ecotheology – Dan Harper

Ecospirituality

Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

“I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents.

“Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

The second reading is from the book Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey:

“Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — …a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves,… and I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by computers. I promise you this: you will outlive them.”

Sermon: “Ecospirituality”

Many years ago the author E. B. White said, “I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” (1)

To save the world, or to savor the world: this dilemma arises almost immediately when we begin to talk about ecospirituality. We all know we’re in the middle of a major environmental crisis, one that needs immediate attention. We could easily spend all our free time trying to solve Earth’s ecological problems. Of course if we spend all our free time solving those problems, then we don’t have any time to enjoy the environment that we’re trying to save. It can feel as though this the price we have to pay: There’s too much to be done, so there’s no time for enjoyment. On the other hand, it can feel as though our environmental crisis has arisen because we all spend too much time trying to work harder, trying to be more efficient and more useful, trying to do more and more. From a spiritual point of view, maybe we should try to do less. Maybe we should spend less time doing, and more time being. Maybe our drive to do more is much the same thing as the drive to consume more, and the drive to consume more is what’s driving the ecological crisis.

Do we save or savor the world? I’d like to suggest one way we might thread our way through this ecospiritual dilemma. But first I have to outline the ecological problems facing us. It’s going to be a bit unpleasant, a little bit depressing, but then I can move on and talk about savoring the world.

Like most big problems, the ecological crisis can be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces. Many years ago, the biologist E. O. Wilson broke down the environmental crisis into five categories: habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, human population, and overharvesting; he used the acronym HIPPO as a way to remember his formulation.(2) But given how much we now talk about climate change, Wilson’s list can feel a bit outdated.

Three or four years ago, I attended an online talk given by Stuart Weiss, a Stanford-trained biologist who works in environmental remediation. There are five items on Weiss’s more up-to-date list: climate change; land use change (which includes deforestation and “defaunation” or the decline of animal populations); invasive organisms; toxication (which includes pollution from solid waste like plastics); and human overpopulation.

That’s a rather daunting list, and even though climate change gets the most attention in public conversations some of the other problems can be equally pressing, or even more pressing. For example, communities that suddenly discover their water supply is contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are going to place a higher priority on addressing toxication. Or if you go for a walk in Wompatuck State Park and notice how many the beech trees are dying because they’re infected with invasive Beech Leaf Disease, in that moment you might feel as though invasive species represent a more immediate problem than climate change.

Each of these five major problems can feel overwhelming. How can we possibly stop climate change? How can we prevent deforestation and defaunation? What can we do to tackle invasive species? And what about toxication and human overpopulation? The overwhelming nature of each of these problems, and the even greater sense of being overwhelmed by considering all these problems at the same time, leads me to the first great principle of ecospirituality: You do not want to feel overwhelmed. Because when you get overwhelmed you can neither save the world nor savor it.

This in turn leads to the first great principle of ecospiritual practice: You are just one person, so you only have to work one of these five big ecological problems. And you only have to find one narrow, manageable aspect of that problem where you personally can make a difference given your skills and abilities. Or you may not find one specific aspect of an ecological problem, it may have already found you. I’ll give you an example from my own life. I’ve been teaching and supervising comprehensive sexuality education programs to adolescents for a couple of decades now. I’ve developed some skill in this area, and teaching about human sexuality seems to be a good match for my abilities. When I happened to read that education seems to correlate with lower birth rates, it finally dawned on me that teaching comprehensive sexuality programs is how I’ve been using my skills and abilities to address human overpopulation.

Furthermore — and this seems odd when I put it this way — for me, teaching about human sexuality is actually a kind of ecospiritual practice. It turns out that doing something to save the world can serve as one kind of spiritual practice. We tend to assume that spiritual practices are things like meditating or doing yoga or studying Torah or attending Dharma talks. But if the effect of a spiritual practice is to make us feel more centered, more grounded, more spiritually whole — then for some of us, engaging in concrete action to help save the world is going to be more effective than prayer or sitting zazen. Using my own experience as an example, in my case addressing human overpopulation by teaching human sexuality makes me feel more centered and grounded. I feel like I’m doing something to make the world a better place. That makes me feel good. It also makes me feel less powerless in the face of ecological problems, so I feel more grounded.

