Sitting on a rock to avoid the muck of the marsh, twelve-year-old me watched with wonder as hundreds of tadpoles squiggled in a murky pond. The pond, and the tadpoles, showed up every year following spring rains on some undeveloped land at the end of my road. Both the pond and the tadpoles disappeared in summer’s heat. How many tadpoles turned into frogs before the pond dried up, I never knew, but witnessing their tiny bodies sparkling, reflecting the sun as they moved, that’s woven into my precious childhood memories.
When I finished high school, my family moved off that street. Teenaged me didn’t spend much time in the swamp, to be honest. There was school and boys and learning to drive, and other high school stuff. Yet a year after we moved, when a friend told me the marsh had been bulldozed for new houses, I cried. Silly, right, to cry for something so ephemeral? I stuffed those feelings down.
And that was that. Except it wasn’t, because here I am, decades later, telling you about the tadpoles. Why?
If you follow the Christian calendar, you know that today is Palm Sunday, the start of Easter Week. Next Sunday is all about rebirth, new life, baby chicks and lambs and eggs. As UUs we may not hold with Jesus as resurrected God, but you can’t ignore the symbolism. Especially when so many things are grave like they are now. You might be clinging to the idea of restoration and renewal as a source of hope.
I have to tell you, though, I think there’s some important work for us before the rebirth. We, and I mean the collective we that includes most Christians sitting in Palm Sunday services right now, we skip over the important middle day – Holy Saturday. It’s the day where the tadpoles fit in. It’s the day that we need to acknowledge, I believe, if we are actually going to find a sustaining hope for new life.
In his book, Earth Grief, Stephen Harrod Buhner wrote:
For we live in a time of tending, when many things we love will die – ways of life, kindred species, Earth climate and landscapes. We should not travel into that future unprepared. And so I believe that it is time for us to sit at the feet of death and allow it to teach us the things we need to learn to make it through the times we now face.
Sit at the feet of death and allow it to teach us. That’s what this is about.
Let’s backtrack a bit, though, for those of us who need a refresher on the historical Easter story. On Friday, Jesus was taken by soldiers to Pontius Pilate and was crucified and died. His body was given to Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jew. Jesus was wrapped in a linen shroud and placed into a tomb Joseph, planning ahead, had just had dug for himself in his garden. They quickly rolled a big stone in front of the opening to seal it before sundown when the Sabbath began. That’s why the women didn’t finish the burial preparations, which sets up the whole Easter morning thing. But what happened on Saturday? Observing the Sabbath, they rested. And they grieved.
For the followers of Jesus, it was the end. They’d been listening to a charismatic Jew teaching amazing stuff and they’d been watching him miraculously heal people for maybe three years. He gave them hope and a vision of life without struggling in their deeply divided social system that the Pharisees enforced and which, it seemed, the Roman government was more than happy to let continue. But Jesus was executed and that was it. Imagine what it must have felt like to be part of a movement, to be caught up in the momentum towards a better future, to think everything is on verge of being okay and then – it’s just done. Maybe, living today, you don’t have to imagine too hard.
Think of what they must have been sitting with – shock, trauma, abandonment, despair, grief. And probably some guilt, because most of them took off before the cross and nails came out. They had no idea that anything would change, that anyone would pick up where Jesus left off and make a whole new religion out of it. We hear the Easter story and know the ending, but, at the time, it was a story whose ending was only discovered as it happened.
That’s true for the story we’re living in, too. The world is full of suffering and loss, but we can picture a better future, even think we’re moving towards it then, bam, hit a wall. Or an administration. Buhner wrote we should sit at the feet of death. What does that mean? It is to be in the perspective of Holy Saturday, open to the harsh realities of life on this planet, unsure of what’s next, and grieving what’s lost.
Our culture likes to skip Holy Saturday, and I’m not just talking about Easter weekend. Grieving loved ones, humans, though compressed into whatever corporations decide is enough time away from productive work, at least gets us some support while we’re in it. We’re getting a little better at allowing others to process the loss of beloved pets. But strangers? Other species? Bits of land? The climate? Oh, no, there’s nowhere to take those feelings of sadness, dread, or even outrage. Think about it. Maybe you haven’t experienced it personally but consider how well-known activists are talked about. Too emotional. Too negative. Too loud. Unreasonable. A society that treats nature, including humans, like a collection of resources to be used for economic growth, has no space for your feelings.
And it has been carefully crafted to be that way. Propaganda from corporate media and even the government keeps on a subtle but constant pressure to conform. If you care at all about immigrants or climate or endangered species, you might hear over and over that your feelings are fringe, that they’re irrational, inappropriate. I have been accused of anthropomorphizing, of caring about other species more than humans, of being one of those wackos who would be happy if humans were wiped off the face of the Earth, just because I had the audacity to suggest that we don’t kill every wild being who poses a threat to unsecured chickens. Developers play those same cards when environmentalists try to hold up a project. Progress and expansion are needed to take care of the humans. I mean, take care of corporate profits. Whatever. What you hear, really, is you are an outlier. You’re the weirdo who cried over tadpoles when we got rid of a mosquito-ridden, mucky swamp for a nice new home. You hear you don’t belong. You’re in this space this morning, so maybe you’re okay with hearing that, but it makes it pretty hard to bring the fence sitters over.
So, what do you do with the feelings? Therapeutic support for ecological grief is lacking. Ecopsychology is a very new thing. Unless you seek out a therapist trained in it, you’re likely to have feelings related to your concern for the planet attributed to some underlying personal problem, or to some past trauma that’s really causing your grief, your despair, your alarm. This leaves us with almost no social support, no way to work through painful feelings or negative experiences. So, you teach yourself to avoid them.
Or you put them to work. Activism is deeply woven into our spiritual identity. And there’s work that needs to be done. Nothing is going to change unless we do something, right? From what I’ve experienced in twenty-five years as a UU, this is not unique to this congregation. But that jump to action is skipping right over Holy Saturday and sometimes even the celebration of Easter and all that beautiful new life symbolism and going right to penning letters to the Corinthians or the editor. It’s a good thing to take action, goodness knows there is enough for us to do, but I have learned through my own struggles with loneliness and burnout that what I desire in a loving spiritual community is space for it all, for companioning through the emotions of deep grief and awe and hope, space for Holy Saturday, space for the tadpoles.
It’s taken self-work to be able to stand here and share this. I look for guidance from many traditions. Here’s one – in the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali gives us a path for getting to a state of pure awareness and interconnectedness. And don’t we all want to be there. That path is blocked by the kleshas, the causes of suffering. One is attachment, or Raga, which is how you’re clinging to or grasping for what you desire, whether that’s things, experiences, or outcomes. You’ve probably heard of the practice of nonattachment somewhere along the line. But there’s another side, another klesha, aversion or Dvesha. Aversion is the way we avoid or resist unpleasant sensations, emotions, or situations. It makes sense to do that, on one level, otherwise you wouldn’t pull your hand away when you touch a hot pot on the stove. But that’s a reaction, involuntary. When you do that with uncomfortable feelings you trap yourself in that reactionary state rather than staying present to what is. You aren’t responding from a place of interconnectedness, a place where you’re holding a vision for the future, a place of hope for rebirth.
Most environmental conservation and social justice organizations operate under the assumption that if you just know how bad things are, you will do something about them. They hit you with facts and figures, the more shocking the better, so you’ll head right into action on behalf of their causes. But they don’t hold space for you to take it all in, to reflect on what it means, to feel however it makes you feel.
One reason, I think, that those groups skip the feelings is because they are complicated. Ecological losses and social injustices differ from our ordinary experiences of losing a loved one because just living as humans with whatever privilege we have means we are in some way complicit in the losses that are occurring. Grieving gets complicated when guilt is mixed with sorrow. And we also get unclear messages about the reasons we’re experiencing loss to begin with. Think back to what I said about what’s in the media. It’s a lot to pick through.
During the time for all ages, I told the story of the Fisher King and the knight, Perceval. It was a good story for this week, since it includes the Holy Grail, which is supposed to be the cup Jesus drank out of during the Last Supper. But what I want you to remember is what Perceval finally did to free the Fisher King from his suffering. He asked a simple question: “What ails you?” The story, I think, gives us a hint about what aversion looks like and what was expected behavior in a society that valued power and masculinity. Not only did the Fisher King’s court avoid talking about their king’s injuries because it was uncomfortable, they didn’t want to bring attention to what made the king seem weak or vulnerable. But Perceval stepped outside the norms and asked. And in acknowledging the king’s suffering, in being present to it, by being compassionate, the king was healed and the kingdom restored.
Compassion means “to suffer with.” It comes from Latin, and the passion part is the same as the Passion of Christ, the suffering Jesus endured on the cross. But I turn to Buddhism to really understand compassion as a practice. Shantideva, an eighth century Buddhist monk, said, “Let all sorrows ripen in me.” Let all sorrows ripen in me. It’s an invitation to feel it all, the whole range of what comes with being human in an interconnected world. Sitting with grief means allowing space for all that, a space in which you cultivate compassion. You become an engaged witness to the suffering. It’s how you look at the death and loss that’s happening around you and open to see what’s happening inside you as you do. It’s all the inner work that takes time.
But here we are in what feels like a race against a series of disasters and injustices that are heading for catastrophe. We don’t have time to grieve, right?
I respectfully disagree. Not only do we need to make time for grief, I would argue that it is the responsibility of a spiritual community to hold space for all those feelings that come with being aware of what’s happening – alarm, anger, despair, grief – and intentionally help each other cultivate the capacity to mourn. And to support each other in sustaining that capacity through rituals and practices that acknowledge what ails us and what ails the world. To hold the container of Holy Saturday for as long as we’re in it, without expectation that we ever experience the resurrection. To be like those on that middle day, knowing nothing but what was lost and just sitting with it.
Spaces and communities like this also help shift the narrative about who we can mourn. It is clear in the media that there are bodies who shouldn’t matter, who aren’t supposed to be grieved – bodies of women, racial minorities, LGBTQ, certain ethnic groups, economically and politically marginalized groups, indigenous peoples, even people of different religions – we hear that those bodies aren’t worthy of grief. And they completely set aside the bodies of the more-than-human world – animals, plants, trees, soil, rocks, water, air. But here we can welcome all as worthy. We can make bodies matter, no matter who they are. Even tadpoles.
I don’t believe we can have the renewal we desire without first mourning the losses we have already sustained. And not just a quick bereavement leave before we get back to work. We have to let grief be pervasive in our experience, to insist on our attention, to relentlessly consume our awareness. Like Buhner said, we sit with grief because it has things to teach us. It’s where we find within ourselves connection to the causes we care about and expand our capacity to respond, not react, but respond compassionately to the next challenges. And we need to sit with grief in community so you can let go of the feeling that the fate of humanity and the planet rests on your shoulders alone, so you know that what you feel doesn’t make you an outlier, that you do, indeed, belong. So, let us honor Holy Saturday not as a day on the liturgical calendar, but as a shared practice of sitting with grief. And mourn together, because there is so much work to do together.