When Picking One Leaf Is All You Can Do
5 min 03 sec: app reading time
March 31, 2025
Dear Friend:
I confess that sometimes I feel helpless as I read the news, watch what's going on in the culture, and hear people express concern about our social condition.
I read a piece this morning that inspired me. I needed the thought to push me through the day.
Written by Charles P. Gibbs, who is an Episcopal priest, a visionary, and a poet who has dedicated his life to serving the sacred in the world, primarily through interreligious and intercultural engagement.
He is a Senior Partner and Poet-in-Residence for the Catalyst for Peace Foundation and the author of Light Reading: Selected Poems from a Pilgrim Journey. For seventeen years, he served as the founding executive director of the United Religions Initiative (URI). This global organization promotes enduring, daily interfaith cooperation for peace, justice, and healing in over 84 countries. Charles brings to all he does a deep commitment to spiritual transformation and work for peace, justice, and healing, and an abiding belief in the sacredness of all life in the Earth community.
Charles P. Gibbs, Pastor, author, husband, and father, having visited Hiroshima and attended conferences about the threat of nuclear war, felt depressed and powerless by the “human capacity to instantly destroy 80,000 lives,” and other unimaginable horrors.
When he arrived home from a conference, he watched his toddler shuffle through a massive pile of leaves, pick up one leaf, and place it in a garbage can—leaf after leaf, one at a time.
He thought it was futile and even foolish, comparing it to his feeling of powerlessness and overwhelm.
Upon reflection, however, his son inspired the realization that amid the sea of dead leaves representing “the shadow side of human life on this planet – leaves of violence, oppression, greed, poverty, injustice, inequality, environmental degradation, and on and on – we can be attentive to a particular leaf calling to us.
We can pick up that leaf, take care of it, and then look for the next leaf calling our name.”
This is the way he described his experience.
In 2006 when I made a personal pilgrimage to Hiroshima. When I arrived at the train station in vibrant downtown Hiroshima, I was bewildered. Everything seemed so normal. A brief trolley ride delivered me to the middle of the Aioi Bridge, the intended ground zero of the bomb dropped by the Enola Gay at 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, a bomb that killed 80,000 people instantaneously and ultimately led to the deaths of over 200,000 people.
Expecting signs of this extraordinary devastation, I looked around and saw … the pointed tip of a small island, with a river dividing and flowing down both sides and an incomprehensibly lush green park on the island.
The Hiroshima Peace Dome, which is, in fact, a skeleton sitting atop what is left of one of the few buildings not completely obliterated by the explosion, sits naked, surrounded by the tall buildings and bustle of this once again thriving city. No matter where you walk throughout the peace park, you can always see the dome, often across a field of green, standing lifeless against the sky, the historical evidence of the single most destructive moment in human history.
The day was shattering. Alternately, I struggled to absorb historical background – the buildup of militarism in Japan, World War II, and the events immediately leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; and sobbed uncontrollably at the reality of the human capacity to instantly destroy 80,000 lives and leave a whole population suffering in varying degrees from radiation sickness and haunted for the rest of their lives. But also, miraculously, committed to a path of peace, working to prevent this horror from ever happening again.
I felt no psychic numbing as I drove home at the end of that conference. I felt as depressed and powerless as I can remember ever feeling in my life. It was late October. The sky was a dark, leaden gray. The night before a powerful windstorm had stripped the trees of their remaining leaves, leaving starkly naked branches extending lifeless into the dying light.
When I pulled up in front of our house, Debbie was sitting on the porch steps, and Ben stood in the middle of the yard between two large maple trees. The night before, they had deposited a sea of dead leaves. Nearly buried in the middle of the sea was a small garbage can. I sat down beside Debbie, and as the lingering light drained from the sky, I tried to talk my way through the darkness I had absorbed from the conference.
As I talked, Ben, dressed in powder blue coveralls, shuffled through the leaves, frequently finding a particular leaf that, for some reason, he felt compelled to pick up. Then he would shuffle to the garbage can and drop the leaf in. Back and forth, leaf after leaf, light fading, cold deepening.
Debbie and I sat there for nearly a half-hour until it was almost too dark to see. Ben never slowed down and never seemed to tire of his work. We finally lured him inside with the promise of dinner.
Later that night, as I sat in my upstairs study, looking down on the seemingly untouched sea of leaves and the small trash can, I thought how foolish Ben’s activity had been.
I could have scooped up more leaves in one armful than he had picked up in thirty minutes. But then I realized that Ben wasn't being foolish; he was being faithful, and in being faithful, was showing me the way out of despair into purposeful action – instead of allowing myself to be overwhelmed because there are far more leaves than I can manage, I can find those leaves I can take care of and get to work.
Ultimately, I believe the sea of leaves is God’s to deal with. That doesn’t mean that I believe God will somehow magically rescue humanity from our foolishness, only that I trust that in the vast expanse of this unfolding universe, light and love are ultimately sovereign.
But that belief doesn’t free us from our responsibility to do everything we uniquely are able to manifest light and love through our lives. In the midst of the sea of dead leaves that represent the shadow side of human life on this planet – leaves of violence, oppression, greed, poverty, injustice, inequality, environmental degradation, and on and on – we can be attentive to a particular leaf calling to us. We can pick up that leaf, take care of it, and then look for the next leaf calling our name.
Over the years, this reflection has not only remained vivid in my memory, but it has also been an ever-present guide for my personal growth and an ongoing inspiration to keep me moving beyond despair at the myriad human-generated catastrophes that threaten the Earth's community to action that in some way might help make space for peace, justice, and healing.
Whether we work at the grassroots or make high-level policy, have a global reach, or devote our time to creating a healthy home for others and ourselves, each of us can answer the call to pick up one leaf. And then another. And then another … clearing the ground … making space for the green leaves of light and love to break through … as long as we’re privileged to draw breath.
With you on your journey,
Pastor Harold