Thursday, September 29, 2011

Holy Listening

          According to the Bangor Daily News, environmentalist and entrepreneur Roxanne Quimby is working to persuade Congress to authorize “a feasibility study of her plan to turn 70,000 acres adjoining Baxter State Park into a national park called The Great Maine Woods.… The Legislature passed a resolve in June opposing Quimby’s initiative.… Maine’s two Republican senators, the Maine Woods Coalition, [and other local groups] have opposed or expressed skepticism about Quimby’s plan.”[1]

Understandably in a troubled economy and a region beset by massive unemployment, people resist what appears to be in the common vernacular, a job-killer. Though proponents of the Great Main Woods National Park Initiative cite an increase in potential jobs related to tourism, opponents argue such a plan would derail efforts “to revitalize the region’s two paper mills, which if restarted could employ about 600 people at manufacturing wages, which are generally higher than tourism wages.”[2] The forest products industry—loggers, paper manufacturers, lumber companies—have a vested interest in protecting access to large tracts of land now privately owned. Not surprisingly, Maine’s U.S. senators and the state legislators are listening closely to the concerns and even the ire of their constituents and contributors. Loggers and their families vote. Forest product manufacturers contribute to political campaigns and send lobbyists to Congress and the statehouse.

I realized as I listened to a call-in public radio show about this initiative, bears can’t call in. Moose don’t vote. Owls don’t have checkbooks. The creatures: botanical, mammalian, insect, avian, aquatic don’t view their habitat as a commodity: a panoply of resources to be harvested, milled, sold. They don’t recognize borders: national, state, commercial, public or private; but I suspect they recognize at some level the intricate workings of the eco-system they sustain.

Here’s the rub. Of course jobs matter to the people who need them, and to the economy at large. And of course politicians are elected to represent their constituents— though the last couple of years many of us wonder whom our elected officials truly represent. The number one issue of the 2012 campaign according to every pundit out there: jobs. From a human point of view right here in the United States, few would disagree.

The problem is we’ve limited the conversation to ourselves. If wildlife could vote in Congress what would they authorize? I bet the polar bears would vote down arctic drilling and vote in cap and trade. Probably a senior states-bear would filibuster for massive regulation of carbon emissions and the penguins would propose new taxes to pay for new technologies to harness the energy sources they rely on: solar and wind.

The wolves and coyotes would vote to end all the leases of public land to ranchers. The raccoons, opossums, foxes and porcupines would call a halt to highway construction and repair. The deer might submit bills to levy taxes on developers whose subdivisions and strip malls eat up more and more of their land. The migratory birds might vote to shutter airports or restrict flight to engine-less craft. The dolphins, in solidarity with their global brethren, would cease trade and diplomatic relations with Japan until it stops the slaughter of dolphins there. And no doubt a coalition of species would enact legislation against light and noise pollution as quickly as they would dismantle the defense department and reallocate its budget to the EPA.

It’s not that our fellow creatures lack a voice; it’s that we don’t listen.

Diana Reiss, professor of cognitive psychology at Hunter College and her research team were “the first to show that Asian elephants and bottlenose dolphins are able to recognize themselves in a mirror—a complex feat of self-awareness previously thought to exist only in the great apes.”[3] In a recent radio interview Reiss explained,

I was really interested in decoding dolphin communication so I was studying their own forms of communication… recording their own signals with underwater microphones called hydrophones and bringing them into computers and trying to figure out what they were doing. But then I thought, well here's another path to try. What if we give them control over a keyboard? It's about 3 by 3' or a little smaller than that. It has white visual symbols on it. And the dolphin can hit any of those symbols —they all look slightly different. And if it hits for example…a triangle it would hit a computer generated whistle that we created. So the dolphin hits a triangle and it would hear a sound and we would give it a ball. If it hit a different shaped symbol it would hear a different signal and we'd rub it. And in this way we were in the situation where we had to respond to what the dolphin wanted. We… turned the tables completely... I don't like to train dolphins. I like to give them ways of reflecting their intelligence.[4]



          In the course I am teaching this term called “The Downside to Certainty,” we watch TED talks to expand our perspective. A recent one featured the Italian scientist, Stefano Mancuso who founded the field of plant neurobiology. “He and his team explore how plants communicate, or ‘signal’ with each other, using a complex internal analysis system to find nutrients, spread their species and even defend themselves against predators.”[5] He says of plants,

They are more sophisticated in sensing than animals. Every single root apex is able to detect and monitor concurrently and continuously at least fifteen different chemical and physical parameters. Plants are extraordinary communicators. They are able to distinguish kin and non-kin. They communicate with plants and other species and communicate with animals by producing chemical volatiles.[6]

           As a student of mine so aptly asked, “What would it mean to see plants as purposeful?”

          How would it change us and the world to listen to the whole conversation not just our own lines? How would the epic of creation unfold if we were to acknowledge there are no bit parts?

          My students readily acknowledge, even without the videos of elephants grieving and bonobos driving golf carts and playing Pac-man, animals experience emotion and exhibit impressive intellect; but the students resign themselves to cordoning off that information. They accept ignoring it as the easiest way to resolve the cognitive dissonance of behaving as though non-human beings are less perceptive, and thus less worthy—without actually believing it.

          It is not just plants and animals that communicate; the weather has certainly expressed itself this year with record-breaking heat, scorching wildfires, devastating droughts, torrential rains, record snowfalls, tornadoes and flooding, earthquakes, and a rapacious tsunami. The earth is not silent in its registration of our activity. The question is not whether we have the capacity to hear; the question is whether we have the willingness.

          Humility is not simply a spiritual virtue. It is part of the apparatus necessary for long-term survival. As individuals we might achieve a lengthy lifespan; and as a species we’ve done pretty well. But for all the rhetoric about future generations, about grandchildren and great-grandchildren, we appear not to be listening for the long haul.

          Most of the parents I know would sacrifice their lives for that of their children. Many parents sacrifice their time, their discretionary pleasure and income, even their personal pursuits so that their children will have better lives. Clearly we are capable of viewing, even subordinating our needs in relation to others; yet as humans in conversation with the forests and oceans, subterranean layers and atmosphere, plants and animals, we turn a deaf ear.

          We do it because the conversation is uncomfortable. It threatens the quality of existence as we know it. It undermines the emotional bonds that give our lives meaning. In a human family, the urgency to provide food and shelter makes employment a necessity so the idea of a national park to preserve pristine wilderness instead of unfettered access for forest products and recreational industries sounds as offensive as a string of obscenities. 

           I remember my father, a big-hearted immigration attorney, asking, “What’s up with the environmentalists crabbing about fishing nets trawling in the Gulf, killing other species? These poor Vietnamese fishermen are just trying to make a living.”

           But so are the fish. So are the turtles and the opossums trying to cross the road. The giant sequoias, larger than the blue whale and far older drop their seed cones with as fervent a desire to have their offspring thrive as we do.

          With the division of the first cell eons ago, the intention to replicate emerged. Life forms of all sizes and shapes, longevities and persuasions seek to replicate or reinvent. To disentangle ourselves from the fabric of creation is not an option even if we pretend it is. So why pit ourselves against the neighboring thread?

          All summer I watch the pumpkin vines in my garden. Tiny tendrils wrap themselves on the wire fence, securing a place for the pumpkins to grow. Green globules form, pear-shaped, suspended in air. The intentionality of that pumpkin plant to grow pumpkins is unmistakable. Great stalks spill onto my walkway and across the patio. Tempting as it is to view the encroaching greenery as an intruder into my space, I can’t help but cheer for a plant looking out for its young, seeking sunlight and adequate nutrition. What parent, what child, what human can’t identify with that?

          Yet so quickly we don’t. We see other species as invaders or commodities, resources to manage, pests to control. I realize practicality dictates this. When the telephone repairman pointed out the enormous wasp nest on the electrical box, I let him spray it so that the meter reader would not risk getting stung. I ceded the right of wasps to nest to the possible safety of another human, but believe me I could hear and see the wasps complain. And I don’t blame them. I did not like what I did. As a student wisely observed last week, “The necessary act is not always the moral one.” Perhaps it is a matter of enlarging our understanding of morality to include species beyond our own.



We’ve all heard some variation of this:

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left

to speak out for me.[7]



          In genocides, the perpetrators cast their victims as somehow less than human: as cockroaches or rats. Do rats insult adversaries by insinuating they are human?

          During slavery, one group treated another as chattel, a word possibly derived from medieval Latin and Old French terms for capital and cattle. What if we had no experience of capital, or property, of one being or area of land owned by another? How would that reshape history? Do trees and birds wonder at the strange geometry of parceling a forest or field?


If we confuse the forest with products it can yield,

if we reduce the epic of geology to strata we drill,

if we drown out the sound of life around us with our own noise,

who will listen to our last breath?


          At the installation service last Sunday, Helen Cohen encouraged us to see our shared ministry as conversation not conversion. We are here to listen to one another and compassionately respond—or in Annie Dillard’s words, “to aid and abet creation.” If we fail to perceive life as a conversation, if we confuse it with an occasion for conversion to remake the set in our own image, and cast only humans in speaking roles, it is we who will play to an empty house.

Amen.

How will the ocean sound in fifty years?

[1] http://bangordailynews.com/2011/08/03/news/penobscot/medway-panel-pushes-for-national-park-feasibility-study/
[2] ibid.
[3] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=whistles-with-dolphins
[4] http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-09-15/diana-reiss-dolphin-mirror/transcript
[5] http://www.ted.com/speakers/stefano_mancuso.html
[6] http://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant_intelligence.html
[7] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/ Martin_Niemöller

9/11

“Love is a place,” e.e. cummings tells us, “and through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places.” It is the first Sunday of our new church year. September eleven, two-thousand-eleven. We are ten years into the post-9/11 world.

          A decade ago in the wake of 9/11, right up to last fall when plans were announced for Park 51, an Islamic Community Center to be developed about a third of a mile from Ground Zero, many Americans voiced anger and fear about a growing Jihadist movement. Ordinary Arab Americans and Muslims of any heritage grew suspect. Understandably, people directly affected by the horrific events of 9/11 were fearful, angry, distraught, but it was from the collective American throat, that the shrill sound of fury overpowered the quieter tones of reason and conscience.

We gather this year as members of a religious community founded in 1768, a congregation assembled in this building since 1837. Our lives would likely be unrecognizable to our forebears who first filed into this grand building at the top of the common—who had no knowledge of internet connection, jumbo jet liners, skyscrapers or even the Pentagon. What our forebears in 1768 and 1837 did know firsthand were the realities of religious intolerance and misunderstanding.

Our Unitarian and Universalist predecessors gathered not in spite of religious intolerance but as a result, Had Unitarians and Universalists not been branded heretics—our theologies of the oneness of God and universal salvation scorned by Calvinists certain of their doctrine of the Trinity and pre-destination—we would likely not be sitting here. Unitarian Universalism emerged from critical thinking in response to deep faith, and flourished in inhospitable soil. If the denomination and this congregation are to thrive we must root ourselves in the place of love.

It is September 11, 2011. Osama Bin Laden is dead. The Arab Spring now dons the autumnal color of crimson as blood runs across the Middle East and drought parches the earth in Somalia. Rebels fight to overthrow tyranny and other rebels confiscate food shipped to the starving. Those who drape themselves in an irate interpretation of Islam will celebrate while Arab-American Muslims living quiet lives will try to avoid accusatory glances.

          The largest population of Arab-Americans in the U.S. lives in and around Dearborn, Michigan, not far from Detroit. On November 11, 2011, a large public rally, part of a ministry of the New Apostolic Movement, is to take place; “the purpose of this [event] is to fight the demonic spirit of Islam.”[1]

          Had I not heard Terri Gross’s interview on Fresh Air (NPR) on Aug. 24 with Rachel Tabachnick who studies this new apocalyptic movement, I would not have known two of its founders, Mike Bickle and Lou Engle, organized Rick Perry’s recent day of prayer. While any of us might be concerned about a new American religious movement calling for martyrs and spiritual warfare, the fact that two of its founders just organized a rally for the leading  presidential contender in the Republican party casts an ominous shadow on the separation of church and state and religious freedom.

      Rachel Tabachnick explains the tenets of the movement:
This group believes … they must re-organize Protestant Christianity …[and] unify the Protestant Church, into one body under the leadership of their apostles…They must take control over society and government and… they will do this in large part through this warfare that they are conducting with demons. … They have what are called prayer warrior networks in all 50 states, and they have very strong opinions about the direction they want the country to take. They teach what is called dominionism. And the idea of dominionism, or dominion theology, is that all areas of society and government should come under the control of God through these apostles and prophets, and that all of these areas of society should represent Christian and biblical values.… They teach that they will go into a geographic region or to a people-group and conduct these spiritual warfare activities in order to remove the demons from the entire population or the demonic control over the entire population. And this is what makes what they're doing quite different than other conservative evangelical or fundamentalist groups of the past.[2]

          Herein lies the challenge on this auspicious day: in our midst, on our soil, embedded in our political process and public discourse, is a religious movement that espouses love while calling for martyrs and claiming all who fall outside their proscribed belief system are possessed by Satan and must be stopped in order for the second coming of Christ to occur.

As we have seen recently in the horrific massacre in Norway by a right-wing extremist, the world is a different place than it was in 1579 when Francis (Ferenc) David, the Calvinist Bishop died in prison for his assertion there was no scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity.

Violence as response to theological challenge or threat isn’t new; beheadings and burning at the stake and other grisly methods of execution punctuated the Reformation era. What has changed with the invention of automatic weapons and improvised explosive devices is the speed and magnitude with which death comes. Instead of burning one heretic at a time in the public square, a lone gunman or suicide bomber can kill scores of people. The flying projectiles of 9/11 claimed three thousand lives within hours.

That increased capacity for long-range, virtually instantaneous damage is what also makes drones and airstrikes possible. The remoteness of our violence intensifies it. Just as it’s easier to verbally accost someone through the relative anonymity of the internet, it’s far easier to depersonalize the ones we don’t actually see half a world away—or down the street. 

At the new Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, a stone of hope rises bearing the figure of the slain civil rights leader, with these words carved in a nearby wall: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“Love is a place and through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places.” I find it hard to imagine love is a place that summons us to cast out the demon of Islam. I find it impossible to reconcile the love Dr. King extolled as a love predicated on religious intolerance. The catch-22 of course is that we are faced with the conundrum: are we to tolerate intolerance? Do we accept an apocalyptic movement that requires the demons of every other form of Christianity and all other religions to be destroyed so that the one true Messiah will return? Do we love the intolerant among us but loathe their intolerance as they purport to love the sinner and abhor the sin? And in so doing are we one and the same?

The nineteen men who boarded four planes ten years ago hijacked Islam the way Joseph Kony transmogrified Christianity with his Lord’s Resistance Army, that terrorized and brutalized an entire generation of Ugandans while purporting to follow the Ten Commandments. It is excruciatingly difficult to meet the extremes of religious extremism with a critical mind and compassionate heart, to enlist reason and conscience in an attempt to understand how and why people come to believe their fellow citizens are possessed by Satan—and remain standing like the stone of hope erected in our nation’s capitol to remind us, “Yes is a world and in this world of yes live (skillfully curled) all worlds.”

Yes is not the only world; but all worlds nest within it and they are ours to inhabit and transform. Our ingathering today is no insignificant matter. We are not just forty people ringing in the new church year. We are far greater than that—for this day occasions a hewing of our own stone of hope within this granite foundation and structure of brick. We are the incarnation of Unitarians and Universalists who have gathered in this parish for two-hundred-and forty-three years, and in this edifice for one-hundred-seventy-five, to create and sustain a place of love. Our inheritance is a religious foundation built on reason and conscience, carved by commitment and faith. We cultivate that world of yes by affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all, insisting that no one is possessed by demons, that no one among us is unsalvageable even if we cannot conceive of their salvation any more than they can imagine ours. We inhabit the world of yes when we acknowledge that those who seek to transform us, or even destroy us, are not some distant unrelated species, some wretched mutation that must be eliminated if we are to survive. That is the trope of no.

In his later writings, Martin Luther King identified the connections among militarism, racism and capitalism. He was not naïve nor was his analysis simple. He understood and articulated what few in his day would acknowledge: being a drum major for peace meant dismantling systems of economy and hegemony far great than the Jim Crow south. He knew of his detractors, he felt the target tacked on his back and yet he persisted. He died in service to a conviction of conscience because to die without would have been a fate worse than death.

If we choose to live with conviction informed by conscience, and reason rooted in faith not devoid of it, we can build that place of love, that world of yes—and in so doing determine whether Unitarian Universalism will thrive or perish. “Yes is a world” wherein all worlds curl: the yes of martyrs who hijack planes and rise from stone. The yes of child soldiers conscripted into horror and the yes of those who would welcome them back, the yes of apocalyptic believers exorcising demons and the yes of iron workers erecting beams from the ashes of Ground Zero. Yes is a world that includes both and no.

Martin Luther King wrote: “The chain reaction of evil, hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.” More than twice as many service members have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, than the number of people who perished on 9/11. The number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians far surpasses that.

With our bodies may we break the chain and be the link of what binds us together. May nothing evil cross this door coming in or going out. Amen.


[1] Rachel Tabachnick, quoted in an interview on “Fresh Air,” NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=139781021,
[2] [2] Rachel Tabachnick, quoted in an interview on “Fresh Air,” NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=139781021