I’m not saying anything you don’t already know. I’m sure many of you have similar kinds of stories that you could tell about yourself. The only thing I’m saying that might be a little different is I’m claiming that you only have to pick one of the big environmental issues to address; and then you only have to find one aspect of it where you can bring your talents and abilities and skills to bear. You don’t have to do everything; you only have to do one thing. If you get really good at that one thing, then you can add more to what you’re working on. But from an ecospiritual point of view, you don’t want to take on too many things. If you take on too many things, you will dilute your efforts and become ineffective, and you may burn yourself out. But if you do that one thing which you are able to do, if you can use your individual skills and talents to address environmental problems, you can experience personal spiritual growth while you help save the world.

Now that we’ve talked about saving the world, let’s turn to savoring the world, for that is the other half of ecospirituality.

In the second reading this morning, Edward Abbey exhorted us to be “half-hearted fanatics” when it comes to saving the world.(3) He is implying that we should spend no more than half our free time saving the world. The rest of our time, he says, we should spend savoring the natural world.

I agree with Edward Abbey on the necessity of getting out and savoring the world. I don’t find myself in agreement with the list of activities he tells me I should enjoy: “hunt and fish and … ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers,” and so on. That may how Edward Abbey savored the world, but that need not be how you or I savor the world. I’ll give you some examples of other ways to savor the world that are perhaps less infected with machismo.

First example: this summer I went to a weeklong workshop to learn about bryophytes, that is, mosses and related plants. Our instructor told us that one of the reasons he studied mosses was because of their aesthetic value. And he took obvious pleasure in getting out into the field to collect mosses. He got just as much joy from being in the lab, looking at mosses under the dissecting microscope or looking at slides of parts of mosses under the compound microscope. I would describe the joy he got from looking at mosses under a microscope as a kind of spiritual experience.

Second example: I know people, and you all probably know people, for whom gardening provides a kind of spiritual experience. Preparing the soil, planting seeds and nurturing young plants, keeping the rabbits and the plant-eating insects from doing too much damage, watering, hoeing, harvesting — the whole process of gardening from start to finish can serve as a kind of spiritual experience. My father was one of those gardeners. In spring, summer, and fall, he seemed to feel a deep need to spend every spare moment working in his garden. One of the last things he did before he was no longer able to walk was go out and check on some pea plants that were still growing in his garden, even though it was November.

Third example: Henry David Thoreau wrote extensively about going for long walks, and the things he saw on his walks. One of Thoreau’s most famous essays is titled “Walking,” and in that essay he claims the people with a real genius for walking actually engage in “sauntering,” a word he says derives from the “idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages … under the pretext of going à la Saint-terre, to the Holy Land.” “Saint-terre” became “saunter,” and the people walking were saunterers.(4) This was how Thoreau humorously justified his long walks: when his more straitlaced neighbors accused him of being a mere idler who walked in the woods to avoid work, he called himself a saunterer, a person engaged in a religious journey, someone who could find the Holy wherever he walked.

Thoreau’s conception of walking as a spiritual practice has become an accepted part of our culture. When we think of things that constitute ecospiritual practice, we are most likely to think of something like Thoreauvian walks in the woods. By extension, it’s not too much of a stretch for us to think of activities like climbing mountains and running rapids in a canoe as possible spiritual practices; these, too, are forms of sauntering.

But I’d like to broaden the understanding of ecospiritual practices. Earlier, I said that teaching a class in comprehensive human sexuality to adolescents was a kind of ecospiritual practice for me. Now let’s broaden the definition of ecospiritual practice even further. I want to broaden the definition of ecospiritual practice enough to include science. For a trained scientist like my moss instructor this summer, looking at moss under a microscope can be a spiritual experience. Doing work in the biological or ecological sciences can lead to spiritual experiences for some people. For these people, science can even become a kind of spiritual practice. Even for people who aren’t trained scientists but who seriously try to learn about biological and ecological sciences, both amateur science and citizen science can become a kind of spiritual experience.

