NATURE SONG/SPIRIT SPEAK

A Service Offered by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
June 10, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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About Our Service Today:

We’ve begun a tradition here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading.  The second weekend of June, when some members of the congregation head off to Ferry Beach in Maine for a weekend retreat, those of us who remain at home gather for a reflective service of songs and readings.  Instead of a typical sermon, we treat ourselves to a special musical guest and to words from poets and writers all gathered around a theme.  This year, we will explore the spirituality found in a normal day, from sunrise to mid afternoon, sunset, and the dark of midnight.  Our special musical guest was Heather Chu, a professional singer, vocal instructor, and choral conductor. Heather received her BMA in Vocal & Piano Performance at California State University, Fresno and continued on to complete her Masters in Vocal Performance and a Master in Vocal Pedagogy at the New England Conservatory of Music.

NATURE SONG/SPIRIT SPEAK:
A WEAVING OF SONGS AND READINGS

I. The Freshness of Morning

“The Way To Start a Day” by Byrd Baylor (excerpts)

The way to start a day is this—
Go outside and face the east and greet the sun
with some kind of blessing or chant or song
that you made yourself and keep for early morning.
The way to make the song is this—
Don't try to think what words to use
until you're standing there alone.
When you feel the sun
you'll feel the song, too.
Just sing it.

A morning needs to be sung to.

A new day needs to be honored.
People have always known that.
Didn't they chant at dawn in the sun temples of Peru?
And leap and sway to Aztec flutes in Mexico?
And drum sunrise songs in the Congo?
And ring a thousand small gold bells in China?
Didn't the Pharaohs of Egypt say the only sound at dawn
should be the sound of songs that please the morning sun?
They knew what songs to sing.
People always seemed to know.

They were bathing in the sacred Ganges River as the sun came up.
And high on a mesa in Arizona
they were holding a baby toward the sun.
They were speaking the child's new name
so the sun would hear and known that child.
It had to be sunrise.
And it had to be that first sudden moment.
That's when all the power of life is in the sky.

If the sky turns a color sky never was before
just watch it.
That's part of the magic.
That's the way to start a day.

 

“Arizona Sunrise” by Elizabeth Tarbox

The sun rose over Monument Valley this morning.  It was quiet, a quiet you could feel inside, broken occasionally by the greeting of an unknown bird or animal.  The red desert dawn hit the rocks and set them alight, tall sentinel rocks pointing to the red and orange sky and to an eternity of waiting.

I was in Monument Valley at sunrise once.  It was June 1972.  The sun impacted the sky and there were three of us there, watching, touched for one holy moment by the immensity of that sunrise, struck to silence by the presence of the sacred.  We are so frail, we share a few moves, a few breaths, our hearts beat to the rhythm of the universe for a moment or two, and we are gone.  But the sun rises over Monument Valley each day as it has done for ages before I lived, as it has don all these thousands of mornings since the day I was there, as it will long, long after my footprints are gone from the earth.  We live for a time only, but during that time we can, if we choose, find places like Monument Valley at sunrise and stand there and pause in our activity and find an infinite peace, a peace not of our making, a peace which truly does defy our understanding.  It is there for us; we need only pause and wait for it to come.

Song: Will There Really Be A Morning
Music by Richard Hundley and Poem by Emily Dickinson

Will there really be a morning?
Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like water lilies?
Has it feathers like a bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh, some scholar!  Oh, some sailor!
Oh some wise man from the skies
Please to tell a little Pilgrim
where that place called “Morning” lies.

Will there really be a morning?
Is there such a thing as day?

II. The Deepest Valley Blooms

“Peonies” by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
  to break my heart
    as the sun rises,
      as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open—
  pools of lace,
    white and pink—
      and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes
  into the curls,
    craving the sweet sap
      taking it away

to their dark, underground cities—
  and all day
    under the shifty wind
      as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies
  and tip their fragrance to the air,
    and rise, their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
  gladly and lightly,
    and there it is again—
      beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
  Do you love this world?
    Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
      Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
  and softly
    and exclaiming their dearness,
      fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
  their eagerness
    to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
      nothing, forever?

“The Roses” by Mary Oliver

All afternoon I have been walking over the dunes,
hurrying from one thick raft of the wrinkled, salt
roses to another, leaning down close to their dark
or pale petals, red as blood or white as snow.  And
now I am beginning to breathe slowly and evenly—
the way a hunted animal breathes, finally, when it
has galloped, and galloped—when it is wrung dry,
but, at last, is far away, so the panic begins to drain
from the chest, from the wonderful legs, and the
exhausted mind.

Oh sweetness pure and simple, may I join you?

I lie down next to them, on the sand.  But to tell
about what happens next, truly I need help.

Will somebody or something please start to sing?

