Rev.
Ann C. Fox
(508) 992-7081
UFairhaven@aol.com
Unitarian Universalist
Society of Fairhaven
The Greatest Story Never Told
a reflection by Rev. Ann C. Fox
October 28, 2007
I am so grateful that passionate Unitarian Universalists from this congregation have come together to lead the Green Sanctuary Project here. You have heard that the project’s main focus is to have our church building be an example of energy conservation and sustainable practices and by extension to invite us all to do this in our homes and in our lives. I have an invitation for you: Will you write to us at the church and tell us what you already do to reduce your carbon footprint, which some call our “ecological footprint”? We would like to publish your efforts in our newsletter to share with others. We also have a list in the Parish House that we began before summer inviting people for ideas on how to conserve energy and water. One person wrote, “Shower less often.” And another wrote underneath it, “Shower with a friend!”
I was impressed when I was in England recently and everyone was talking about reducing their carbon footprint. They are recycling to the nth degree! This is an enormous turn-around from just two years ago when people there were very lax indeed about recycling. Al Gore’s movie has done a great deal to raise-up the urgency of conservation. A Dutch woman told us that Gore’s movie was being shown in all their schools in Holland. She also said that in Amsterdam the government requires everyone to recycle and as an inducement now charges each household by how much their garbage weighs—not the stuff for recycling, but what they are throwing out! Yes, the garbage collectors actually weigh each household’s garbage bag. It has apparently been very effective in getting people to sort out their recyclable items. In the UK and Canada, you can buy food and clothing that have carbon labels that specify how much carbon was used to get the item to market.
You probably know that a “carbon footprint” refers to how much carbon dioxide (C02) and other greenhouse gases are emitted in producing the products we use. Products for a sustainable life cause very little greenhouse gas emissions.
I have a challenge for you. Did you know that the number one thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint to a great extent is to become a vegetarian?!! For the third year, the three-day Bioneers' Conference last week served only locally-grown, vegetarian food of excellent quality. They were being role models for us. Now being a vegetarian myself, this is close to my heart. I’ve been one for more than two decades, only adding fish to my diet since I came to live in New England. All of my meals are balanced with protein of some kind.
Factory farming of animals is not only harmful to the environment and the animals, but grain must be grown with lots of pesticides to feed the animals. It takes 10 lbs of grain to get 1lb of beef. I don’t expect everyone to suddenly become vegetarian, but do you think that you and your family could have only vegetarian food on, say, two or three days a week, balanced with vegetarian protein? (Perhaps we could have vegetarian potluck suppers here!) This is my challenge to you. This would reduce your carbon footprint immensely and be good for your overall health as well. There are many other healthy alternative proteins, such as, beans of various kinds (and there are dozens of them), tofu, fish, nuts, cheese, and quinoa (an ancient Peruvian, high quality protein grain). For a quick meal, I sometimes crumble a veggie burger over my whole-wheat spaghetti as a protein alternative. I once published in the newsletter a recipe for vegetarian curry using vegetables and garbanzo beans over brown rice (not white rice which like white bread, has very little nutritional value). You can add seafood to the curry if you like.
Another easy way to offset your carbon footprint is the practice of composting all your vegetable peelings, eggshells, grass clippings, leafs, and many other things. There is a workshop on this today outside Harrow Center after the service. We are hoping for a good attendance at it. The great benefit is that you will get marvelously rich soil. And stirring the compost can be a meditation.
Historian of religion, Huston Smith, describes his spiritual practice. He said, “Every day I begin with a mixture of prayer and meditation. Then I pay attention to my body with some yoga exercises….Then, for further meditation I stir the compost! I love this part and I glory in knowing that with God’s help it becomes whatever she wants it to be!” Let us now turn to the bigger picture that includes the Greatest Story Never Told.
