The Spiritual Practice of Turning Soil

Mother’s Day May 11, 2014

Thought to ponder at the beginning

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

– James Baldwin

Opening Words and Chalice Lighting                               A Morning Offering, by John O’Donahue

I bless the night that nourished my heart

to set the ghosts of longing free

into the flow and figure of dream

that went to harvest from the dark

bread for the hunger no one sees.

 

All that is eternal in me

welcome the wonder of this day,

the field of brightness it creates

offering time for each thing

to arise and illuminate.

 

I place on the altar of dawn:

the quiet loyalty of breath,

the tent of thought where I shelter,

wave of desire I am shore to

and all beauty drawn to the eye.

 

May my mind come alive today to invisible geography

that invites me to new frontiers,

to break the dead shell of yesterdays,

to risk being disturbed and changed.

 

May I have the courage today

to live the life that I would love,

to postpone my dream no longer

but do at last what I came here for

and waste my heart on fear no more.

 

Sermon           The Spiritual Practice of Turning Soil ©         Rev. Sylvia A. Stocker

 

A Mother’s Day sermon is a yawning chasm of a trap. People have so many different needs on Mother’s Day.

Needs to recognize both deep, loving bonds and also hurtful relationships, because our family experiences differ.

Needs to recognize the hard work of motherhood, and also the doubts, disappointments, fears, and uncertainties many mothers feel.

Needs to recognize that mothering is one of the most blessed and one of the most accursed occupations on earth.

Needs to recognize people missing their mothers, mothers missing their children, women missing the chance to mother.

Needs to recognize the chosen mothers in our lives – the women and men who have loved and nurtured us, even when we were not their actual children.

Needs to recognize the anguish of families that fall apart for many reasons and mothers who endure the heartbreak of knowing their children’s lives will be challenged or compromised because of physical or mental disabilities that put them outside the mainstream.

On top of all that, we need to remember the first Mother’s Day, created in 1870 when Unitarian Julia Ward Howe issued the Mother’s Day proclamation, a pacifistic call to all mothers to take up the cause of peace.

Addressing all those needs in one service is impossible. Today, in honor of everyone’s needs on Mother’s Day, I will lift up a metaphor – the metaphor of turning soil – as a spiritual practice all of us can engage to create fertile and nourishing inner ground that can support nurturing relationships.

When I was little my father helped me to create my own flower garden. Today is Mother’s Day. But in contemplating the spiritual practice of turning soil, my father comes to mind first. My father was the family gardener. My father was the one who taught me about soil in a literal sense – about adding good stuff to it, digging out rocks, and pulling out weeds. He taught me pretty flowers need fertile, nourishing soil in which to grow healthy and strong.

In that long-ago springtime, my father let me choose seeds and determine the garden design. He showed me how to hoe rows, spread the seeds out, then tap a light layer of soil down on top of them. He explained how much to water. But before we did any of that, he helped me to prepare the soil. The soil in our yard consisted of glacial till – gravel and clay left behind in the last ice age. So we had to add good soil that would support the growth of allysum and zinnias. With shovels and spading forks, we turned the soil over, making a spot of fertility in the midst of a seemingly barren part of our yard.

My mother, who tended the indoor plants and grew robust African violets, taught me about metaphorical soil. She was the poet in the family, so the language of metaphor came naturally to her.

She was the one who would have explained that, just like flowers, children needed to be planted in healthy, fertile, nourishing soil in order to thrive. She would have advocated for soil composed of love and patience, encouragement and consistency. Her soil would have included other key ingredients: lessons about making mistakes and picking up the pieces and continuing forward, lessons about facing loss and disappointment, lessons about striving to do one’s best, lessons about taking life by the hand and holding on tightly until the last step of the journey, lessons that acknowledge mysteries, doubts, and unanswered questions, lessons that evoke awe, gratitude, humility, and generosity.

Good parenting requires a certain amount of turning over the soil to make ready a nourishing environment for children. Parents can increase their effectiveness by measuring the legacy of their parents and determining what skills and practices to keep, what to discard, and what to bring in fresh and new. Each new generation seems to want to improve on the last one, and sometimes that actually does happen.

Years ago, my family was cleaning out my grandmother’s house after she died. My father and I were to clean out the basement one particular day. We opened the door from the kitchen to the basement, and my father stopped short, gazing at the wall. He pointed to a nail there and told me his father (my grandfather) used to hang a strap there. When my father or his brother misbehaved, my grandfather would get the strap and beat them with it. Nothing could have surprised me more, because that mode of parenting is one my father consciously jettisoned. There were no beatings in my family; my father had weeded them out of the soil.

It’s not that my grandfather didn’t do his own weeding: Indeed, he did. He, the son of a man who was always drunk, never touched alcohol, thereby providing security to his family that he had not enjoyed growing up.

My mother had done similar weeding. Her mother (my grandmother) had grown up largely without a mother or a father. Times were tough in those days, particularly for Irish immigrant families, like my grandmother’s family. My grandmother’s mother died when my grandmother was a child. My grandmother’s father placed her in an orphanage, and she never saw him or her little brother again. She never knew if the two of them succumbed to the same illness that carried off her mother or if the family simply abandoned her.

