Home Ground: Two Sundays at the UU Church of Spartanburg

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, what I would ordinarily call a sermon is called a meditation. That turned out to be the right word for what I was invited to offer there over two Sundays this August.

Their Minister, the incredible Scott Neely, asked me to think with the congregation about home. I had been writing for much of the summer about watersheds, attention, Edith Stein, and the moral life of a place, so I began with the most ordinary piece of ground I know: the slope behind our house in Spartanburg, where rain leaves the roof, crosses the yard beneath a black walnut, and begins its long movement toward Fairforest Creek, the Pacolet, the Broad, the Congaree, the Santee, and finally the Atlantic.

The two meditations became a small series called Home Ground: Watershed, Attention, and the Life We Hold in Common. The first asked where the water goes. The second asked what we demand of it while it is here. Between those questions is much of what I have been trying to understand in my academic work and my writing at Carolina Ecology: how attention reveals a world already shared, how empathy corrects the assumption that my own position is the center of that world, and how those discoveries become obligations within the places where we actually live.

The First Home Is a Watershed

The first meditation began with a roof and a claim that has stayed with me: every house in this county sits on a slope, and the slope decides where the water goes.

That sentence sounds like hydrology because it is simple hydrology (which I loved teaching in my years as a Middle School Science teacher!). It also unsettles many of our usual ways of describing home. A deed tells me where my property ends. Water crosses that line without consulting it. A street address places our house within a human system of roads and mail routes. The watershed gives us another address entirely. It tells us that we are downstream of someone and upstream of someone else, receiving what has already passed through another place and sending something onward in turn.

This is where Edith Stein’s account of empathy entered the meditation. Stein describes the lived body as the zero point of orientation, the here around which every there arranges itself. Encounter with another person reveals another center, another here from which I appear as a there. The encounter does not erase the difference between us. It discloses a common world that neither of us invented and neither of us owns.

I have come to think that a watershed can teach something similar. The water won’t let my yard remain the center. It leaves. It carries the material history of one place into another. It gives the abstract claim that we are related a direction, a gradient, and sometimes a muddy pair of shoes.

The meditation also returned to the black walnut in our backyard, where I sit most mornings before the children wake and the day becomes noisy. After enough mornings, a tree ceases to be scenery. It becomes a tutor in the discipline of attention. That tree has been holding a corner of our slope together, shading our children, feeding squirrels, and keeping the red clay from leaving for the creek. The ground has been keeping us all along.

The full service is below. The video begins at the start of the meditation, though the music, readings, and life of the congregation are worth hearing too.

The meditation begins at 25:24.

The complete text is available at Carolina Ecology: The First Home Is a Watershed.

What We Ask of the Water

The first Sunday moved from hydrology toward relation. The second had to ask what relation costs.

That week the question became unavoidably local. On South Pine Street, at the former Kohler factory site, a large data center project was moving forward. At a county fact-finding meeting, Spartanburg Water estimated that the facility would use roughly 459,000 gallons of water each day, an amount comparable to the use of more than two thousand single-family homes. County Council had also delayed the final reading of a proposed data center moratorium until September.

Those facts placed an old prophetic text inside the county calendar. Amos speaks to a society that is prosperous, religious, and convinced of its own order. He calls for justice to roll down like water and righteousness like an enduring stream. The Hebrew image is stronger and stranger than the familiar English rendering sometimes allows. Amos imagines a seasonal watercourse that keeps running, a torrent that cannot be waited out or crossed on foot.

The important question was larger than whether the water system has the technical capacity to serve one more customer. Engineers can answer that question, and their answer matters. Another question stands behind it: Who belongs to the “we” making the request? Who is present when the cost is assessed? How far downstream does the moral community extend?

Here, Stein’s account of empathy became political. A public hearing, at its best, is a civic practice for shifting the zero point. It brings other centers of experience into the room and reveals that the official account of a place is partial. A person who wakes to the sound of construction at three in the morning knows something a permit does not contain. A longtime water customer knows something that cannot be reduced to projected capacity. Lawson’s Fork, the Pacolet, and the Broad hold claims that our procedures still have difficulty hearing.

I also wanted to say plainly that I am implicated in the demand. I use the cloud every day. My doctoral work, this website, Carolina Ecology, and the sermon itself depend upon machines housed in buildings like the one being built on South Pine Street. Innocence would be a false position from which to speak. The more useful work is to ask whether the arrangements among us are right, whether the public has genuinely been allowed to appear, and whether the water will leave the encounter diminished.

The full service is below. Once again, the recording begins at the meditation, and once again I recommend the whole service. TJ Turner’s music, including Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” made its own argument more eloquently than I could.

The meditation begins at 33:40.

The complete text is available at Carolina Ecology: What We Ask of the Water.

A Common World

I am deeply grateful to Scott and Anne, Erin and Kimberly, TJ and Clemson, Janice, and the staff and tech team at UUCS for their hospitality and trust. I am especially grateful to the congregation. The conversations after both services continued the meditations in ways I could never have written beforehand. Several people gave me new questions about the proposed ordinance, the history of this county, and the responsibilities carried by people who depend upon the same systems they are trying to examine.

That experience clarified something about the relationship between my academic work and public theology. I have been using the phrase ecological intentionality to describe a form of attention adequate to a world of living relations. In a seminar paper, that can remain a conceptual problem. In a sanctuary, with a bowl of water rippling near the chalice and a county decision approaching on the calendar, the idea has to touch the ground.

These two Sundays helped me see the movement more clearly. Attention teaches us where we are. Empathy reveals that our view from here is one view among others. A watershed gives that common world a material form. Public life asks whether we will organize our decisions as though any of this were true.

The map shows ownership. The slope shows relation. We need both kinds of knowledge. Only one of them tells us where the water is already going.