Ancient Sediment
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
Opening Sunday, Sept. 9, 2001

Reading: Doug Heath’s  explanation of 2,400 year-old leaf found in sediments from Lake Quannapowitt

	I don’t know what it was about the discovery of this leaf that caught my imagination when I read about it in the Item.  Maybe I simply identify with sediment.  For years I have made the quip that I can’t learn any new information because my brain is too full of useless trivia like old TV jingles from the 50's – use new white rain shampoo tonight and tomorrow your hair will be sunshine bright.  It is as if there were a thick layer of sludge up there and I need to find a drain plug to get rid of it before I can put any new information in.
	Or maybe it’s the presence of the miraculous in something as ordinary as a leaf.  We will shortly be awash in leaves; we know that after providing us for a few weeks with a dramatically recolored landscape,  they will all fall off and clog our sewers and litter our lawns and provide us with hours of back-breaking labor to get rid of.  But besides being a nuisance, leaves are a common symbol of transience. The leaf falls from the tree, and another year has gone.  The leaves from last year – well where do they go?  They mulch down and fertilize our lawns.  They belong to the class of ephemeral things, like the mayfly.  As Robert Frost said, nothing gold can stay.  
	Yet what a wonder that one of these very symbols of impermanence should turn out to be older than the earliest Christian churches, older than most Roman aqueducts and monuments.  What a wonder that this leaf was growing in the first century after Buddha taught, while Plato was writing and before Alexander the Great began his conquests.  That by the time Jesus walked the earth, this leaf had been entombed in the sediments of the lake for four hundred years.
	The scientist in me asks what force arrested its decay.  After all, if every leaf that fell stayed around for 2,400 years we wouldn’t be able to see the ground at all at any season of the year.  Wakefield and the rest of the world would be a giant leaf-pile.  What was it about this particular leaf that allowed it to escape the fate of its fellows?  Did it not have any oxygen there in the lakebed to undergo what Frost called the slow smokeless burning of decay?  
	Then too, any leaf is kind of miraculous when you think about it.  Leaves turn light into a kind of chemical energy which the tree then converts into matter.  I saw a film this summer on Star Island which was made to show how poor our science education system is.  It consists of interviews with students at commencement at Harvard and MIT.  The student stands there in cap and gown while the interviewer asks a science question, and the question is this.  The student is given in one hand a seed, and in the other a piece of a tree limb.  The interviewer says, now you understand that this limb and the rest of the tree grew from a seed very much like this.  Yes, the student answers.  Very well, the interviewer asks, tell me where all the stuff came from?  
	Now I doubt if I could answer that question to the satisfaction of the scientists, but the question itself underscored the miraculous hidden in the ordinary.  Somehow the tree pulls together light from the sun, water from the earth, carbon dioxide from the air, nitrogen from the soil, and through its DNA and its processes of cell replication from its beginning as a little seed it uses these ephemeral, almost non-material elements to make something so massive and solid that we can cut it down and build from it our houses, our barns, our churches.  The timbers which went into the building of this church came from trees which started life as tiny seeds sometime in the sixteenth century, or two thousand years after the tree which bore the leaf found at the bottom of the lake.
	It is the leaf which turns the light into the building material.  You or I can’t make building material out of light, but a leaf can.  You or I can’t breathe in carbon monoxide and breathe out oxygen, but a leaf can, and thank goodness.  For if we didn’t have the leaves to do this, we animals would soon run out of oxygen.  
	What kind of animals and what kind of people were found around the shores of Lake Quannapowitt when this leaf was still on the tree?  According to an article by James Bradley in a town history I consulted, Native Americans inhabited this area for at least the last ten thousand years.  When the first humans arrived, the climate was far different, a combination of tundra and boreal forest like present-day Labrador or northern Quebec.  About 8,000 years ago, the climate got warmer, and hardwoods began to invade the pine forests.  There was probably a system of large shallow lakes, of which Quannapowitt is the last survivor.  
	“Another climate change occurred 3,000 years ago.  
The climate was warmer than today’s, and there are indications it may have been drier as well.  Pollen records indicate a diverse deciduous forest that contained oak, hickory and other nut-bearing species. It also appears that much of the earlier shallow lake environment had filled in as open water was slowly replaced by red maple swamp and peat bog.  While this may not seem like an attractive setting to us today, it was for native people.  Ecological diversity meant that a wide range of plant and animal resources were available not just for food, but for all the necessities of life – shelter, clothing and implements.”  
	But you didn’t come here this morning for a science lecture or a history lesson, and I must confess that the thing about the leaf in the lake that most attracted me was what it does to the metaphor of water as spirit, a metaphor I have explored from this pulpit several times in the past.  
	It isn’t just me, either.  Religious thinkers for millennia have seen the properties of water as good for attempting to explain the inexplicable.  Since John the Baptist Christians have dedicated infants and adults to God by baptizing them with water, a use we continue in this church by using the water we collect today for any child dedications we perform during the year.  Deep calls to deep says the psalm, and another says as the deer longs for the flowing stream so my soul longs for you oh God, my soul thirsts for God.  Another psalm says the river of God is full of water.  One of the sayings collected in the book of proverbs says “The words of the mouth are deep waters, the fountain of wisdom is a gushing stream.”
	In the Theravada Buddhist tradition, the holy men, those who have advanced along the road toward enlightenment are called Arahants, which means “stream enterers.”  Since their goal is to escape the cycle of rebirths, I suppose that this would be the stream of time.  And of course neo pagans celebrate water as one of the four ancient elements, alongside earth, fire and air.
	Now none of these traditions will claim that water is spirit; it is a familiar piece of our common sense which can be helpful in understanding something which cannot ultimately be either adequately explained or even articulated.  In the Zen phrase, it is not the moon but the finger pointing towards the moon.
	Why is water a good metaphor for spirit?  In part because it is so slippery and amorphous.  Water in its liquid state is colorless and shapeless, adopting the color and shape of whatever vessel contains it.  It is everywhere and in a sense nowhere.  It is capable of powerful movement, and also capable of the most peaceful stillness.  Like spirit it can be wide and shallow or narrow and deep.  
	And we humans have an affinity for water.  After all, we each come swimming into this life on a sea of amniotic fluids.   Not only do we need to drink plenty of it, the human body itself is over 90% water, and this is basically a portable sea, for our bloodstream makes sure that our cells get bathed in the sea water in which they first evolved.  There is a theory now current that the reason our species, homo sapiens, developed large brains while our cousins the neanderthals did not was that our species tended to live near water and to eat fish.  Even now, a high percentage, I believe more than 80%, of the human race lives within an hour’s drive of the ocean or a large inland sea.  
	Like our lives, water tends to be shallowest when it is moving the fastest.  Lately I have begun to see how I crowd my own life with so many experiences that I don’t have time to reflect on them or put them in a context of meaning, because I have moved on to the next experience.  I have the sense that if we can learn to live more slowly, we will live more deeply.
	And almost all the surface waters of the planet are in the end connected.  Though we may think of ourselves as sealed vessels, we are all in the end interconnected.  I have found in my ministry that when I can connect with another person’s deep joy or heartache, it is like I am tapping into his or her watercourse.  I once described the work of ministry as like a holy plumber, trying to forge the spiritual tubings between people and keep them unclogged.  It is in this sense that ministry happens to all of us all the time, without the intervention of professionals.
	I was reminded of this forcefully at the end of the week in my law office.   Several law business share the same space, and we all tend to rush around in there with our noses buried in our books and focused on the important tasks we are doing for our clients, and most of the communication that goes on concerns work.   One of the people I have seen in this way on a regular basis was a vibrant young woman who worked as a paralegal and always had a cheerful word, and ran the office betting pool on the basketball tournament in the spring.  She usually radiated good will and never seemed to have a bad day. On Thursday night, distraught over a romantic breakup, she left the office and killed herself. I had spoken to her not half hour before.  Though her distress had nothing to do with the people she worked with, I can’t help being left with a sense of failure.  Though I don’t try to practice ministry at my law office, I can’t help wondering what might have happened if I had tried to make some sort of deeper connection with her in that brief encounter on Thursday, if I might have been able to avert the tragedy.
	Now the idea of water as spirit is a thought I have been pushing around for a long time, but what caught me up in this latest story was the idea of what lies under the water.  Sediment.  All the stuff that has been suspended in the water and has settled out, all the stuff that passes through our lives, suppose it doesn’t go away but just settles out to the bottom.  Like the TV jingles at the bottom of my brain-pan.  Like the way your parents raised you.  Like all the stuff of your childhood religion, the creeds, rituals, hymns, the taste of the pew backs when you were just teething.  Sure, we rejected all that as adults, we declared ourselves freethinkers, we joined a liberal church.  But a lot of that stuff is still down there at the lake bottom.  And it’s not just the stuff that is part of our individual lives, but also the stuff of our collective lives as a people.  Down there in our common lakebed is a lot of alluvial history, a lot of it more troublesome than a 2,500 year old leaf.  There is colonialism and patriarchy and slavery, to name three of the biggest and scariest, and they don’t just stay buried on the bottom, but they are constantly leaching into the water of our lives today, giving us a whale of a pollution problem.
	If I might extend the metaphor one step more, it seems that this sediment not only constitutes a kind of alluvial history, but also shapes the current container of our spirit.  Where there is plenty of spirit, where there is plenty of fresh water, where there are sources, springs from which we refresh ourselves in the present, these pasts events are not going to dominate.  But if we don’t seek out our sources of refreshment, if we don’t pay attention to our depth dimensions, the possibility exists that we could shoal out or even dry up, overwhelmed by all the stuff of our past.
	Freud talked about an “oceanic” feeling that we encounter when we are at our most connected.  I felt that literally last weekend as I got a sailboat ride courtesy of Bill Dowdall and visited one of the Harbor Islands courtesy of the National Park Service.  There is something resplendent about being offshore, something that nourishes me.  Here is a poem by a friend of mine.
	One more thing about sediment.  Some of it doesn’t just sit there.  Some of it is alive. From our alluvial history, sometimes new life can grow.  Consider this poem from Mary Oliver.
	Here read “The Lilies Break Open over the deep water”
	We bring our waters here, collected in separate vessels, and we mingle them to symbolize the coming together of our persons after the summer break.  This is good symbolism, but it takes the water out of its context, away from its sediment.  But in doing this, we are doing no more than the water would do anyway, for it is characteristic of water to move, as the spirit moves.
	One last thing about water: it can be dangerous.   We all know water can drown us, and we all know water driven by wind can capsize us and come on shore and do a lot of damage.  This is why the image of Jesus walking on the water, and stilling the waves with his command, was such a powerful story for the fisher folk of ancient Judea.  And this brings me to this poem by 
Mary Oliver with which I will conclude.  It’s entitled “Maybe”