Song: Frühlingsglaube (Faith in Spring)
Music by Franz Schubert (Sung in German)

The mild breezes are awake,
They rustle and stir by day and night,
They are at work everywhere;
O fresh scent, o new sound!
Now, poor heart, be not afraid,
Now everything must change.

The world grows lovelier every day,
One cannot tell what yet may happen;
The flowering will not end;
The farthest, deepest valley blooms,
Now, poor heart, forget your pain!
Now everything must change.

III.  The Grace of Natural Things

“The Call of Beauty” by John O’Donohue

Every life is braided with luminous moments.

I was with a friend out on Loch Corrib, the largest lake in the West of Ireland.  It was a beautiful summer’s day.  Time had come to rest in the silence and the stillness that presided there.  The lake slept without a ripple.  A grey-blue haze enfolded everything.  There was no division any more between earth and sky.   Reaching far into the distance, everything was suffused in a majestic blue light.  The mountains of Conamara seemed like pile upon pile of delicate blue; you felt you could almost reach out your hand and pull them towards you.  No object protruded anywhere.  Trees, stones, fields and islands had forgotten themselves in the daze of blue.  Then, suddenly, a harsh flutter as near us the lake surface split and a huge cormorant flew from inside the water and struck up into the air.  Its ragged black wings and large awkward shape were like an eruption from the underworld.  Against the finely woven blue everywhere its strange form fluttered and gleamed in absolute black.  She had the place to herself.  Se was the one clear object to be seen.  And as if to conceal the source as she soared, she left her shadow thistling the lake surface.  This was an event of pure disclosure: a sudden epiphany from between the worlds.  The strange beauty of the cormorant was a counterpoint to the dreamlike delicacy of the lake and the landscape.  Sometimes beauty is that unpredictable; a threshold we had never noticed opens, mystery comes alive around us and we realize how the earth is full of concealed beauty.  St. Augustine expressed this memorably: ‘I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep.  I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and to all things that stand at the doors of my flesh.  My question was the gaze I turned to them.  Their answer was their beauty.’

Song: I Love All Graceful Things
Music by Eric Thiman and poem by Kathleen Boland

I love all things that move with grace,
The shiv’ring of the aspen trees,
The bending grass before the wind,
The leaves that sway in summer’s breeze.

The swan that glides upon the lake,
The ripple of the flowing stream,
The circle of the swallow’s flight,
The clouds that almost moveless seem.

The rise and fall of silv’ry waves,
The flutt’ring wings of butterflies,
The curving scythe among the corn,
The setting sun, when daylight dies.

The autumn dance of wither’d leaves,
The snowflakes steady, gentle fall,
The gleaming slant of April rain,
I love them all, I love them all.

IV. The Mystery of Moon and Midnight

“On Summer Evenings” by Wendell Berry

On summer evenings we sat in the yard,
the house dark, the stars bright overhead.
the laps and arms of the old
held the young.  As we talked we knew
by the dark distances of Heaven’s lights
our smallness, and the greatness of our love.

Now from that upland once surrounded
by the horizon of unbroken dark, we
(who were children only a life ago)
see reflected on the clouds the lights
of three cities, as if we offer to the sky
some truth of ours that we are certain of,

or as if we will have no light
but our own, and thus make illusory
all the light we have.

 “Night Song” by Martha Reben

I sat alone before my campfire one evening, watching as the sunset colors deepened to purple, the sky slowly, darkened, and the stars came out.  A deep peace lay over the woods and waters.

Gradually, the wilderness around me merged into the blue of night.  There was no sound save the crackle of my fire as the flames blazed around the birch and cedar logs. 

The moon came up behind the black trees to the east, and the wilderness stood forth, vast, mysterious, still.  All at once the silence and the solitude were touched by wild music, thin as air, the faraway gabbling of geese flying at night.

Presently I caught sight of them as they streamed across the face of the moon, the high, excited clamor of their voices tingling through the night, and suddenly I saw, in one of those rare moments of insight, what it means to be wild and free.  As they went over me, I was there with them, passing over the moonlit countryside, glorying with them in their strong-hearted journey, exulting in its joy and splendor.

The haunting voices grew fainter and faded in the distance, but I sat on, stirred by a memory of something beautiful and ancient and now lost—a forgotten freedom we must all once have shared with other wild things, which only they and the wilderness can still recall to us, so that life becomes again, for a time, the wonderful, sometimes frightening, but fiercely joyous adventure it was intended to be.

Song: L’Heure Exquise
By Armand Silvestre and Poem by Paul Verlaine (Sung in French)

The white moon shines in the forest,
From every branch comes forth a voice,
Under the foliage, Oh beloved!
The pond, a deep mirror, reflects
The silhouette of the dark willow,
In which the wind in crying.
Let us dream, ‘tis the hour!
A vast and tender calm
Seems to descend from the firmament,
Which the orb clads in rainbow colors;
‘Tis the exquisite hour!