The openness, the vastness,
the myriad creatures.
It is peace, it is beauty,
it is life.
It is fragile.
— Jason Pfeffer
In our UUCG worship service on April 21, the worship team invites us to “listen to the earth.” How attuned can we be to the more-than-human world? Along with the earth-centered songs and stories we share, we watch a video moving us through a wide range of landscapes, introducing us to creatures of every size and shape. As a spiritual practice, I ask us to draw or write or ponder in our hearts, minds, and bodies what we are hearing from the earth as we watch or listen.
Jason Pfeffer’s beautiful poem, shared here with permission, rises up within him. What a magnificent summing up of all we have explored in this month of focusing on the “Gift of Interdependence”!
Then, last week when I am in New York City, I pay a visit to “my other church,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I spend a few hours diving deep into just one exhibit, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” And from it, my sense of what interdependence means grows even broader and deeper.
The Harlem Renaissance is a Black-led cultural movement from the 1910s to the early 1930s that produces art, literature, music, and theater. The artists draw on the community’s African roots and other cultural influences in order to celebrate authentic African American life and transcend white-imposed stereotypes. It’s something new and dynamic, and its impact spreads around the world. Yet the movement’s history is suppressed in the United States beginning with the Great Depression in the 1930s; my own formal education has barely touched it.
Even so, through friends’ recommendations of books, music, poetry, and art, the Harlem Renaissance has long held a hazy but glowing place in my mind and heart. I’ve imagined the smoke-filled jazz clubs where Louis Armstrong plays; journeyed into the stark and tender landscapes of Zora Neal Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; felt my heart thump to James Weldon Johnson’s stirring lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing”; stretched my mind with Langston Hughes’s frank poetry.
Now, coming face to face with these artists and more in the Met’s exhibit last week, I feel it all come to life so vividly. Isn’t it ironic and amazing that something as static as a museum exhibition can breathe with so much energy? We can see and feel how people and ideas, stories and styles connect and spark off each other across oceans and continents. We can hear and sense how the past still reverberates in the present and how both build the future.
Here at UUCG, we have spent much of April breaking down the barriers between our human lives and the more-than-human world so that we can sense our interdependence. Because of this practice, I’m finding myself more alive to the wonder of our human interdependence too. Because Langston Hughes lived—and lives on—I’m more alive than I would be if such a person had never existed. Because we’re striving to be awake and alive, connected with all that is, our children and our children’s children may be more alive too.
Interdependence goes every which way. And isn’t that a very good gift?
~Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones
