Earth Sunday 4/25/10

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The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Acts 9:36-43 • Psalm 23 • John 10:22-30
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad 4/25/10

My father was and is a geologist and a physical scientist, and when every Earth Day rolls around I inevitably think of him. He was from my earliest memory, a devout atheist, and an ecstatic, evangelical lover of God’s creation. All through my childhood I was gifted with many camping trips in the various places we lived. We moved from place to place, not infrequently, as he carried out his work as head of the United States Geological Soil Survey. He even made dirt seem wonderful. He took us to The Appalachian Mountains, the Shenandoah River, Mount Washington, Sugar Loaf mountain, Rehoboth Beach, Bethany Beach, Assoteague and Chiniteague islands, the beautiful Tridelphia Resevoir on the Patuxant River, the glaciers of Upstate New York, and the Eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

I absolutely received my first experience of God through this instructed love of nature. On a camping trip when I was five years old, my father gave me the job of walking down a wooded path to put the milk and the eggs into the ice-cold stream. I was thrilled to see, when I came back to fetch them, that a raccoon had found them and had a glorious breakfast. I then got lost trying to find my way back, so I climbed a friendly-looking tree and waited for my father to come and find me, which he soon did.

I never darkened the door of an Episcopal Church until I was eight years old. At that time, my mother, a preacher’s kid who married an atheist, finally found she had to come back to church. But I knew who God was and I had an inexpressible gratitude for what she had created.

My father, from the beginning, was a good shepherd to us kids, teaching us to be good shepherds to the beautiful fauna and flora of the earth. After he stopped working for the government, he was a professor of geology and physical science for 25 years, and he taught this same love of nature and responsibility for shepherding to all his students. When I would go back to Maryland to visit, we could not go to a public place without ecstatic former students of his calling out “Dr. Gardner! Dr. Gardner!” They certainly knew his name.

From a very young age I was told all about how the earth fit together. I was told about plate tectonics, about air pressure, wind patterns and why the sky was blue. I was taught how rocks were formed, igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic including my father’s personal favorite igneous rock, granite. I heard him talk so much about granite as a young child, that the first time I ever heard someone complain that they were being taken for granite ( probably my mother) I imagined that it meant they were mistaken for a large gray rock.

I was pretty sure my father was the Messiah, at least it certainly seemed like it to me. He knew everything- he knew about how the earth was created, how stars were made- how creatures evolved. I thought he was brilliant. I remember clearly that he took me aside one November when I was 3 years old and told me that I was to tell no one, but that he was going to vote for Eisenhower. How silly, I thought. Anyone would be able to tell that my father would be the best imaginable president. Why bother with other candidates?

When I was 10 my father became desperately ill, and his energy for shepherding shrank to nothing. He lost his job at the Soil Survey, got full disability, and had to rebuild his life from zero, once he began to recover. But, thank God, it seemed that nothing could snatch him from my hand, and he did regain his health.

Our beautiful psalm for today, the 23rd psalm, speaks of a father, of a shepherd whom we know will never be snatched from our hands. It speaks of a God who gifts us with the glory of creation, symbolized by the green pastures and the serenity of the still waters. It speaks of a God who will fill our every need, feed us with the finest food, keep us from fear. It speaks of a God who will restore our souls.

As I was writing this my father called me on the phone from Maryland. He wanted to talk about the volcano in Iceland that is still erupting, and correct several misconceptions about it. He also told me that he had been on that volcano (it is called E-16, he said) in Iceland when all it was doing was melting the glaciers a little. Volcanic ash is a misnomer he said emphatically. You only get cinders and ash from combustion, and there is combustion in a volcano only in Hollywood movies. He began to explain to me that what people call volcanic ash is actually tiny fragments of rock- in this case basalt- that has exploded apart when the hot lava hits water and steam erupts from the volcano. He then went on to tell me the exact physics of a volcanic eruption, about the viscous mantle of lava under the earth’s crust, and what happens when it begins to leak through, which, given plate tectonics, it inevitably does.

I was reminded again that I had a father who gifted me with creation, and that, amazingly he is still in my life, unrolling its mysteries. Although he would never put it this way, I believe that when are sheltered and nourished and even when we are challenged by God’s exquisite creation, this is the purest form of God’s love for us.

As Henri Nouwen implies in our second reading, if we can see all of nature as a sacrament, just as we see the bread and the wine, we have a chance of saving the glory of nature from our own destructive hands. He goes on:

“God is with us, not as an isolated event once a week, but as the concentration of a mystery about which nature speaks day and night.”

The mystery continues in the roaring of hurricanes, the endless tides, the blue mountain mists, the glory of our vast forests, and the extraordinary and fierce explosions of a volcano. It is the whirlwind described in the Book of Job, it is unknowable and unspeakably precious.

God in creation knows our names- knows all our needs and fulfills them all. We and this beautiful, fragile creation are one.