The Peace of Wild Things:
Learning from Lilies, Great Herons, and Little Babies
August 5, 2007
Eleanor Harrison Bregman

Recently I was reading fairly tales with my daughter Isabelle and we encountered King Midas. The illustration is what really caught my eye. King Midas is sitting behind his piles of gold, counting them. What struck me most about the picture was not the tall piles of gold. It was what those piles of gold were blocking. It was his obstructed view. It was what he couldn't see. He couldn't see his daughter tending the roses outside, much less smell the roses himself. I began to imagine what else he couldn't see: he couldn't see the pauper outside of his castle; but he also couldn't see the beauty of a sunset or the peaceful gliding of the great heron. King Midas couldn't see any of it because his piles of gold were obstructing his view of everything else.

Many of you are familiar with the first part of today's ancient testimony about the so-called rich fool. He has a few good years, builds bigger barns, and then says to himself, "OK, finally, I can relax - eat, drink, and be merry." He dies that night and we're left with the ominous line, "and so it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." The moral of the story is not that making money is bad - the man's problem isn't that he's built bigger barns, it's that at the point that his responsibility toward the world should have begun, he chooses to sit back, relax, and do nothing. We're left with the stark contrast between the abundance of the man's barns and the paucity of his life span. So much for a light, summery sermon message.

Or maybe not. When I first discussed this passage with my husband, Peter, who many of you know is Jewish, he had no preconceived notions about the passage and its meaning. I know you heard a little about the benefits of interfaith marriage from Donna last week. This is yet another fringe benefit of doing Christian ministry while being married to a Jew. Peter has fresh eyes when it comes to the gospel. He also has a contrarian take on most everything, so I've learned that if I'm going to consult him, I need to do it earlier than the night before I deliver a sermon. He will, undoubtedly, suggest I change my entire sermon - and I'm too much of a J on the Myers-Briggs scale to do that most of the time. So I decided to run this passage by him with enough time for his angle to percolate.

When Peter heard the story, he assumed the man was a fool because he waited to enjoy life until after building his fortune instead of enjoying life while he was building his fortune. I had a hard time with this interpretation. No, I argued, this passage is about what we do with our abundance if we have it. It's about economics. It's about our obligation to the world around us. And so it is for those who store up treasures for themselves but aren't rich toward God. It's obvious, right? But Peter got me thinking.

So I went back to my books, to the Greek, to different translations. And one translation of the last ominous line stood out: "And so it is for those who store up treasures for themselves and [emphasis mine] do not live with God in view." Do not live with God in view. It's a little bit more of a spacious translation, but the substitution of living with God in view for being rich toward God changed things for me, or at least made me reconsider Peter's interpretation. And so it is for those who store up treasures for themselves and (not but) do not live with God in view. What if this man's problem was that while he was going about tilling the fields and building bigger barns, he didn't keep God in view? And what if this meant that not only was he not using his fortune for the benefit of others all along, but also that he couldn't see divinity and holiness enfleshed in the world around him, in his everyday life - in his grain, in the wood drake, and the blackberries and the lilies? What if, like the picture of King Midas behind his piles of gold, this man's biggest problem was that his obsession with bigger barns kept him from seeing the very things that made his life meaningful?

Not all of us are obsessed with piles of gold. Our life's work may not be building bigger barns, as it were. But could Jesus be saying, whatever your life's work is - whether it's reforming immigration law or teaching young people or offering pastoral care in a hospital or growing mutual funds - if you don't do this with God in view and you put off noticing the divine in the world around you until after you have succeeded in fulfilling your life's ambitions, however worthy, watch out? Your life might end before you have the chance to actually experience the beauty of life around you.

So what prevents you from living with God in view?

What treasures do you store up for yourself that prevent you from experiencing the divine from moment to moment? It may be your apartment or your IRA or your iphone. But these may not be your golden calves. Your "bigger barns" may be a fixation on your professional life. The way you constantly benchmark your achievements. An incessant striving. It may be your status as a leader in one of your communities. It may be the constant time-crunch with which you structure your life. And dare I say this at Judson, it may even be our obsession with work on a particular social justice issue that sometimes prevents us from encountering the holy in the very people we are trying to help.

What prevents you from living with God in view?

Whether you've identified some aspect of your life's work or a literal possession, it's when these possessions come to possess us that they become cages that obstruct our view of the holy and prevent us from fully experiencing the depth and joy of the divine all around us.

One so-called possession that prevents me from living with God in view is my preoccupation with the career/family balance. This takes the form of worry. I worry I'm wasting my education while taking time away from work to raise children. I worry that I'm focusing so much energy on my nuclear family that my global and community families are neglected. This worry keeps me from experiencing the holiness enfleshed in my children, in moments that I have with them on the way to school or in the park or even in refereeing fights over who gets what piece of play-doh. How many of us who have or have had children have found ourselves quickly trying to send just one more email - wait, hold on, I'll be right there, just a sec - to find your kid has gone on to some other game, some other story, and has lost whatever it was they so desperately wanted to share with you. How quickly their present becomes our past.

But how do we live with God in view? It is no less hard for us fools than for our fool of the first century. Our culture tells us we've got to work every minute toward our goals, whatever they are. Kids worry about college while they are still in elementary school. Or at least their parents do. Our present government seems so hopeless that unless we work to reform it every second we think we'll be forever lost in a morass of awful immigration legislation, illegal surveillance, and war in Iraq. We live in an economy of scarcity: scarcity of time, scarcity of resources, scarcity of mindfulness. In this economy of scarcity, how are we to live with God in view? How are we to be mindful of God's presence all around us?

