“Landscapes of Faith”

Two of my favorite hymns, “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” and “O Beautiful For Spacious Skies” were written in response to inspiring landscapes, specifically the Berkshire mountains and the Colorado Rocky mountains and Pike’s Peak in particular.  For myself, I have always turned to the natural environment for inspiration, renewal, sustenance, and the peace that passes all understanding.  Throughout my life, going to the mountains, staying at a lake or seaside cabin, walking a beach, being in the woods, these activities and more have been part of the sustaining fabric of my life.

Often, when I lead a graveside service, it is the psalms which call on God’s presence through the natural environment that seem to offer comfort and sustenance for grieving persons.  The psalmist cries out in Psalm 121 “I lift up my eyes to the hills, from where will my help come?”  The belief that spiritual restoration, healing and nurture are found in the natural environment is rooted not only in our passion for vacations and getaways, but also in the therapeutic understandings tracing back to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.  Mental health hospitals and substance abuse treatment centers have been built for centuries in places of exquisite natural beauty.  Carl Jung himself built a stone house by hand on the shores of Lake Geneva.  He was convinced that he could always count on the beauty and tranquility of his lakeside

residence to anchor him through the storms and challenges of his own personal and professional life.

So the idea that God can be found in the beauties of nature or that healing can come from the external landscape of the natural world is nothing new.  Jesus himself seemed to have a great instinct for finding  the  places  of natural beauty and solitude for

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respite and renewal.  The Gospel accounts tell of him going up into the hills, going down to the seashore, wading out into the Jordon River, retreating for forty days into the desert wilderness.  He seems to me to be a person very much at home in the natural world.  It is amazing when you stop to think about it, how much of his ministry of healing, teaching, and preaching takes place outdoors.  And as the construction activities here at Dennis Union escalate over the coming months, we may have to give serious thought to out door alternatives.  Our Sunday school leads the way in this area.

I suspect that most of us here can give account of particular landscapes that have inspired and sustained us.  Many of us live here on Cape Cod because of the natural beauty of this region.  Some of us buy our homes and plan our lives to be near a particular beach, a particular sunset or sunrise we yearn for on a daily basis.  How many of us feel close to God from the deck of a boat, the top of a mountain, in the depths of a rain forest.

When I served the Congregational church in Bristol, RI, we hosted a delegation of pastors and elders from the Presbytery of South Korea.  All of the visitors took a two day trip to visit Niagara Falls.  Their theological perspective emphasizes the grandeur of God in the magnificence of these great water falls.  To come to America and not seek God’s witness at Niagara Falls was unthinkable for our South Korean brothers in the faith.  A short anecdote about our visit with our Korean friends:  After sharing coffee and dessert with them, we had a hymn sing together.  Their favorite hymn was “Jesus Loves Me”, a hymn which Reinhold Niebuhr once claimed summed up the whole of the Christian faith.  But they did not sing it sweetly.    They  sang  so  boldly  that  we

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thought they might truly raise the slate roof of our old church parish house.

My friend the Rev. Katrina Clinton spent her Sabbatical last summer exploring the “thin places” she had learned about in America.  She packed up her camper and traveled from Maine to Alaska.  Celtic spirituality defines a thin place as a place where the material world is only thinly separated from the spiritual.  Celtic spirituality believes that the life of heaven is inseparably woven into the life of earth.  God is the Life within all life, the Light within all light.  Shafts of that divine light penetrate the thin veil that divides heaven from earth.  (Celtic Prayers from Iona, J. Philip Newell, Paulist Press, NY. p.7)

Katrina traveled throughout America getting to know persons who believed they lived in such a thin place, a place made sacred by its history, its beauty, its relationship to its inhabitants.  Katrina is a gifted photographer and she has captured thousands of images which tell the story of God’s handiwork and presence.

Recently she led a deacon’s retreat for the Rehoboth Congregational Church at my home on Hundred Acre Cove in Rhode Island.  I am happy to report that the shores of Hundred Acre Cove are part of her thin place exhibit.

Two weeks ago twelve women from Dennis Union Church gathered at the home of Tony Coccio and Jane Springer.  Part of our retreat was dedicated to walking meditation on the beach, learning the gentle art of going deeper within ourselves to seek God’s presence in our lives.  I suspect that each of us could readily identify places in our own lives that are such thin places.

