Psalm 1 and What Kind of Times Are These by Adrienne Rich
February 16, 2025
By Rev. Nicole M. Lamarche
Welcome again on what is in our tradition the sixth Sunday after the Epiphany. Thank you for being here! I feel especially grateful for you all and this place in this time. I invite you to take some deeper breaths and whatever you are bringing with you, maybe you can let it go for a time. So that we might tune into the gift of whatever the Universe has for us today. I offer this prayer from Psalm 19. God may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Approximately 402.74 million terabytes of data are created each day. And by created, I mean data that is newly generated, captured, copied, or consumed. By the end of this year, 181 zettabytes of data will have been generated. The United State currently has more than 2,700 data centers.
The amount of data generated annually has grown year-over-year since 2010. It’s a more and more and more kind of moment on planet earth. And this more and more has data entering our world at a pace never seen before in human history, coming at us faster and faster and faster….
And all this data, all of this more and more, means that there is a lot of information, a lot of data coming from so many places, from so many different intentions, that it is hard to know how to sort through it all? It can feel hard to know for sure what to take in. This was true before this moment in 2025, but it feels bigger and louder right now. In a piece in the NYT last month, Ezra Klein wrote about how our attention is being captured. He wrote, “Our attention is a wildly available resource. And some of the world’s most powerful corporations extract it at a scale in increasingly sophisticated ways leaving us feeling like bystanders to our own minds.”
In the last century, Herbert Simon, a scholar whose work significantly influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology, wrote eloquently about both the gifts and the pitfalls of having so much information at our disposal. His primary research was about how we make good, decent, thoughtful decisions with all of this information and he is best known for this theories of “bounded rationality and “satisficing” which is as I was interested to discover, is a decision-making strategy that includes searching through the presently available alternatives until an “acceptability threshold is met,” but without necessarily maximizing any particular objective. In 1971 he wrote an essay titled, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” and Herbert A. Simon said, “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” In short, Herbert Simon knew that, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”
I am going to say that again. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”
At the women’s retreat last week and thank you again Nicole for leading and holding the space while we were away, Jana reminded us of this simple spiritual truth: energy flows where attention goes. Energy flows where our attention goes, so if our attention is impoverished, from either a lack of intentionality with what we do with the gift of our time or impoverished from a diet of news overwhelm infused with ultra-processed fear and misinformation, we are left feeling unsettled, anxious, and unsure of what to respond to or how. I know what this feels like, this wealth that creates a poverty. And maybe you do too? Where are left feeling hungry, empty, seeking to be filled up in the wrong places.
In our desire for fulfillment and with so much to sort through, we sometimes struggle to know the difference between information and wisdom. Do you feel that? I know that I do.
As Scarlet Lewis writes, “Knowledge, an accumulation of facts and data gleaned from books, studies, and external sources, serves as the foundation of our understanding of the world. It is accessible, quantifiable, and often serves as the bedrock for further exploration and discovery.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is an elusive, deeper understanding that comes from the internal synthesis of our experiences, emotions, and knowledge.”
I don’t think wisdom is elusive. That’s what we are here for today.
And in our Christian tradition and in the Jewish tradition, wisdom comes directly from the Holy, it has a voice, and it was there in the beginning as evolution churned on bringing us to awareness, to consciousness. To understand Psalm 1 we must connect it to the book of Proverbs where wisdom is personified as a woman who is crying out to all who will listen. In Proverbs 8:22 we read, “The Lord created me at the beginning of God’s work, the first acts of long ago….” In verse 22, the word beginning is translated re-shit in Hebrew which appears as the first word of Genesis with an added preposition, bere-shit, which invites us to hold the idea that wisdom Herself is woven into Creation, that it was the very first thing God did in the creation mythology that we have. Wisdom was there from the start.
As scholar Larry Lyke writes of Psalm 1, “The imagery in verse 3 is especially important in tracing the history of the rise of the status of early written traditions. In declaring that the wise “are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season,” the psalmist associates the wise with fully fertile and verdant trees and likens torah to the fresh running water that sustains them.”
In other words, wisdom can be found rooted deep and it is here and has always been and those who are nourished by it will have fruit. Right now, it feels like wickedness is having a flare up. Like it’s some kind of medical condition. But do you know what I notice? It’s a surface thing; it has no roots, hate and fear are the least creative options. They won’t last in the long run. Its leaves will wither and fall, and the tree will rot. Wisdom has roots so deep that no storm can overcome it. It is networked and expansive and unflappable. It is more like something that is familiar to some of you, the Pando, from the Latin word I spread! Which is the world’s largest tree, a quaking aspen living in Utah in the Fishlake National Forest. It is estimated to have 47,000 stems that appear to be individual trees, but they are not. It is one huge, glorious system of roots, a system of wisdom that knows truth and coordinates the production of energy, supports regeneration and defense. So, it seems to me that part of how we know it is wisdom is if it supports the whole tree.
There is a lot I don’t know. Even with all this information we have. But I do know for sure that wisdom is with us, that she was here from the start, present at the beginning. I know for sure that wickedness, will not, cannot win, in the end. It isn’t rooted deep enough. And as the poet Adrienne Rich told us, I know for sure in times like these, it's necessary to talk about trees.
It’s necessary to remember that we can be, we will be, we are, like trees planted by streams of water. We are a pando, fueled by the power of love, connected so deep that on the surface we might just look like a bunch of thin boring old trees! But we’re not. Hold on, stay deep, don’t be fooled! We are doubling down on love! We will not be uprooted by hate or fear. We will
not be uprooted by anger and othering, smothering us with worry, and infighting, being told that the enemy is each other. No! We are doubling down on love!
So Beloved of God, in a time of wickedness, how can we remain like trees planted by streams of water, with leaves that do not wither? What does it look like for you to double down on love? What does it look like for CUCC to double down on love?
Beloved of God, happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, don’t be fooled, don’t be uprooted, don’t be afraid! We are doubling down on love!
May it be so! Amen!