Marx, Theodore Parker, and William Lloyd Garrison.  There are essays with ideas about living in community from Utopianists and/or people who visited Brook Farm, like Robert Owen, Ralph W. Emerson, Joseph Smith and Louisa May Alcott.   Not to mention additional essays from Hawthorne and Fuller, herself!

Hawthorne was a founding member of Brooke Farm and lived there in 1841.
He wrote Scarlett Letter in 1850 and died in PLYMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE in 1864.

From an early age I've been interested in the idea of Utopia.  When I was 8 or 9 I created one, on paper, called MORGANIA.  It had a complex social system, agrarian infrastructure and benevolent monarchical governance hierarchy.  I created a language for my land, spending months filling notebook pages with basic English words and their Morganian translations.  I drew intricate maps of the island where the kingdom existed, with explicit details as if from memory.  I even invented a cosmology and theology, based around a omniscient and beneficent magical unicorn deity named, of course, MORGAN.  This may have all happened a year or two before I read the Narnia Chronicles series but I was not surprised to learn that other magical kingdoms like mine had been invented when I later met C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. When I got to university I wanted to 'figure out' what was the most fair and efficient economic and political system, so I read everything I could about that  -- and in graduate school I started reading Fourier, Owen, and Marx.  Even part of me now longs for a Brook Farm experience, as short lived and unsuccessful as I know it was. And that's saying a lot having survived, recently, a challenging experience of 'living in community' for three weeks in the woods in India.  I'm curious to see if some of the same issues that plagued our experiment in Sadhana may have also reared their heads at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, MA.

I'm curious about the Blithedale Romance because I understand that Hawthorne was a member of the community (Blithedale = Brook Farm) and then wrote the novel, mostly as satire. He left the community before the end of one full year -- he greatly disliked the physical labor and he held some of the people he met there in contempt, despite respecting their ideals.  He based the character, Zenobia, they say, on Margaret Fuller.  Her pride is much an issue in the novel.  He loves her spirit but criticizes her ego.  She has a disastrous end (the real one and the Zenobia in the book).  I think Hawthorne may have something to say here about EGO and its dangers...


If anyone reading this blog has read this novel, please pipe up and put in your two cents!  Mixed metaphor, sorry.  Here's a quick plot summary for those of you who are unfamiliar:


Abjuring the city for a pastoral life, a group of utopians set out to reform a dissipated America. But the group is a powerful mix of competing ambitions and its idealism finds little satisfaction in farmwork. Instead, of changing the world, the members of the Blithedale community individually pursue egotistical paths that ultimately lead to tragedy. Hawthorne's tale both mourns and satirizes a rural idyll not unlike that of nineteenth-century America at large.  
http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/blithedale_romance/

and this one... also none too cheery... from a book review on Amazon

Brook Farm was only the best-recorded of the many utopian communities founded in the USA in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. Some of them were based on religious enthusiasms, some were philosophical, but several were essentially built around pre-Marxian communism. Brook Farm was launched as a joint stock commune of philosophical bent and evolved in a few years into a rigid socialism that disappointed "free spirits" among its founders. Hawthorne was in fact one of the founders and a member of the board, so to speak, but he withdrew in dismay after less than a year. Literary scholars of the 20th C have tended to treat Hawthorne as a "conservative" who rejected social and political reform. In 'Blithedale', the 'reformer' Hollingsworth is a man of talent and integrity who is 'diminished' by his reform monomania. But the 'anti-reformer' Coverdale, the failed poet narrator, is equally diminished by his inability to commit his talents and energies to anything worthwhile. Hawthorne himself was a study in ambivalence and irresolution, as peculiar and variable as any of his characters. 
http://www.amazon.com/Blithedale-Romance-Nathaniel-Hawthorne/


Well... I've got Blithedale and I've got these delicious essays for the weekend.  


I'm like a kid in the candy store.  And because I spent most of today (a snow day) catching up on emails and other 'responsible' things, I think I'll spend all day tomorrow reading this great novel and some of the juicy essays in this collection.  Whoopee!  And maybe I'll come to find some more answers to my questions...
  
What is a Utopia?  Why do we seek Utopia and is "out there" or "in us"?


What is dystopia? 


Does living in community (like Sadhana or Brook Farm) bring us closer to Utopia?  Closer to ourselves?

In addition to reading Hawthorne, I have also been re-reading Walden, Walden II (by Skinner) and a funny novel entitled "Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ;s Childhood Pal" (just to keep the balance). Gotta laugh too!


I find that the best sermons our Minister, Sarah, gives are those well researched, historical, intense/sincere, personal, funny and philosophical, with a dose of good practical example.  So maybe I can find something worthwhile in these pages and in reflection.  Let's see.


The fire crackles in my stove, our pooch is snoring curled up on the couch between us.  Snow falls gently.  The trees in my wood are mystical white as the sun sets.  I miss the green and lush tropical evergreen forest.  But I'm happy.  Michael is here with me.  He is also jealous that I am hogging the Blithedale Romance and all these essays about the 19th century -- he eyes my stack covetously -- he is a sucker for the transcendent.  


Still, he knows the answers to my questions without reading any of this.


He'd tell me our  UTOPIA IS RIGHT HERE, BABY.  And he is probably right.


At least this weekend, he is.