Including science broadens the definition of ecospiritual practice beyond what our society usually allows. Our society usually assumes that science and religion are completely incompatible. But some of the scientists I’ve known have been very spiritual people; perhaps they wanted nothing to do with traditional religion, but they were spiritual. Anything that brings us into a greater awareness of the wider ecosystem, the wider universe, can result in a spiritual experience.

I find it difficult to name that wider awareness, to come up with a term for that transcendent feeling. Traditional words for this feeling include God, Dharma, Brahman; but to my ears, in contemporary American idiom none of these words can quite convey exactly what I mean by a transcendent feeling. Ralph Waldo Emerson described the feeling of transcendence by saying: “all mean egotism vanishes; I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.”(5) I like this formulation better, even though the image of a transparent eyeball is grotesque. But Emerson gets at the experience of what can happen when engaging in ecospiritual practices: your sense of self can disappear, leaving you with a simple awareness of oneness with the rest of the ecosystem.

I may not like the image of the “transparent eyeball” — and even in his own day, people made fun of Emerson for using that image — but I have nothing better to offer. Personally, I prefer to talk about the interdependent web of existence, but that phrase doesn’t really describe that feeling where you lose your self and feel a part of a greater whole. How do you describe it when a scientist loses themself for an hour looking at a specimen of Ulota crispa complex through a microscope? How do you describe it when you’re working in your garden, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been so immersed in the life of plants that you lost track of an hour or more? In that hour, all mean egotism vanished. In that hour, the currents of Universal Being circulated through you. Even when I’m teaching a course in comprehensive human sexuality, I’ve had times when all my mean egotism vanished.

Maybe there are no words to talk about this. We get to a certain point, and words fail us. We know what the ecological problems are; words are adequate to talk about the ongoing environmental crisis. Words begin to fail when we want to talk about experiences of the interdependent web of life. My moss instructor could tell us that looking at moss was beautiful, but the expression on his face and the posture of his body said that there what was going on inside him was more than simple appreciation of a pretty plant.

Words may fail, but when we can talk to someone face to face, most of what is communicated happens without words. That’s why we come here on Sunday mornings — you may listen to my inadequate words, but more importantly there is communication that happens just by being together. So it is that the best way to learn about ecospirituality is to have it come up in casual conversation with another person. Look at the eyes of the gardener when they tell you about putting the garden to bed for the season. Listen to the tone of voice of the hiker when they tell you about climbing Mount Garfield in the White Mountains. Observe the body language of the person telling you about their environmental project. Because words are inadequate, this may be the only way to discover what ecospirituality is: being with people who are doing ecospirituality in their day-to-day lives, even if they don’t call it by that name.

Notes

(1) Quoted in “E. B. White: Notes and Comment by Author”, Israel Shenker, The New York Times, 11 July 1969.
(2) See for example his lecture on 18 March 2011 at the Smithsonian Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6-cIBuzjag
(3) Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire.
(4) Henry David Thoreau, “Walking.”
(5) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”

Ecological Spirituality and Our Congregation

This sermon is one in an occasional series where I attempt to relate one of the seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association to current events, and to our congregation.

This week I thought I’d speak to you about the looming environmental disaster. The second reading this morning serves as an adequate reminder of the challenges we face, and I don’t think we need to rehearse the details of environmental disaster. I am sure most of us here this morning are all too aware of the problems we face. Nor do I want this to turn into one of those doom-and-gloom sermons. Instead, I’d like to reflect on what we might do as a religious community.

And it seems to me that we need a spiritual response to environmental disaster. Technological fixes will be necessary. Changes to our neoliberal capitalist economic system may be in order. Yet it seems to me technological and political and economic fixes are necessary, but not sufficient, for addressing environmental disaster.

This is not an original argument on my part. Back in 1966, historian Lynn White, Jr., presented an influential paper titled “The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” White contended that our current ecological crisis began in the Western world when our culture made the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. During the Enlightenment, the Western world began to draw a firm boundary between human beings on the one hand, and on the other hand all non-human organisms and rocks and soil and air and everything else. Furthermore, the Western worldview began to believe that we human beings are more important than anything else. And Westerners justified this new worldview with religion. For example, there’s a passage in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 1:28, which reads: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” [KJV] This was interpreted by many Westerners to mean that we humans were separate from the rest of Nature, and we could do whatever we want with everything else on earth. Even now, in our allegedly secular age, this religious worldview still dominates our thinking.

