In the Belly of the Albatross

by Patricia Caspers

"We’ve come to make sense of this embrace
to see the shapes of ourselves in these birds"
--Victoria Sloan Jordan

The Great American Garbage Patch-- it almost sounds quaint, doesn't it? As if it might be a junk pile on the back acre of grandpa's farm where one could find and re-purpose a rusty old wagon or a two-wheeled tricycle.

The name doesn't connote the serious nature of it (no pun intended), so perhaps it should be called the Great Pacific Eco-Destroying Cesspool of Plastic and Toxic Sludge. There's been some recent debate about the size of the plastic island in the Pacific, some saying it's as big as the U.S., some saying it's as big as Texas, and some arguing that, no, it's only about one percent of the size of Texas.

I don't know how big one percent of Texas is, but here's the thing: If the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is any bigger than the size of my big toe it's too big, and there are a million reasons why this is true, but here's one of them: the albatross.



Once a month I teach poetry to the children at the Unitarian Church in Fitchburg, Mass. The theme for January is Reuse, Reduce, Recycle, and I wanted to show the children the ways artists and writers employ their talents to make the world a better place.

As I researched environmental poetry I stumbled across Victoria Sloan Jordan's poems about the albatrosses, and I knew it was going to be the lesson.

The albatrosses mistake the brightly colored plastic floating in the ocean for food, eat it and starve to death or choke, but not before feeding it to their babies, repeating the cycle. All over the atoll are rotted albatross carcasses, bellies exposed to show the pieces of plastic perfectly intact. Of the 21 species of albatross, 19 are nearly extinct.

Sloan Jordan wrote about her visit to Midway Atoll with Chris Jordan who photographed the dead albatrosses.


I showed the UU children one of the less graphic photos, and they wrote poems titled, "In the Albatross's Belly," listing what they saw there. One boy's poem began, "No fish."


I didn't know what was happening in the sanctuary while we were downstairs discussing the plastic pieces we saw inside the albatross, but I opened Rev. Seligman's sermon this morning and found this:


"None of us alone or even collectively can save everyone. We cannot stop homelessness or hunger. We cannot compel those who wield weapons of mass destruction or improvised explosive devices to turn them into ploughshares. We cannot eliminate all forms of exploitation: animal, human, botanical. But we can build an ark. We can create a structure to preserve creation. To preserve the power and relentless testimony of creativity: human, animal and botanical. We can implement ministries urban and rural. We can till the ground and cultivate gardens. We can compost. We can create spaces for contemplation: labyrinths and gardens and walking trails. We can create spaces to memorialize and honor our beloved by partnering with the land and its verdant beings." -- Rev. Leaf Seligman


There are very few things I do well. I can't be trusted with a hammer and most of what I attempt to grow browns and curls, but I like to think I can turn a phrase on occasion. Maybe I can make an ark of words.


What will your ark be?

You may also be interested in Chris Jordan's artwork depicting U.S. mass consumption: Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait

The Choice is Ours

I begin with a parable of a who woman has worked hard all her life. She has accumulated considerable assets and would like to put them to good use. She cares deeply about the world’s well being. She wants to engage in some form of tikkun olam, repairing the torn fabric of creation. She thinks about building a community center, staffing an academy of practical and whimsical arts. She mulls over ideas for gardens and trails, downtown spaces for cultural enrichment or hospitality, but her mind spins so that she finally looks in the Yellow Pages and locates a renown design team in Boston. She meets with their top guys who draw up a series of plans, but something about them doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe the Boston firm is too upscale or big-city so she finds a smaller firm in Worcester and meets with their best designer and urban planner. They offer interesting suggestions and the woman decides to sleep on it all. For several nights she tosses and turns, not understanding why she can’t just settle on a set of blueprints. On the morning after the sixth restless night, she decides to walk to her neighborhood market to clear her head; but she is so lost in thought she bumps into a fellow on the sidewalk and nearly topples him.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry” she exclaims. “I can’t seem to get out of my own way but I certainly didn’t mean to get in yours.”
“I’m all right,” he offers graciously enough. “Do you mind if I ask what you are so preoccupied about?”

The sun is shining and the snow makes everything feel fairytale safe so she opens her heart to the stranger and tells him her dilemma, how she has reached a point in life where she has resources to share but wants to make sure she puts them to the best possible use. The man listens intently and says, “Maybe I could help you.”
It’s at this point she realizes the walking stick he’s carrying functions as a white cane.

