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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 21, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
If you were planted, what would grow? What is left in a room when you leave the room? What is left in a group when the group scatters? What would be left here on Earth when you leave?
Call to Worship
by May Sarton
Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.
Meditation Reading
THE GARDENER 85
by Rabindrahnath Tagore
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden… gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
Sermon
Long ago and far away, I went on a pastoral visit to an old man in the hospital. Mr. Hatcher had a career as a civil rights and social justice activist, retiring from being the head of Piedmont Community Action, bringing the Head Start program to the county and improving hospital transportation for marginalized communities. In the back of the house was a deep gulley, covered in brush and poison ivy. He started puttering in the yard, and gradually overspilled the yard and began clearing out the gulley. “By that time, I was burned out on trying to solve human problems, and I took to the woods, where I could have a little more control over my environment and my friends the plants.” Thirty years later it was a ten acre garden open to the public. He had always told me he hoped his life would end before his legs gave out. “I always wanted to live to 95, he said, ” but living to 90 has made me think about changing my mind.” I took him a big sprig of rosemary from my garden, so he’d have something from the outside in his room. He held it to his nose and smelled deeply. “Ah, that rosemary really pulls its weight.”
He was himself a seed, you see, starting small, making his way through obstacles, a centimeter at a time, gathering helpers slowly. “I find an ugly spot and make it a beauty spot.” He said.
If you were a seed, what would grow from you?
Theologian Howard Thurman wrote “Do not ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
We all know of people who started small and made a big difference. 16 year old Greta Thunberg started Friday Climate Protests in Sweden, and now she speaks all over the world. She starts her speech with “I’m Greta Thunberg, and I want you to panic.”
There is Yacouba Sawadogo, a man in Burkina Faso, who began planting trees to stop the desertification of his country. There is Kate Sessions, a botanist and horticulturalist in the late 1800’s who lived in San Diego. She did research and found trees all over the world that would grow in that dry climate, and she planted them there in San Diego. You can see the results of her efforts… it’s called Balboa Park. People have started great businesses in garages and kitchens. A publishing company started up and revitalized the town I lived in in upstate South Carolina. It started when a few friends were having coffee one morning. They wrote some words on a napkin. Now they publish amazing literature by Southern writers. A whole town now thinks of itself as a writers’ town. It’s not only starting something small, we carry beginnings within us like seeds.
We can be a seed in nearly every interaction. You have had people who have been an inspiration to you, who have said encouraging words that energized you. You have had interactions with people that discouraged you. You’ve read a line in a poem, a novel, a Scripture verse, you’ve heard lyrics of a song that made you stop short and say “I never heard it put that way…”
Here are some seeds that blossomed in me and changed my thinking. One was a teacher named Byron Katie, who said “We suffer when our thoughts argue with reality.”
One was in a 12 step meeting, when someone said “what other people think of me is none of my business.”
We can plant a seed of discouragement too: In my experience, someone bustling up and saying in an impatient voice “here, let me help you with that” can be nice, or it can communicate a lack of belief in your capability. In my Southern family, one way to sweetly diminish someone is by use of the word “little.” How’s that little project of yours coming?’ “How’s your little job?”
To be encouraging you might say something like “You’ve got this,” “You know what to do.”
“I’m right here if you need me.”
Some people are gifted at inspiring others to think, or to be courageous. If you look up the 10 most inspiring speeches, you get famous people saying things like “never give up, define success for yourself, make the world better, joy is always in process, it’s always under construction (Matthew Mconaughey) and Yoda “Do or do not. There is no try.” Which makes absolutely no sense to me. Then, of course, the ultimate inspire-er, (also fictional,) Coach Taylor, who wins, in my opinion, with “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”
I’m not saying that you have to be Coach Taylor every day as you move through your life. I’m saying this. We’ve all watched CSI enough to know about Locard’s Exchange Princple, which says that wherever you go you leave traces behind. Fibers, fluids, skin cells, words, feelings. “every contact leaves a trace.” Some of us are carriers of anxiety. We worry so much, and we worry when other people aren’t worried enough, so we agitate them a bit so their foreheads are more rumpled when we leave them. Some carry laughter, some carry a listening presence. Some people carry peace. You just feel better when they’ve been around. Some are calming, some are strengthening. Some carry love. After interactions with them, you know you are loved, and you can love more. These are little things, the size of a seed sometimes.
Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Some of you have touched so many lives. You have been teachers, coaches, you’ve been in business with people, you have co-workers, you’ve had family and interacted with strangers. You may never know what seeds you’ve planted. You may have a student communicate with you and tell you years later what something you said meant to their lives. If you have had such a teacher, or such an interaction, think about making contact with that person to let them know.
Letter to Agnes De Mille from Martha Graham
There is a vitality,
a life force,
a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.And If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine
how good it is
nor how valuable it is
nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly
to keep the channel open….
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