The Unitarian Universalist Reverend James Reeb once asked the question,
"Is there nothing worth risking one's life for? Are there no dreams or
goals so important that we risk our destruction to gain them?" As our last
president John Buehrens put it, James Reeb answered these questions with
his life.
James Reeb's ministry was strongly rooted in social action, and in the
summer of 1965 he was compelled to join the march on Selma, Alabama. While
leaving a restaurant in the company of two other UU ministers, he was
confronted by four white men and was beaten to death. The other two
ministers were also beaten but had survived.
In 1531 Michael Servetus wrote a treatise on Unitarian theology entitled
On the Errors of the Trinity. In medieval Europe this cannot be expected
to have gone over very well. While he had evaded his trial for over twenty
years he was finally apprehended in 1553. He would not recant his beliefs,
and was burned to death for professing the heresy of Unitarianism.
Katherine Vogel was another burned for the crime of Unitarianism. Her
final words said that as long as she stood by the truth as she was given
to know it, then nothing evil could befall her soul after her life was
ended.
These are brave people, folks. They all knew that they were risking their
lives when they stuck to their guns and did what they thought was right.
It is sometimes difficult to come to grips with the fact that some people
have actually died affirming the principles of our faith. But, in point of
fact, there are a myriad of reasons people have died for our faith. Some,
like Vogel and Servetus, were sacrificed for our early theology. Others,
like Reeb, died affirming the inherit worth and dignity of every person.
The beginning of August has often marked the first harvest for many
farmers, and today you saw baskets of fruit being paraded into the
sanctuary. When a piece of fruit is picked from a tree, a piece of that
tree is very literally being sacrificed. The organism of the tree has
given up a part of itself for the betterment of the human who will eat it,
and that is all. Nowadays, its seeds will probably not be planted, and
nothing will be given back to the tree in return.
This sets the stage for the symbolism of the August first ritual. For many
modern Pagans, August 1st ("Lammas"), is the day that we recognize all of
the sacrifices people have offered for the benefit of our faith's
principles. We also acknowledge the sacrifices that must later be given in
order to maintain our faith community. Today, in the spirit of this
holiday, I will discuss a different kind of sacrifice that we, the UU
body, must make in order to not only maintain our integrity as a movement,
but our Earth as well.
I want you to think back on the commercials for vacations you most
recently have seen. What do you think these commercials consider the most
popular idea of escape in our culture? When the camera angles are placed
on this environment, what do the scenes look like?
With a group of Unitarians, and with anyone really, I would expect several
different answers, but what probably came to mind for many of you is some
type of beach- setting. Possibly the Caribbean, with vast beaches and blue
oceans that stretch to the horizon?
What the commercials for these resorts do not tell us is how quickly these
beaches are becoming dirty with litter and blue waters are turning brown
from pollution. What these commercials do not tell us is how damaging oil
spills have been to the sea-life here, how the plastic from old six packs
of coke gets hooked on the helpless sea animal and eventually strangles
it. What we don't learn is that the people on neighboring islands are so
dirt poor and disease is so rampant that we wouldn't want to look at them
in magazines much less set foot on their vast beaches.
Why are these things not shown to us on as frequent a basis as we see
these commercials? It seems like an easy question with an easy answer:
truth, and more critically, ethics, do not sell. But this is not an easy
or acceptable answer in the least. This is the hallmark of a society that
is not only undemocratic and sick, but it also signals a society that has
chosen to sacrifice community values for personal betterment. For greed.
For unfettered capitalism. So in order to make money, our ignorance is
allowed to run free. We do not think about the Mexican family that is
forced to ride the circuit in order to pick our strawberries, preventing
their children from attending school and thus creating another generation
of poverty. Or we do not think about throwing that aluminum can into the
garbage. It doesn't matter, that doesn't make me richer, so why should I
care, why should I think about it? Our pervasive ideology is that we don't
want to think about it. That's serious; that's important.
And this is just mostly. Mostly we do not think about these things. The
scariest part is that sometimes we do think about it. I once overheard a
woman say that she was sure her beaded scarf had been made by some child
in India, that it must have taken days for that child to make that single
scarf. I stared at her in disbelief. She concluded by saying that she
can't save the world, and that someone has to pay those children their
three cents a day so they can eat.
At that point I remembered back to a workshop I took at the University of
Cincinnati on child labor. I was not impressed by much of the information
I saw at this workshop, but I remember very clearly a certain set of
pictures. These were pictures of children who had, since about the age of
six, made similar beaded draperies. Their hands were completely mangled;
they were so tiny and yet looked more crippled and weathered than the
hands of someone who had seen seventy years of life.
These are the small sacrifices we make in order to live comfortably. These
are sacrifices that are adding up and slowly eroding all of our Unitarian
Universalist principles. If I cannot buy something from the store without
eroding my religious principles I think it is only natural that I would
start to question. Why are these things we except or don't know about or
don't want to know about? I know it's not our fault, it is the culture we
were raised in. Ok, so what can we do about it?
John Buehrens, former president of the UUA, writes that the implications
of our growing world community call on us to be more conscious of these
decisions. We can be informed, responsible consumers, but it
does take a lot of time and effort and work, and it is often very
difficult. And I don't mean to undervalue that struggle because I know
very intimately how difficult it really is. It is difficult to feel
connected to those poverty-stricken workers thousands and thousands of
miles away. It is difficult to see pictures and feel that those people are
not from a different world, that they are not human at all.
When people were first exposed to the conditions of the holocaust many had
the same reaction as we do to the poverty of our world-neighbors. People
felt disconnected from it; they could not believe it had happened and
could not believe the world allowed it to happen.
Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, paints a realm in which
people are programmed to not feel badly about anything, to just wash any
unpleasantness away with a hallucinogenic drug. The children in this world
are conditioned from the beginning of life to react to situations in this
way, growing up in a boarding school and never really knowing their
parents. While I have much more hope for our world than Huxley's abysmal
future, the point of our beliefs and impressions being formed in childhood
were not missed.
Thandeka, associate professor of theology and culture at Medville/Lombard
Divinity School, noted that there is an essential, primal connection we
forge with our caretakers from the very get-go of life. If one smiles at
an infant, the infant will smile back, if one broadens their smile, the
infant will broaden his/hers.
A recent study was done where a baby was filmed flailing his limbs as his
mother laughed and played with him. When the video was slowed down, the
baby was seen to be moving in sink with his mother's voice; his seemingly
random movements were not random at all.
Vicki Noble, a noted author on feminist spirituality, noted how she would
sit in her rocker for hours on end with her baby. She described the
experience as euphoric, as not knowing where she began and Aaron, her son,
left off.
Many parents are connected to their children, very intensely and
spiritually, beyond any physical evidence you could find in science. I
mentioned a case earlier, but that was really just the tip of the
ice-burg, it goes much deeper than that. My father dreamt, before I was
born, that I would somehow be contaminated by light. I was later diagnosed
with a disease that does not allow me to be in the sun. And this is just
one example. Speak to almost any parent, and ask if they had no inkling of
what their child's gender may be, what they may look like, what the child
would be like. Sometimes it is just fantasy, but sometimes we are
connected to our children and parents beyond explanation.
This primal connection we have with our parents is fantastic and unlike
any other relationship we could have later in life. We later must set up
barriers, keep people out, but for just about a year we are completely
connected to our parents.
Everyone has that first experience where this trust is broken. When I
reached the first grade I was placed in a classroom with a teacher who was
physically abusive. While she never touched me I can remember very clearly
her hitting the other children, though it was usually one child in
particular. I almost want to say that he had it coming. He was a bully,
constantly picking on me and other kids. What I can say for certain,
however, is that he didn't get better with each consecutive punishment. In
fact he got much worse. By the end of that year his bullying became ever
more frequent and he began to torture animals.
His primal connection had certainly been broken, if it had ever been
there. I do not think that his parents really knew how to handle him
besides buying him more things. I remember at one point he stole several
$20s from his mother's purse and buried them in the schoolyard, which,
looking back, was probably a very symbolic act indeed.
This is not a sermon about the evils of money. My point is that nothing
can substitute that primal connection we somehow loose later in life.