“I have architectural training and I know something about the needs of our community.” And in the pause where she’s thinking how do I say this delicately, he reaches out and takes her hand. “But the best gift I have to offer is that my vision isn’t limited to what I can see.”

Sisters and Brothers of Wonderful First Parish, let our vision be unrestricted; let it surpass what we see to encompass what we hear in our hearts and in the voices of our community. We stand on such a marvelous threshold, and I do mean a threshold of marvel. Every day we hear and observe in the news examples of human interaction devoid of tolerance; we read of unyielding fronts of entrenchment and stagnation, a lack of vision so astounding the sightless among us shake their heads with pity. But here, we are poised on the brink of possibility, to enact a set of ministries limited only by our capacity to imagine.

Ann Saalbach emailed photographs of an extraordinary building in Cardiff, Wales. She writes of it:
The Wallich is an organization in Cardiff which supports the homeless. About 3 years ago they bought an old church building and remodeled it to contain their offices and a set of meeting rooms, training rooms and a cafeteria which they use to generate income by renting them to other organizations. I think their building gives a good example of what can be done. Inside the large building shell, a smaller three-story structure (shaped kind of like an ark) is built. There is a wide hallway all around this “ark” containing the stairways and elevator to the upper floors. The original windows, floors, organ and ceiling of the church are all still there. The floor plan of the ground floor inside the “ark” is devoted to rooms available to rent to other organizations (training and meeting rooms) and the café. The two ramps are staircases leading to the upper two floors, which contain Wallich offices. Climbing the stairs takes you to the 2nd floor, which has open plan offices, a staff coffee area and some closed offices. The third floor is smaller than the second, right up under the ceiling. It also has open plan and closed offices. [The original outer structure of the building is preserved.]

I love that an old historic church has been transformed to contain an ark. In the book of Genesis, in the great retelling of what was probably a Babylonian flood narrative, we read of such specific instructions given Noah to build an ark.
Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. (A cubit is the distance from the elbow to the middle fingertip, about eighteen inches. So in a more familiar measurement, that’s 450 feet long by 75 feet wide and 45 feet high.) Make a roof for the ark and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower second and third decks. (Gen 6: 14-17 NRSV)
The precision of instruction suggests the importance of building a craft structurally sound, but the form must be functionally suited to its purpose, explained herewith: “For my part I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die.” (vs. 17)

In this ancient parable, Noah is tasked with constructing an ark that will be a time capsule for all the living land-based animal species. He must build precisely yet swiftly for the urgency of his ministry is unprecedented.

The protagonist in the story has never seen a flood of this proportion. He may have seen other floods but not one so utterly catastrophic. Though he must expend enough time to adhere to sufficient materials and dimensions, he has no time to dawdle, to over-analyze, or fret about the possibility of failure. In short, dear Noah must simply act.

I have no doubt the designers in Cardiff who consulted with the Wallich organization that serves the homeless, considered carefully the needs of both the organization and its clients. And I would bet just as confidently, that the decision to create an ark within that church building served and continues to serve as a mighty metaphor for the purpose, the mission and ministry of the organization.

The ark is salvific. Literally, it is the vessel of earthly salvation. The critters on board did nothing to ignite God’s wrath. That was the doing of humans. But without the ark, the innocent species would perish. And if we are to be honest in our use of the metaphor, we must acknowledge all the creatures outside of that relatively small ark die. The ark cannot save everyone, but it does preserve creation.

And that sisters and brothers, is the work of tikkun olam, and the ministry of First Parish. None of us alone or even collectively can save everyone. We cannot stop homelessness or hunger. We cannot compel those who wield weapons of mass destruction or improvised explosive devices to turn them into ploughshares. We cannot eliminate all forms of exploitation: animal, human, botanical. But we can build an ark. We can create a structure to preserve creation. To preserve the power and relentless testimony of creativity: human, animal and botanical. We can implement ministries urban and rural. We can till the ground and cultivate gardens. We can compost. We can create spaces for contemplation: labyrinths and gardens and walking trails. We can create spaces to memorialize and honor our beloved by partnering with the land and its verdant beings.

We can transform our building imbued with the aspirations and exhalations of generations of free-spirited Unitarians and Universalists into an ark. We can form spaces for training, meetings, artist studios, more intimate chapels of worship, a library rich not just in the texts and sounds of our tradition but the ones we draw upon. We can hew out of the timber of our expansive spirit and ingenuity spaces and places within these walls that preserve the vitality of our liberal religious heritage.

Here’s what I love about the metaphor of an ark. It is not a pleasure craft: not a self-centered Jet-Ski; not a luxuriant yacht. Not a cargo ship intended only for commerce. It is a container with a mandate nothing short of salvation. Not some extra-terrestrial kind. Not the sort of salvation that requires adherence to a creed, though it does involve a covenant. “But I will establish my covenant with you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. And of every living thing, of all flesh…”(vs.18-19a)

The ark represents promise—the promise of assurance and also, potential.
Let us build an ark with our resources and our unlimited vision. And through that endeavor renew our covenant with conscience and direct, unmitigated experiences of holiness.

Let us task members of the congregation with investigating the necessary materials and dimensions, but let us not dawdle to lay in stores of cypress because to quote Wayne Elsey, the founder and CEO of Soles4Souls, “Almost isn’t good enough.”
If Noah had almost completed the ark, or almost built it to specification, or almost gotten pairs of all the species on board, he would have not preserved creation. Wayne Elsey offers his own set of specifications for fashioning a viable nonprofit focused on improving the world. He cautions against the temptation to become stagnant defining a problem. “The present” he writes, “is a moment in time when [we] are afforded the opportunity to make a difference. The only chance we have at achieving a measurable impact is to do something. …Making a decision is just as important as making the right decision. What is the right decision? How can [we] know for sure?” As Wayne Elsey notes, we can’t. As he puts it, “Decisions force [us] to declare what is most important…Knowing where we are headed becomes a key evaluation marker to ensure we are pushing ourselves in the right direction.”
Elsey aptly notes, “If our personal checkbooks provide evidence of what’s important, the same must be true about the way we spend money within organizations we represent.” The question he poses: “What does our posture toward money say about the legacy we are building?” Though he and his organization have a worldwide impact, having distributed over 12 million shoes, he still suggests being realistic: doing what we can where we are. A mission statement too long to memorize is likely too complex to materialize.

He argues not for awareness but engagement. It’s not enough for folks to know we are the church by the boulder, that we host a coffeehouse or hold Sunday services at 10:30. It’s not enough for people to know we stand with Planned Parenthood and support gay marriage. Awareness, Elsey states, “doesn’t generate contributions, inspire social change, or motivate people to action.” Engagement does. Engagement makes one a stakeholder and thus engenders commitment, “and becomes the fabric of a lasting relationship,” a fabric restored through tikkun olam. The more tangible, and not just concrete opportunities we offer the good people of Fitchburg and the surrounding area to engage with us in our ministries to repair creation, to make our lives sacred by recognizing the poetry of our days, the greater our chances of remaining vital and being able to sustain this congregation.

A bit like Noah, Wayne Elsey is saving soles, that’s s-o-l-e-s, but in the process he may be preserving the souls, s-o-u-l-s, of the those of us “with the margin to fulfill a mission.” He writes, “Every decision we make either helps us achieve our goal of distributing one pair of shoes every second or distracts and delays us…The longer it takes to accomplish our goal of giving away shoes, the more people … lose their lives as a result of needless exposure to disease and viruses contracted as a direct result of not having shoes.”

We may think what we do is not as urgent. No one will contract parasites or infection if we don’t expand our ministry, if we don’t renovate this space, if we don’t explore the rural ministries gestating within us, but we don’t know who is out there, or for that matter, in here, who will reach a moment when having a labyrinth to walk or a garden to till, or a safe place to walk in the woods, or plant a tree in memory will make a critical difference. We don’t know which child might cultivate a lifelong commitment to the environment for having explored the woods or planted seeds of a Sunday morning in RE. We can’t see who might enter this building in search of a life-altering encounter with art or music, worship, or a training program or a respite room for the homeless who need a warm comfortable space to spend the day. We can’t see the person living with mental illness who finds his or her way to a ministry in this space that offers meaningful interaction and creativity. We can’t see all the moments of every person who might eventually come into contact with First Parish—which is to say the ministries we create. But we can decide whether to shape an ark. The choice is ours. Amen.

The Humanity of Heroes

Last semester during a library instruction session for my students at Keene State, the librarian clicked on a website with a URL of martinlutherking.org. It seemed an obvious choice for information about one of America’s heroes. It did not take long however for the students to realize the website was intended to defame King as a plagiarizing, adulterous communist who brought shame to our nation with his scandalous acts. For someone like me who grew up revering Dr. King, it was downright maddening to once again witness the lack of any political or historical context when assessing the content of his character and his impact. But nor am I suggesting we whitewash Martin Luther King, Jr. tempting though it may be. There are always critics willing to inflate the mistakes and missteps of prophets to undermine the truths they speak to power, but it is far more powerful to follow in the footsteps of Jacob who wrestles with the angel who appears before him, and emerges from that tussle with a blessing and a limp. As much as we may ache for our heroes to be devoid of character flaws or vulnerability, a hero devoid of human complexity is not one we can even try to emulate.

The writer and former yeshiva student Avi Steinberg writes of the Hebrew prophets King drew inspiration from. Many were criminals—and not just for their revolutionary ideas. Isaiah, like many brilliant preachers, had a weakness for indecent exposure. Elisha committed first-degree murder when someone made fun of his hair. Abraham did time; Joseph did time; Jeremiah did time; Daniel did time. So did Samson. Jacob was a con man who spent most of his life on the lam. Both Moses and Elijah were fugitives for committing murder. And so was David until he returned with a loyal band of outlaws. The prophet Hosea had a predilection for hookers. Nearly every single one of the prophets was either a criminal or had spent time among criminals.

When we think of heroes, sometimes we idealize as much as idolize them; but as Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen puts it, “Most heroic journeys involve going through a dark place—through mountain caverns, the underworld or labyrinthine passages to emerge finally, into the light.”

Perhaps heroism demands the difficult passage, traveling though one’s shadow side to reach an illumined place. To be at the mercy of human failing, the predilections of ego, the hunger for relief, the compulsions of achievement and the singlemindedness of vision is what carves into the outcroppings of rocks the prophet’s path toward justice.

Were it all about hearing God’s word on a mountaintop and simply relaying the message to the people, we would not be a society still riven by idolatries of gold and the desecrations of self-will.

If we recall the story of Moses journeying to the top of Mount Sinai, God summons Moses in verse twelve of chapter twenty-four, and then gives explicit instructions about the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant, the curtain, the altar, the oil for the lamp, vestments and daily offerings. Finally God gets around to the Sabbath law but by now the people in the foothills have grown restless as is our human wont; during the delay they go to Aaron, Moses’ brother who bids them to remove their gold jewelry which he smelts into the shape of a calf.

In the seventh verse of the thirty-second chapter of Exodus, God rages, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them.” Moses implores God, “’Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster’ …and the Lord changed his mind.”(vs.12-14)

The Lord doesn’t forget what the people have done; God remembers instead the promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, to multiply their descendants like the stars of heaven.

Thus the narrative instructs us not in the art of denial but the meaning of covenant. The people in their restlessness waver and so does God. It is Moses who summons the courage to implore God to recall God’s end of the bargain.
We have in this legendary account a man brave enough to challenge the forces of ultimate power, a spiritual forebear of Martin Luther King Jr., who like Moses faced the wrath of powers unimaginably strong. Not just sheriffs and segregationists with vitriol and dogs unleashed, but the full force of institutionalized racism no less catastrophic than an infuriated god.

On the tableau of biblical landscape Moses appears writ large as a human savior who delivers his people from the throes of slavery and then the throes of a capricious and demanding god. Yet this is the same Moses, who as a younger man “went out to his people and saw their forced labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”(Ex 2:11-12) But the next day when another Hebrew indicated he knew, Moses went on the lam.

Part of what made Martin Luther King, Jr. so heroic was his ability, lo, his unwavering commitment to nonviolent resistance. As much brutality as he faced, he never struck back nor did he condone violence among the ranks of oppressed African Americans who bore the lash as well. When King’s home was attacked, when his life was threatened, when he witnessed the injury to and fatal attacks on others, he still refused to take up arms, understanding to do so would undermine not his credibility but his purpose. He knew to preach the importance of recognizing each person’s humanity meant he could not practice dehumanizing violence himself.
But let us consider the contortions any of us would go through to avoid striking back. It’s easy to pontificate. I espouse nonviolence all the time, but if I am honest, were someone to hurt my dog, or someone I love, it would take a force greater than my dog’s pull, and that is fierce, let me tell you, to keep me from hurting back. So when I think of Martin Luther King, Jr., day after day after day, for years, practicing such restraint in the face of continual assault, he is nothing short of heroic.

So what are we to make of his plagiarism? The historian Ralph Luker, one of two scholars “responsible for directing research on Martin Luther King's early life for the Martin Luther King Papers Project” wrote:
What became increasingly clear as we worked through the papers from King's early career is that there were serious problems of plagiarism in his academic work.… the pattern seemed to be that the more familiar King was with a subject, the less likely he was to plagiarize. On matters that were fairly alien to his experience, he borrowed heavily from others and often with only the slightest wink of attribution.…the further King went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long established practice.
…Two things, it seems … were going on. First, King was a charming young guy, intent on returning to his professors the kind of work they expected of him.… So, the roots of King's plagiary lie in one of our two expectations of students. We expect them to learn what the authorities have to say about a subject. He worked the authorities' words into a seamless construct of his own creation and told his professors almost exactly what they, themselves, believed about a subject.

…The other thing … going on, particularly in King's later academic career, was that he was being patronized by his liberal, white professors.… in the context of the time, the temptation to over-reward a charming young African American student who told his liberal white professors in the North almost exactly what he knew they already deeply believed about a subject was simply overwhelming.

…Had he pursued an academic career, his heavy reliance on the authorities, often without citing them, could have been fatal. But in preaching, perhaps even in most public speech, genuine originality is more often fatal. A congregation, even a public audience, expects to hear and responds to the word once delivered to the fathers [and mothers]. It is the familiar that resonates with us.…especially the familiar that appeals to the best in us, is what we long to hear.

And what of his infidelities, sexual indiscretions that sadly enough pepper the lives of many in the public eye? No doubt the scrutiny Martin Luther King faced because he so brazenly challenged the Jim Crow status quo, led to the discovery and publicizing of his peccadillos. J. Edgar Hoover unleashed FBI agents as viciously as Bull Connor unleashed fire hoses and German Shepherds. Wiretaps and surveillance dogged King with the constancy of epithets hurled and threats made.

When I studied the life and work of King in a course about him during divinity school, my own response to his infidelity changed. Finally comprehending the burden placed on his shoulders, the grueling nonstop pace of his life, the constant risk, the relentless demands, and unprecedented expectations placed on him before age of thirty made me understand the human hunger—not simply for sexual gratification or adoration—but to simply shut the world out for a few minutes and lose oneself in carnality to stop the endless pressure for a moment. It’s not my place to make excuses, but as someone who idolized King when I was a child, it is helpful as an adult to understand that his iconic status did not exempt him from the frailties and releases of the flesh. In fact that very status may have plunged King deeper into them.

King’s later writings make clear his awareness that racism was inextricably bound to militarism and industrial not just personal exploitation. The later speeches attest to his weariness, perhaps disillusionment. He expended several lifetimes of effort in a less than a score of years. He traveled to India to meet Gandhi; he went to Washington to meet with the President, the Attorney General, to address a nation. He marched with striking garbage collectors and bus boycotters. He prayed with children and over them when they died in a church bombing. From his mid-twenties, he did not leave his house or his family without knowing the probability of death. Perhaps more than any other twentieth century American, Martin Luther King relinquished the possibility of a personal life, of an unexamined life, in order to take up the mantle of prophet.

We don’t encounter many prophets in this era though there is no shortage of pundits. But prophecy demands far more than an opinion or the great release of emotive gas we have grown used to hearing escape media mouths. Prophecy demands almost unimaginable courage, nothing less than Moses on a mountaintop taking on God. That’s what prophets do: speak truth to power. Eliot Spitzer as New York State’s attorney general took on the banking industry. Did he cheat on his wife and hire prostitutes? Yes. And if we are to believe the documentary, “Inside Job,” which chronicles the recent financial crisis, so do scores of Wall Street financiers. The film documents bank budget line items devoted to escorts and entertainment. In the same way it was easier for J. Edgar Hoover to attempt to discredit King for his womanizing and so-called communist sympathizing than it was to destroy the allegiance of millions who depended on him to lead them into the Promised Land, it was easier for Spitzer’s political opponents to undermine him for hiring prostitutes than it was to dismantle the public service he provided through financial regulation.

Prophets are neither superhuman nor simply mouthpieces for God channeling divine exhortation or warning. They speak at their own peril, risking ire from all corners to ignite the fires of truth. When God chose Moses to liberate the Hebrews from slavery and then summoned him up the mountain to receive the tablets that would seal the covenant, God chose a man whose courage was matched by his own ire at the sight of injustice. Perhaps God recognized in Moses a bit of Godself.

As we commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. let us not seek to deny his shortcomings and his imperfection under pressure. Let us lift up the courage he exemplified, the willingness to be human on a world stage. Let us recognize his vulnerability in ours and seek the courage and clarity necessary to neither yield nor succumb to injustice. Amen.

Closing words
Though the popular preacher, speaker or student may say what is familiar, what we long to hear, what the prophet says is enduring.

The words attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people” remain heartbreakingly true. And whether he originated the line or rephrased the sentiment a hundred times more, his willingness to say it over and over to good people who stayed silent bespeaks a bravery heroic still.