We may not quote the Bible any more in our secularized world, but it is an unquestioned axiom for most Westerners that we human beings have dominion over the non-human world. We humans get to make all the decisions. We humans don’t really need to consider any non-human viewpoints. If we do consider non-human viewpoints, we do so at our sole discretion.

This new Western worldview set up categories of binary opposites. We Westerners like to believe that there is humanity on the one hand, and Nature on the other hand. Nature is waiting to be tamed or subdued by humanity. Similarly, we tend to believe that mind and body are separate, with body waiting to be tamed by mind. And again, we Westerners believed for many centuries that man and woman were binary opposites, with women waiting to be tamed or subdued by men. Many people here in the United States still believe this about women. And we Westerners have believed for many centuries in a binary distinction between Civilization and Savagery, with Savages waiting to be tamed or subdued by civilized men (and I do mean men; in this worldview, it’s the men who do the subduing). So Westerners gave themselves permission to kill off the indigenous peoples of the United States, and to develop the brutal system of chattel slavery for people of African descent.

Our post-medieval Western worldview tends to categorize everything into binary opposites: mind – body; man – woman; civilized – savage; humanity – everything else. For each of these binary opposites, one of the opposites is more powerful and has dominion over the other binary opposite. This worldview helps justify colonialism, sexism slavery, and so on. This worldview gives license to the more powerful of the binary opposites to dominate the Other.

This remains the dominant worldview in the United States, and has real-world effects. Many people in our country still believe in the binary opposite of men and women, with the result that transgender people are discriminated against, women are no longer allowed to have abortions in many states, and women still earn less than men for the same work. Many people in our country still believe in the binary opposite of white-skinned people and non-white people, with the result that we can document significant differences in health and wealth among people simply on the basis of their skin color, and we also have a loud minority of white people who say that people of color should be ruled by white people. Many people in the United States still believe in the binary opposite of humanity versus the non-human world, with the result that it is considered perfectly acceptable to exploit the non-human world, as long as it benefits at least a few human beings.

I suggest that this is a religious or spiritual problem. We Westerners think of religion in terms of belief, but religion and spirituality are really about worldviews. Thus it becomes a spiritual exercise to stop thinking that one binary opposite should subdue or dominate the other binary opposite. We need to figure out a different worldview. And we Unitarian Universalists are especially well placed to do this work. We’re already heretics. We already know how to reinterpret Western religion so that it becomes less destructive.

Let’s return to that passage from the Hebrew Bible: “God blessed [the human beings], and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” As Unitarian Universalists, we have already come up with alternative ways to interpret this passage from the Hebrew Bible.

Our first reinterpretation of this Bible passage comes from feminism. As the second wave of feminism took hold within Unitarian Universalism, way back in the 1960s, we began to understand that “to have dominion” and “to subdue” are not the same thing as “to completely destroy.” As feminists, we would agree with Rosemary Radford Reuther, who in her book “Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing,” pointed out that the role of humans in this Bible passage is not that of “an owner who can do with it what he wills,” but rather that of a steward who is caring for the earth. We have not been given permission to cause some of God’s creations to go extinct.

Henry David Thoreau came up with another way to rethink that old passage from the Hebrew Bible. In 1862, in his essay “Walking,” he said, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” It should be remembered that Thoreau was raised as a Unitarian. However, he became an ardent abolitionist, and he left Unitarianism in part because the minister of the Unitarian church in Concord, where he lived, was at best a lukewarm supporter of abolitionism. So you can see that Thoreau rejected the binary opposition of white people over black people, of free people over enslaved people. Similarly, he rejected the binary opposition between humanity and the non-human world. He acknowledged that human beings could indeed “fill the earth and subdue it.” But he felt that our preservation depended upon reserving parts of the world for wildness.