A year or so ago, three scientists in our congregation gave their view on religion vs. evolution. One of them said that there is room for theories of both science and religion. Today, I suggest to you that humanity’s stories of the beginning of the universe, including the biblical story of Genesis, have their roots in our deepest intuitive knowledge that the origin of this earth and the stars and galaxies around it are part of the “dream of God,” for lack of a better term. The story of Genesis says that we were made from dust. Some cosmologists say that, “We were made of stardust.” I thought of this phrase this summer when I was in Big Bear, California, far from any city lights, where the clear, evening sky presented to me what seemed like the stars in a planetarium. It was a breathtaking and deeply spiritual experience. “This is the Cosmos,” I thought. Even now, I can see it in my minds eye. Nature is of great significance to my spiritual life.
A whopping 72% of this congregation specified in a survey that nature (or “earth-centered spirituality”) was a very important part of their spirituality. Perhaps in Nature the “thousandfold voices of the natural world [become audible to us]” (Berry, p.18) as Thomas Berry said. They are following in the footsteps of our Transcendentalist forebears, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The numerous readings related to the Earth at the back of our hymnal bear witness to our thinking as a people. All the readings this morning were chosen from our hymnal.
I am also guessing that there is deep part of us that is intuiting our relatedness to the Earth and even, perhaps, the Cosmos. This is, I believe, an evolutionary step in our thinking about our place in the world. Thomas Berry, historian of religion and one of the greatest environmental thinkers of our time, would understand this.
You might have read Thomas Berry’s book Evening Thoughts. He calls creating a sustainable future The Great Work with initial capitals for The Great Work. He advises us to find our role in The Great Work of living a more sustainable life. He tells us that the personal God who created the world with humans as the most important and with whom HE made a covenant, a sacred promise, to care for them is too narrow a story and that we need a wider, more inclusive story where all the earth’s creatures are important and human beings are only one subsystem in the many subsystems of the Earth. We should care for not just the human community but the Earth Community. We are only part of the Earth Community. (p. 20)
Thomas Berry believes we should learn the biospiritual story of the 14 billion year old Earth that combines the perspectives of both science and religion. He believes we should learn and celebrate the milestones of the evolution of the earth and its subsystems for its processes are also transformations. He suggests that we need to “create rituals for celebrating these transformation moments….and especially celebrate that star out of which our own solar system was born and the various life-forms of Earth became possible.’ (p.21)
“Some 65 million years ago…the life systems of Earth brought forth their most entrancing beauty [and birds]…. and some 60,000 years ago [humans as we know ourselves to be emerged] with developed speech…and the capacity for song and dance and elaborate ritual within the sacred community of the entire natural world.” (Berry, p.49)
Last week, at the Bioneers’ Conference, Leo and I attended a talk with two remarkable men called Mamas from the Wiwa tribe, the indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Columbia. They were fantastically dressed, with steady eyes and a look of self-possession and knowledge that they did important work. One of them spoke only his native language; the other had learned Spanish in hopes of finding a way to stop their forests from being cut down. A charming young woman who knew both languages translated for us. Through many caring groups and individuals, they had been to the United Nations and managed to save their forested land for themselves and other tribes in the mountains and rivers of Columbia. Through an interpreter, they told us that they lived at the heart of the world and their job was to care for that heart with their reverential rituals. They said that as long as they cared for the center of the world, everyone else would be safe. Strangely it seemed so obviously the truth; that is, if we will do our part.
I suggest we include this planet and the cosmos beyond in our meditations as a way of keeping our connection with all of it “center stage.” One cosmologist, Michael Dowd, says that we are the aware creatures providing the cosmos a way of contemplating itself. Perhaps we will be less lonely less alienated if we befriend the stars and in a leap of imagination, other conscious creatures somewhere in this cosmos. Such an approach might bring the scientists and theologians together! It would certainly help to create a greater reverence for the Earth and the universe from which it sprang and it would transcend all cultural and religious boundaries.
To help our Earth and future generations survive, we have a new spiritual practice before us—living a more sustainable life. Let me end with a poem of William Wordsworth (Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey):
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Reference
The following has informed and inspired this sermon:
Berry, Thomas. Evening Thoughts: Reflections on Earth as Sacred Community, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 2006.
The Third Bioneers’ Conference, October, 2007, hosted by the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA and presented by the Marion Institute.
Dowd, Michael, The Reverend. The Great Story, a four hour DVD. More information can be found at www.TheGreatStory.org.
© The Rev. Ann C. Fox