Transcription of Bill Gregory for the show Preserving the Royal #263
Lisa: As is often true in life, we eventually get to meet the people that we hear much about and today I have that opportunity. This is Bill Gregory who is an author and retired United Church of Christ minister, who formerly worked at Woodfords Congregational and currently is part of an important environmental stewardship movement within the First Parish Church in Yarmouth. He lives pretty nearby me on Cousins Island. I live on Littlejohn. He’s got some fascinating things to say about why we should pay attention to our waterways and really the environment in general. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Bill: My pleasure, Lisa.
Lisa: You and I both share a commonality of the Yarmouth and this wonderful entity that we have called the Royal River, which really has been part of Yarmouth and the surrounding town’s landscape, well always, but has really been important in many ways to us. Why did you get to be interested in the Royal River?
Bill: Lots of interesting story. A good friend of mine, Carol Bass, who lived in Littlejohn, came to me 1 day at Island and said “I’m middle-aged. I will get MS and I would like to develop my spiritual life. Would you lead a group of vibrant people together?” Long story short, we did. The group is still going. It’s wonderful and important part of my life, but Carol has moved to South Carolina because of her MS. She contacted me and asked if I were to write a piece on spirituality in a river for the Edisto River in South Carolina that she lives next to. It turns out that the industrial outfits have been invited to use the Edisto and she was trying to organize and be part of an organization to oppose it. I said I’d do that, but I didn’t know the Edisto and I realized that I didn’t know the Royal either.
A friend of mine, Art Bell and I get arts canoe and started down the Royal River a year ago and discovered that it wasn’t a river really. It was a pond. The river behind the Elm Street Dam is very quiet, lovely to canoe on, lovely to ice skate on the winter, but it’s character as a river has been taken over. When we came down, it was remarkably quiet. We couldn’t hear birds. We didn’t see evidence of lifeforms in the river. It turns out there are, but there are eels in the river and there are some fish and so forth. It just didn’t seem alive.
We decided that we wanted to learn more about the river, get in touch with the Maine Rivers which is right in town and with the help of director of Maine Rivers whose name I’m having a senior moment escapes me, but it will come back, began talking with the environmentalist groups about what their interest. We are really newbies and they welcomed us. It happened at that same time that the town counsel is reconsidering the motion of a previous town counsel to take out one of the dams. There are 2 dams in the river. A town counsel decided not to take it out under the influence of the commercial interest, the Marinas in particular, who have a legitimate stakeholders position on taking the dam up because it would impact them and the question of “who is going to represent the river?” came up.
Up to now in the town of Yarmouth, its history since settled by Europeans has taken the river as a commercial resource to be used for commercial purposes. Pot mill, chicken plucking business, saw mill. Dozens and dozens of factories over the years, but that’s over now. We realized that the dams were created in a wonderful attraction. You get the mirror effect of the dam water provides. It provides recreational effect which all serve some purpose, but nobody in town spoke up at town counsel for the life of the river itself. For the river is placed in an environmental system that ultimately involves all of us and not only all the waterways. The Royal is 1 of 2 Maine natural waterways that flows into Casco Bay and the health of Casco Bay is dependent on the health of those 2 rivers.
We got connected with the environmentalist group, Art Bell and I and then we went into our church and said which was saying anybody who wants to do something justice oriented or service oriented, we encourage you to do that and we’ll support you and we’ll call you an official aspect of the churches’ life. We said, “We want to be an environmental stewardship group.” Environmental stewardship – Royal River is the name of our organization and this is all fed for me and then I’m essentially a nature mystic. I’m a Christian. Jesus is central to my faith and understanding of ethics, but my experience of God comes through nature more clearly than any place else.
Having to deal with my years and years and years of hiking in the high country of the Sierra Nevada in California and my major mystical experience happened in the Sierra Nevada. It’s always fed me. I found God. I found mystery. I found meaning in the natural world. Carol directed me to her river. I went to the Royal River. The Royal River has said to me … Not further river because it speaks so far of greater voice than I, but it says 1 thing. One of the things is says, “I’m not what I could be.” There are few places on the river where you can see it actually below the Bridge Street Dam. It flows as a river there. It’s really quite natural. There are people there fly fishing. It’s got life to it. Then you have to go quite away upstream before you get to the headwaters where it’s a river again.
Anyway, that’s a long answer to your question. That’s how I got there. Art and I have taken on the task of helping the citizens of Yarmouth see the river first and then see it as having life and worth even sacredness of its own and ask the question not how can the river serve us, but how can we serve the river.