Still a third interpretation of that old passage from the Hebrew Bible comes from theologian Bernard Loomer, a Presbyterian who joined the Berkeley, California, Unitarian Universalist church late in life. Loomer said that we misinterpret Jesus. Jesus was not God, but rather proclaimed the Kingdom of God. What Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God was precisely what Loomer termed the interdependent web of life. (Loomer, by the way, was the one who introduced Unitarian Universalists to the phrase “the interdependent Web of Life.”) In the Kingdom of God, not a sparrow falls but God knows about it; in the interdependent web of existence, all living beings are intimately connected, and not a one dies but that all are affected. We humans have dominion, but not in the sense of having power over other living beings. Instead, God told us humans that we have dominion, God was telling us that we power with, not power over, the non-human world.

More recently, we Unitarian Universalists have been exploring yet another spiritual worldview. We have been listening carefully to other spiritual worldviews. In fact, we’re experiencing this in the musical selections that Mary Beth has chosen for us this morning. I would especially draw your attention to the offertory music, a piece by Navajo composer Connor Chee titled “Hózhó” (and I’m afraid I’m mutilating the pronunciation of this Navajo word). In the composer’s notes, printed in your order of service, Chee explains the concept of hózhó, or balance. By listening carefully and respectfully to his music and his explanation — by listening to his spiritual worldview — we can experience another understanding of how human beings could relate to the non-human world. We don’t want to be condescending or impose Western standards onto the Navajo worldview, nor do we want to try to coopt Chee’s spiritual worldview and try to take it over for ourselves. We remain who we are, but through this cross-cultural encounter we can learn and grow.

So these are just some of the ways we Unitarian Universalists have already become aware of emerging worldviews, emerging spiritual outlooks. We need to shift our spiritual worldview, because the old Western religious worldview is what got us into this environmental mess. That old Western religious worldview showed us how to have absolute power over other humans and non-human beings. In these days of ecological crisis, we need to shift our focus slightly. An ecological worldview allows us to see, not how to have power over other beings, but how all beings are interconnected. The science of ecology expresses this in terms of systems theory, and interlocking feedback loops, and non-linear systems. Since all beings are connected, the harm we do to the least of those beings is harm done to the entire ecological system.

And actually, ecospiritualities aren’t really all that new. There is an ecospirituality in what Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God, about loving one’s neighbor as oneself. There is an ecospirituality when the Dao de Jing says, “…in giving birth you do not possess it, in doing it you do not retain it, in leading it you employ no authority…” [10b, trans. Robert Eno]. There is an ecospirituality in the traditional Navajo concept of hozho, balance.

That narrow old Western worldview is still dominant in our society. I find myself slipping into that old way of thinking. That’s one reason why we bring our children here, to nurture them with a different worldview. That’s one reason why we come here each week: to remind ourselves of other ways of being in the world, so we need not slip back into that old dominionist worldview. It might look like we’re just sitting in these pews, here in this two hundred and seventy five year old meeting house. Yet what we’re really doing here, week after week, is reminding each other of another way of being in the world. And when we leave here and go out into the world each week, we begin to reshape the worldview of rest of our society. What we do here affects the rest of the world, because we are all part of the interdependent web of life.

Another way

The sermon below was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California, at the 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. services. The sermon text below is a reading text; the actual sermon contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2015 Daniel Harper.

We Unitarian Universalists are known for our openness to the beliefs and practices of other religions. But we also have our own native spiritual practices, and today I’d like to tell you about spiritual practices from our own tradition, rooted in the relationships between human and non-human beings. I have to warn you, though, that this native Unitarian Universalist spiritual practice is a challenging spiritual practice to follow; which might explain why we have mostly ignored it, and instead turned to popularized spiritual practices from other traditions that aren’t so demanding.

And this native Unitarian spiritual practice starts with the story of how Henry Thoreau, who was raised a Unitarian, went to live at Walden Pond.

When Henry Thoreau got out of college, he had to decide on a career. First he was by his home town of Concord, Massachusetts, as a school teacher. He lasted two weeks. A member of the school committee dropped in to see how the new teacher was doing, and told Thoreau to improve discipline by using more corporal punishment. Thoreau called on half a dozen students at random, beat them, and handed in his resignation that night. (1)

Next Thoreau went to work for his father in the family business of manufacturing pencils. But this was a job and not a vocation; so he also started writing regularly in a journal; and, along with the rest of his Unitarian family, he became an abolitionist, trying to abolish slavery in the United States.

