April 18, 2004
By Kelly Barth, Lisa Grossman & Joanie Levenson

But as C.S. Lewis says, things ugly to an adult aren't necessarily so to a child, which would explain my early memory of making friends with a housefly. I set out red-hots, the little cinnamon candies, and watched for him. Of course, it was always the same fly. So close would he let me approach that I could see him mop his retractable soda straw mouth all over the candy and then watch him wash his delicate, hinged, bead of a head with a thin, hairy foreleg, like a cat.

The year before I was born, my family settled in the Chapel Hill subdivision of the then new "ugly" suburb of Raytown. Our house sat on a hill that had once been pasture and was now covered with unrolled scrolls of Kentucky bluegrass, more than happy to take root, and spindly trees that, as of yet, had no real business there. So recent had been the leveling that a working dairy farm still remained two cul-de-sacs and a dead-end away. We could still hear the cows mooing in the morning as we drank our milk. We and other families had planted all sorts of plants and cement foundations and driveways and houses that did not belong there, displacing plants, birds, animals of all sorts, that, until very recently, had. I didn't know any of this. To me, it was just home.

The other common denominator among environmentalists was that during childhood, an adult had taught them respect for nature. For me, that adult was my father. Now there seem to be plenteous books parents can buy to tell their children how much they love them: Love You Forever, Do You Know How Much I Love You, I Love You Like Crazy Cakes, Lordy Lord Do You Know How Much I Love You. I could eat you up. But in the late '60s and '70s, we had Little Visits with God, Hansel & Gretel, Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake. We had to read between the lines for the subtext of love. My father wasn't an effusive man. In fact, he often found it difficult even being pleasant. He worked long hours at the Corps of Engineers doing more managing than engineering, which left him feeling trapped, impatient, and, at the very least, cross. Like sailors reading the sky, my sisters and I learned to be careful around him. Except, that is, when he was outdoors. Outdoors, my father had a great capacity for love. There he knew what to say to me, what we could do together.

Like the day in March with a wind like no other I had ever felt, he wrapped my sister and me up in his army blanket, a two-headed cocoon, and laid us giggling on the squeaky metal glider with its white paint chipping off. There we lay, warm and safe, surrounded by gray-green bruised clouds before rain. Against my mother's better judgment, my father wanted us to experience the wind. He grew up in Healy, Kansas, just east of the Colorado border where the wind never stopped blowing and no one knew what it would do next. One thing it had done was shape my father.

We shared the same love for animals. One we particularly loved was an ornate box turtle, that somehow in spite of all the chain link fence between him and the meadow-covered hillsides he had been free to occupy only a few years earlier, had found his way into the always damp flower garden my father had built. He was bigger around than a teacup, but smaller than a dinner plate, about 15 years old my father said, counting the concentric age rings of cuticle on one of the green plates in his back. Turtle hissed at Kim and me when we picked him up, which we were permitted to do for only so long. My father allowed Kim to paint one foot of Turtle's toenails with bright pink polish, thinking it might just help us identify him again, which it did for four or five seasons without a freshen up.

Things that would have driven another, more pleasant adult half-crazy didn't phase my father if they involved the outdoors. Like the time, in a harvesting frenzy, I had pulled up al his seemingly ready winter onions, ever single last fifty odd of them and laid them on the back porch, a huge clod of dirt still attached to each of their roots. Or the time, in my eagerness to weed, I pulled out all the heirloom mint in the garden that he and my mother had painstakingly transplanted from my late grandmother's garden. I did such things not out of maliciousness, he could see that, but because, in being outside, I found things to do. And they were things that resembled things I had seen him do. His response to my misguided attempts at gardening was not to shame or discourage me, but to allot me my own 14x5 plot in which everything was allowed-crooked rows, poorly thinned carrots, overtended radishes, single season onion sets. By watching and helping my father, I continued to learn. He had the dirtiest, most utilitarian hands I had ever seen. Hands that could save anything.

I saw a rabbit skin itself once on our chain link fence, our neighbor's unidentifiable yellow dog pulling on its one end, our basset hound on the other. Once I had driven them both off, all the rabbit could do without working legs was lie on its side and scream, a piercing tea kettle I could do nothing for. Before my father, who I had run inside to retrieve, could reach it, it had stopped screaming and breathing. We touched its fur together and looked at its toe pads, things living animals will rarely permit. While I tried to hide that I was crying, he told me the story of how when he was a boy, he had felt thrilled to be included in the jackrabbit round-up. My father was fascinated with jackrabbits. He was told to find a stick, one that would be his own stick, and was encouraged to whittle and polish it, even carve his name on it if he wanted. When the big day came, he stood in a long line of relatives and neighbors, shoulder to shoulder. They moved across the fields like a giant comb. My father hadn't realized what he'd been meant to do with his stick. The jackrabbits had become a problem. To his father's shame, my father spent the rest of the day hiding in a shed, trying not to hear the whooping.

"Do rabbits go to heaven?" I asked him. Raised Southern Baptist, he knew the doctrine.

Without hesitation, he said, "I think they do."

