Sometimes we’re invited to live by our principles at the very moment we’d rather have things go more satisfactorily our own way.
As a great fan of the Parliament of the World’s Religions and an attendee since the 2009 convening in Melbourne, Australia, I was thrilled when my proposal to offer an Earth Hospice ceremony was accepted for this year’s Parliament in Chicago. I had asked to hold the event outside, but when I arrived at the enormous convention center last week and discovered that I’d been assigned to a terrace right above a major expressway, roaring loudly in two directions, I was very disheartened.
I asked one of the program organizers if there was another option, but she said there wasn’t. Then I considered moving the ceremony to the adjacent terrace, which overlooked Lake Michigan, gleaning in the morning sun. I could make some space, I thought, even though other activities were taking place there. I got flaps from some cardboard boxes and made signs that would direct people, like a trail of breadcrumbs, to the new location.
But as I was placing the signs, it suddenly dawned on me that the whole point I’m trying to make about being in attentive presence to the Earth, especially in times of crisis and places of wounding, is that we must both accept what’s awful about our circumstances and absorb with gratitude what’s beautiful in them.
So, when the ceremony began, I welcomed the traffic noise. And after the introduction, when I asked the group if they wanted to move to a quieter place, they said no! There we stayed, with the lake to the East; the expressway and rows of concrete planters full of jaunty scarlet impatiens to the South; the convention center and the city of Chicago rising up as glass, brick, and steel in the West and North. We spoke of our grief for what the Earth and we are suffering and named beauty we had recently experienced. Finally, we made a gift for the Earth out of leaves, flowers, sticks, feathers, and some trash that I had collected in a nearby park, and we concluded by offering a prayer or wish for the Earth.
Many of the participants said afterwards that from then on they would think differently about what belongs in their environments and what they may only tell themselves does not belong.