First Parish Sermon Archive

(Note from the author: In recent years, by request, I have given one sermon a year that I
have given in Wayland before. This year’s (below) can be found in Perspectives, a collection
of some of my early sermons in Wayland, copies of which are still available.)The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.
Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.
They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.
Robert Frost, “In Hardwood Groves”

To be religious — some people take that to be a negative phrase. Oh, he’s so religious always butting into people’s lives; holier than thou, don’t you know; counts rosary beads all the time; spends all her spare time polishing the church silver. Religious type, you know? Always has an answer from the Bible for everything, always talking about sin and the devil.

Not all of that is negative, one understands. There is even at times some envy built in,
or nostalgia, even something akin to admiration. And I sincerely hope I bear no ill will or
disrespect toward those who find in conventional forms of piety their souls’ contentment and sustenance.

But I would like to suggest that there are other ways of being religious, and that one
way is simply this: to recognize and appreciate and hold with loving hands the sacred things of this life — the green and vital and growing things, the brown and aged and dying things, a child, a loved one, a stranger, a parent, openness and innocence, tenderness and self transcending love, a bloom, a seed, a mountain range, a finely turned vase, a finely turned phrase of music, the courage of conscience confronting injustice, the warm silent depth of a relationship long nurtured. To stand transfixed before the ocean, the hills, a lover, a friend, and to sense a profundity in that moment, a sense past words of being in the presence of not just something else, but of something more — this, too, is to be religious.

This is no less than what sent earlier folks into talk of the indwelling divine or of God
incarnate throughout Creation, breaking through at those moments with the revelation of his glory. Those terms were natural ways of expression at one time as they are not to many in ours. If you take God for granted, as was done for most of western history, statements about God are ways of talking about life; they point beyond themselves. God’s existence being assumed, the word becomes transparent, a tautologism. If the existence of God becomes the issue, people may only hear the word and want to argue about it, with nobody understanding what anyone else is saying because the variety of Gods to be believed in or rejected is so vast. God as a word becomes opaque, its own use the subject of debate, and few peer long enough to see what a person is trying to talk about.

So we may be wary about talk of standing in the presence of the transcendent. But
what then shall we say? We still need to talk about those special times — when for at least a moment the confining, self-conscious boxes of our egos fall like tissue paper and we truly sense, without mediation, the wonder of something out there.

I find that there are terms in our theological handbag I still cannot do without; “sacred”
is one of them. The moments I’m talking about are sacred, times when we are in the presence of that which commands our reverence or awe (those are all terms I mean to keep), when something breaks through the glom, the haze, the fog through which we move day by day, reaches through our routines and defenses, grabs us by our scrawny necks and yells, “Hey! I matter more than whatever it is you’re doing. I matter more than that report, than that TV show, than that worry you’re stewing about It may even be that I am what life is all about, that in me you may find some hint as to what the whole thing adds up to.”

Sacred. Wonder-full. Leaf mold. I love leaf mold. Comes autumn (if you haven’t
noticed), the leaves turn color, fall off and land on the ground. If they have the misfortune to fall on a part of the earth immediately surrounding the home of an American middle class family, they have intruded upon something called “lawn” and stand a fair chance of being put in plastic bags and buried in some public facility with clorox containers and dog food cans. But most wi1l land within the woods, or be put there by those other middle class Americans, equally defendant of those places called their lawns, who have woods convenient to dump their leaves in and thereby save the cost of plastic bags and the trip to the local public facility. If the leaves do end up in the public facility, the story ends there, in that the plastic bag, if properly sealed and not damaged in transit or burial, will provide (one is told) a virtually timeless vault insuring that the leaves never do any good for anyone ever again.

If they end up on the forest floor, however, they rot. This also happens in compost
heaps. They return to that whence they came, in a way more literal than is true of humans in recent centuries. We return people to the earth, but not, insofar as can be eternally prevented, to earth itself. The leaves less begrudgingly, more gracefully restore the elements that fed the tree they shortly before adorned. To dirt they soon turn. If you have somehow never dug down through the layered leaves to view their return to earth, deep, rich earth, that is your assignment before lunch: to seek out a nice, deep blanket of oak or maple or beech leaves and dig down to the mold beneath, leaves made dirt; and then a forest floor deep with pine needles, and plunge your hand down into it. It’s good for the soul.

It’s good for my own soul, anyway. Along with the ocean and the woods themselves
and some other things I listed earlier, leaf mold has the power to provoke in me a response that maybe deserves to be called worship. Maybe that’s what worship is, in some part: being brought into contact with those things that speak most deeply to one’s heart, that touch on matters of ultimate faith. And surely leaf mold may do nothing for you but get your hands dirty; then find the thing, the place, the activity that does it best for you. Church services, incidentally, one likes to hope, at least occasionally function as worship in that sense, calling forth in us a depth of appreciation for the wonders of life and a renewed aspiration to personal lives more aligned with the holy things of life — more loving, more supportive, less distracted, more firmly grounded, more in touch with that which is not mere fashion or fancy but which persists from generation to generation, upon which one’s hope and faith may be grounded.

Let me offer a warning, though, if you are going to go out and find a spot bare of
snow, or brush aside the icy crystals, and plunge in a hand and rummage about. When I
talked about this topic with the Sunday School, I came prepared with a basin of genuine
parsonage leaf mold, pedagogically marvelous, of course — except that when I went
rummaging about to come up with something in all that dark brown dead stuff that would in the spring be reborn to life anew, I managed to locate and hold up for their edification the impressively long and tenacious root of the poison ivy which I then got between my fingers.