That was all I needed to know. What he said has allowed me to think outside the doctrinal box, to think of other creatures as having relationships with God that we know nothing about.

We buried the rabbit together in the garden, where its body, he said, would make other things grow.

Lisa Grossman's Talk

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, being outside and having natural areas to explore was a given from my earliest memory. As a child and young adult I spent most of my days exploring the fields, woods, and creek that were an extension of my back yard. There I had independence, freedom, and I found solace. I learned what happened as the seasons changed and how it looked and felt in all weather. I don't know how I would have survived young adulthood without such a place.

My parents still live there and a walk down to the creek is always an essential part of any visit home. A few modern houses have sprung up down the road, but my creek and fields remain, thankfully. Looking back I realize I often took open space and natural areas for granted.

After high school I spent 10 years living in urban areas. After 3 years of going to art school in Pittsburgh, and 7 years working for Hallmark in Kansas City, I found myself longing to live nearer open space. I also needed to spend my life energy in more meaningful and authentic ways.

1995 was a big year of transition for me. I met Kelly ( at Broadway Baptist Church!), I "came out" to family and friends, I quit my job at Hallmark, I went back to school for a painting degree, I began freelancing, and I sold my first paintings at the Dolphin Gallery downtown.

In '96 I moved to Lawrence, where Kelly and I purchased a small 1954 ranchette. The move to Lawrence triggered more transformation. Until then I'd been fairly naive about my place in the larger community. Patterns of commerce and growth are revealed in smaller cities and you can see interdependence more clearly.

From home I could get out to the countryside around town in 10 minutes, and I began painting in the wide, flat, floodplains of the Kansas River year round, on a regular basis. I became very fond of these places -- and then I started noticing things.

I saw that the bluff to the north was slowly losing it's profile to the landfill and gravel pit. I saw the power plant and I waited at train crossings while 200 identical cars of coal rolled by. My heart sank when farms were replaced by strip malls, subdivisions, and big box development, seemingly overnight. I watched sprawl extend west to Clinton Lake, and the gap steadily closing between Kansas City and Lawrence. New real estate signs appeared daily along the commuter corridors. And not just here but everywhere I traveled. This is when it hit me - the thing I care about most, open space, was disappearing before my eyes and I couldn't do a thing about it.

I began to make connections. I started to see how my life fit into and impacted the world around me. My electricity comes from that power plant that burns that coal that probably was mined in Montana. My tap water comes from that river, the same river our "treated" sewage is flushed back into, (that YOU all drink - WE live upstream!) the same river we're told is not safe for human contact. Whatever I put into my trash is filling up space in that landfill on the bluff. We drive a 90-mile round trip to come to Kansas City. I feel guilty about the trees that were harvested for my canvas stretchers and the minerals mined for my paint. I began to despair. We can't help but have an impact on the environment just by living our lives. We all need food, clothing, shelter, and a source of income.

Kelly and I are slowly learning to live more consciously now, doing what we can to try to lessen our impact and work for positive change. We've gotten involved with and conservation groups. We've volunteered time, money, and skills. We write letters to editors, walk, ride our bikes, and use our new public bus system. We're getting to know the farmers who grow our food. We've met the German Baptists who raise the chickens and eggs we eat and the local producers of our milk that comes in reusable glass jars. We've worked to get local candidates elected who are now making great decisions about issues in our community including open space. We vote. We're working to stop a trafficway from being built through an environmentally and culturally significant wetlands bordering Haskell Indian Nations University. (See the note in the bulletin insert if you're interested in helping us with this one).

Living in this consumer culture, each of us has more power than we know just in where we choose or choose not to spend our money. Kelly and I have chosen to support independent, "human-scale" businesses whenever possible. "Your Dollar is your vote," a popular bumper sticker in Lawrence says. We reject the "too much is not enough" attitudes and predatory tactics of the sprawlmart chains. These choices do not leave us feeling deprived. Quite the opposite, - we feel empowered, and satisfied knowing our actions contribute to a healthier community.

I'm continuing to make connections in other ways. I'm just beginning to see how my creative process, my spiritual life, my vocation, and my activism are related.

I've seen that my spiritual health is directly tied to my ritual of going out into the land to paint. There, I sit quietly, observing changes in light, weather, and season. In the struggle to capture the essence of a moment keenly felt, I sometimes experience a state of reverie – the sheer joy of living - a sense of deep gratitude for my life and all of Divine Creation humming around our planet. At its best, my work is an act of praise - joy that I cannot explain or suppress.

The work is conceived in reverie, but it wells up from a place of loss - the painful reality of living in degraded landscapes, on a planet ravaged by war, industry and greedy enterprise. I see the minimalism in my work as seeking balance - an appropriate scale of human to planet – an attempt to recover the sense of being one species among countless millions on a vast planet.

Increasingly, I'm finding ways to use my work to support the causes I believe in. I donate work to charity auctions and my images have been used on note cards and posters as fundraisers for land preservation efforts. I also speak to these issues in slide presentations and interviews.

And lastly, I'm beginning to understand that what I believe about God and this Divinely created planet is related to justice for the earth and is inseparable from political action. It's on my heart to try to speak for those without a voice, especially this oppressed Earth. Back in the early '90s I was sitting in quiet time in the balcony at Broadway Baptist Church. I'd been fretting about feeling unempowered, about my lack of strong opinions and my fears of speaking out about anything. After a bit, to my surprise, the unmistakable voice of God came into my head saying "You don't have to speak now, but someday you will." It was scary, but at the same time I felt a reassurance that when the time came, I would know what I needed to say. I've concluded that where you find your passion, you will also find your voice.

Joanie Levenson's Talk

³Where you find your passion, you will also find your voice.²  Clearly Lisa has found her passion... and her voice!  And what about that image we were left with earlier of Kelly and her father  burying the rabbit together with her father assuring her (and us) that the rabbit¹s body would make other things grow.  Isn¹t that a beautiful reminder of our Father/Mother God¹s redemptive power at work in  the natural world ?!  Did you hear, as I did, the echoes of our value statement in their words and images today?  Listen again to that statement: 

³We recognize that the heavens and the earth, in all their beauty, wildness, and life-giving bounty, are the work of our Creator. God-made resources sustain us, and we see the creation as  something in which we take joy, have reverence, and find God.³

Lisa and Kelly are doing their best to live their lives in harmony with this value.  The questions that their efforts always bring up for me, are ³How are I doing?² and ³How are we doing?²  Are we, as individuals and as a community, also doing our best to respect and embody this value?  If your first response to this question includes the least amount of guilt, please remember Kelly¹s father for a moment -- graciously, he did not shame his willing child¹s attempts, but rather he offered her space and encouragement to learn and to grow.  And I believe that this is also the same grace with which our God regards each of our efforts, no  matter how small they may feel to us.

Lisa shared with me recently about how delighted she was last month after the celebration of our 5th anniversary, when, without any input from her or from Kelly, someone made re-usable tablecloths instead of buying throw-aways, and someone else decided that the more fiscally and ecologically responsible action was to wash the plastic dishes that were initially purchased for their disposability.  The changing of old habits takes time, but in these decisions the seeds of change are evident -- we are trying  to live more consciously in relation to existing resources.  And, of course, there is still much room for us to grow and change, and ongoing change requires more than the patient persistence of a passionate few -- we really must all be willing to participate.

Kelly and Lisa and I spent quite a lot of time talking about what is it that stands in the way of willing participation?  The answer is obviously going to be a little different for each of us . . .  For some, maybe the problems seem too overwhelming . . . or too hopeless.  For others, maybe the needed changes seem too risky . . . or too uncomfortable . . . or too inconvenient.  Or maybe our individual efforts just feel too small and meaningless.

I believe, however, that these and most other obstacles to our participation can ultimately be tied to some the unquestioned assumptions of our North American culture -- particularly the assumptions about the relationship between humanity and the rest of the created order.  We live in a culture that largely operates from the assumption that human beings are separate from, superior to, and meant to dominate over nature . . . a culture that has largely refused to acknowledge that all beings have value not just human beings. We live in a culture in which it seems easier, maybe even preferable to deny the critical reality that human beings are a profoundly  dependent  species.

But if we are to survive -- if our children and their children are to survive and thrive, we must recognize this critical reality -- that human beings are ultimately utterly dependent upon the balance and well-being of the rest of creation.  We¹re dependent upon the earth for all the essentials that human existence requires -- for breathable air, for edible food, for drinkable water.

With Paul¹s words, from the 12th chap. of his letter to the Romans:

³I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies  of God, to present your bodies [and your actions] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world, [or to this world¹s assumptions] but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.²

We are beings who are called to be transformed into the image of Christ . . . called to repent -- to change and renew our thinking . . . called to reject the arrogance of flawed cultural assumptions that are resulting in life-threatening imbalances . . . and called instead to acknowledge the critical reality that we  thoroughly interdependent beings who have been created by a loving God to live in radically redemptive relationship with all of creation.

Sometimes the call to change our thinking feels pretty overwhelming . . . easier said than done, with so many of humanity¹s ways of thinking that probably need to be examined.  But, I believe, that if we start simply -- with just one thought -- that the changes that follow will lead us, when we are ready, to the next new way of thinking. And in the case of this needed change -- the need to more fully acknowledge the interdependence of our life and of all life -- a good and simple place to begin seems to be to more deeply rest in the belief that ³in God we live and move and have our being.²

Meditation Intro:

So I invite you, now, to close your eyes and to take a restful walk with me . . .

and to pay attention, as we walk, to what it feels like for you to live and move and have your being in the love of God . . .

. . .  imagine that you are walking in a favorite wooded area . . .
. . .  feel how the earth supports you your steps . . .
. . .  see the welcoming arms of the trees . . .  
. . .  and feel the warmth of the sun where it peeks through the branches . . .
. . .  hear the birds singing their praises as you pass . . .
. . .  Listen . . . remember . . . In God we live and move and have our being . . .

. . .  feel the moisture in the air as you come closer to the edge of the water . . .
. . .  smell the green . . . and the brown . . .
. . .  Listen . . . remember . . . In God we live and move and have our being . . .

Closing prayer