UUCF Frederick, Maryland May 2, 2004 9:00 am and 11:00 am Hope is in the Dirt: Healing our Spirits by Caring for the Earth ---------------------------------------------------------------- When the litany of Earth's destruction is all around us, it's easy to sink into despair. But the Earth's resilience is all around us, too, offering hope that we, too, can be healed. Our Seventh Principle encourages us to imagine our church as "Green Sanctuary" where we heal our spirits as we heal the Earth. Good morning! I'm really glad to join you this morning. I'm always excited to visit congregations, especially those that are trying to get a Green Sanctuary program started. Somehow I can't resist an invitation to share my "gospel of the Earth" with anyone willing to give me their attention for a few minutes. Our topic this morning is hope, and I have to admit that lately, the issue of finding hope and staying motivated and energized is somewhere near the top of my list! I thank you for this opportunity, and I hope I can spark your imagination just a bit this morning. Our world currently faces environmental challenges of a size and scale unheard of in modern history. Humans, particularly in developed countries, contribute to unprecedented climate change, species extinction, and degradation of air, water, and soil. Moreover, we face these challenges within the context of a global political economy that not only depends entirely on the Earth's natural resources, but also wastes or despoils them at almost every turn. I don't think I need to recite the litany of all this destruction - you know it well enough - (and if you don't, ask Rod Sauter he'll give you enough references to drive you to despair!) Around the world, conflicts and wars are inevitably tied to resources - oil, water, land, and food. Clearly, it's tough to find hope in all that mess! Basic human rights depend on access to natural resources and a clean environment, which are increasingly unavailable to billions of people. These are basic life and death issues, calling upon us to reflect deeply about what it means to be a human being in the world - the very essence of religion. In fact, religious leaders from most of the world's faith traditions have claimed that the environmental crisis may be the greatest moral and religious challenge facing humankind in the 21st century. All the world's religions are called to embrace fundamental changes in the way humans interact with our Earth's environmental systems. Actions are required at all levels - individual, community, national, and global - to change individual behaviors and societal/cultural structures. Some suggest religions may be the only human institutions still able to effect the necessary changes. I don't pretend to know the solutions to the crisis. I'm pretty sure there are many - and they are all complex, and involve changing at least some of how we live on the Earth. But I do believe that the recent move to bring this discussion into our faith communities is one of the most important advancements in the search for solutions. In the last two decades, most religious faiths have been reexamining their scriptures and traditions to develop the theological frameworks to move them toward a more sustainable way of living on this earth. Each tradition has its own language, but virtually all are now teaching at least a couple of basic principles: that humans have no right to wantonly destroy the earth's resources; and that we have a clear responsibility to protect the earth for future generations. Roger Gottlieb is the author of a groundbreaking book, "A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Healing the Earth." He was also a keynote speaker for us at General Assembly in 2002. Roger tells us that we must maintain a strong spiritual identity to keep ourselves energized for the work of healing the Earth. "It is in our spiritual identity" he says, "that we seek to develop . . . a basic acceptance of who we are and an essential appreciation and embrace of the world. This embrace may center on God or Goddess, on a particularly exalted teacher, or simply on the earth itself. In any case, it leads us back to gratitude and wonder for the daily miracles of creation." In other words, Gottlieb says, knowing ourselves helps to clarify our connection with the Earth, which motivates us to live in such a way that we care for its blessings. For the past couple of years, I've been co-leading a covenant group at the UU Church in Arlington, Virginia where I live. Our theme is eco-spirituality. I try to encourage us to look to nature for wisdom in all aspects of our lives, including healing the damage we've done to the Earth and to ourselves. If we're observant, Earth's metaphors teach us how to live as much as any other religious scriptures. If we pay attention, we can learn much about relationships and trust, about transformation, about hope. We must believe that it matters: that what we do as individuals matters, and that we can do more collectively, and that by doing it collectively we can be more effective. And that maybe, just maybe, we can turn things around. Some of the best environmental thinkers affirm this. Thich Nhat Han, Terry Tempest Williams, and Joanna Macy are among my current favorite teachers. Let me share some of their wisdom, arising from the dirt. Thich Nhat Han is a consummate observer. Listen to what he learns from garbage: "When we look deeply at a flower, we can see that it is made entirely of non-flower elements, like sunshine, rain, soil, compost, air, and time. If we continue to look deeply, we will also notice that the flower is on her way to becoming compost. If we don't notice this, we will be shocked when the flower begins to decompose. "When we look deeply at the compost, we see that it is also on its way to becoming flowers, and we realize that flowers and compost 'inter-are'. They need each other. A good organic gardener does not discriminate against compost, because he knows how to transform it into marigolds, roses, and many other kinds of flowers. "When we look deeply into ourselves, we see both flowers and garbage. Each of us has anger, hatred, depression, racial discrimination, and many other kinds of garbage in us, but there is no need for us to be afraid. In the way that a gardener knows how to transform compost into flowers, we can learn the art of transforming anger, depression, and racial discrimination into love and understanding." Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist and a Mormon who lives and works in Utah, in the southwest desert. She reminds us that "healing must begin within our communities, and within ourselves, regarding our relationship to the Earth, Wild Earth . . . We are in the process of becoming Earth. We are not separate. We belong to a much larger community than we know. We are here because of love. "I have inherited a belief in community" (she says), "the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time. We are eroding. We are evolving. We are conserving the land and we are destroying it. We are living more simply and we are living more extravagantly. We are trying to live within the limits of arid country and we are living beyond the limits of available water. We live with a sense of humility and we live with a sense of entitlement. I hold these oppositions within myself." There are many ways for us as Unitarian Universalists to act collectively on our covenant to respect and promote the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part. I believe The Seventh Principle Project is one of the best models. SPP is an independent affiliate organization of the UUA, established to facilitate and support the environmental work of Unitarian Universalists. We focus on the theological, spiritual, and ethical aspects of human values and activities that affect the health and sustainability of the living earth. We try to work within the UUA - the larger institution of our faith - to encourage a higher priority for in-depth study and reflection on the ecological aspects of our faith, and to push the denomination into examining our structures and behaviors to more closely reflect our values in terms of the interdependent web. Social change is slow and incremental, as you know. But we are seeing some change at the denominational level. For example, this year we managed to secure a serious commitment from the GA Planning Committee to begin the process of creating "greener" General Assemblies. We have also been invited to participate with the Center for UU Camps and Conferences to help them build a strategy to implement the relevant aspects of our Green Sanctuary Program in their programs and operations. These two actions alone represent a major increase in the UUA's commitment to live by our seventh principle. But in a denomination with such a strong commitment to congregational polity, real change comes from the bottom - and on the issue of the environment especially, our church leaders are waiting to hear from the grass roots before they take up the call to heal the Earth in a big way. So that's where we focus most of our effort - in congregations like this one. The Seventh Principle Project is the initiator, designer, and sponsor of the Green Sanctuary Program, which hopefully most of you have at least heard something about. A Green Sanctuary is a congregation that lives out its commitment to the Earth by creating a sustainable life style for its members as individuals and as a faith community. Sustainable living is not about our material comfort (though these choices are an important part of the overall life style); it is about choosing to live in a way that nurtures life, builds relationships, and rejects material consumption as the sole determinant of happiness. The Green Sanctuary Program provides a framework for responding to that call. To become a Green Sanctuary, a congregation carries out a series of activities in four focus areas: worship, religious education, environmental justice, and sustainable living. In our worship we try to deepen our spiritual life to nurture the spirit and provide the energy and motivation we need to live by our values. Religious education helps us understand the complexities of natural systems and how they're affected by human activities, and what are the implications of these interactions. Environmental justice recognizes that poor people and people of color are the first victims of the environmental problems, while they have the least ability to protect themselves and their environment. We must understand that the various oppressions in society are all aspects of the economic and political power structures we've created, and we have an obligation to change those structures to create justice. Sustainable living examines how our individual and communal lives affect the Earth, for better or worse, and considers lifestyle changes that will enhance sustainability. Together these four focus areas make up a comprehensive program that touches on all aspects of congregational life. We can find Unitarian Universalists across the continent actively working to extend and deepen their understanding of the condition of the Earth and the impact of human activities. And commitment is growing to transform our theologies into social action. It's exciting to see this vision evolving into a "reality show," with an ever expanding litany of real examples in