Earth Day and Renewal

2025-04-27

Finally, friends, spring has sprung in Buffalo. The cherry trees bloomed this week, just in time,
for a change, for the annual cherry blossom festival. And here too in Mississauga, here at UCM,
spring appears in daffodils and hyacinth and more. The long, slow spring with its cold rains and
winds, its cloudy days, it has indeed arrived. Seed and sprout, bud and blossom and leaf are
emerging. You can glance out any of the windows in this Great Hall and see that it is so. The
Earth, our Mother and our care, once more fulfills the promise of thriving life.

In the words of Wendell Berry, “The earth is what we all have in common.” When Earth flowers,
when she provides such beauty, it is easy to feel this common truth, this lure of connection. But
55 years ago, when Earth Day was created, who could have known that our disregard for Earth
and her abundance could grow so extreme? Over these years, we learned and, finally, we
acknowledged how injury to the land and water and air is also injury to our human bodies and
health. Who could have anticipated that our growing knowledge would be blatantly ignored,
devalued? That the extraction from Earth, that the devastation, that the profits exacted, could be
considered more valuable than our mutual survival? Even as we relish and enjoy the beauty of
spring, we cannot help but hold in common as well the sorrow of a world on fire.

When Earth Day was conceived 55 years ago, the Unitarian Congregation in Mississauga was
just a teenager, finding its way tentatively as a religious community, then named the Unitarian
Congregation of South Peel. With several ministers, and also without ministers, through the
work and love of elders remembered and those visible only in the pages of cookbooks and
histories and congregational records on paper, UCM came into existence, gathered together to
tend to this earth and to nurture its people. Here, we acknowledge our responsibility to steward
this land in healthful ways. And here you all are. Here we are.

For more than 70 years now,

“You have been looking for something larger than yourself. Inside
of you there is a yearning, a calling, a hope for more, A desire for a place of belonging and
caring.”

You are looking for loving kindness, for wellbeing, for wholeness. You seek loving
kindness, wellbeing, wholeness, for yourself and for others in this world we share. “And so, you
began seeking a beloved community: A people that does not put fences around love.” And so,
you have arrived here, now, with “a belief in a shared purpose, a common yet precious resource
That belongs to all of us when we share.” Here, where we strive to “deepen spirit, nurture
community, and build an equitable, sustainable world,” we have found common cause with and
mutual care for each other.

All of us here, we have been looking for something larger than ourselves. Some of us seeking
refuge from conflict and war. Some of us seeking companionship in strange and new lands.
Some of us seeking companions for action. Some of us seeking solace for our own hurts and
the hurts of the world. We come with different needs, but with common purpose, knowing that
we are each better when we live in community. And though

“Connections are made slowly,” we “weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. [. . . We] keep tangling and
interweaving and taking more in [. . . We] “reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.”
“This is how we are going to live for a long time,” until “the harvest comes.”

And the harvest keeps coming in, as winter turns to spring, once again renewal arrives. The harvest comes as
we age and die, as new lives are born. It comes as folks arrive for the first time and feel
welcome, as folks return again and feel welcome. The harvest comes as our present rolls into a
future we plan for and yet remains unknown, always more difficult and more beautiful than we
can plan for.

We are, all of us, part of a community “of Memory and Promise,” a community which
acknowledges the history that leads us to this day, which celebrates the goodness that we
create together, and which yearns for a future of more—more commitment, more diversity, more
compassion, more justice. This is a community where we covenant “for the solemn promises
that counteract the randomness of a future in which anything and everything is possible.” We
commit “in advance to certain relationships and values [. . .] because what we build with
intention, and even with difficulty, is more satisfying in the long run than the pleasures that we
happen to encounter.” We covenant through “time-consuming rituals, invoking powers that we
scarcely know how to name, because we are seeking some way to give our lives the density,
and dignity, and depth that we suspect, with longing, might yet be possible.”

Together, right here, in this circle of song where we are one, we build a community. We build so
that as a community and as individuals, too, we may join other circles with common values,
common concerns, common goals, living our faith by enlarging our reach. May we together
affirm “a new vision of hope [. . .] of a just and inclusive society,” a society of “the unity of all
persons, a unity that opens our eyes, ears, and hearts to see the different but common forms of
oppression, suffering, and pain.” Let us pledge we would be one. “Within ourselves and within
the gathered community,” with one more step and then another, may we “discover the strength
not to hide in indifference,” but rather move forward with the energy and “action to transcend
barriers — be they racial, political, economic, social, or religious.” May “We pledge to make our
tomorrows become our todays” as well. May it ever be so.

Rev. Rita Capezzi