This is our mystical, our spiritual, experience of the greenness of the world; To be a green sanctuary is not just being an environmentally sound institution, but to be a place that ensures the renewing of our spirits and opens us to the most abundant and vibrant life. It is essential to take practical steps to protect the world and the health of the earth and its interwoven ecosystems. We must work in our private lives and as a whole congregation to reduce, reuse and recycle. There are many reasons to be motivated to live more sustainable lives, but the deepest is that our spirits are green. We are born of this earth; its stuff is the substance of our most profound experiences.
When the national Association of Unitarian Universalists added the sixth source back in the 1980s it was pretty clear what we were talking about. We wanted to embrace a new wave of religious practice in our congregations. The sixth source was a way of intentionally affirming the place of some Native American traditions and those of Paganism or Neo-paganism such as Wicca in our tradition. The sixth source celebrates spiritual teachings that ground us in the harmony of the sacred circle of life. Some of these traditions affirm or of a God and Goddess, while others are less theistic.

You may know that the word "Unitarian" refers to someone who believes that God is One. However, in the 1960s and 70s, after atheistic existential humanists became dominant in our congregations, the saying was that "UUs believe in One God - at Most." Now, what with the 6th Source and the pagans and all added in, the saying is that "UUs believe in One God - More or Less." The implication is that existential humanism is human centered and paganism is spirit centered, and Christianity God centered, but I argue that all are earth-centered. All religions were at one time earth-centered in the sense that they are grounded in this world, and in the desire to live well and hopefully on this green earth. All people want to create sustainable traditions and communities that endure the ages, in harmony with the powers that create and sustain us.

{mospagebreak}One image of this is of the tree. We have placed this sacred image of the tree of life in our sanctuary. The tree is something that endures over generations with deep roots and branches that sustain all living things, and to which all life returns. In a sense it is an image of the Spirit of Life, not each individual spirit but the Great Spirit, the spirit of all life and love, as a tree. This is an ancient image. In appears in the opening lines of Chapter 15 from the Bhagavad-Gita (written somewhere between 150 and 350 years BCE). It begins with a description of a banyan tree. I don't know if you have seen these things but they are wonderful things, with many branches going up and then many roots extending down from those branches, all woven together in a thick tangle of wood and leaf. Krishna says:

 This is an image of the whole of the spiritual and religious life as a tree. But then Krishna says: "But with determination one must cut down this tree with the weapon of non-attachment. So doing, one must seek that... Supreme Personality of Godhead from which everything has began and in which everything is abiding since time immemorial."

Some people think that this passage and similar passages in other religions traditions are anti-materialistic. The Hindu idea is that this world is maya or illusion and the spiritual goal is to deny material existence to reach samadi or release. A similar idea exists within some forms of Christianity. I understand the validity of this interpretation, but my theological understanding is that the problem lies not in the material world but in the human mind. It is from our grasping and craving that illusions are created in the way we see and understand and pursue life. We tend to become invested and entangled in the details of religion and politics, and ego-centric drama, and thus miss the real nature of Nature. A green spirit then is Zen-like, truly present and yet not clinging. It nurtures non-attachment rather than detachment. It arises from being awake to the true beauty of this fragile and transient world. A green spirit is not anti-materialistic but meta-materialistic. Each of can nurture openness to the green spirit that upholds life.

I think of children who find wonder in even the smallest things as perfect examples of this spirituality. One of the most wonderful things you can do is to take a walk in the natural world with a two or three year old and move at their pace and try to see as they see. I think of sparrows, those very common birds the color of dirt, which are found from Norway to Uzbekistan to Indiana but never are they more than 400 meters from any human structure. They chirp and chirp as if to say, "Pay attention to us too."

A fine example of a green spirit was Dag Hammarskjold, the man who more than anyone embodied the heart and spiritual ideals of the United Nations. I discovered that this man, who was so involved with the grandeur and turmoil of international affairs, also wrote haiku. The idea of haiku is to show as clearly and simply as possible a moment in nature, as nothing special, and yet to see it fully as an expression of the spirit of life. Hammarskjold wrote: "April snow / the cardinal sought shelter / in that white forsythia." Many of you may have noticed the yellow forsythia blooming this past week in Muncie. The white forsythia is not true forsythia but a rare and spindly little shrub that is native to Korea and was commercially produced in America as an early blooming plant. In the haiku we can see the whiteness of the snow and the flowers, the feeling of cold, like today, that comes just as we are beginning to expect daily warmth and light. The thin branches of the bush provide little shelter from the cold, and yet there, vibrant as a sunrise, like the red circle on the Japanese flag, the cardinal. In many cultures red is the color of life and fertility and in contrast to the cold serene snow it is a sign of life and hope and warmth.

{mospagebreak}So the person of a green spirit is awake to the world as it is, but that is not always easy. The world moves in cycles other than that of human life. The philosopher Wittgenstein said "If a lion could speak we could not understand it." He was saying that the mental perspective of lions is quite unlike ours and that in some way Nature is not the same as human nature. But I disagree with the idea that we are radically different. Certainly, each species has its own predilections, and we could not relate to all the values and thoughts of a lion but there is something universal in all life. We are not aliens to the earth but really born of it. Everywhere is home. The author Ursula LeGuin wrote a piece I have long loved titled "The Author of the Acacia Seeds." It is about someone finding poems written by ants on acacia leaves. At the end, after the author speaks about those who seek to understand the language arts of ants, and dolphins and penguins and plants (including the failure of Dr. Srivas, in Calcutta, who used "time-lapse photography, to produce a lexicon of Sunflower,") she goes on to say,

Once one begins to develop a green spirit one begins to see not simply the passing moments of beauty, but also the grand flow of all being. Along these lines there is a philosopher, Andrew Light, the Assistant Professor of Environmental Philosophy at New York University and author of the book Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice, who proposed the idea of "Green Time." This is the expansive and incredibly slow perspective of trees and forests and mountains. He writes: "Time is green; it is bound with the long rhythms of the natural world as they come and go, and not with the relatively brief experiences of the self-conscious beings of the planet." In literature he holds up for example the Elven society of Tolkien's Middle Earth as a representative image of the most sustainable in human nature, the most purely scientific and artistic, perfected and purified so that they live among the trees, open to the air and seasons. They are only a metaphor, an ideal, of the green spirit we long to embrace and become.

I know that life can be painful, and sometimes we want to be quit of this world with all its sorrow and injustice and suffering. It is a powerful moment when you can realize that no matter that your pain, yes even the pain of all who suffer this day, yes even when merged with all the pain and sorrow any human being has ever suffered, are but a drop in the vast sea of time. To be awake to green time is to see the arc of the universe from a divine perspective. It allows us to appreciate the moment, but not cling to it. The greenness of life has endured for eons and we can live by its rhythms.

This awareness was expressed in the mysticism of ancient Israel. As the prophet Jeremiah put it (17:7, 8) "Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD... He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit." And in the Ninety-second Psalm, "The righteous will flourish like a palm tree; they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon... They will still bear fruit in old age; they will stay fresh and green." The tree of life sustains us if we understand its true nature when we see the spirit of its substance. We are able to know reality at its ultimate root.

There is a saying among the Cree people of North America about the average American, "Only when the last tree is cut; only when the last river is polluted; only when the last fish is caught; only then will they realize that we cannot eat money." But I think we can learn that the earth provides not only food for the belly but food for the soul. The enduring human spirit is a green spirit, grounded in the world and alive with all living things. Environmentalists are often labeled "tree-huggers" and "bunny-lovers," the general idea being that they care more about trees and cute animals than human beings. There may be a few of those, but the overwhelming majority of environmentalists care about ALL life on the planet, including humans, and are only trying to ensure that we are all healthy and prosperous. To paraphrase Chip Giller, founder of the environmentally oriented web site Grist.org, the so-called fight against "global warming" is just a secret plot by crazy people to promote their real agenda of cleaning our air and water, improve our use of resources and make our cities safer and more livable. But it is more than that. It is the expression of a green spirit, an awareness of beauty, wonder, and a perspective that includes the rhythms and cycles of the eons.

On this Earth Day Sunday, what can we do to nurture a green spirit? We can remember that it is not all about us and we can mindfully and gratefully become amazed at the web of all life and of its fleeting fragile beauty. Please attend the presentation of the Business Fellows on the Green Sanctuary, or plant a tree, or add leaves to our paper tree of environmentalism, and always find ways to "reduce reuse and recycle." But above all nurture in your life a vision of the larger truth that turns through all cares, all wonders, all mystery, drawing us toward wholeness and truth.