Midweek Faith Lift
April 25, 2018
The Earth is the Heart
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Good Morning and Happy Earth Day! This is the day that we celebrate and honor Mother Earth and all that she embodies for us. It is a day to pause and reflect how we can honor her all the other 364 days of the year and begin to live in harmony, in relationship with the earth again. Our individual and collective journey on this planet is such a short duration when we look at the life of the planet. We treat the earth as the place that we live, not as someone with whom we live. As we celebrate Earth Day, what we are really doing is celebrating our relationship with the Earth, our Mother. We are shifting from Earth as object to earth as subject. We don’t live ON the earth, we live in sacred relationship with the earth, heart to heart.
The genesis of this talk came to me in the realization that the word heart is an anagram for the word earth. Just move the “h” and you change the word from heart to earth. Somehow that really got me! Because I also believe the heart is the earth, our deep connection to the earth. And the earth is also the heart. To me that is what it means to be grounded, anchored, “earthy” if you want to call it that. I describe it as “keeping it real.” The Native American tradition teaches that the Earth is the heart. When we drum on Wednesdays, there is the Mother Drum, the deepest drum that resonates with the heartbeat of the earth. Drumming is a sacred ritual that connects us to the heartbeat of the earth and to our own heartbeat, our own “earthiness.”
Then a song that came to me in the shower of course, at the start of April, which we are calling Earth Month here at Unity of Ames. It goes like this:
I am One with the Heart of the Mother, I am One with the Heart of Love, I am One with the Heart of the Mother, I am One with God.
Sing it with me:
I am One with the Heart of the Mother, I am One with the Heart of Love, I am One with the Heart of the Mother, I am One with God.
I am One with the Heart of the Mother, I am One with the Heart of Love. Hmmm….this is a song about Oneness, but most of the time, I live with a sense of disconnect, more a sense of myself as a thinking being than as natural, sensual, earthy, embodied being. I relate through language, talking and listening, watching the facial expressions of others when they talk and when I talk. I listen to their tone of voice to see if it matches what they are saying. I want to be fully present to what they are saying and feeling. I want to be fully present to what I am saying and feeling in my body. When I am in relationship with someone I want it to be an embodied experience. I want it to be more than a “head trip.” I want our hearts to open to one another and to touch. That is what I strive for in my relationships with others, with you, with my loved ones and with myself. But I don’t always succeed in this and neither do they.
When we come at this earth day from the perspective of relationship, then the question becomes, how do we show up in this relationship? And how does Mother Earth show up? Are we really listening to each other from the heart? Lately she has been showing up with a lot of snow and cold when my heart has been longing for sunshine, warmth and real Spring weather. So lately, I have been pretty frustrated and irritated with Mother Earth because she won’t give me what I want! How’s that for a good 4-year-old consciousness? Works for me! I have to admit that in this relationship with Mother Earth, I don’t always show up like a grown up, but more like a whiney toddler, or an ungrateful teenager. Hmmmm……How patient is Mother Earth?
We are in relationship with Mother Earth, but she doesn’t talk, not in words anyway. So how DO we form this relationship? It is not even like the relationships we have with our pets, because I know they “talk” to us, right? They whine, and meow and bark and jump on things to get our attention and to get what they want. They watch our moods and they check on us to see how we are doing. They do all of that without “talking” in the human sense of it. And they actively love us. It is a full-body experience. If you have more than one pet, then you know that they truly do love each other because they groom each other and they groom us. We cuddle them, we hold them, we touch them and feed them and bathe them. We allow them to get very close, to sniff us and sit in our laps, lick us and make us part of their tribe. We are clearly in relationship with our pets and it happens through mind and heart and body.
It is this last one, the body, that seems to me to be the deepest link to our relationship with Mother Earth. We are told early on in our evolutionary journey that we as bodies come from the earth and that we will return to the earth again. It is in Genesis:
Genesis 3:19 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
19 By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
We are spirit embodied in the dust of the earth and when we die, we return to the earth. Meanwhile, we live in this body, in relationship with our body. We have tried really hard to ignore that by ignoring our bodies or even more debilitating, having shame and hating our bodies because they don’t live up to some standard of beauty or strength. We have worked hard to deny our bodily experiences, or we have gone to the other extreme, savoring them and seeking pleasurable experiences with the goal of avoiding all pain. The truth is that the human embodied self, experiences pain and pleasure in this journey of life on planet earth. It is through the heart that we connect to each other in these experiences. In the midst of great challenges and sorrow, we don’t say we are “broken brained”; we are broken-hearted. That is our earthiness speaking, our embodied self, speaking.
Finding harmony in this embodied relationship with pleasure and pain is a huge part of our life lesson. The message of Jesus is that he and we are an embodiment of Spirit and we can live in a dynamic harmony within mind, body and Spirit. Even in the face of human suffering, bodily suffering, love is present, the heart is present and we are connected to each other.
This week in his meditation, Reuniting Our Separated Selves on Tuesday, April 17, 2018, he quotes John O’Donahue and says the following:
The body is a sacrament . . . a visible sign of invisible grace. . . . All our inner life and intimacy of soul longs to find an outer mirror. It longs for a form in which it can be seen, felt, and touched. The body is the mirror where the secret world of the soul comes to expression. The body is a sacred threshold; and it deserves to be respected, minded, and understood in its spiritual nature. . . . The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. —John O’Donohue
As it says in I Corinthians:
1 Corinthians 6:19 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?
Rohr goes on to say:
How we relate to one thing is probably how we relate to everything. How we relate sexually to ourselves and others is a good teacher for how we relate to God (and how we relate to God is an indicator of how we will relate to everything else). Religion, as its root re-ligio (to “re-ligament”) indicates, is the task of putting our divided realities back together: human and divine, male and female, heaven and earth, sin and salvation, mistake and glory, matter and spirit. This is the task of every human life. (Rohr, April 17, 2018)
So on this Earth Day, 2018, I sit with the question of how do I put the divided realities in my life back together. How do I see and experience the wholeness in myself, that my thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs and my body temple are all part of the same whole, all part of God. When I can grasp that, I can begin to grasp what it means to live in harmony with the earth, to live from my heart. This isn’t about being politically correct, it is about cultivating the willingness to understand that we are all part of the same whole and that what we do to one another we also do to ourselves. It means we cultivate healthy boundaries with others; boundaries that recognize the wholeness of each of us even when the other person does not see the whole.
It means that we cultivate a consciousness of being a creature that has consciousness. And it is our consciousness that informs how we live in relationship with this earth from which our bodies have come. We stop trying to “get rid” of our human nature and recognize that we are a real part of nature. We live from our heart, which is our most direct connection to the earth. We seek to experience our heart connections with the whole of creation and we stop seeing others through the narrow lens of “part”—oh you’re a part of “that” group, so you are not ok, you are not with me. When we only relate to parts instead of wholes, we can make terrible mistakes, and we all do this in one way or another.
Being in loving relationship with the earth asks us to live from the heart. When we can find our way to that, we will stop hurting ourselves, we will stop hurting one another and we will stop hurting the earth. It will be a huge shift in consciousness, and on this Earth Day, or Heart Day, 2018, we are called to live from the Heart on this Earth.
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb