Category Archives: Ecology, religion, justice

A tale of the city, part two

First part of this series: link.

The details of the murders came out over the course of the trial. My most vivid memory, I think, was the testimony of the blood spatter analysis expert. As she was qualified as an expert witness, it became obvious that she was an extremely bright young woman: degree from one of the Seven Sisters colleges, a long line of qualifications for someone so young (she must have been in her early twenties), articulate. She was attractive in a geeky sort of way; at least she seemed attractive until she was asked when she first decided to become a blood spatter analysis expert: “When I was 13,” she said, turning to face the jury (she always turned to look at us when she testified), “after I read a true crime book where the crime was solved due to blood spatter analysis.” That was just a little too creepy; to know at thirteen that you wanted to become an expert in such an arcane, and, let’s be honest, such a gruesome job.

When the two victims were stabbed, the blood went everywhere. It was on the clothing of the defendant: little spatters of blood on his boots, on his pants, everywhere. We learned about the different types of blood spatter, and how a blood spatter analysis could tell how far away someone was standing when the blood was spattered. The defendant was standing very close indeed.

A week ago, I happened to stumble across a journal that I had kept in the summer of 1983; and tucked in the back, I just happened to find five entries from March, 1992. I don’t remember writing them. Two of those entries concerned the murder trial….

4 March 1992

We continued deliberations today; all twelve of us shut into the jury room, with the symbolic mace leaning across the closed door, from one jamb to the other. Because of Ash Wednesday, the judge allowed us to start an hour late, and our foreman came in with his forehead smudged. Ash Wednesday I know is the first day of Lent but aside [break in the original]

Carol just came in and wanted to talk….[long digression about our trivial conversation]

I had meant to write about the jury, our deliberations, the gory incidents brought out at the trial. At least I have gained a few minutes when I have not thought about the trial and our deliberations. Tomorrow, I am cooped up again in a small room with eleven others, becoming rubbed raw, each of us, against the others and the moral horror of events.

Part three of the story…

A tale of the city, part one

Before a church meeting today, J— asked me why I hadn’t yet written about the recent gang violence in New Bedford [Link]. I said because if I wrote right now, it would be too negative. But her question got me to thinking about violence in cities, and that got me to thinking about something that happened a couple of weeks ago. And if you bear with me, I’ll eventually get back to what’s going on in New Bedford right now.

Back on May 20, Carol and I were staying up in Cambrindge, and we walked from Porter Square to Inman Square, and then kept walking down Cambridge Street. All of a sudden, I felt funny, and I turned to Carol and said, “This neighborhood isn’t safe.” She didn’t understand why I said that, or why I felt that way — it was a beautiful sunny day, no one looked threatening, the neighborhood hadn’t really changed. And then I realized what was going on.

Back in February, 1992, I got called for jury duty, and I was empanelled on a jury that was going to deliberate in a murder trial. It was actually a relief to hear the trial would probably take three weeks:– I was working for a carpenter, he had no work to speak of, I was already down to three days a week; and if I served on a jury, the state would pay me fifty bucks a day for the duration of the trial.

On the first or second day of the trial, they took us all on a bus to go out and see where the murders had taken place. One of the two people murdered was Rigoberto Carrion. He was stabbed while walking through a housing project off Cambridge Street late at night, and managed to stagger out onto Cambridge St., and collapsed in the middle of the street at a set of traffic lights.

I saw those traffic lights, and that’s when I started to feel funny, and that’s when I said to Carol that the neighborhood we were walking through wasn’t safe. I had seen those traffic lights for all of five minutes through a bus window at the beginning of that trial in 1992. But the memory was still clear enough fourteen years later to set my nerves on edge when I walked by….

Part two of the story…

Cheap Yankee

Not that I’m obsessed with gas prices or anything, but….

My ’93 Toyota Corolla got 37 miles per gallon on the trip up to Cambridge and back. As a cheap New England Yankee, with gas prices hovering around three dollars a gallon, I’m feeling pretty good about that. Sure, a new Toyota Prius would get 44 miles per gallon (as tested in the real world by Consumer Reports), 19% better than my thirteen year old Corolla. But that new Prius would cost me well over twenty grand, whereas my Corolla cost six grand, used, in 1997. So I’m keeping a car out of the landfill, and saving gas, and saving money.

Oh, and I walk to work.

Here’s a case where being a cheapskate is pretty much the same thing as being an environmentalist.

Memorial Day weekend

I’m about to drive up to Cambridge to spend a couple of days with Carol, who has been working up there. I’ll have to fill my gas tank on the way up. Ouch. I can feel the pain in my wallet already. Carol sent me a link to a little online movie about the high price of gas. Be forewarned: the lyrics to the country-and-western soundtrack aren’t exactly polite in places, and you may not want to watch this with your kids. But I’ll bet you’ll be humming the chorus to yourself next time you stop at a gas station. Link

Going to the dump

Yesterday was a brilliantly warm May day. Perhaps a little too warm, for in this ear of global climate change every bit of weather that seems out of the ordinary reminds me (rightly or wrongly) that we’re headed for very different weather patterns over the next few years.

Today, I’m headed off with the First Unitarian youth group on a retreat. We’re going to meet up with the youth group at the Unitarian Universalist church on Nantucket Island. Then we’re going to make a field trip to the dump. The Nantucket dump has some of the best “antiquing” (a.k.a. trash-picking) you’ll find at any dump anywhere. Since landfill space is at a permium on the island, they make a huge effort to recycle everything, and anything that’s remotely useable is set aside so it can be picked through.

So we’re taking a kind of an ecojustice field trip with the youth group. And maybe we’ll be taking a look at the future: already, our consumer society is so glutted with things that you can get just about whatever you want on the used market for free.

After thinking about these kinds of things, I’d be pretty gloomy if it wasn’t such a beautiful day outside.

Transcendental change in liberal religion?

I don’t usually post my sermons on this blog, because for me the sermon is a spoken genre that doesn’t translate well into written form. But people at church seemed to like this sermon, so I thought, what the heck, maybe you might like it. And this sermon is for you, no matter what flavor of religious liberal you happen to be.

Be warned: if you were in church this morning, I usually ad lib 20-30% of the sermon, including most of the funny bits — so this is different from what you heard today.

Readings

The first reading this morning is from the book Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter titled, “Sounds”:

What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

I did not read books the first summer [I lived at Walden Pond]; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time…. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

The second reading is from the Hebrew prophets, the book of Isaiah, chapter 24, verses 5 and 6:

The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.
Therefore a curse devours the earth,
and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt….

Sermon — “Transcendental Ecology”

In case you haven’t noticed, the historically liberal churches have been shoved off to the margins in the United States. Historically liberal churches such as the Episcopalians, the Congregationalists, the Methodists, the northern Baptists, the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterians, the Quakers, and yes the Unitarian Universalists, have been losing members and influence for some forty years now. We used to be at the center of things. Forty years ago, during the Civil Rights movement, when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called on church leaders to come stand beside him, we in the historically liberal churches went and stood. Some religious liberals even died for Civil Rights, including two Unitarian Unviersalists: Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Luizzo. At that time, we engaged with the outer world, and our opinions actually mattered.

Since that time, Unitarian Universalists and all the other historically liberal churches have been steadily losing membership and influence. (We Unitarian Universalists have actually been gaining members in the past twenty years, at about one percent a year; which however is not enough to keep up with population growth but at least we’re not shrinking like all the other liberal churches.) I sometimes feel that we religious liberals have spent the last forty years in a kind of a daze; we have spent the last forty years gazing at our navels. Sure, individual religious liberals work harder than ever to make this a better world — but as a group, as a liberal religious church, we are far from the centers of power and influence.

Of course, you know who is at the centers of power and influence. While we religious liberals have been gazing at our navels, the Religious Right, a loose coalition of many of the fundamentalist churches, some of the evangelical churches, televangelists, billionaires, and other conservative Christians, has gained in power and influence. The Religious Right has enormous influence in Congress and in the White House. The Religious Right is extremely well-funded. The Religious Right has charismatic preachers, some of whom have built churches of upwards of thirty thousand members. We are shrinking and increasingly irrelevant; they get to elect presidents.

I think it’s time for us to change. For the past forty years, we religious liberals have been coming to our beautiful church buildings, politely sad because global warming and massive species extinctions are destroying living beings that we consider sacred. Perhaps we even gently wring our hands, and we say we don’t quite know what to do. We know that environmental destruction is a religious issue. We know that one of the roots of the ecological disaster we face today is the simple religious fact that Western religion has mis-interpreted that passage in the Bible, the one where God gives us dominion over all other living beings, to mean that we can rape the earth and destroy at will. We know, too, that the Religious Right is happy for their God to have dominion over the United States, and for men to have dominion over women, and for men in the United States to have dominion over all over living beings — and when they say dominion, they don’t mean it in a nice, polite way, they mean domination. We religious liberals know all that, and when we leave our beautiful churches after coffee hour, we seem to forget all this until we next come to church, maybe four weeks from now. We conveniently forget that the ecological disaster we are now facing has deep religious roots.

I think it’s time for us to change. We no longer have the luxury of sitting quietly in our beautiful liberal churches. We no longer have the luxury of chatting politely with our friends at coffee hour about everything except the religious roots of the ecological crisis (to say nothing of the religious roots of gay-bashing, the religious roots of the widening gap between rich and poor, and so on). We no longer have the luxury of being able to separate our polite religion from the rough-and-tumble of real-world events; we no longer have the luxury of hiding our religious faith from the world.

So I’m going to try to set an example here this morning. I’m going to speak here publicly about my deeply-held religious faith, a religious faith that drives me to try, against all hope, to save what’s left of the natural world from further destruction. Maybe what I say seems a little raw; maybe I’m making one or two people feel uncomfortable. We have gotten out of the habit of speaking of our deeply-held religious beliefs here in our liberal churches; we have, in fact, gotten out of the habit of being religious. But that’s what ministers are for: to set the best example we know how to set, and to call people to be religious.

So let’s talk religion — to start us off, I’ll talk about my own deeply held religious beliefs.

I’m a Transcendentalist. When I was about sixteen, I had a transcendental experience. I was sitting outdoors at the base of Punkatasset Hill in my home town of Concord, Massachusetts, with my back against a white birch tree. There was this alley of white birches that someone had planted along an old farm road, and the fields on either side were still, at that time, mowed for hay twice a year. So I was just sitting there on a beautiful late spring day, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the oneness of everything. I mean, this was an overwhelming experience, I really don’t have the words to describe it. Since then, I’ve had numerous other transcendent experiences, some more powerful than others.

What do these transcendental experiences mean? Well, I suppose I’m still trying to make sense out of those experiences. When I was about twenty, I found William James’s book Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he describes the various mystical experiences that people have. James said that perhaps a quarter of the population have mystical experiences of one sort or another, and in his descriptions of the various kinds of mystical experiences I could see the outlines of my own mystical experiences. But James’s book didn’t tell me about the meaning of my mystical experiences.

I found something of the meaning of my transcendental experiences in a book by my fellow townsman, Henry Thoreau. I had always disliked Thoreau when I was a child; when you grow up in Concord, and go to the Concord public schools, you get force-fed Thoreau and Emerson, and Alcott and Hawthorne for that matter. I don’t take well to force-feeding and so dismissed Thoreau. But at last I found that Thoreau’s book Walden probably described what I had been experiencing better than anything else, especially when he writes:

I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, …until by the sun falling in at my west window… I was reminded of the lapse of time.

I discovered that I, too, love a broad margin to my life. That broad margin is a margin to my life in which I have the time and the space to be able to be rapt in a revery, to reflect on the ultimate meaning of the universe. It is also a margin to my life where I can reflect on the difference between real religion, and religion as it is imperfectly practiced in the world around me.

When I have been able to sit “rapt in a revery,” I have come to the inescapable conclusion that there is a unity which binds all human beings together, which binds all living beings together — which, indeed, binds us human beings to the non-living world as well, to the sun and the moon and the stars above and the rocks under our feet.

I can put this into scientific terms if you’d like: all parts of the ecosystem are interconnected, these interconnections can be modeled in terms of systems theory using feedback loops and non-linear relationships; and to harm one part of an ecosystem will have wide repercussions throughout the ecosystem. I find I am quite comfortable with scientific language. I can also put this into the language of Christianity if you’d like: God’s creation consists of earth, moon, sun, and stars; of the ocean and all the creatures that live there; of the birds of the air; of the plants that grow and the animals that live on the earth; of human beings. And to harm one part of God’s creation is to do violence to God. I find I am reasonably comfortable with Christian language. Or if you like, I can also put this into the one of the dialects of neo-paganism, which might sound something like this: the Goddess who is Gaia, earth mother, mother of all that lives; the Goddess who is the Moon Goddess who sets the rhythms of the seasons; it is she whom we love and must respect, and to harm the ecosystem is to harm the Mother Goddess. I find I am reasonably comfortable with neo-Pagan language, too.

Right now, the specific language is less important than the fundamental underlying insight. In fact, we could even put this in words that the Religious Right might recognize:

The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.

(Right after that, by the way, Isaiah goes on to say why the earth has become polluted: it’s because his people have twisted and mis-interpreted their religion.)

Yes, we have broken our covenant, our promises, to the earth. I am told by some religious liberals that in speaking this way, I’m not being decorous, I’m not being polite. (Funny how you don’t hear the Religious Right saying to each other, “Now be polite!”) But my religious faith sets me on fire; I’m not polite. I know that my faith can transform the world; I know that my faith can change the religious attitudes that lead to dominion theology and global ecological catastrophe; but I am told by some Unitarian Universalists that I am not polite, because I’m trying to change this nice comfortable little religion we’ve had for the past forty years.

Maybe that’s the problem: mine is not a comfortable faith. I have not been made comfortable by having transcendental experiences that cause me to sit rapt in a revery on a summer morning; I have not been made comfortable by the religious realization that my contribution to global warming and habitat destruction is morally wrong; I have not been made comfortable in the knowledge that our churches must grow quickly or sink into complete and total irrelevancy as the Religious Right gains more and more influence in the United States; I am not comfortable knowing that it is up to me and other religious liberals to combat the misguided religion of domination that is the Religious Right.

I suspect that I’m probably passing along some of my discomfort to you. I keep challenging you, I know; I am not the warm, cuddly pastor that I would kind of like to be. I would love to be able to stand up here week after week, and be able to preach warm, comforting sermons. I would love to be able to sit with you each week and pass on comfortable religious thoughts as you live out your life. It would be so much easier if we could just keep on with our small, comfortable little church; for after all, growth just means more work for us. I wish I could be a warm comfortable cuddly pastor, in a nice relaxed sleepy little church; but I don’t think either you or I have that luxury.

My friends, the world is changing around us. Very rapidly. Ten years ago, I would have laughed at the idea that these United States could turn into a theocracy run by a Religious Right who distorts Jesus of Nazareth’s message of love into a message of prejudice and intolerance, who use the Bible to justify ecological disaster. Ten years ago I would have laughed at this idea; now I believe such a theocracy is a remote but all-too-real possibility. It will be a theocracy based on a religion of domination: men dominating women, the rich dominating the poor, straight people dominating gays and lesbians, and above all humanity dominating and destroying the rest of the natural world. Because, they will say, it is God’s will.

If such a theocracy comes, it will not be comfortable to be a Unitarian Universalist. If such a theocracy comes, we in the liberal churches will have no one to blame but ourselves. We have let our religion become optional, sort of like joining a country club, or supporting National Public Radio. We have let the Religious Right steal the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus and the other Jewish prophets away from us. We have let the political liberals to completely separate environmentalism from religion. We have let our churches dwindle in size, even though we are told that our churches get more newcomers and visitors, relative to our size, than the churches of the Religious Right. And we have been coming to church when we feel like it, staying comfortable, looking always inward.

My friends, I know that many of you are facing serious personal challenges. There are people in this congregation who have are facing so much that they don’t have any energy left over for anything except staying alive. But that, too, is a very different thing from having a country-club church; when life is that overwhelming, you are not in a position to have a safe comfortable religion; life is not letting you have safety and comfort. If we could start remembering that the world is not a comfortable place for most people, maybe we could offer each other a lot more comfort.

I’d like to invite you to join me in remaking liberal religion; in remaking this liberal church. I invite you to be on fire with your liberal religious faith. I invite you to feel your religion so deeply that when life overwhelms you, your religion becomes a source of strength. I invite you let your religious convictions of love, compassion, and justice draw you into passion and commitment to heal the world. I invite you to be moved by your deeply-held religious belief that all living beings are sacred, that the whole ecosystem is sacred.

If we did that, this church, First Unitarian in New Bedford, would once again become a force to be reckoned with. As it stands now, a few people are impressed with our beautiful building, and maybe with our past exploits; but aside from that, our little congregation of less than a hundred people is safely ignored. But if we choose to do so, we could change the world.

From frogs to creation

A couple of weeks ago, we went in to Seven Star books in Central Square, Cambridge. Though it’s known as a New Age bookstore, Seven Stars has the best selection of new and used books on world religions that I have found in eastern Massachusetts. I found a two-volume copy of Hymns of the Rgveda translated by Ralph T. H. Griffiths, from Munshiram Manoharlala Publishers, New Delhi. The book is simply a wonderful artifact in and of itself: the typical off-white paper used by printers in India, fingerprints where the printer picked up sheets before the ink was fully dry, a dust cover with a tessellated leaves-and-flower motif in pale green.

This week, I’ve been dipping in to the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda, a collection of hymns to ancient Vedic gods and minor deities, is considered one of the oldest religious-literary works in the world. I find some of these hymns fairly incomprehensible, like this one which praises frogs (Book VII, Hymn 103):

1. They who lay quiet for a year, the Brahmans who fulfil their vows,
The Frogs have lifted up their voice, the voice Parjanya hath inspired….
3. When at the coming of the Rains the water has poured upon them as they yearned and thirsted,
One seeks another as he talks and greets him with cries of pleasure as a son his father….
6. One is Cow-bellow and Goat-bleat the other, one Frog is Green and one of them is Spotty.
They bear one common name, and yet they vary, and, talking, modulate their voice diversely….

According to Griffiths, Max Muller saw this hymn as a satire on the priestly class. Maybe, but it seems more likely to me that we are simply missing some cultural referent that prevents us from really understanding what the hymn meant originally. Some words from the past must remain forever obscure.

Yet there are other hymns in the Rig Veda which I find moving and thought-provoking, such this hymn about creation (Book X, Hymn 129):

1. Then was no non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
2. Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day’s and night’s divider.
That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.
3. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.
All that existed then was void and formless: by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit. …

6. Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?
7. He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he does not.

These are words from the past which still speak to me with the same sense of wonder, the same sense of confronting the unknowable, with which they spoke to the priests and followers of the ancient Vedic religion, when this hymn was first sung three millennia ago.

Perspective

John Bullard, a member of the Unitarian Universalist church here in New Bedford, has a powerful piece on global warming (and the leadership vaccum in today’s world) on the editorial page of today’s Boston Globe. Link

John writes, in part:

Right now we are showing (and our leaders exemplify) characteristics that, in combination, are toxic. We have believed since Genesis that we are apart from nature and our job is to achieve dominion over the earth. We believe we are in control of the earth. What hubris. We are largely ignorant of science, and we hope what we don’t know can’t hurt us. And lastly, we live in denial. This issue of the changing climate isn’t really that big a deal. Arrogance, ignorance, and denial — that is a fatal combination.

What we need from our leaders is the opposite. We need them to know that there is no more important issue than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We need a proper sense of perspective. This isn’t just about Cape Wind. This is about more Cape Winds, everywhere we can put them. This is about nuclear power because the risks from long-term storage of nuclear fuel rods pales in comparison with the harm being caused right now.

When John speaks of leaders in this piece, I think he mostly means political leaders. But I want to extend what he says to religious leaders. Global warming is no longer something religion can ignore — what will our liberal faith do to make sense out of the looming environmental disaster, and how will our faith motivate us to strong and immediate action?

Six months after Katrina

Someone I know went down to Mississippi a couple of weeks ago, to do a week’s worth of volunteer clean-up work with the youth group from her Unitarian Universalist church, the Winchester Unitarian Society. The photos her group brought back show a devastated landscape: ruined buildings, smashed cars, huge piles of junk surrounding what used to be a middle-class houses. Volunteers in hazmat suits, with faces hidden behind respirators. Desiccated carcasses of dogs. These pictures shook me up. They show a devastated landscape, one that should not be this devastated by now.

A few of these photos can be seen on the Winchester Unitarian Society Web site [link], along with some comments from youth who went on the trip. Two of the comments:

“I think people need to understand the extent of the damage that we saw. It wasn’t just one road or neighborhood, but actually miles and miles and towns and towns of obliterated houses and lives. The damage is ineffable, and you need to know that even though Katrina may not be on the front page anymore, it doesn’t mean that it’s anywhere near taken care of.”

“New Orleans is hurting just as badly, or worse, than everybody says it is. Also, it’s virtually empty of assistance to the naked eye. There’s no one there. Just residents trying to rebuild their lives. Who’s going to help them?”

Six months ago, my sister Jean asked the rhetorical question: How would the federal government have responded if Katrina had hit Connecticut? Let’s ask another version of that rhetorical question today: If Katrina had hit Connecticut, what would Connecticut look like today, six months afterwards?