Lisa: As you are talking, I’m thinking about my own children. I was raised in Yarmouth and I had not really ever done anything with the Royal River as a child, but each of my children has now paddled on the river. It’s become part of the high school curriculum. I think, for them, that was so eye opening to actually think of it as a recreational place because you are entirely correct with the way that it has been dammed. There’s not a lot that people actually do on the river itself after a certain point. That’s an interesting idea that we can live in a place in our entire lives really and never really know something that’s right next to us and with us.
Bill: That’s right. It’s really amazing because in the early days even though it was commercial, the river was the center of the town. It was all based on the river and then main street became the main focus of town and the old village model. Art Bell was saying the same thing. He had lived here for years and Art too lives in Cousins Island. He says, “You know I’ve never paid attention to the river.” You just so drive over it. You see it as a picturesque.” You look from the inner state and you see the falls. You left from Route 1 you see the reflection of the Bridge Street mill, but you don’t look at it as a river. It doesn’t seem to have a life of its own in our mindset.
Lisa: On May 21st, you actually did an event which was an honor, a World Fish Migration Day.
Bill: Yes. Everybody celebrates right?
Lisa: Exactly. It’s a big holiday, but you brought together a number of different interest including the native American interest and you really specifically went in a direction of native American spirituality.
Bill: That’s right. It’s true.
Lisa: It’s interesting because the way that you are telling me this. You thought that that would be more easily accepted than if you brought it through as a Christian spirituality.
Bill: Yes. It’s sort of the reflection of our secular age and the bad name that a conservative Christianity has given to Christian faith in particular. That’s not entirely a balanced statement. I’m a liberal and people on the right of me might argue, but I’m of the opinion that full understanding of the Christian faith has been worked even, in some ways, severely wounded by the prominence of Evangelicals. If I were to stand up before our group and say as a Christian I want to talk to you about the health and well-being of the Royal River, immediately people would begin to feel intimidated because I think either I’m an Evangelical and want to convert them to my way of thinking or that they have made decision to be interfaith or agnostic or atheistic and that the sectarian option would be for some interesting, but for others interruptive.
In this day of beginning to honor the native American population that live among us and have life and gift, culture that needs to be honored. We need to understand the history that devalue them and the terrible way that our country has let slavery and second class citizenship occur. We’ll be trying to find a way out of that for decade, century. We are still struggling. Because of that sympathy for native American life, the native American spirituality which is nature-based and sees the human being as part of nature, but not above it. It’s grateful for, at least as I understand. There will be other native Americans that I can’t speak for because I don’t know them well enough. I don’t have the right to speak for them.
What I’ve read, what I understand, what is spoken to me about what the native American approach to nature is this sense of being part of it and nature is sacred and we are sacred, but we are not more sacred. If we are going to use nature, we have to be concerned for its well-being and grateful for what it provides us. By bringing that into the conversation, I think when you look at the Royal River with the possibility expanded spiritual perspective, at least that’s my hope.
Lisa: It’s interesting that as a former Christian minister you almost end up being an apologist at times for this faith that you’ve dedicated your life to. Mysticism has been an important part of Christianity from the very beginning.
Bill: That’s right.
Lisa: In some ways, my understanding is that it actually has become somewhat marginalized and the idea of gnosis or knowing and that connection that one has with the greater spirituality. That’s not what one usually thinks of when one thinks of Christianity.
Bill: It’s hard for me to know what one thinks of, but I think as I watched it I think you are right. It’s a question of authority. In every system, the question whether it’s religious system or economic system or governmental system, the question is “What’s the authority? What do you regulate yourself around? What has authority over you? What do you give authority to?” In organized religion, the authority is in my tradition which is congregational, the experience of the individual in what’s call an Episcopal or hierarchical system.
The authority is the hierarchy which its members has dedicated their life and they have been called out and recognized as leaders and in some ways reflections of Jesus at least in the mind of the followers. Pride corrupts, power corrupts absolutely. Any human oriented system always suffers from a hierarchy that doesn’t develop a humility that has to be corrected. The experience of God, the experience of the more, the experience of the ultimate, the essential is really at the heart of all of the religious traditions. The question of the mystical which has got to be that experience. There’s always more than you can name, always more than you can …
The essence of the mystical experience is that there’s some fancy words for it, but it’s ineffable. You can’t tell someone about it. It’s momentary. You have in the moment and then you come down from the mountain or wherever it is, but it changes you and you have a sort of knowing which is not a defining. It’s not a control. It’s a quality of blessed relationship that you profoundly grateful to have experienced. I think that’s at the heart of all traditions and all faith whether they are Christian or otherwise.
