The Cloud in the Paper ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
April 14, 2024
Diana Beresford was orphaned at the age of 12. Both of her parents died within months of each other, and she was left in the care of an indifferent uncle in the city of Cork, in Ireland. While the young girl was grateful to have escaped being assigned to one of the infamous Irish laundries, so often the fate of young poor Irish girls, her uncle took no notice of her at first.
Luckily for Diana, she had other relatives: a wide network of people who lived in a part of Ireland called Lisheens, known for its ties to the land and for its ancestral Celtic ties and ancient folkways and knowledge. And in the summers, Diana was sent off to live with the villagers.
There, in the 1950’s, people still followed ancient Celtic codes. One of these laws was that an orphan became everyone’s child. Diana wrote, “Even the poorest of the poor felt that it was their privilege to give me something, if only a single ripe Bramley apple, or the choice gooseberry from their gooseberry bush outside their front door, or the first ripe strawberry.” (Diana Beresford, To Speak for the Trees, p. 36-7).
Diana entered a fascinating world, that was, in the mid-20th century, dying out. Younger people were leaving for cities and for the United States, and turning away from all the ancient practices and knowledge. And so the community decided, that because Diana was everyone’s child, they would work together to pass along their knowledge to her, so that she could keep their traditions alive. During her summers in Lisheen, she learned the wisdom of plants and animals. Everyone who had wisdom they wished to preserve was asked to help out.
There were no telephones at the time in Lisheens, so people who wanted to teach Diana would visit the local public health nurse, who also fostered knowledge of ancient healing arts. Diana remembered, “…anyone who had a bit of knowledge they wanted to share with me would pay Nurse Creedon a visit…and let her know. Each offering was equal to any other: a small bit was as good as a big one, since they all contributed to the pot. She would then send a runner…up to the farmhouse…This whole wonderful chain was largely invisible to me. The bit of it I encountered was usually a simple line from (my cousin) Pat in the morning, something to the tune of ‘Diana, such-and-such a person up in the mountains wants to see you.’”
It wasn’t all medicinal or healing arts. The community knew Diana’s story and how deeply traumatized she was. As she told the story, “With the tea on the table, one of them might say, ‘Sit down now, Diana, and give your mouth a rest. Well, you know, we were talking and we were worried that maybe you might get lost.’” Diana went on, “Not physically, but mentally – that my sense of self or purpose would abandon me. ‘So,’ the day’s instructor might say, ‘ I’m going to tell you how I manage when I feel lost or overwhelmed.’” Diana was taught forms of Celtic meditation, or ‘going into silence,’ as the community called it. (Ibid., pp. 44-46.)
“We were worried that maybe you might get lost.”
Our theme this month is Interdependence. It can be a challenge for Americans to accept the concept of everything being dependent on everything else. We have a national ethos, a culture, that prizes independence. Early in our history we began to lift up the ideal of the ‘self-made man’: people who succeed in life without having anything to start with. The president born in a log cabin. The people who started out working in the mail room and made their way to the corner office. Of course, the message is that anyone can achieve if they just work hard enough.
But in fact, all around us, everywhere we look, we can see that in order to thrive we need the presence of everything that is around us: not just each other, but other plants, animals, and the natural world taken as a whole.
Because of that, the notion of interdependence, of the cloud being needed for the paper, being present in the paper, becomes a spiritual concept, truly a religious belief. In fact, Interdependence is one of the new core values being proposed by the Unitarian Universalist Association to replace our seven Principles.
Thinking deeply about this, it strikes me that independence isn’t spiritual, cannot be spiritual, if it rejects the importance of life-giving connections.
When Diana Beresford arrived in Lisheens the first summer after her parents died, she was emaciated, prone to fainting, and deeply grieving. In her book, To Speak for the Trees, she mentioned that there was seldom any food in her uncle’s house. But what if her wasting away had a deeper cause than simply physical hunger: what if she was so cut off from love and care that she could not thrive?
How independent are we meant to be?
We know from literature and from the messages of all the major religions that we are meant to seek out connection and relationships. The Quakers sometimes ask people to consider this question: Whose are you? Not who, but rather, whose? To whom or what do you belong? In the words of the late Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn that we heard earlier, “ to be is to inter-be.” Think for a moment about how often we define ourselves with words that indicate relationship: we are someone’s brother, or grandmother, or child; someone’s teacher or lover. We orient ourselves around relationships.
In recent years neuroscientists have been finding ways to study more and more of the functions of the human brain, in an attempt to answer a fundamental question: are we oriented toward relationships and community because of learned behavior and thousands of years of practice, or are we actually physically wired to be social? To connect?
It turns out that there is considerable research now that indicates our brains encourage us to behave socially. We really are hard-wired to be in relationship with one another. Neuroscientists are using a type of imaging called functional MRI’s to study which regions of the brain are activated during social activity. Here is just one example: when people played games in which cooperation was an option and not just personal gains, the reward regions of the brain, the pleasure regions, activated. In other words, cooperation was experienced as rewarding. (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_biology_prepares_us_for_love_and_connection)
The studies contribute to something called Social Baseline Theory, or SBT. “This theory suggests that the human brain operates under the assumption that our interactions with others are a vital resource that helps us stay safe and meet our goals.” The authors of this study, psychologists James Coan and David Sbarra, suggest that the brain equates social resources with physical resources such as oxygen or glucose. (Ibid.). In other words, when we have adequate social connections, our brains experience those as resources that help to strengthen us and make our lives easier, something like having an espresso or an energy drink before engaging in a strenuous physical activity
Think for a moment about the pain we experience when we lose a loved one, or if a dear friend or partner chooses to end a relationship with us. We can feel agony. In fact, that feeling is not purely emotional, but originates in the brain, along the same neural pathways that are activated when we feel physical pain.
Diana Beresford experienced this agony; the loss of her primary relationships with her parents, the loss of her role as a daughter. And so a farming village set out to recreate those broken pathways, rebuilding networks of relationship, restoring her purpose, forging new relationships and a sense of belonging. Picture for a moment the messages being transmitted by foot up the hill to her farmhouse from all different directions, repairing what was broken. When we talk of healing after great loss, because of all the research, we can now understand that such healing is physical as well as emotional. In restoring vital relationships, we restore ourselves to health.
A moment ago I asked, how independent are we meant to be? Well, of course, we want to be competent, and self-reliant, able to manage our own lives and the demands upon us. But mystics and neuroscientists alike tell us that to thrive best, it is interdependence that we seek: ties that can hold us when we face hardship and adversity, much as the lichen clings to boulders in the woods.
For that reason, the value of Interdependence has been suggested to be one of the new core values for Unitarian Universalists. The language proposed for this change to our association’s bylaws reads like this:
“We honor the interdependent web of all existence. With reverence for the great web of life and with humility, we acknowledge our place in it.
We covenant to protect Earth and all beings from exploitation. We will create and nurture sustainable relationships of care and respect, mutuality and justice. We will work to repair harm and damaged relationships.”
I love the mention of humility. For most of human history, we have treated other beings, other species that share the earth with us, as lesser, as something to be used, to be exploited, to profit from. Science is finally advanced enough to teach us that we are very wrong. We have learned much in recent decades about how other species connect and communicate, and how interdependent they are. We have learned that when trees are being attacked by insects, they have ways of letting nearby trees know. The algae and fungi that combine to create lichen act cooperatively. The more we learn, the more we understand the importance of cooperation, of reciprocation, of relationship.
Here in the United States we have looked at the world through a lens colored by capitalism, which has created a belief in the superiority of competition, of independence. Competition and independence cannot be spiritual values, for they turn away from the desire for all to thrive, for all to live in harmony, in a sense of mutual care and concern. Competition tells us, in order for me to do well, you must be less successful. Only one of us can win.
We are learning so quickly now in the 21st century. We have learned to observe how other species cooperate, and reciprocate. We have learned that our human brains activate our pleasure centers when we act cooperatively. It is time now to embrace humility, to look more closely, to learn how to act in concert with other species and with each other. Let us commit ourselves, in the words of our new value of Interdependence, ‘create and nurture sustainable relationships of care and respect, mutuality and justice.’
Remember the words of poet Wendell Berry: “We clasp the hands of those that go before us, and the hands of those who come after us; We enter the little circle of each other’s arms…and the larger circle of all creatures.” (Wendell Berry, The Larger Circle)
May it be so,
Amen.