Henry Thoreau still wanted a job that would be a calling, a vocation. So he and his beloved older brother John started their own school. This school, what we today might call a progressive school, was a great success. Their school only lasted for two years, until John’s tuberculosis worsened to the point where he could no longer teach, and so they closed the school. Over the next year, John started to recover from tuberculosis — but then he accidentally nicked his finger with a razor, contracted tetanus, and died a week later.

His brother’s death deepened Henry’s struggle to find his path in life. Henry drifted along, trying different things, until three years after John died, when he got permission to go live on a woodlot owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, right next to the railroad tracks on the shores of Walden Pond.

Henry built himself a small cabin there. He cleared some ground and planted a garden. He spent much of his days outdoors. He read deeply in ancient Greek and Roman literature, in the Bible, and in the holy books of other world religions. In his journal, he wrote about what he had seen in the outdoors. He wrote a memoir about a camping trip he and John had taken, rowing down the Concord River to the Merrimack River, then upstream till they could go no further, then traveling by land to the White Mountains, then into the mountains and all the way up Mount Washington, the highest peak in New England.

Henry Thoreau didn’t got to Walden Pond to pretend to live in the wilderness; he didn’t live there to escape from the world. In fact, the opposite is true: his cabin on Walden Pond was a station on the Underground Railroad. Some people are embarrassed by Thoreau, saying: Oh, but when he was at Walden Pond, he went to his mother’s house to eat dinner and get his laundry done! Yes, and while he was at his mother’s house he plotted with Concord’s radical abolitionists on how to help slaves escape.

So far from trying to escape from the world, Thoreau got himself arrested while living at Walden Pond. He refused to pay the poll tax, which, he said, was an immoral tax because it went to pay for an unjust war against Mexico. He spent just one night in jail because someone — he never learned who it was — paid his poll tax for him, probably out of embarrassment that this Harvard graduate wound up in the town jail with drunks and uneducated bums.

Henry Thoreau lived at Walden Pond for two years and two months, keeping track of when the flowers bloomed, watching the trees come into leaf, and then he went back to live with his parents and sisters. He had finished the business he had to transact at Walden Pond: his spiritual path led him elsewhere.

I think Thoreau is very difficult for many of us Unitarian Universalists today because he is more concerned with transcendent reality than with his career. He made his money manufacturing pencils and working as a surveyor. But his real concern was not his paid jobs, it was his spiritual life.

Our priorities tend to be the other way around: we think our careers deserve more time than our spiritual lives; or maybe we think that our careers are a spiritual matter. Here in Silicon Valley, we worship our jobs, and we like the fact that we can brag about working seventy hours a week — actually, I’m now down to about fifty hours a week, most weeks, except when I work more than that — and we don’t like it when Henry Thoreau tells us, quite convincingly, that we need only work a couple of months a year to provide for the necessities of life. If we did this, says Thoreau, we could spend the bulk of our lives contemplating the divine reality that we mostly ignore. But rather than confront this embarrassing truth, we turn our attention to other, less demanding, spiritual paths. Take, for example, the current Silicon Valley fascination with mindfulness. “Mindfulness” turns out a mis-translation of the ancient Pali word “sati,” a subtle Buddhist concept that means something like “memory of the present.” (2) But we prefer our Westernized and mis-translated version of mindfulness because it demands so little from us. Mindfulness is pursued by executives from Fortune 500 companies, so it must be good. Mindfulness means we do not have to give up our seventy-hour-a-week jobs, because we can be mindful at work, which will make us more productive, and allow us to spend even more time at work.

“As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence [says Thoreau]. We have the Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, there is hardly anyone within hearing, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire.” (3) Today we do not even need to leave to comfort of our cubicle to watch the fire, we just wait for someone to post a video on Facebook. And so we are distracted for a pleasant moment in our seventy hour work week.

Because he will cause you to doubt about the value of your career, I cannot recommend Thoreau as a spiritual guide. But if you are crazy enough to want to follow Thoreau’s spiritual and religious example, I’ll tell you about three life-changing spiritual practices recommended by Thoreau.