The question of authority particularly in congregational traditions has been that experience, but then the structure gets established and the question becomes, “Are we preserving the structure as our act of faith or are we preserving the right of individuals and encouragement to have their own experience as the act of faith?” I find myself on the latter position. My encouragement, my preaching, my work has always been in the congregational tradition, very respectful of individual experience. At the same time, sharing a tradition, the heart of which was Jesus’ mystical experience and where he was baptized. He comes out of the water a changed person.
There will be Christians who will argue with that interpretation, but that was his epiphany. That was his mystical experience. It’s affirmed in a tradition, but it’s certainly my empowering experience. It happened in small pieces all through the course my life and it was Jesus and the expansion of the church that kept me connected. I knew there was more of there that I wanted to follow. I think it was during the ’60s which was when I came in to the church. The spiritual life and social justice were the 2 primary concerns and it continued so true my life. That’s enough I think. What more would you like me to talk about?
Lisa: I think it makes perfect sense that if somebody ask you to think about a river and to really get a sense of the river that you would want to go experience that river yourself. If somebody wants you to think and feel about the Royal River that you need to actually get on that river. It also makes perfect sense, the sense of wanting to be involved in stewardship and social justice because you want to be among the people you are connected to because that’s part of this bigger experience I believe that you are describing.
Bill: It’s all about relationship and the quality of relationship is the heart of it. The mystical experience is the essence of the quality relationship. Love is a reflection and experience of the relationship of spirit of grace that is available to us all and the violation of the trust that love encourages becomes the unethical or the unjust individual or social act. That has to do with how we treat nature as well as how we treat one another. It’s just that in our hierarchy that we spoke of earlier and the authority in our worldview coming out in the enlightenment is that individuals, human beings are what it’s all about that exist for us and everything else subservient and that’s a self-deafening vision.
Lisa: You and I share a common friend who is no longer with us and that is Hanley Denning. She and I went to college together and we knew each other.
Bill: Did you really?
Lisa: Yes. I know that you knew her quite well before she passed away and I believe it was, maybe, 7 years ago. I think somewhere in the not too distant past.
Bill: That’s tragic.
Lisa: When I think about Hanley and the work she did with Safe Passage and educating the children who lived outside the Guatemala City dump, it really reminds me. Echoes of what you are saying came through in the work that she was doing where there was this need for justice and connection and the sense that she was connected to these children and they shouldn’t suffer anymore than anyone else that she knew.
Bill: You ask me about the mysticism and I mentioned knowing. Another way to talk about seeing and Hanley saw. She saw the sacredness, the beauty of those children. The story when she went down there, and in happenstance, discovered a nun who befriended her that showed her the dump and showed her the homeless people that were making scratch in a life. It showed her the children who were caught in that system of oppression and materialism. She saw the beauty of them and said, “I’ve got to do something.” As you know the story, she went home, sold everything, moved down there. That’s incredible. I’ve taken groups there. I’ve gone there. Nancy and I have gone there when Hanley was there. I remember 1 time Nancy and I were talking with Hanley.
Hanley was very encouraging of people to come down because she knew it was the way to finance but also she wanted the extended world in her life to know about this, to see with her eyes and after we had talked to her and we were walking away. Nancy turn to me and she said, “You know, I have the distinct feeling that we’ve just been talking with a saint.” She had that aura about her that she had given herself so completely to love and service that it had become her. She loves sitting with her co-workers and like a people magazine and exploring what the latest fashions. She is fully human being, but she had this deep compassion. You are right. By touching on Hanley, you are touching what touches us whether it’s the river or the birds or your own children or the immigrants who trying to find life some place.
Lisa: It is truly been a pleasure to finally meet you and I did actually first learn of you through Hanley many, many years ago.
Bill: Oh, really?
Lisa: The fact that you showed up today to speak with me is really quite something. We’ve been speaking with Bill Gregory who is an author and retired United Church of Christ minister who formerly worked with Woodfords and I was a member of the First Parish in Yarmouth and really helping out with the environmental stewardship specifically with relationship to the Royal River.
Bill: That’s right.
Lisa: I appreciate your coming in today and having this conversation with me and I appreciate what you are doing with the Royal River.
Bill: Thank you for your empathy and your collegiality and for the invitation.