The thing about leaf mold is not just what it does in itself, this process of deterioration
by which both the world is rid of its annual crop of leaves, which otherwise by now would have covered the earth past hope of human habitation, and by which the soil is rejuvenated and enriched and made more suitable for further growth by other trees and shrubs. That’s miraculous in itself, it seems to me, but even more, in some crucial way it stands for realities about the nature of the world

More than just being aesthetically satisfying, leaf mold serves for me as a religiously
profound symbol, as the ocean does too, as the crucifix does no doubt for others — as a
symbol that embodies and expresses a central truth about the worshipper’s understanding of how things are. The comparison is not accidental, in that both that worshipper’s crucifix and my leaf mold speak, among other things to each of us, about death and how it fits into some larger perspective. And in neither case is the worshipper’s understanding of the reality being appreciated adequately expressed in literal statements, propositions and dicta.

The crucifix, I fantasize, carries the message for my imaginary partner of reassurance
that death is acceptable, along with some implicit guidance about how then to conduct one’s life. So, too, for me, although the reassurance comes not from the remembrance of the Lord’s sacrifice on the cross that all who believe in him might have eternal life with the father in heaven, but in the remembrance of realities that seem to me to represent just as well the structure of reality. For both of us the whole scheme of things is captured in, represented by, our respective symbols. His may remind him that the ultimate reality is a God apart who, estranged from the world, redeemed it by the sacrificial death on the cross of God incarnate, winning for the believer eternal life in heaven. Mine reminds me of that reality which to me is ultimate and encompassing: the natural world and its processes — life and death, growth and decay, individuation and continuity.

For this is life, this dead brown stuff, “life” as I sometimes try to use it here, life not as
that thing opposed to death but as that larger reality that includes both life and death, that
continuity of which we as individuals are a part, as are the birds and the slugs and the moss. One of my two points with the children was our good old Easter pitch that out of seeming death, life yet arises. I figure it is never too early to start giving them the good news. What I did not do there, I am doing now — pushing the death motif a final step. The point is not just that out of what looks dead some things retain the mystical power of dormancy — that seeds here lie, little capsules that after sitting brown and inert in the ice-cold earth will spring out into (oh, no!) yet another buckthorn, four foot tall by next October. No, the point goes even further. It goes to the heart of death itself, past dormancy to death, to that brown stuff here that looks so dead because it is dead and will not be green and miraculous in the spring. That time comes too, and death that part of life goes on, incorporating into itself what was once life and shall be again, as life and death their timeless dance of yin and yang proceed, each reliant on the other.

That’s just one message the rotting leaves evince. No less than the crucifix which along
with its reassurance speaks related messages about suffering and other things — so too my
leaf mold has other thoughts to provoke. With the children, for my main message I used leaf mold as a metaphor for the things we do for other people, our parents and friends and
teachers and others. For while it isn’t always clear that the nice things we do amount to
anything at all — and often nobody makes any fuss over the fact that we did them, or
sometimes even seems to care — those nice things are like the leaves which the trees produce and in the autumn let fall to the earth. They nourish the soil, just as the nice things we do nourish the soil of those around us. Where there are no leaves to fall, I pointed out, the soil is not very fertile, and trees and shrubs have a hard time growing. But the leaves as they rot make the soil rich, which helps the other trees grow healthy and strong — just as we help people, and give them that kind of soil, rich in kindness and understanding, when we do nice things for them. And as the trees around us grow healthy and strong, they produce more leaves that enrich our own soil, and our whole part of the forest thrives. (I’m not sure I laid it on that thick, but I may well have. We keep trying to find ways to draw out their compassion and consideration.)

That point, too, can be pushed a step further. Culture is like the leaf mold, the rich soil
available to our roots as they stretch down into our past to find beauty and inspiration to
enlighten and beautify and sustain us in our days, laid down for us as a gift by those who
have died, just as we shall leave behind us the works that later souls shall probe in search of insight and inspiration and wisdom.

Turning it around slightly, our own lives may be seen reflected in the process the trees
go through in feeding on themselves — in effect, in drawing strength and vitality from the
processed product of previous years. We, too, feed on our own pasts: our roots take
nourishment, our lives seek for strength and vitality, in the soil of a past enriched by the
experiences of seasons gone by — or not enriched but impoverished by the paucity of our
efforts so far, or by our failure to process those layers of past mistakes and successes into the well rotted, well digested humus called wisdom that comes of time and reflection. We are not born new every morning, any more than society must begin from scratch each day. Our life as a people is rooted in a cultural heritage, and our own lives are rooted in the wealth of our past experience, the leaves produced in seasons past on our out-stretching limbs, just as today from us comes the crop that in future years our roots shall probe in search of sources of strength and vitality.

And the reason, I contend in conclusion, that leaf mold works so conveniently as a
metaphor for a variety of disparate points is because it does embody a reality that is central to the structure of the world, a truth about continuity that to me has sacred import, has a religious dimension that informs my understanding of life and death, of the purpose of life, of the nature of reality. Life dies in order that life may live. The present feeds upon the past. “However it is in some other world/I know that this is the way in ours.”

May life its reassuring power your days inspire, and may your efforts draw new vigor
from the knowledge that, whatever else may fail and fade, forever writ upon the face
of this globe shall be all acts of mercy and of justice, of courage and of love. Amen.