congregations and communities across the continent to balance out the litany of destruction. UUs join with activists in other faiths to speak out in public witness for protection of a of natural resources and special places, what the Native Americans have called sacred sites. We join local community organizations to protest the operation of polluters in poor and minority neighborhoods. We start covenant groups in our churches to support each other's search for meaning beyond the emptiness of a life of endless consumption. We gather in interfaith celebrations for the blessings of the earth in Easter sunrise services and Earth Day and Solstice rituals. In our congregations, we take concrete steps to conserve energy, and offset our on-going usage by supporting renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. We learn about the impacts to the earth from our food production and consumption system and we try to make alternative choices. We might host a farmers market in our parking lot. We celebrate the bounty of the Earth with community feasts made from food that's locally and sustainably produced, low on the food chain, and mostly organic. We sponsor a "bike to church" Sunday, and promote car pooling to events as much as possible. Wringing our hands in despair at the magnitude of the challenge is simply no longer good enough. Our communities of faith bear witness to the injustices both in human relationships and in our relationships with the natural world. By using Nature's gifts of beauty, wisdom, and unlimited possibilities, and by acknowledging the link between the environment and social justice, we are responding to the call to reverse the cycle of destruction we have brought upon the earth. I want to wallow in the dirt just a bit more now, following an image Gary Gunderson's book, "Deeply Woven Roots," where he describes our roles and relationships in a healthy community with the metaphor of the forest. "It is hard not to look up in awe into the high reaches of a deep and healthy forest. But the true story is in the dirt, the roots. And what is forest loam but fallen trees? Everywhere you look in a natural forest you see trees on their way to loam, and soil on its way to the sky . "I think of a congregation and its surrounding community as a forest, an image that leads us into the future in two ways. First, we can see ourselves as one of the trees, taking comfort in the complex richness of our enduring connections. Second, we can see ourselves as foresters, with the humble patience of stewards who measure their contribution in terms of decades, nurturing and defending a living process. "Although a forest may span miles, any one tree has to grow where it happened to sprout, hoping to bear the fruit it can. Storms and fires sweep aside the weak. Some are more resilient than others; some keep growing even after they are knocked down. But the big difference is whom they grow next to, whose roots tangle with their own. A forest's resilience reflects its diversity. Any one tree relies not just on its own roots, but on an interwoven fabric of roots. And while it is a good thing to put down roots, grow into the wind, and rise high into the sky, it is also good to know that, even in our falling, even as our individual memories slip behind, we will continue to be a part of the whole." We already know that a few of us recycling our soda cans, or turning out the lights when we leave a room, or eating vegetarian food, or taking the bus or metro to work, is important. But these actions carried out alone cannot change the world. We certainly can get the change started, and we must start it! But we cannot do it alone. I encourage you to use the metaphor of the roots, and see whose roots will tangle with yours as you collaborate and cooperate in your community, to prove to yourselves that collectively you can accomplish so much more than any of you can ever achieve alone. The principle of the interconnected web reminds us that we are connected to each other as well as to the Earth and all the creatures that are a part of nature. I hope that each of you individually will find the best place to make your contribution, and that together you will become that interwoven fabric of roots that supports a healthy forest. Truly there is hope in this dirt. As I mentioned earlier, the work of the Seventh Principle Project is based in the roots - the grass roots. As an institution, the UUA takes no responsibility for promoting our work, and does not support us financially. They leave it to individual members and congregations to support our mission. We've accomplished a tremendous amount over the last four years, but we can't afford to lose traction now. In order for us to continue to respond to the call of the Earth, we must rely on memberships and contributions from YOU. It's sort of like public radio, you know. Without your support, we can't exist. Your Board of Trustees has agreed to take up a second collection this morning. I believe you recognize the importance of our mission. If I'm right, I encourage you , I ask you to be as generous as you possibly can when the basket comes to you in a few minutes. Now I'd like to close with a section of a poem by Denise Levertov called "Beginners." Some of you may have heard this before, but it bears repeating. Beginners by - Denise Levertov But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope? So much is in bud. How can desire fail? We have only begun to imagine justice and mercy, Only begun to envision how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors. We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle. So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture, so much is in bud.