The first spiritual practice is to spend a great deal of time outdoors, closely observing the natural world. Thoreau spent hours each day outdoors, checking to see when the various species of flowering plants first bloomed each year, watching how dead animals decay, closely observing all the minutiae of life around him, and then recording his careful observations of human and non-human beings in his journal. I’ve tried this a couple of times recently — spend most of the day outdoors, observing the relation of humans to non-humans, the interdependence of living things, how living things depend on non-living things — and I can report more than just about any other spiritual practice, it has gotten me closer to a transcendent reality. The problem with this spiritual practice, however, is that it makes me a less effective employee of this church, because I begin to believe it as important to watch Black Phoebes build their nest under the eaves outside the door to my office, than answer the email you have sent to me.

The second spiritual practice is to read the holy books of the great world religions. Thoreau lived at a time when the scriptures of non-Christian religions were being translated into European languages for the first time. Of course he already knew the Western Bible, and the spiritual writing of the ancient Romans and Greeks. But he was also able to read deeply in books like the Confucian Analects, and make those stories become a part of him, as when he writes: “Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu [Confucius] to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!” (3) So it was that Thoreau understood the place of humans in the universe: as much as we might like to think we are like gods, we are in fact limited fallible beings. Books like this keep us from thinking we are better than other humans, or thinking that humans are somehow better than non-human beings. Thus we open ourselves to the web of relationships of which we are a part. And the problem with this spiritual practice is that it is a blow to your pride, from which you may never want to recover.

The third spiritual practice is to find your own way to truth. Thoreau did think that everyone should go build a cabin on a woodlot borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He did not care whether or not we read the Confucian Analects. He was not trying to recruit us to join the Underground Railroad. He wanted us to come face to face with reality, to see the world as it really is, to ignore illusions of progress represented by commercial success. This has been the task of religion since the dawn of time: to get us to see things as they really are. But this is a dangerous task. Thoreau said: “If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a scimitar, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” And this is why you should ignore this part of our Unitarian Universalist religious tradition. It is safer to stick to the popularized versions of religion. Go take yoga classes, but do not delve into the depths of Hindu philosophy. Practice mindfulness, but ignore the difficult path of Buddhist enlightenment. Read leadership books that quote ancient Chinese philosophers, but do not attempt to diminish the number of your faults. Come to church here if you like, but do not take seriously the ravings of prophets like Isaiah and Jesus and Jeremiah who say we can make this world a better place.

So I will close by telling you this: Don’t read Thoreau. He will only cause you trouble. If you are young, he will tempt you to drop out of school and go hike the Pacific Crest Trail (which is our North American version of the pilgrimages to the holy land), and then you will not get into Harvard and your life will be ruined. If you are trying to raise children in Silicon Valley, he will tempt you to tell your children: “Stop doing homework and spend time outdoors!” and then they won’t get in to Stanford and their lives will be ruined. If you are retired, he will tempt to become like the retired admirers of Thoreau I once knew who devoted their time and money to social justice causes and filed their bills as follows: Bills To Be Paid; To Be Paid When There’s Money; Refuse To Pay for Ethical Reasons. Trust me, this is a recipe for trouble.

No, you should stay away from people like Thoreau. He will make you crave only reality. He is like all those religious prophets, telling us that we need not live the way we do now, that we can follow a better way.

Notes:
(1) The facts of Thoreau’s life are taken from the standard scholarly biography: Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography, enlarged and corrected edition (Princeton University Press, 1982).
(2) For the origins of the word “mindfulness” in English, see Virginia Heffernan, “Mind the Gap,” New York Times Magazine, April 19, 2015, p. 14.
(3) Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For.”
(4) Analects Book 14.26.1-2. In James Legge’s translation: “Chu Po-yu sent a messenger with friendly inquiries to Confucius. Confucius sat with him, and questioned him. ‘What,’ said he, ‘is your master engaged in?’ The messenger replied, ‘My master is anxious to make his faults few, but he has not yet succeeded.’ He then went out, and the Master said, ‘A messenger indeed! A messenger indeed!’”