More Pooh, Less Rabbit: In Which We Consider the Spirituality of the Hundred Acre Wood
A SERMON BY REV LINDA A HART
A person I knew when I lived outside Washington, DC was a speech writer for the director of one of the large governmental agencies. Over a beer one night she was talking about a particularly difficult speech she had to write, and commented that she knew she was in trouble when she began quoting Alice in Wonderland as a starter. I sometimes find myself in the same sort of position, in that I sometimes quote somewhat odd sources such as Doug Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy.
It wasn’t until I saw someone suggest that we need more of Pooh in the world and less of Rabbit that it occurred to me that there was something to returning to the classics of the Pooh books to help to remind us about what is needed in the world, and perhaps especially in the world as it goes faster and faster.
Throughout history, stories have been used to describe facets of human experience. Freud famously used the story of Oedipus to describe the process that young children, and in particular boys, go through as they try to develop adult relationships with their mothers.
In studies I did around the role of stories in our lives for my dissertation, it came clear to me that it matters deeply what sort of story we tell about ourselves, and what sort of story that we seek to live out, even if unconsciously. What story are you living out in your life? What hero are you following?
Increasingly in the wider world, I fear, we’re seeking to live an old version of what I think of as the American dream which is about being out for yourself, raising your standard of living, amassing wealth, no matter the cost to anyone else, a seemingly uncaring individualism that thinks it unimportant to have concern for those who are not clever enough to sort out how to work the system to your advantage. It is inspiring to see the growing movement that questions the hoarding of unlimited wealth with little obligation to the rest of society, indeed with little care for those whose actual labour has made the wealth possible. Perhaps we will see the story change again as it has before, and the story will be one of care and compassion rather than profit.
But that story isn’t the story that I mainly want us to reflect upon today. I want to wander back to the Hundred Acre Wood, and revisit our friends there, and see if we might be able to find some portion of that story that we might want to seek to live out, see if there’s a hero that we might learn from in our own quest.
Though we didn’t have the pleasure of running into all of the characters in our reading this morning, surely we know them all. Early on Rabbit assesses them all and finds them wanting in one way or another: Pooh, Piglet and Eeyore whose heads are mainly fluff; Kanga who is too busy watching Roo to be of any use; Roo a possibility for seeking out for his very important day mostly because he says ‘Yes, Rabbit’ and ‘No, Rabbit’, but unfortunately, his associations make it difficult, that is he has Tigger around who is the kind of Tigger who doesn’t pay any attention to the Important Things that you have to say and do and is wholly too bouncy to be of use. Christopher Robin, of course, is who Rabbit seeks to serve and in fact is the one who Rabbit’s Busy Day and Important Tasks all revolve around. Owl, too, he dismisses for, although he can spell Tuesday so that you know it’s not Wednesday, still spelling isn’t all that important anyhow. Rabbit himself is the one who must be relied upon.
Hoo boy. Can I ever get myself into some Rabbit energy. So busy and important, and so dismissive of others around me who are not nearly as busy and important, or well sorted. When I have the ability to be aware of that energy in me and in my life, I am mostly able to step away from it, but not as much nor as often as I think I should.
Do you have that voice in your head, too? Does it mutter to you whilst you drive or when you consider those around you some days? Who is in the world with you? Is it people with fluff in their heads, who even if they have some amount of wisdom it is the unessential sort? Are they too busy or too bouncy or simply associating with the wrong people? What is that whisper that you hear?
So much Rabbit in our heads. So much Rabbit. Even more, there is that importance and busyness. Seeking Christopher Robin, this gorgeous moment comes:
He knocked at the door, and he called out once or twice, and then he walked back a little way and put his paw up to keep the sun out and he called to the top of the tree and he turned all round and shouted, ‘Hallo!’ and ‘I say!’ ‘It’s Rabbit’ – but nothing happened. Then he stopped and listened, and everything stopped and listened with him, and the Forest was very lone and still and peaceful in the sunshine, until suddenly a hundred miles above him a lark began to sing.
‘Bother!’ said Rabbit. ‘He’s gone out.’