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But I think we also know that landscape does not always bring us closer to God. A therapist at Butler Psychiatric Hospital in Providence, RI once commented that the beauty of the environment and buildings at Butler is often not experienced by patients struggling with acute mental illness.  I once visited a person who had been released from a long stay at a state mental hospital, one not known for natural or architectural beauty.  I asked about the environment.  Had it been difficult to live there?  “Oh no, not at all,” replied my friend.  “You don’t notice your surroundings when your mind is in a state of such turmoil.  After I was well, I was grateful to have been in a place where I was safe.” 

Today I’d like to suggest that while we can’t always be in an external landscape that strengthens our faith and brings us closer to God, we can still find God by cultivating the landscape of our own soul.  The external landscape of the world which we see day to day, hour by hour, is in part determined by the internal landscape of our own state of being.

Again we see this in many ways in Jesus’ ministry.  Jesus does not see the world in the same terms that others see it.  Where the disciples see the nuisance of children trying to get close to Jesus, Jesus sees the blessings of the presence of little ones and instructs all who will listen that the kingdom of God will only come to those who try to be like children.   When Jesus and his disciples retreat to a place alone for a while and the crowds persist and pursue them, the disciples experience fatigue, anxiety, and the scarcity of resources.  Not so with Jesus.  He tells them calmly to take their five loaves and two fish and feed the  five  thousand  hungry  persons.    The  internal  landscape  of

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Jesus’ reality is always different from the reality we expect.  Where we see scarcity, Jesus sees abundance.  Where we see poverty, Jesus sees faith. Where we see disease, Jesus sees wholeness.

The challenge for us is to see what Jesus sees and begin to replant the inner landscape of our own internal world.  How can we learn to see glasses that are half empty as also being half full?  This, my friends, is perhaps the greatest challenge of the Christian life.

First a couple of common sense approaches.  A friend of mine teaches a special class of junior high school girls.  The girls are considered high risk, kids with a pretty strong history of emotional problems, problems with self discipline, problems with acting out, problems of not doing well in school.  As their teacher, Karen is expected to help them begin to have better social skills, better study and work habits, better learning, better grades. 

A tall order when you can’t get into such a class without first being in considerable trouble in life.  The class has a code word.  It’s “halt”.  HALT.  Every time you are about to lose your temper, you stop, you halt, and you ask yourself, “What’s going on with me right now?  H, am I hungry?  A, am I angry?   L, am I lonely?  T, am I tired?  If any one of these things is true, then I must halt and address that need before proceeding.   I won’t be able to function appropriately if I am hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.  No sense blaming anyone else.  These are things I can do something about.  Not a bad approach for any of us, I think.  And what a responsible way to change our own inner landscape!  The whole world looks bleak through a lens of hunger or anger, or being lonely or tired.

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My second common sense approach comes from the 20^th century theologian H. Reinhold Niebuhr, but when I recite his words, you may recognize them as the prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous.  “God grant me the wisdom to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

There is also, I believe, a landscape of the church itself.  Granted, with our church propped up on beams and a new foundation in progress, we have at the physical level quite a chaotic looking landscape.  But I know, as many of you do, that in our worship, our many church activities, our fellowship and study, we have here at Dennis Union a panorama of hope and encouragement in more ways than any one of us could count.  We cannot estimate the meaning that our church brings, not only to those we know, but also for persons beyond our doors.  We as a people are a landscape of reality for ourselves and many others.  We are that legacy of hope, that vessel of salvation even when we are not aware of it.

At the close of our service today we shall sing Katherine Lee Bates hymn, “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies.”  This shy New England college professor traveled to the American west for the first time in the summer of 1893.  After viewing the sunrise one morning from the summit of Pike’s Peak, she was so enraptured over “the expanse of mountain ranges and sea-like sweep of plains,” that in the evening she wrote the first version of this now beloved hymn.  (Guide to the Pilgrim Hymnal, Albert C. Ronander, ed., p. 338.)

My friends, the hope of God will always be a mystery that cannot be fully analyzed or quantified in human terms.  May God bless us and keep us as we rejoice in the beauties of this God created world.      Shalom and Amen.

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“LANDSCAPES OF FAITH”

Text: Psalm 121

Rev. Kathleen S. Henry

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

June 24, 2007