On Navigating in Disorienting Times

This is a sermon I delivered at the West Cummington Church on Lay Sunday Feb 16, 2025

Right before the election of 2016, my parents sold their lovely Virginia property, our home since the early 80s. It was down a dirt road with a couple of old barns and a magnificent fifty-foot magnolia tree. It also had a swimming pool—more like a pond surrounded by trees. We girls were supposed to take turns with a long-poled pool skimmer, scooping out the decayed leaves which lingered on the surface before sinking to the bottom and plugging the drain. 

By the time my parents needed to sell the house, whose beautiful land was too much for them to be able to care for anymore, the pool was covered even in summer. The new owner was planning on tearing down the house and outbuildings, but promised to preserve the land as it was. But two years later when my parents returned to the neighborhood, hoping to walk down that old dirt road again, their property had been parceled into McMansions with tidy lots. They’d entered a foreign state. Every tree was gone, every hillock leveled. “We didn’t know where we were,” my mother said. “I mean, were we standing near the old shed, or where the magnolia tree had been?”

How do you find your spot on the earth when the very ground has vanished?

Stories like these, which those native to the Americas have been living through for centuries, are increasingly common in this era of climate change. Our daughter Lila’s friend Grant left Asheville for college right before Hurricane Helene rendered his hometown unrecognizable. “The very rivers have been re-routed,” Grant’s mother told us. “It’s hard to figure out where I am when I’m driving around. How can you orient when every landmark is missing?”

Isaiah 51:6--Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath: for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be forever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished. 

There are many ways the ground can disappear from under a person. We lose some essential, self-defining part of ourselves: an athlete gets injured and can no longer compete. A singer loses her voice. A brilliant scholar develops Alzheimer’s. An irreplaceable minister has a stroke.

Or your beloved tells you they were born the wrong gender. Your wife tells you she’s always loved women. Your husband’s been having an affair for years, and it’s time to end the marriage. Then, you look back and examine every moment to see where you took a wrong turn in your own understanding of the lay of the land. Heaven and earth may pass away, but what remains? Where are our landmarks?

We’ve all been witnessing our own democratic government morph into oligarchy. All the regular avenues, the ways and means, are becoming subverted and the people, departments, your very understanding of yourself vis à vis your country, your state, will need to be re-interrogated. Oh, right. It won’t work that way anymore.

Many of you follow Heather Cox Richardson regularly. The day of the most recent inauguration, she reminded me that this is the Reality TV administration. It’s all about shock and outrage. The intention is to win our eyeballs, then inject us with our own adrenaline and cortisol. The stakes ramp up until there’s an explosion. The very point is to upset us, to dis-orient us, until we close our eyes, curl up in fetal position or go live off the grid. Or to a lesser extent, become so discouraged we just keep shopping on Amazon because what’s the use of fighting Jeff Bezos?

How do we re-orient? I hardly need to tell you: we are an Easter people. We are standing atop a phoenix. I have to admit that when the church burned down fifteen years ago, I initially felt that maybe the writing was on the wall: after all, Congregational churches were and are closing all over the world. There was a perfectly good building five miles down the road, a church that was always looking for a good minister. Why not merge with them, let Steve preach from that pulpit, save us all a lot of time and money and work? And, grief, though I wasn’t conscious of this motive at the time. 

Well, first of all, thank God we have a minister who had a bigger vision than mine. Just as he would later gently and diligently rehab his left hand after suffering a stroke, he then gently and diligently led us out of the wilderness and back home again. The work to rebuild this church was painful, painstaking, and took nearly four years. It involved countless micro decisions, hundreds of meetings, and the patience of several saints. 

Second, the illusion that merging with the Village church would have allowed me or anyone else to leapfrog our grief wouldn’t have lasted long. Because we can’t run from these things. We have to face the rubble, the blackened earth, the razed trees of destruction. As Steve reminds us, the God of Isaiah 47:7 says, “ I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”

So that swimming pool at my parents’ old house? The one that doesn’t exist anymore? The pool had beautiful round glowing lights, which in my memory, were inlaid around its sides. The best thing about having a pool surrounded by trees was skinny dipping on hot Virginia nights. Those memories are keenly present with me, as I am sure certain sweet memories of your youth punctuate your own consciousnesses.

When I get still to pray or meditate, I see a light at the very bottom of my soul, like a pool light at the lowest point, where the drain usually is. It’s fixed and still and eternally glowing. It’s in me but it is not me. It is very young, like a small child, but it’s also pure and wise. My only job is to keep from dumping things onto it to hide it from view. It needs to be visible so that I can SEE whatever happens to be the truth of this moment. 

A final story: Twenty-five years ago, I lived with my first husband in an old farmhouse in Hatfield, perched maybe four yards from the main road with another two yards of backyard before the land dropped, precipitously into roughly five acres of bog and wetlands, a great tangle of junk trees and prickle bushes, rife with mosquitos and gnats. “What a waste,” I thought. Our neighbors had landscaped their yards into something vaguely arable. I always planned on someday making the bog a pond, or even just filling it in for our future kids to have a real backyard. 

We’d been living there five years with our two aging dogs. The week I had a miscarriage, Emma, the older dog, died. It was November, after the first freeze but before the ground had hardened, the one time of year our boggy backyard became navigable. As we walked Cassie, the surviving dog, down into the marsh, I felt as though I’d discovered a secret place inside of myself, like a dream where you suddenly realize there are rooms in your home you never knew existed. The land was beautiful, with the flaming sumac and chokeberry bushes, the fallen leaves still vibrant on the ground, the shrinking pools, the undulations of the land now visible. 

I buried the remains of the miscarriage and scattered Emma’s ashes on a small rise. My then-husband said, “But won’t this tie us to the land?” I crouched over my tiny grave and didn’t answer. I patted the earth down—it was still soft, like a baby’s fontanel—and fashioned a little cross out of twigs and set it over the mound. 

A year later, that husband was gone, Cassie was gone, too. But, after the first freeze when the brambles retreated, I walked out there by myself and sat in that bog, wondering why I’d ever wanted to reshape this land. This land, which had held me and my grief, which had spoken to me through its very contours.

The brain re-routes, the heart re-routes, just like the river reroutes. The new house goes up. A tree is planted. I left that house, found another. I met a man and together we found a church, raised a family, disoriented each other over and over again, but found that pool light inside each of us. As my friend Dar Williams says, “There’s the wind and the rain and many stars that guide us; we have some of them inside us.” 

Everything is destroyed; everything is rearranged. The light endures.

There’s the wind and the rain/and the many stars that guide us
We have some of them inside us. -Dar Williams