The Ocean in Winter: Reading Nature s Scripture A Sermon Offered by Rev. Tim Kutzmark February 2, 2014 Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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1 The Ocean in Winter: Reading Nature s Scripture A Sermon Offered by Rev. Tim Kutzmark February 2, 2014 Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading Feel the clarity of thoughts sharpened by a blast of truth from winter s wind. Look up, look down, and feel the throb of your heart, warm and beating. Elizabeth Tarbox. Yesterday afternoon, NPR s This American Life (with host Ira Glass) offered an episode on the topic of beaches. In an attempt to make us forget the polar vortex and temperatures in the single or low double digits, the show explored the beaches of summer, that time when we flee to ocean s edge to soak up sun, frolic in the surf, and bask barely clothed on sand and blankets. Now I gotta tell you, I love the ocean in summer! It provides a warm certainty that no matter how anxious or addled I may be the sound of the sea will center me, balance me, and soothe my tattered soul. But the real greatness, the real power of that liminal place where sand and sea meet is only truly glimpsed months after the lifeguards have packed up their red rescue tubes and gone home. The ocean in winter invites solitude, simplicity, and a sparseness that is unmistakable. The ocean in winter invites us to see with fresh eyes a place we thought we knew. The ocean in winter doesn t comfort us or coddle us with sunkissed naps and easy-read beach books. The ocean in winter coldly challenges us with danger, exposure. It challenges our mind to be alert and open and ready. It challenges us to see something new, raw and primal about the earth and about ourselves. Unitarian Universalist minister Elizabeth Tarbox writes: I went to the beach on the night of the full moon. This night there were cold, moon-cast shadows and slabs of blue ice, braced against the other, spread across the beach. This was a landscape I d never seen, a wind-whipped, winter sculptured world, a temporary icemade rock formation along my slim, smooth straight of sand. I tried to walk forward and my shoes slid beneath me over the sheer face of these frozen chunks. Strange and graceless was my body, sliding about in a dance without rhythm or choreography. But there was something connected to, something I could only understand with the instinctively animal part of me that braced its muscles against the wind. That part of me belonged on the rocks of ice that night, the part that didn t mind the wind stiffening my face and hands. 1

2 I wanted in that moment to be covered with coarse hair and to turn my long wolf nose to the moon and howl out my being. Or to race on all fours across those frozen slopes, with fresh snow dusting and whitening my polar fur. (Polar Vision, from Evening Tide) Don t you love that image? Howling out our being at the moon? Racing on all fours across slopes in our snowy polar fur? The ocean in winter can be, as Unitarian poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, beyond reason or control. Whereas the beach in summer is cluttered with chairs, coolers, sun screen, sand buckets, balls, badminton nets, and radio s blaring blasts, the beach is winter is solitary, silent, empty, empty of everyone and everything except driftwood, ice and snow. This is the ocean in winter s invitation: come, simplify your life, come cleanse your soul of all that is extraneous, all that is baggage that you can now release and leave behind. Poet J. B. Goodenough writes: Go out, And the winter Will clean you, Clean you white As sheets In a wind off the sea, Clean you pretty As the wing Of the herring gull, Clean you hard As ice on the edge Of the scutch grass, Clean you honest As snow on bones Along the tide-line. As Unitarian Universalists, we look to the natural world as a living scripture as a source of learning, inspiration, and revelation. We believe that the natural world nature itself can teach us lessons about life and its meaning. Our faith believes that if we watch the turn, turn, turn of the seasons, we will understand our world and ourselves better. Some religious traditions look only to an ancient book as scripture, as the keeper of revelation, of life lessons. Unitarian Universalists see wisdom displayed through many sources, including the direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder which moves us to a renewal 2

3 of the spirit and openness to the forces that create and uphold life. Thank you to Unitarian Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller for opening this doorway into deeper knowing. The ocean in winter is a force that creates and upholds life. It reminds us that we need periods of resting, of repose. It reminds us that although things may seem dormant or even dead life is preparing itself, down below the surface. Life is preparing to reemerge. Life forever wishes to reinvent itself. This is true for the ocean; this is true for us. Jamie Maughan, our church s resident oceanographer, ed me on Friday about a hidden but essential aspect of the ocean in winter. Jamie says: There is a phenomenon in the winter near-shore oceans and estuaries that has always amazed and impressed me. The ocean waters cool as winter approaches and the cold water (which is heavier) sinks to the bottom. The process continues until the ocean stratifies with two very distinct layers. There is an upper and lower layer and the two do not mix because of the strong thermal barrier/stratification. That means all the "fertilizer" (or nutrients) becomes isolated in the bottom waters where there is no light and thus no plant growth. In the surface waters there is light but no nutrients so there is very little plant growth. As spring approaches the waters warm up and the thermal stratification is broken. Which means the nutrient rich bottom water mixes with the surface water where there is plenty of light and there is a spectacular bloom of microscopic plant life. Mother Nature has planned for this and she releases all the larval forms of animal life to coincide and feed on the bloom. This adds to the dynamic and rich ocean ecosystem and each drop of ocean water is alive with life and promise for the future. The oceans rapidly transition from a quiescent-at-rest refrigerator to a system teeming with life. Without the winter hiatus in the near shore ocean the beautiful spring event would not occur. Sometimes our lives feel stratified, separated, divided, disjointed, in pieces. Nature, through the ocean in winter, tells us this is the natural way of things, this is simply the natural cycle of the turning of life s seasons. Just as the separated ocean waters give way and blend into a spectacular bloom of life, our disjointed, separated, piecemeal lives will re-mingle and fill us with life and promise for the future. Anyone who has spent time in a church community knows that church life 3

4 sometimes feels stratified, separated, disjointed, in pieces. Over the span of a church s history, there are bound to be times of discontent. We have disagreements. We have questions. We have doubts when there are difficult partings. We want answers that policies don t permit. We feel distrustful. We wish for transparency. We hear rumors. We hear only one side of the story. Something tells us that can t be the full picture. This happens in every church at some time or another, and more than once. But Nature, through the ocean in winter, tells us this is the natural way of things, this is the natural way of systems, this is simply the natural cycle of the turning of life s seasons. Just as the divided winter waters will soon give way and blend together into a spectacular bloom of life, our sometimes disjointed, separated, piecemeal church life will re-mix and remingle and fill us with life and promise for the future. Mother Nature tells us this is the way of the world. I think that is what Elizabeth Tarbox was trying to tell us in our reading earlier in the service, when she said: I was hurting so I went to the beach the icy beach with sand pitted by near-frozen spray from an ocean that roared and rolled and drove a million pebbles before it. I saw the gulls, two or three, here and there, with that gray-flecked look of fledglings, and I wondered how they survived the brutality of a winter no one warned them would be coming. But gulls ride the waves and face into the wind. They ride each wave as it comes that is how they do it. It is the only way. If we follow their example, we will ride the waves, take each new challenge, and face it so we can see what is coming and prepare ourselves. If we stay together and face the wind, we will be able to ride out this storm and the next, until the wind stops roaring and the waves become calm. For all its noise and threat, the ocean encroaches only a few yards up the beach each day before it retreats. If we ride the waves and face the wind, we shall still be together tomorrow when the storm is over and the ocean is quiet. (Snow Watch, from Lifetides) Oh, the ocean has much to teach us. Nature is such a natural, uninhibited teacher. May we read her scriptures well. May it be so. Blessed Be. Amen. Copyright 2014 Rev. Tim Kutzmark 4

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