“On Orchids and Insects”
2 Corinthians 5:16-19; John 9:1-11
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
October 19, 2014
The World Cup Semi-finals game was set to start in a few hours. For the first time in anyone’s memory, Costa Rica was in the final four. In the little village of Santa Elena, in the cloud forest of Monteverde, the partying had already begun. No one was coming for a tour of the Orchid Garden, except, of course, two photography-loving tourists from Framingham, Massachusetts.
The staff at the Orchid Garden was surprised to see us, and we were equally surprised by what we saw when we arrived. We periodically go to Tower Hill for the annual orchid show, so we were expecting to be overwhelmed by big, bold, dramatic orchids–especially since we were in the cloud forest where everything seems to be extra big.
Instead, our guide handed us each a magnifying glass and took us over to our first orchid. To our naked eyes, the flowers were nothing more than dots of yellow and red. With our magnifying glasses, we could sort of tell that they were orchids.
Eddie, our guide, was a tall young man with a shaved head and a long braided tail. He didn’t fit my stereotype of an orchid aficionado, but he knew a lot and was eager to share his knowledge, even two hours before the big game.
We learned that most orchids are tiny; the ones that make it into the Tower Hill show are hybrids modified by humans. We learned that each flower contains within it both the male and female organs needed to reproduce. In most cases, an orchid needs an insect to come into the flower to carry the pollen between the male and female parts.
Unlike many flowers, most orchids do not have nectar for the insects to eat. In order to draw them in, an orchid has to fool an insect into thinking it has something tasty inside. Some orchids use scent to fool the insects–the smell of horse urine or rotten meat. One orchid mimics the odor of a female insect, attracting the male of that species. Another orchid looks remarkably like a spider web, drawing in a particular bug that preys on spiders. Each kind of orchid is designed to attract one species of insect; if that insect becomes extinct, so does the orchid.
In nature, we learned, orchid flowers are short-lived, for they have a very specific purpose: to be pollinated. When the bright color or distinctive odor of an orchid has succeeded in attracting a bug to pollinate it, the flower dies as a seed pack forms in its place. The pack contains thousands of spores, which are ultimately released into the air. Only a few of those spores will ever grow, because each kind of orchid needs a particular kind of fungus in order to germinate. If everything goes right, one or two spores will land on the right kind of fungus, and the cycle of life will continue.
Eddie’s enthusiasm for these minuscule flowers was contagious. Fran and I were struck by their delicate resilience. The capacity to fool an insect and the need for the right insect and the right fungus at the right time. Tiny flowers that are even more beautiful because they are only there for a few days.
Last week, in my sermon, I talked about the awe I felt during my sabbatical as I read about human anatomy. The human spine, I preached, is nothing short of miraculous. Our trip to the Orchid Garden fell right in the middle of my awe-inspiring sabbatical focus on the human body. As Fran and I wandered amongst the orchids, I felt that awe expand. I saw our amazing human spines alongside these amazing orchid flowers. We are truly wondrous creatures, part of a truly wondrous creation.
Last week, Norma Hart loaned me some DVD’s from the Teaching Company, the group that produced The Great Courses, video series of half-hour lectures. This series is called How the Earth Works, and Norma pointed me to lecture number 8. “You’ll like it,” she said. “It reminds me of the things you’ve been talking about since your sabbatical.” Lecture #8 was called “The Rock Cycle–Matter in Motion.” What in the world, I thought, does that have to do with the human spine?
I sat down to watch. Professor Michael Wysession, a geophysicist from Washington University in St. Louis, started by asking me to take out a piece of paper. “Imagine,” he said, “all the ways you could take a carbon atom from that piece of paper and transfer it to a tree outside your window.” He began with the obvious answers–obvious to him, at least. You can bury it near the roots of the tree, and when the paper degrades the carbon atom will be absorbed by the roots. Or you can burn it, and the carbon dioxide will be absorbed by the leaves.
After these simple options, my new teacher was off and running. You could rip the paper up in little pieces, he said, and flush it down the drain. The carbon atom would make its way into a stream, then a river, and ultimately into the ocean. It might be eaten by a clam and used to create the hard clam shell, which would fall to the ocean floor and be buried with other shells. Eventually it becomes compressed into sedimentary rock.
Perhaps it then finds itself in the middle of a plate collision creating a new mountain range, which would push the rock deeper into the earth, where the pressure and heat cause metamorphosis and the limestone becomes marble. As the mountains above it erode, the marble rises to the surface, until it is finally exposed. Subjected to erosion, our carbon atom returns to the sea and falls to the ocean floor, where this time it ends up in a subduction zone, sinking deep until it reemerges as magma in a volcano, then released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for our friendly neighborhood tree to absorb. Whew! Of course, my new favorite professor adds, the process might take a billion years.
I began to see why Norma recommended the lecture. The intricacies of the human spine are mirrored in the delicate systems that enable an orchid to survive, which are mirrored in the massive geological cycles of our planet.
As he imagined our carbon atom’s billion-year journey from paper to tree, Professor Wysession described the rock cycle and how it is intertwined with the carbon cycle and the water cycle. He also demonstrated how we are intertwined with all three: “In a very intimate sense,” he said, “you are part of the rock cycle all the time. With every single breath you take, atoms go in and out of your lungs. Materials are absorbed through your skin….The longer you stay in any one place, the blurrier the line becomes between you and your environment.”
To honor our bodies as sacred means honoring all of creation as sacred, for we are all interconnected. We rely on each other for life and new life: atoms and insects, spines and orchids and rocks.
In recent years, we have become acutely and painfully, if belatedly, aware how much human activity has impacted the world around us—pollution, destruction of entire ecosystems, climate change. We are compelled to learn very, very quickly how to do things very differently. Conservation, political action, development of renewable energy, changing how we eat—there is so much to do.
The starting point for all this needed activity, perhaps, is a rediscovery of wonder—wonder at the beauty of a minute plant that lasts only a day, awe at the forces that turn paper into marble into volcano, amazement at human bodies that balance big heads on tiny feet and human minds that can rethink our relationship with the world around us.
Our anthem this morning was a prayer for healing of body, mind, and soul. We need to add a fourth component: healing our relationship with the world around us. Jesus recognized that need when he used mud—dust from the ground mixed with his own saliva—to heal the man who was blind. Until we reclaim our connection with earth—dust, rock, insect, flower—we cannot see the full glory of our own lives or of God’s creation. When we claim that connection, our vision awakens to awe and we are healed by wonder.
The apostle Paul writes about becoming a new creation. In one sense, that is already, always happening in and around us. Orchid flowers become seed pods; a piece of paper becomes marble; our cells split and grow and die and are replaced; our bodies exchange atoms with everything around us.
In another sense, we are made new when we rediscover that we are not discreet individual creatures moving around in a static environment. We are made new when we claim that we are part of something greater than ourselves, an interdependent whole that is constantly being transformed. Then we can truly begin what Paul calls our “ministry of reconciliation”—repairing, restoring, reclaiming this wondrous creation of which we are part.
A tiny flower. A majestic mountain. A flexible, durable spine. May we awaken to awe at this glorious creation. Amen.