And again I find myself in that picture. In the stillness and beauty of the morning, and in the sunshine with the whole world stopped and listening, and a lark singing, and all I can think of is the agenda that I have and my Important and Busy Tasks to be done. Have you been there? Standing next to a door that you want to open, and bothered because you can’t get on with it (whatever it might be), and unaware of the moment, rare and quiet and listening. So much Rabbit in the world. So much Rabbit in my head.
Though it is often the Rabbits in the world who do, in fact, get some important things done, and see things through and pay attention to Needful Things, still there is something missing: that holiness that Annie Dillard suggests to us, the holiness that is everywhere in the world if we make ourselves aware and move with intention to discover and embody it. ‘God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem,’ she says, ‘this creased and feeble life, “the world just as it is and not otherwise.”’
The Rabbit in us has the energy and the focus and capacity to do this, I wholly believe, ‘to lift up the fallen,’ as Dillard suggests we all should, ‘and to free the imprisoned. Not merely to wait, not merely to look on!’ She reminds us ‘[We are] able to work for the redemption of the world.’
But I think it’s something more than taking up the work of our days with that holiness, or perhaps more rightly said, seeing the holy in taking up the work of our days. There is also the way Pooh lives in the world. When Rabbit finds him in our story he has just finished singing his hum, a song, a poem. Rabbit wants to know if he made it up:
‘Well, I sort of made it up,’ said Pooh. ‘It isn’t Brain,’ he went on humbly, ‘because You Know Why, Rabbit; but it comes to me sometimes.’
‘Ah!’ said Rabbit, who never let things come to him, but always went and fetched them.
Rabbit, still worried about finding Christopher Robin, pesters Pooh about it. But Pooh has no Useful Information to provide. Not that he saw Tigger nor that he saw Piglet. It didn’t even matter that Christopher Robin had breakfast with him with his ‘little basket, just a little, fair sized basket, an ordinary biggish sort of basket full of.....’
Pooh hasn’t been keeping track of what has been going on, where Christopher Robin has been, only has known the sweetness of breakfast and sitting in the sun and having conversations and finding poems. He knows things, of course, but not Important Things. He has seen the world and sings about it:
Oh, the butterflies are flying,
Now the winter days are dying,
And the primroses are trying
To be seen.
This work, I suggest is the work of the soul: honouring the divine in the world around, feeling the flow of the world without need to control or push, taking time to be without agenda or task, to hear the songs that inhabit the world around us, feeding friends, spending time, taking time to be in the world.
Thomas Moore says:
The aim of soul work therefore, is not adjustment to accepted norms, to an image of the statistically healthy individual. Rather, the goal is a richly elaborated life, connected to society and nature, woven into the culture of family, nation and globe.
That’s the life of Pooh: cultivating his heart, cultivating the soul, watching the world, making connections, simply being in the world, even as he knows – and Rabbit clearly tells him – that he’s not of much help in the matter of finding where Christopher Robin is. Pooh is humble but unfazed in his pursuit of the pleasures of his life, his honey and songs, the delight of friends and adventures that lead places he never imagined they might, his ability to laugh at his folly, but never fear stepping out again to go places that interest and intrigue him.
Who is your hero and what is that story that you are seeking to live out? That’s the final question that only you can answer for yourself.
Myself, I wish I made more time to be more like Pooh, and paid attention to be less like Rabbit, at least those parts of Rabbit that are Busy and Important.
Whoever you choose, and however you choose it, remember this: Our lives are given to us to redeem that bit of the world we are given, and it is important that we do what we can with what we have. ‘The work is not yours to finish,’ Rabbi Tarfon said, ‘but neither are you free to take no part in it.’ Remember the best of what Rabbit can offer.
Whoever you choose, and however you choose it, remember this: Live so as to embody the holiness of your work, of your task, and don’t neglect the conscious cultivation of your soul: sing and dance, feel the sun on your shoulders, lift your face to the soft rain, taste honey and write poetry even if it’s mixed up and Not Helpful.
And may we all be well blessed in our choosing and in our living.