Touch the Earth, Reach the Sky

Living Love through the Practice of Trust:

Touch the Earth, Reach the Sky

Sitting under the Bodhi tree on the verge of enlightenment, the one who would be Buddha was confronted and challenged by the god Mara, the threat of violence and domination and delusion. Needing a witness, and left on his own, he reached for the earth and begged for help. With a roar, the earth replied, “I bear you witness.” In troubled and dangerous times, surrounded by rage and pride and hatred, the Buddha put his trust in himself and in the earth.  With some help from our Transcendentalist ancestors, we’ll explore our liberal faith’s trust in life and in ourselves, and consider where we find our still point, our ground.

Touch the Earth

Rev. Joe Cleveland

March 2, 2025

 

When there is chaos and hurt and harm around you, when it feels there is a chorus of voices raising themselves against you, where do you put your trust?  

I am certain that I am not the only one here who keeps books by their bedside. I always have something on hand there to help me settle in to sleep if I need it. One of the books features the art of Chiura Obata. I first got to know Obata’s art through my California family and Obata’s paintings and woodcuts of the High Sierras of California and at Yosemite. I don’t really know anything about art or painting. Obata’s work just looked beautiful to me.

Chiura Obata, Passing Rain, 1930, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum

I love the colors and there’s just something about the way the lines are drawn. I don’t have words for it. It’s beautiful, and I just wonder at them.

Obata was born in Japan in the mid 1880’s. He emigrated to the United States in 1903. He lived through the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906. He lived through the Depression. In 1933, he gave an address at a meeting of the California School of Fine Art Society of Women Artists in San Francisco where he said this:

Nature gives us endless rhythm and harmony in any circumstance, not only when we are on a joyous path, but even in the depth of despair we will see true greatness of beauty and strength, beauty of patience, and beauty of sacrifice. Above the borderline of nationality, everybody must feel a deep appreciation toward Mother Earth. . . . If we keep appreciation in the depth of our hearts, not only our senses will develop more energetically . . . but our feeling will become as clear as full moonlight.

Like many of us, I have been very concerned about the Executive Orders our current tyrant-in-chief has signed in his relentless effort to bully everyone he can into obsequiousness before him.

With my ear sensitive to the words “Executive Order” I happened to notice that this past week [It was actually February 19th] was the anniversary of Executive Order 9066 which Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed in 1942 and resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. The order was driven by fear and racism. I note the absence of any concentration camps for German Americans or Italian Americans in this country during World War II.

In 1942, Chiura Obata and his family were among those forced to these concentration camps. By this time, Obata was a professor of art at the University of California at Berkeley. In the camps, Obata kept painting and drawing and started an art school with 900 students at one camp. When he was moved to another camp, he started another art school that had 600 students.

Nature gives us endless rhythm and harmony in any circumstance, not only when we are on a joyous path, but even in the depth of despair we will see true greatness of beauty and strength, beauty of patience, and beauty of sacrifice.

Chiura Obata, Topaz, 1942, sumi on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum

The book by my bed is called Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata’s Art of the Internment. The art is beautiful and heartbreaking. He painted the camps by moonlight. And he sketched and painted the people, too.

“If we keep appreciation in the depth of our hearts, not only our senses will develop more energetically . . . but our feeling will become as clear as full moonlight.”

I am impressed by the resilience of his spirit under terrible conditions. The way the paintings are, well, I’ll say beautiful again, and how they also don’t avoid the reality of the situation. He just paints and sketches what he sees. Eyes open to what is happening around him, he feels, clearly, and he keeps going. He kept painting, kept teaching. 

 

When the powers that be rise against you, what can you put your trust in? 

 

It seems clear to me that Chiura Obata put his trust in at least two things. He clearly kept a connection with nature and with the Earth. He also had a trust in himself. I see that simply in the fact that he kept painting, he kept drawing, he kept sketching. He trusted his own eyes. He trusted his skills. He let himself be himself.

When I think about the history of our Unitarian Universalist theology, it is the transcendentalists who urged us to trust in ourselves. That was their innovation. They were pushing back against the tradition in philosophy of empiricism, or the idea that the only stuff you can know is the stuff that you can measure and perceive through your senses. Our transcendentalist ancestors said no, there is knowledge and wisdom and truth that resides within us. There are things that we have intuitive knowledge about, intuitive experience of. Ralph Waldo Emerson worried that, “we but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.” Emerson says: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Emerson believes, “The power which resides in [you] is new in nature, and none but [you] knows what that is which [you] can do, nor [do you] know until [you have] tried.” Emerson wants you to be you.