Intimacy. As Thandaka pointed out during this summer's GA, a lack of
intimacy is where it all goes wrong, where people snap, where we loose our
connection to our parents, friends, our society and the Earth.
If anyone has read up on psychoanalytic theory, this school of psychology
claims that most of our adult difficulties come from unresolved childhood
conflict. While I do not agree with most of the things psychoanalysts have
to say, I would agree that damage in our most formative years can be
detrimental.
On the other hand, noted psychologist Karen Horney claims that all
previous conflicts can be resolved through healthy, loving adult
relationships. This is a way to reconnect to that primal sense of
security, to regain sacrificed intimacy.
The difficulty then comes when we strive attach that primal sense of being
to a larger connection of existence, to the interconnected web of life.
What I have found is that a spirituality of immanence can help with the
process. Starhawk says this on immanence: "Immanence is so much more than
only paganism. People of all religions have experienced divinity as
immanent." It is very difficult to act selfishly or exploit the Earth when
one sees god as an integral part that existence. We are not only harming
the inherent divinity in our neighbor, we are harming a divinity that is a
part of ourselves.
I would like to turn now to my experience as a young boy with my Roman
Catholic grandmother. To my grandmother, Jesus was her concept of
immanence. He was present in all people, and she felt that his love needed
to reflect in the way she treated people. She disconnected herself largely
from the dogma of Christianity and began to live the way she felt her god
would have wanted her to. If I look back on my religious experiences with
her, I could have seen this coming. Instead of frequently reading her
Bible, she reads a book of prayers to the Virgin Mary on almost a daily
basis. But this new theology is not easy for her. She was raised in an era
and family that was racist, sexist, and over all bigoted. These were the
sacrifices she made in order to more fully live her religion.
I admire my grandmother. I think in many ways she has achieved some type
of spiritual understanding of her divinity that is reminiscent of the
primal love we feel for our parents. As she grew older she did not, as
most people do, become more set in her ways. If anything she became more
open minded, saying that everyone needs to find the right religion for
themselves, that people's personal lifestyles are their business and that
over-all, no matter what transgressions take place, Jesus will still love
that person. Almost sounds like Universalism.
But as much as I respect my grandmother's connection to her divinity, I
cannot find god in the cathedral as she does. I feel that primal
connection when I am in nature. Sometimes, in fact, I feel so overwhelmed
with the feeling that I am a child of this diminishing wilderness that I
am utterly overwhelmed by the sacrifices our race is making in the name of
progress. These aren't the positive sacrifices that we name on the tide of
August 1st, they are the shameful sacrifices tearing at the fabric of our
co-existence with this earth.
When James Reeb opened his first sermon at All Souls in Washington D.C.
with the question, "Is there nothing worth risking one's life for? Are
there no dreams or goals so important that we would risk our destruction
to gain them?", I am not sure what my answer would be. I can only hope
that in the position of Reeb or Servetus I would have mustered enough
courage to stick to my convictions, but I would have to be there before I
knew for sure. And hopefully, for the cause of the Seventh Principle we
will not have to be in that situation. If we all make our small
sacrifices, then hopefully we won't need martyrs for our cause. I have
spoken on a lot of negative sacrifices our society is making on our
behalf, but sacrifice is not inherently bad. The word sacrifice comes
from, and forgive my mispronunciation, the Greek "Sacre,"
which means sacred, and "Facer", which means to make. When
we sacrifice a negative part of our existence in favor of a positive one,
we are literally making that part of our lives sacred.
But how? How then can we work to live simply and in harmony with the
earth? This fall, Earthspirit will be aiding in several projects to help
educate the St. John's community on these issues. I have not found all the
answers yet, and I can only hope that I find them in time, that
we find them in time.
These sacrifices are not easy, they're not quick, but with support, I
believe that they can be achieved. And by doing so, we can more fully live
out our Seventh Principle:
Respect for the interdependent web
of all life.
We have to start somewhere, maybe we can start here. Let the church say
amen.
Lucas Hergert is President of EarthSpirit
Contact us with questions
or comments.
