Please join me in a responsive reading by poet Wendell Berry, number 646, "The Larger Circle". I will read the first line, and you respond with the words in italics. After the reading we will sit together in silence for a few minutes. Number 646.

ring bowl, silence for 3 minutes, ring bowl again

The poems we are sharing with you today are from three very different poets, and from three different times and places. One thing that ties them together is that each of the poets has an interest in social and political activism that is expressed through their work. Another is that they all sought to balance their sometimes cynical view of humanity by evoking a sense of wonder and an optimistic vision. 

English author William Wordsworth lived from 1770 to 1850. He was born in the Lake District and there learned a great love of the natural world. Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a series of lyrical ballads that are said to have begun the Romantic movement in English verse. The romantic poets celebrated spontaneity, creativity, and transcendence, and spoke of the power of nature as a spiritual force. But though Wordsworth is known mostly as a nature poet, he also wrote poems of social protest in opposition to Britain's stance against France during the French Revolution. He speaks of war as a force "where good and evil interchange their names, and thirst for bloody spoils abroad is paired."

In the 1806 poem "composed by the side of Grasmere Lake" Wordsworth offers us a celestial viewpoint on mankind's brutality:

Jove, Venus, and the ruddy crest of Mars
Amid his fellows beauteously revealed
At happy distance from earth’s groaning field,
Where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a seminal figure in the establishment of the Beat movement in American poetry that began in San Francisco in the 1950s. He was a poet, activist, playwright, and the co-founder of City Lights Press which published the works of many contemporary American poets and authors. His writing was politically charged and passionate. Biographer Larry Smith says that Ferlinghetti's work "developed major themes of anarchy, mass corruption, engagement, and a belief in the surreality and wonder of life.”

Poet Wendell Berry is best known for his poems about the majestic woodland he reveres, life on his Kentucky farm, and ecological activism. The Poetry Foundation website describes his work as "celebrating the holiness of life and the everyday miracles often taken for granted". In his short poem about patriotism, he writes

All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be,
is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt
the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve
undiminished the land and the people. If national conduct
forsakes these aims, it is one's patriotic duty
to say so and to oppose. What else have we to live for?

Although these three poets lived in different times and places they all reflected on the role of patriotism in their work and in their lives. They all spoke out against what they saw as corruption or hypocrisy in their society, and they all advocated for peace and a more universal viewpoint. Berry in particular takes great comfort in the natural world. In what may be his most familiar poem, called "The Peace of Wild Things", he writes

When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children’s' lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

*******

 Poetry addressing social issues and human rights has a long and rich history. In our time, a short list of just a few of the more well known American poets who have focused on activism and civil rights would include: Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Denise Levertov, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Carl Sandburg, and Alice Walker.

While I'm impressed with the work of all of these authors, I admit that I am not an overtly political person, although I have managed to make a few phone calls and do some volunteer work from time to time. Most of the poets I admire most write primarily of their love of nature, and of a sense of wonder at our place in the world. For example, E.E. Cummings has been described as having a "clear, childlike perception,... a way of coming smack against things with unaffected delight and wonder." He wrote beautiful lyrical and adventurous poems that reflected his love of life, though he could also be quite cynical and critical of conventional conservative thinking, and a champion of individual self expression. This excerpt celebrates wonder and mystery and condemns those who can only see the world in a practical and literal way.

What time is it? it is by every star a different time,
and each most falsely true;
or so subhuman superminds declare
– nor all their times encompass me and you:
when are we never, but forever now...

Time cannot children, poets, lovers tell
– measure imagine, mystery, a kiss
– not though mankind would rather know than feel

Cummings protested war in his time by registering as a conscientious objector, and he was detained in a French camp for several months during World War I. Some of his poems address the issues of pacifism, such as one that begins "next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth" and goes on to describe men "who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter, they did not stop to think they died instead, then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

Wendell Berry is known for his outspoken activism on environmental issues. The two poems of his that I have chosen to read, reflect his alternating moods of despair and hope for his fellow man, and for the delicate ecosystem that we all share. They are taken from a collection of his poems called "This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems" written over a 35 year period and inspired by his solitary Sunday walks through the Kentucky countryside.

The first poem was written in 1979, the second in 1992.

I go from the woods into the cleared field:
A place no human made, a place unmade
By human greed, and to be made again.
Where centuries of leaves once built by dying
A deathless potency of light and stone
And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless
Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain,
The growth of fifty thousand years undone
In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock
And clay – a "new land", truly, that no race
Was ever native to, but hungry mice
And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns
And thistles sent by generosity
Of new beginning. No Eden, this was
A garden once, a good and perfect gift;
Its possible abundance stood in it
As it then stood. But now what it might be
Must be foreseen, darkly, through many lives–
Thousands of years to make it what it was,
Beginning now, in our few troubled days.

I went away only
a few hundred steps
up the hill, and turned
and started home.
And then I saw
the pasture green under
the trees, the open
hillside, the little ponds,
our house, cistern,
woodshed, and barn,
the river bending in
its valley, our garden
new-planted beside it.
All around, the woods
that had been stark
in the harsh air
of March, had turned
soft with new leaves.
Birdsong had returned
to the branches:
the stream sang
in the fold of the hill.
In its time and its patience
beauty had come upon us,
greater than I had imagined.

In these two poems what resonates most for me is the author's reverence for the natural world and his sense of belonging to a place, of being connected to the land. In Paul Woodruff's book titled "Reverence" there is the story of a conflict between a group of environmentalists and the inhabitants of a town who see the local forest only as a source of income. They have no sense of reverence for the majestic trees, no feeling of being related to the forest or its creatures. Without that sense of reverence Woodruff argues that it is impossible to find any common ground to explain why the trees should not be cut down. He suggests turning to art, which he says "speaks the language of reverence," and which he sees as beginning with a deep understanding of our human limitations and an awe of what lies beyond our comprehension or control. The capacity for awe, he says, brings a humility and a respect for our fellow human beings. The opposite of reverence is hubris, a disregard for the humanity of others and a lack of empathy.

I see this as one of the major political issues of our time; a lack of respect for other cultures, prejudice masked as patriotism. For me, patriotism involves a commitment to the wild places I feel drawn to, more than a love of country or nationality. It speaks to the seventh UU principle of the interdependence of all life. All the poems we have heard this morning give me some hope that humanity can move beyond a narrow nationalistic viewpoint to something more positive and universal.

Please join me in singing our closing hymn, #342, with words by Wendell Berry.

Now please join hands for the benediction.

May the sun bring you new energy by day,
May the moon softly restore you by night,
May the rain wash away your worries,
May the breeze blow new strength into your being.

May you walk gently through the world and know
its beauty all the days of your life.

Blessed be.

postlude

We extinguish this flame but not the light of truth,
the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment.
These we will carry in our hearts until we are together again.

Our worship is ended. Our service begins. Please take a moment to greet your neighbors and invite them to fellowship in Forbes Hall.