Ironically, being yourself is also what truly connects you to others and the fundamental nature of things.  Emerson knows, “to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all […]—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense, for the innermost in due time becomes the outmost …” 

It can be really difficult though, to trust yourself. As much as we are a society that privileges the individual, we are also a society that tries to stamp out difference. That is what President Trump’s executive order trying to vanish transgender people is trying to do. That is what the government of the state of Iowa is trying to do by passing a law to exclude transgender people civil rights protections.  That is what another recent executive order does in its proclamation that English, and only English, is the language of America. There is something that we’re all supposed to be and God forbid that we’re any different. And that’s the theology there. That’s the belief. That god does not tolerate difference. That is a bully’s god.

There has actually been a study conducted that concludes that over the span of 20 years from the year 2000 to 2020, there’s been a decline in our quest for individuality. There has been a rising tide of a desire for conformity or blending in. 

 

How do you resist a crowd of voices raised against you?

 

This is making me think about the story of the enlightenment of the Buddha. The Buddha-to-be goes through a number of experiences and tries a number of different approaches to enlightenment. Finally he comes to the bodhi tree. The one-who-will-be-Buddha, Gotama, walks around the tree, circling it, trying to find the place where other previous Buddhas have sat. Every time he pauses at one place, the Earth doesn’t let him stay there. The Earth heaves and sinks, and the Buddha moves on. Finally, on the east side of the tree the ground remains calm, the ground is still. The religious scholar Karen Armstrong says “the text emphasizes the fantastic shuttering of the Earth as Gotama circled the bodhi tree to remind us not to read this story literally. … the ‘immovable spot’ is that psychological state which enables us to see the world and ourselves in perfect balance.” Sitting there in balance, Gotama intimidates the god Māra. Māra, the god of delusion, confronts Gotama with fierce storms and with an army of soldiers. Māra tells Gotama that that spot by the bodhi tree, ‘that belongs to me!’ he hollers. In lockstep support of him, Māra’s soldiers all say together, “I am his witness!”

The Buddha calling the earth to witness. Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art

The confrontation between Gotama and Māra is so frightening that, not only aren’t there any people around him, the gods who have been hanging around, eagerly curious to see if Gotama is actually going to achieve enlightenment have run off, too.  As Karen Armstrong tells the story, Gotama did something out of the ordinary, 

he asked for help. Reaching out with his right hand to touch the ground, he begged the Earth to testify to his past acts of compassion. With a shattering roar, the Earth replied: “I bear you witness!” In terror, Māra’s elephant fell to its knees and his soldiers deserted, running in fear in all directions.

This is why, in so many depictions of the Buddha, he is sitting cross legged on the ground, reaching to touch the ground with his right hand.  Karen Armstrong says that this story of the Buddha is about how, “Even though the world seems to be ruled by the violence of Māra and his army, it is the compassionate Buddha, who is most truly in tune with the basic laws of existence.” 

Where can you put your trust when all around you seems to be calling out against you? Chiura Obata put his trust in himself and the Earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson does the same, though he is confronting nothing anywhere close to what Obata had to confront. Emerson and the other transcendentalists were reading religious texts from the far east. It seems to me that Emerson and the other transcendentalists put those ideas together with the ideas that they already had from their Christian understanding of God as a god of love, Who created humans with and from love with a bit of the divine in everyone, and the still point, the point of balance, is in trust of nature and life and existence, and trust in oneself.  Emerson’s version of reaching to the earth and asking for its witness is in his first book, Nature:  

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

 

UU Shared Values as an atom: These values are what we are made of. (graphic by Tanya Webster)

All of these ideas have shaped Unitarian Universalism and inspire a current Unitarian Universalist minister to be inspired by the Chiura Obata.  As Unitarian Universalists, we declare that every person is inherently worthy.  And people are not worthy because they are all the same.  As different as we are or may be from one another, as Unitarian Universalists, We celebrate that we are all sacred beings, diverse in culture, experience, and theology.  And if the crowd seems to be roaring against you, even if you are on your own and the gods got intimidated and ran off, we can hold appreciation in the depths of our hearts, as part of how we cultivate in ourselves a spirit of gratitude and hope. In doing so, we realize we are connected to one another in relationships of interdependence and mutuality.  If we are all connected, then we are never really alone, as individual as we might be.  We and all of life emerges from interdependence.  Standing on the bare ground, sitting and reaching for the ground, painting the moon which does not neglect to shine on the concentration camp, we honor the interdependent web of all existence with reverence and with humility.  

Unitarian Universalism believes in you.  Unitarian Universalism puts its trust in you.  Unitarian Universalism wants you to be the you you are, even as it wants to nurture your transformation and growth in spirit. 

Even though it may feel that all the world and its powers are rising against you, falling in line behind a gods of delusion and fear, find your bare ground. Find your still Earth.  Trust thyself.  You are not alone, and you are loved.  I love you. Unitarian Universalism loves you.

May we all come to trust and live in the deepest authenticity of our interdependent selves.  May you know yourself to be part or particle of God.

OOS Mar 2 2025.docx

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