Were Nature Mine - It Is Not

"Were the Whole Realm of Nature Mine"

3. "Were Nature Mine - It Is Not”

First Presbyterian Church

Reverend Donald E. Ray

July 11, 2010

Traveling to Virginia last week to visit my son and his family, we were enjoying the breathtaking panoramic vistas on the ride through the mountains in Pennsylvania , West Virginia and Virginia . Were the whole realm of nature playing in my head, my reverie was interrupted by the car radio, Tony Bennett singing, If I Ruled the World.” On long trips, since I don’t text while I drive, I use the time to plan some project or process ideas for a sermon in my thoughts. This sermon was of course on my mind. “Every day would be the first day of spring,” Tony intoned. “My world would be a beautiful place . . . My world would wear a smile on its face . . . If I ruled the world, every man would say the world was his friend.” I listened and I looked. The beauty was already there. If there was any hostility, it was in the highway traffic where no matter how chaotically, humanity does rule. There was beauty only a couple of weeks past the first day of spring but I could recall pictures in my mind of the Blue Ridge mountains in the glorious autumn colors and thought; the arrogance of humanity ruling the world, designing it to our individual purpose.

One of the lessons I remember vividly from my first year college English grammar course, was the use of the verb were in a condition contrary to fact. “When it was mine . . .” I would say in reference to the house I owned upon first moving to Jamestown . I might say of another house I saw on my morning walk, “If it were mine, I would add a deck, or change the landscaping.

Were the whole realm of nature mine, . . . wrote Isaac Watts. A condition contrary to fact—the whole realm of nature was in reality, not his—nor is it ours—nor has it ever been the property of humanity. One of the misinterpretations of the Genesis stories of creation is to equate the word dominion with ownership and therefore absolute control to do with as one wills. Curiously, the illustration provided by the American Heritage dictionary is a quote from Jonathan Edwards. “The devil. . .has their souls in his possession, and under his dominion.” (1)

From the first time as a child, we clutch some toy in our hands and say defiantly to the one who would take it from us, “MINE.” We must wrestle with the idea that all we see and touch is indeed, mine. Wrestle with that idea we must because in reality, it is not all mine. The concept of ownership has some necessity relative to property. There may be some importance to having our name on the deed to a house and lot. Holding title to a car, paying at the check-out for the groceries we take home for our week’s meals, settling accounts at the furniture store for the recliner we take home as ours to sit on in our living room is the stuff of our economic culture. But does that claim to ownership allow for wasting what is ours when many in this world starve because we have a distribution problem with sharing its resources.

Ownership is in fact, an unrealistic way of looking at the whole picture. For the most part, I like the western New York climate. When folks complain about the winter’s cold and snow, I likely comment that we don’t have fire storms sweeping through the hills, our houses aren’t swept down the hill in a mud slide, rarely does the wind devastate all in its path, the ground doesn’t shake under our feet—I guess I can’t say that unequivocally any more.

Two weeks ago I was sitting in a class room at Lily Dale leading a seminar on pastoral skills when the room began to move like a row boat on the wake of a passing cruiser. No, it was not the presence of some spirits. It was the ripple effect of an earthquake, the epicenter near Ottawa in Canada . It lasted only a few seconds, not long enough to take me beyond surprise to anxiety. There was no evident damage; calm seemed to restore; there were no more tremors. One of the women in the group, however, had come from Santa Barbara , California . Her reaction was instant panic. She was ready to evacuate the building.

It was my first experience of an earthquake—gratefully minor, without devastating effect. But it was a reminder I have taken to heart; that it is not in an illusion of the permanence of the things for which I can claim ownership that my security rests. It is not in holding tight to what is mine and grasping for more that I find gratification in life. It would seem that the mine, mine, mine, mentality runs so deep in us that it takes losing, or at least the threat of losing all or much of what we think we own to bring us to the realization that the whole ream of nature is not mine.

That realization can be unsettling, depressing. Or we can make the leap of faith Isaac Watts suggests in the concluding lines of his hymn;

Love so amazing, so divine

Demands my soul, my life, my all.

As a child, we learn that letting go of what we claimed as “mine” actually introduces us to the new world of playmates, friends, the sharing that multiplies our enjoyment. There is relief from the burden that ownership can be, opening the way for relating to the stuff of life—the realm of nature in another religious adopted word, stewardship.

Eugene Peterson in his translation, The Message, uses the word, “responsible” rather than dominion. In the context of the creation story, humanity has a distinct role. The writer recognizes that humanity is gifted with the reasoning powers, the memory, and the wisdom that can benefit creation. To take responsibility, is to use those gifts care-fully.

In the early years of my life, I grew up on a dairy farm in southeastern Pennsylvania . My father, having lost everything in the depression, was intent on the security of his family. He purchased the farm to ensure that we would never go hungry. Owning that farm was important to him. But ownership no longer had the meaning it once had. He had come to the realization we are all part of something greater. He was not one to verbalize much about his beliefs. His day to day living spoke clearly. Understanding the nature of the soil; appreciating the needs of the livestock; accounting for the seasons and the weather; valuing human life with its limitations and responsibilities as a part in the whole realm of nature was his faith leap.

To produce the feed crops for 35 cows, calves, a few pigs and sheep, and initially two horses to work the farm, with less than 50 tillable acres was no small feat. The strategy for planting crops was planned in advance. Year to year rotating crops that require different nutrients from the soil in exchange for natural fertilizers they returned, kept our fields rich and productive far beyond neighboring farms where the owners would push their land to the limit each year. On the slopes, alternating contour strips of corn which leaves much soil exposed to possible erosion and hay or grain crops that provide ground cover kept rich top soil from washing away down the drainage ditches along the road.

Cross breeding cows resulted in a herd of “mutts” that would never win ribbons at the County Fair but produced more and better quality milk and were generally healthier than the show animals some raised for their own pride.

My father’s farming practices, responsible to nature’s land and vegetation and animals had roots in his faith. We did not harvest on Sunday. In my father’s practice of his faith, that was his Sabbath keeping. It was a day of rest necessary when six days were often sixteen hours of intense labor. But more importantly, it was his recognition of the God of creation. At times when the weather made it difficult to make hay while the sun shone, the Sunday Sabbath was preserved. We attended church, no easy matter when the cows still needed to be milked, fed and stables cleaned before we could go to worship, but we did it. It was that sense of the God of creation that was translated in the responsible interaction with nature that was at the core of our farming.

My father and mother had four children, but when they talked about “our” children, it was never in the sense that we were but an extension of their life and dreams. It was always with the sense of their responsibility to help us grow to be who we are in our own lives. That is continued in our family decision to skirt the lucrative real estate development market and keep the property as open space where the realm of nature can be enjoyed and recreation facilities can be part of the nurture of children and families as that land once provided crops for the animals. Appropriate to my father’s stewardship, the park bears my parent’s name.

Condition contrary to fact. Were the whole realm of nature mine—It is not. Gratefully, it is not. We are freed to be awed in its beauty. We may live in this world, exploring, learning, growing receiving and giving, finding peace and harmony that comes with open hands. We can discover that living in the realm of nature with Isaac Watts rather than Tony Bennett playing in our heads is the life of beauty and love so amazing.

Amen.

(1) The American Heritage Dictionary, p. 417

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