A sermon by the Rev. Daniel Schatz, delivered at BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, June 8, 2003

Sermon:  A Sense of Place

Sun almost at height already.  Hired boat and crossed to Matsushima.  Distance of more than two li.  Landed at Ojima Beach.

Now, though it’s been only too often observed, Matsushima presents a magnificent vista, the finest in our “mulberry land” and comparable to that of Lake Dotei or Seiko.  The sea enters at the southeast, three  li  wide at that point, like Sekko at flood tide.  All sorts of islands gather here, steep ones pointing to the sky, others creeping upon waves.  Or some piled double on each other, or even triple, and some divided at one end and overlapping at the other.  Some bear others on their backs, some seem to embrace them, as if caressing their offspring.  Green of the pines deep, needles and branches mauled by the salt winds – though controlled by nature – look artificially trained.  The feeling: one of intense beauty, of a lovely creature engrossed in her glass.  Perhaps in the Age of the Gods Oyamazumi shaped this place.  Who with brush or speech can hope to describe the work of heaven and earth’s divinity?

 Matsuo Basho, Back Roads to Far Towns
tr. Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu

      In 1849, Henry David Thoreau published an account of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  It was over 400 pages long.  “If Mr. Thoreau plans to publish his autobiography on the same scale,” wrote one reviewer, “we shall all have to enlarge our libraries.”  Of course, much can happen in a week.  Lives turn around in a week.  You can have earth shattering adventures in a week.  Just look at the summer blockbuster movies.

      But  nothing much happens in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  What fills the four hundred pages is not a tale of intrigue or tragedy or even adventure, but rather an abiding sense of place.

      “Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts.  We glided noiselessly down the stream, occasionally driving a pickerel or a bream from the covert of the pads, and the smaller bittern now and then sailed away on sluggish wings from some recess in the shore, or the larger lifted itself out of the long grass at our approach, and carried its precious legs away to deposit them in a place of safety.  The tortoises also rapidly dropped into the water, as our boat ruffled the surface amid the willows, breaking the reflections of the trees.  The banks had passed the height of their beauty, and some of the brighter flowers showed by their faded tints that the season was verging toward the afternoon of the year; but this sombre tinge enhanced their sincerity, and in the still unabated heats they seemed like the mossy brink of some cool well.”

      Reading Thoreau’s Week is an encapsulation of a New England summer.  What made his description so powerful is that he did not merely write a sense of place.  He lived it.  For Thoreau, noticing the world around him was religion.

      When we awake to the world around us, we not only see and hear and smell and feel and taste differently, we also begin to live differently.

      This is part of the reason summer vacations are so important to most of us.  Like Thoreau, we decide that we need to get away from the familiar, the hustle and bustle of Concord – or of Warrington, or Doylestown or Ambler or wherever we happen to live.  We need to go out and look at the world.

      I grew up in Washington, DC, a town so dominated by people from elsewhere that it comes as a surprise to many that anyone was actually born there.  As a college student I spent summers working for the National Parks and History bookstores, at places like the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Arlington Cemetery, and Ford’s Theater.  Through those jobs I came to see aspects of my home town I had never noticed before.

      So often we travel elsewhere to experience the beauty or history of a place, but we miss the treasure that is around us in our own home.

      Maybe it’s the tourists.  Anyone who grew up in a tourist town carries a certain disdain for the breed.  When I was living in New Hampshire I saw people with bumper stickers that said things like, “If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?”

      The truth is, sometimes tourists notice what we have missed.

      A few years ago, as I was driving through Nova Scotia with a friend, I came to the startling conclusion that although I tend to dislike being around tourists, I really love being one.  What I’ve discovered is that it isn’t so much the traveling that I love, but the mindset it puts me in.  Away from the responsibilities of everyday life, as travelers we become free to explore, to learn, to let the places we visit become part of us.

      The Japanese poet Basho understood this well, and his travel diaries and haikus are for me as much scripture as any bible or sutra.  His travels were spiritual journeys through places, attempts to achieve enlightenment by merging his individuality with the spirit of a place.  If he could be fully part of a small piece of the universe then he could be fully part of the universe as a whole.  His diaries and poems are the record of these journeys, and they are a brilliant synthesis of the Shinto sense of place with the Buddhist sense of totality.

      His descriptions aren’t always pleasant to read.  One of his most famous haikus describes a night spent in a barn – the fleas, the lice, and what the horse was doing near his pillow.  Beauty, as conventionally defined, isn’t always the point.  For Basho, the point is a sense of connection, of oneness, moving toward enlightenment. 

      Our world, our reality, our universe is one.  We usually think of ourselves as separate from that, as individuals who relate with the world around us, but this is a half truth.  We are the world around us, and the world around us is us.  When we come to realize that truth, more than intellectually, but spiritually, we have arrived at the beginnings of wholeness.

      We are not separable from our environment, although we have various ways of attempting to separate ourselves.  But the truth, if we are to be honest, is that we are merely human beings, and we are as much a part of the larger reality as your cells are part of your body.

      The poet, novelist and essayist Wendell Berry once said that if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.  Much more than most of us realize, our sense of self is defined by the world around us.

      That world isn’t only one of natural land and seascapes.  Never think that because you live in a suburban or urban environment your sense of place need be any less than those who live in the country.  There is a sense of place in the city that is unique to that city.  There is a sense of place on every suburban block that is unique to that neighborhood, if we are awake to see it and live it. What do we see?  What do we hear?  What do we smell?  What do we feel?

      I think – it’s embarrassing to realize how far I had to go to experience this – but I think of Santiago, Chile, a city about the size of Philadelphia.  And I think of the poblaciones, the poor neighborhoods, with their tiny houses, apartments, mud streets and dogs, everywhere there were dogs.  (They’re much nicer dogs than in the United States.  I noticed this even before I heard another American say, in her basic Spanish, “Los perros son simpaticos.”)

      I think of the downtown area, with the busses, called micros, belching out fumes, and some lunatic hanging out the door as the bus turned into heavy traffic.  (All right.  I admit it.  I was the lunatic, and it was a blast.)  I think of the city center, with its stalls of fruit vendors, its gamblers, its buskers, its vendors shouting “cigarillos Americanos,” its stores for the wealthy and its stalls for the poor.

      I couldn’t describe Philadelphia so well, and I was in Santiago for only a few months.  But we tend to notice more when we are away from home.  That is when we are awake to the world around us.

      And that is when we awake to the cultural as well as natural features of a place.  Having a sense of place without reference to people and culture only makes sense if we are in a wilderness, and we would have to travel to Antarctica to find wilderness without much of a human history – but in the world we live in every day, human culture is part of our sense of place.  If we don’t know where we are, we don’t know who we are.

      When I say culture, I’m not only thinking of history, or regionalism, or anything else.  The culture of a grocery store, a hospital or a hotel is as much part of those places as the history of the area, or the natural history of the ground on which they stand – more, perhaps.

      A couple of weeks ago, I was nearly overwhelmed with a sense of place when for the first time I walked into something called the Q-Mart.  Have you been there?  It’s a mixture of a flea market, farmer’s market and discount shopping mall in Quakertown, and walking through the Q-Mart feels like a cross between a state agricultural fair and a Salvador Dali painting.  You can find anything from cheap woodcrafts to Chinese spices to gaudy discount luggage.  It assaults the senses.  The people are a cross section of blue collar workers, farmers, town dwellers, discount hunters and teenagers looking for a place to hang out on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  The radio is tuned to the Quakertown station, and every 15 minutes or so it plays a commercial for the Q-Mart.  You can get a decent lunch there, and they even have Dutch funnel cakes, and if you’re bored you can test out a new Martin guitar.

      You can feel as much of a sense of place in the Q-mart, or any other human space, as you can in nature.  It isn’t beautiful by any definition I know, except maybe this one:  it is a place rich in the senses – it is awake, and it is an inroad to a kind of rural class and cultural diversity most of us here rarely experience.  And there’s lots of cheap stuff there, but that would be digressing.

      My point is that there is just as much to be gained by connecting with a place like the Q-mart as there is in being one with a grove of trees.  Living a sense of place is not about what convention finds beautiful, or what we think is lovely; it’s about how we are open to the world around us.  It is a spiritual discipline precisely because in some places it takes discipline to let go of our judgments and our opinions and simply be.

      It isn’t a discipline of knowledge, not intellectual knowledge in the normal sense.  It’s a matter of being, of becoming part of the place in which we find ourselves.  If we open ourselves fully, keep aside the concerns and the worries and the cares, and simply be in a place, we will find that in this place, whether it is an alley or a suburban lane, is more of the world and more of the truth of life than we had seen in the last month or year.

      “To see the world” wrote William Blake,

      “in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower,

      hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

      and eternity in an hour.”

       When was the last time you sat down and examined the cracks on the road, or the universe that is contained in a single square foot of lawn?  When was the last time you looked for God in the boarded up row houses of an old mill town?  When was the last time you looked for something sacred in the roofline of your own house?

       The poets know it, or at least the better ones do.  The artists know it and the novelists know it.  In their writing and in their truth-telling, they teach us to wake to the holiness of right now and right here.

       But it is the children who know it best.  Do you remember Shel Silverstein’s most famous poem?

      There is a place where the sidewalk ends

      And before the street begins,

      And there the grass grows soft and white,

      And there the sun burns crimson bright,

      And there the moon-bird rests from his flight

      To cool in the peppermint wind. 

      Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black

      And the dark street winds and bends.

      Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow

      We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

      And watch where the chalk-white arrows go

      To the place where the sidewalk ends. 

      Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

      And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,

      For the children, they mark, and the children, they know

      The place where the sidewalk ends.

The children know how to find truth in a place. 

       God is in this place, whatever place, any place you happen to be.  If you let a place touch you, the world becomes part of you.  And – maybe for the first time in many months, or years, or since you were a child  - you become part of the world.  And you know it.

       It really isn’t that difficult, although it sounds like the discipline of sages.  But is isn’t that tough.  On your way to work tomorrow, if you work – try to notice something you never noticed before.  You might want to stop at a traffic light; we don’t want any accidents here – but look for some detail that you never gave the slightest thought to.  Or you could go for a walk.  Step out from your door for five minutes and notice something new.  Look at it well.  Make it part of you, whether it is beautiful or ugly or bland as you would normally consider it.  If you have the chance, listen and smell and taste the air as you look around you.

       Learn who you are.  Learn why the world is.  Grow into it.  Lean into it.  Let a sense of place fill you, and let go of all of those other responsibilities and worries and cares and preoccupations.

       I know it isn’t easy.  That’s why we take trips to force us to let go, even when everything we need is right here.

       It isn’t easy.  We have cares and concerns and suffering and schedules and too much to do.  Maybe you are hurting.  Maybe you are too busy trying desperately to hold the threads of your fractured life together to take the time to find God in a place.

       I understand.  I sometimes feel the same way.  It is in times like these that we most need to open ourselves to the reality in the grain of sand, the sacred in the roofline.  Make time.  It doesn’t have to be much time.  Five minutes could be enough time if you can somehow persuade yourself to let go of what you have to do and just sit and be a part of something larger than yourself and your life.  You might cry, if you’re close to the edge.  That’s good.  It’s probably something you needed to do.  Or you might realize that five minutes is not enough, and though it’s all you can spare, you need more.  That’s all right, too.  It’s a beginning, and a glimpse, and it’s enough to pull you outside yourself and your troubles.  It’s enough to remind you that you are more than the sum of your worries.  It will help you.

       Every one of us, in every moment, is part of a place.  It is a small place, and a larger place, and it is the earth, the universe, life itself. 

       We are the place and in the place is holiness.  It is only up to us to allow ourselves to wake to the spiritual truth that surrounds us.