The Awe of the Forest

The scripture reading for this sermon was Acts 17:22-28

I remember as a child, going for long walks in the woods.  I don’t know if I was an especially willing participant in these long walks.  I imagine I kicked up quite the fuss when mom or dad would come into the room to say that we were going for a walk.  I’d roll my eyes, gripe and grumble, and we’d be off.

But forests are whimsical places.  Places where magic, especially for children, still exists.  Once I’d moved through my “struggling to pick up my feet” phase of the constitutional, (I’m guessing that was around the time I’d figure out that my parents weren’t listening to me, and were continuing to go for their walk with or without me) I’d quickly find myself lost within the expanse of it all.  I remember we used to go to the Bruce Trail, a trail that runs through the wilderness of southern Ontario (and I don’t mean Toronto).  And there was a recreated First Nations village, complete with long houses.  I thought it was the coolest, and I would immediately get drawn into that world.

The woods around our cottage were no different.  Me and my buddy James would head out into the trees, playing either Robin Hood, or Lord of the Rings.  A part of me would like to say that ended when I grew up, but deep down inside, I’m glad I can say it didn’t.  This summer I went exploring with my niece and nephew, only for a few minutes, but I found myself drawn back into the magic of it all.  And as I sat under the massive trees of Stanley Park in Vancouver, writing this sermon, I couldn’t help but realize that the same thing which made forests feel magical as a child, continues to exist within them. 

Forests are wonderful.  They are places that can draw us out of ourselves while at the same time drawing us deeper into ourselves. They are places to pause, away from the racket of the world, or the racket of our own minds; to hear a collection of sounds, to see sights, we otherwise wouldn’t.  They remind us of the shear complexity of the biosphere.  How interdependent all of creation is.  Trees and other plants depend on the nutrients from their dead ancestors and from those animals which die and decompose into the soil.  And they are dependant on many of those same animals to pollinate, or to plant their seeds for them.  In return, they offer homes, they offer food, they offer the very air that all of us breathe.  Forests crowd us in, cutting off our sight, and surround us in the mystery of wondering what is just beyond those trees.  And though there probably won’t be orcs, there will always be the possibility of something new and exciting, maybe even terrifying.

Because, more than anything, forests fill us with a sense of awe, a sense of humility, and at times a sense of fear all at once.  They are places that through those very feelings bring us to our knees before the Holy.

Paul had just come from a long walk, and now he was surrounded by the sights and sounds of Athens.  People yelling across crowded streets, smells filling the air, every class from slave to noble, races from across the Roman Empire were gathered together.  Temples and statues to different gods crowded the streets, the markets, and the buzz of activity was in the air.

It was a different pace of life than what he had been used to on the road.  Chased out of Thessalonica, Paul had spent sometime wandering the way to Athens.  Undoubtedly throughout his many travels, he would have passed by any variety of wildlife, he would have passed through groves of olive trees and fields of wildflowers.  He would have seen life completely foreign to the great cities of Greece and the rest of the Roman Empire.

And so when he comes across an altar to “an unknown god”, he immediately starts speaking.  He says, “Do you know why this god is unknown to you?  Do you know why you cannot find this very god you claim to worship?  Because you are looking here!  Here amid human constructs, amid markets, amid temples and religion!  If you want to know this God, you need to experience this God, you need to be filled by the awareness and awe that God is not within your little structures, but is in all things!  God is the union of all things and beyond in which all of us live and move, and have our being.”

We have lost our sense of awe for the world around us. We who have conquered almost every corner of the globe, now see ourselves as standing apart from it, see ourselves as somehow above, distinct from the world around us.  Does anyone else see that as isolating?  Does anyone understand how lonely a worldview that is?  The idea that somehow we are detached from the world? There is something incredibly tragic about that.

This is one of the many reasons forests are so important.  I could list off their scientific and ecological utility, but today we’re talking about their affects on our spiritual side.  On that side of us that long for right relationship, on that side of us that longs for union and wholeness.  That opportunity to stand in the woods, to see, to hear, to feel the utter complexity and interconnectivity around us.  That opportunity to stand back, to look up at the enormity of a tree, and to see it surrounded by countless of its brothers and sisters, fills us with a sense of humility.  A realization that we are not above creation, but we are a part of something far grander than anything we could possibly comprehend.  To go to those places where we cannot continue the illusion that we are entirely in control, we need that!  We need that opportunity to ground us in reality and awe.

Paul understood that.  Paul understood that human creation, whether physical buildings, codified religions, or anthropocentric images of God, that cultures, that social structures, that nations and empires could not contain the eternal, though we perhaps like to think it is so.  Paul understood that all things live and move and have being their being in God.  And so he invites us to stand back and just experience and be awed by the holiness of all that is, rather than trying to construct it for ourselves.  Thanks be to God, Amen.