For my grandmother, deprived of consistent love, the damage was real. My mother used to tell how her mother would fly into terrific and sometimes violent rages – sometimes hurling things across the room – and then later be filled with remorse. My mother consciously chose to weed that behavior out of her soil. She sometimes spoke sternly – what parent never angers? What child never provokes? But my mother’s way of communicating that she was really, really, really angry was to call me by my first and middle names: Sylvia Ann. A far cry from throwing things.

Whether we are mothers or not – fathers or not – all of us have choices about how we spend our time, how we engage with our world, and how we build our relationships. In child rearing, hormones help us bond with small children. But hormones carry us only so far. Chance and circumstance also take us partway – and sometimes dumb luck if we are fortunate. All of that stuff just happens; we have no control over it. But we can choose to work with our own hearts and souls. We can enrich our own inner soil. Thoughtfully measuring our experience – turning the soil of our inner life, keeping the good stuff, pitching the bad stuff, tilling in nutrients that are missing or sparse – those things, hard work though they are, will help to produce the fertile ground that will welcome thriving relationships. That is true not just in mother-child relationships, but in all relationships.

Essentially, these are the key steps for improving soil. Consult a gardening manual for details.

Step One: Test the soil.

Soil can be too acidic or too basic for your crops. Some soil contains poisons. You can test literal soil by sending a sample to a county extension office.

The metaphorical soil we depend on to nourish relationships is harder to test, because we have to rely on self-examination that can be sometimes elusive and sometimes painful. But the truth is we continually have the opportunity to evaluate our way of being in the world. Each interaction – particularly the most perplexing or troubling interactions – can serve as a chance to test the soil: to observe, reflect, modify … and observe, reflect and modify again.

When I served as a chaplain in a hospital for the mentally ill, one of my patients’ conversation consisted mostly of mutterings I could not understand, with only occasional recognizable words. It wasn’t even “word salad” because a lot of his utterances were not even words. At first I was flummoxed by trying to make sense of his conversation. I learned, over time, to nod and repeat back to him the words I did recognize. I also discovered he liked Irish music. So sometimes I would sing to him.

By observing, reflecting, modifying – by testing the soil – I came up with a higgledy-piggledy way of communicating with my patient, but I could see it gave him comfort. By trying new things I kept testing the soil until I discovered something that worked.

Step Two: Address known problems.

Literal soil that is too acidic or too basic can be modified by additives. Soil that contains poisons will have to be replaced if you are growing food.

We can address known problems in our metaphorical soil, too. That’s what my parents did when they rooted out the violence that plagued their childhoods. That’s what any of us does when we make a conscious effort to change our ways of relating to the world, because sometimes we really do need to change.

Here’s a small example. In the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I researched gun- and violence-related metaphors that permeate the English language. I quickly collected more than 80 commonly used phrases. (You can see them on my blog on the church website.) Amazing and troubling for me was to recognize that I frequently used many of the phrases. I vowed to try to expunge them from my vocabulary. If I wanted a peaceful world, I could make one small start by using peaceful language. Now I try not to say things like “bullet-proof argument” or “shooting straight from the hip,” or “I was blown away.” Sometimes those phrases still slip from my mouth, but I am getting better at choosing other words.

Addressing a known problem begins with awareness – seeing the problem, recognizing when it is recurring – and then substituting different behavior in its place. It’s hard to do, but turning soil is always hard work.

Step Three: Take care of your soil.

For literal soil, that means adding compost – kitchen scraps, manure, cover crops, yard trimmings – to increase the soil’s fertility. It also means avoiding walking on it, refraining from adding chemicals to it, and waiting until the ground is dry enough to work, and watering it when it is too dry.

Caring for our metaphorical soil means caring for our souls. Caring for one’s soul can mean taking time for quiet, for thoughtful reflection, for meditation or prayer, for wonder and awe, for listening to other people and creatures and also to the spirit inside. Caring for the soul means eschewing toxic thinking or action – being picky about what to take inside and incorporate into one’s inner world. Caring for the soul means to recognize, with humility, that one’s own life is part of a web so enormous as to be impossible to comprehend – and yet one’s own small part in things matters, because each element of that web matters.

In today’s world, busyness increases exponentially – there is little time for caring for souls. Moreover, people bury themselves in gadgets and headsets that keep them isolated and engaged only with what they want to see or hear. Church is one of the few places where many of us set aside time for reflection. We may hear music or sing songs we do not like at times. We may hear messages we do not agree with at times. But we suspend our individual preferences to share a common experience. We set aside time to tend to our inner soil.

Being human is complicated. We carry, all mixed up in a kind of stew, the genetics of our birth, the experience of our past, and our hopes for the days to come. Each day is a new opportunity to enrich the soil of our spirits, by testing, reflecting, and addressing our issues, and taking care of the precious, unique light each of us possesses. That is the fulfilling work of a lifetime – turning the inner soil of our spirits so that more and more, with each passing day, we can increasingly become the fertile ground for creating a world of understanding, peace, generosity, and love.