While the assigned text for this Sunday in some traditions stops after the rich fool passage, lucky for us at Judson we aren't bound to the lectionary. Because after the story of the rich fool, Jesus offers his prescription for this dis-ease of scarcity. "Consider the ravens, they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life span? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?"

If you want to live with God in view, stop worrying so much. Try to emulate the un-self consciousness of the natural world that lives purely in the present. Go lie down by the water with Wendell Berry and experience the grace of the world.

When I first moved into NYC, my former boss and mentor, Sue Anne Steffey Morrow, gave me the Wendell Berry poem we read this morning in a frame, only she replaced the word "water" with "Hudson River" as the place to lie down when the worries of life take over. I thought this ironic at the time - the peace of wild things down by the Hudson river?! Has she ever seen the trash floating by? The barges? The pollution rising from New Jersey smokestacks?

My instinct is to challenge Jesus, too: what about when God doesn't take care of the ravens and the lilies? What about drought? Disease? Predators? What about when bad things happen to good people? Where is God's care then? This is just a Bobby-McFerrin-don't-worry-be-happy-namby-pamby message that won't stand up to the tests of real life. I wonder if any of you has heard this and other such biblical passages and dismissed them because they don't stand up to the realities of your post modern experience.

So why do I find this passage about the ravens and lilies hard to swallow? Why can't I rest more often in the grace of the world and enjoy the peace of wild things? Why is it easier to berate myself for not doing more for the world than it is to allow myself the possibility of experiencing God's care? Why is Peter's interpretation of the rich fool passage harder for me to see? Do any of you identify with these questions?

Here are a few possible answers. Perhaps because it means we have to give up the illusion that we are in control of everything. Perhaps because we have to give up the idea that we must earn periods of restfulness and tranquility. This passage challenges me to say it's OK to occasionally live inside the metaphor of God as the caring parent full of abundance and beneficence. It challenges me to trust and let go. It challenges me to acknowledge that my worry doesn't get me anywhere. As Anne Lamott puts it in her recent book, Grace (Eventually), I have to face the idea that all that "striving after greater beauty and importance, and greater greatness, is foolishness."

So when I first moved to NYC and had one of those anxiety driven days, I said, what the heck, let me take Berry's advice, go down to the river and ride my bike along the path from 125th to 72nd. And you know what I discovered? The sounds of kids' voices as they ran along the path by the river. Couples embracing as if they were the only two people on the planet. I smelled the smell of river water. It smelled like a real river, not pollution. I saw blossoming trees. I felt the grace of the world and the peace of wild things that do not tax their lives with forethought. And I remembered that just because I choose to enjoy the present moment, it doesn't mean that I am avoiding the world's problems. Just because I am not worried about the fate of the latest project I am working on doesn't mean I don't care about it.

Many of you know I had a baby exactly one month ago. His name is Daniel. And lately Daniel has been my teacher when it comes to the peace of wild things; this month with him has been blissful, despite the lack of sleep, because I've lived from moment to moment in a way that I rarely allow myself to do. When I sit with him in my arms, it is deep peace - in the words of my Episcopal upbringing, a peace which passes all understanding. I can't fully explain it, though I reckon it has something to do with his being fresh from another world, his utter un-self-consciousness and his dependence on me. And maybe just a few hormones! I remind myself that when I'm fully present to this peace I'm not abandoning my other responsibilities outside of my family. On the contrary, if I can bring this peace to my work outside of my family I will be better able to live with God in view then too.

Jesus' lilies and ravens, Berry's wood drake and great blue heron, Mary Oliver's black honey of summer, baby Daniel. These things point towards God's abundant and mysterious peace. They direct our view towards a caring beyond words and they point to a wildness and an unselfconsciousness where worry is non-existent. They redirect our forethoughts of grief by inviting us to enjoy the ripe fruits of what they and God have to offer us in the present moment. Fruits that will be lost on us if we don't see them, experience them, taste them - if we fail to relax, eat, drink, and be merry now.

But we have to be willing to let go of our lens of scarcity. Be willing to experience those moments of mindfulness, wisdom, and peace in the midst of childrearing or marches for peace or movie making or social work or teaching. We have to adopt a lens of abundance so that we can see beyond our exhaustive striving, live with God in view, and trust that there is something larger than us, larger than life, in which we live and move and have our being. It might mean recognizing that time with loved ones is a most precious gift. It might mean offering sanctuary to someone as long as we're not so caught up in the good fight that we can't experience the divine in the process. It might mean asking ourselves how much of our lives is eaten up by worry. It might mean slowing down a bit and not over-scheduling ourselves. It might even mean going and sitting by the Hudson River one evening, or in your favorite park, and noticing the grace of the world, the peace of wild things, even here in NYC. What better season to begin to do this than summer, when nature flaunts her prodigious fruits. What better morning to do this than now, during our August agape meal, when we can let everything fall away save our happy tongues tasting the fruit, and tasting the bread and wine that is indeed our sign of God's abundant care and love. And, should all of these fail you, you are always welcome to come to 20 West 84th Street to hold baby Daniel.

· Ancient Testimony: Luke 12:16-28