REVERENCE FOR LIFE
Frank Carpenter, October29, 2006
I am enjoying the drive between home and church. Each spring and each fall I enjoy the ride
most of all. I drive down
It seems to me that this year’s foliage is extra fine. For the most part, it is more subtle then usual, not turning straight to brown. Varied shades of green and yellow, and then there are those spectacular trees. Barbara Hadden talks about the tree next door. The colors, the tree I like best around the church is the one across the street. At home, there is one spectacular tree that turns yellow, an other that becomes dark crimson.
The Seventh Principle of the our Association of congregations calls for “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” The play of autumn colors is an invitation to accept our naturalness, a reminder that, yes, we are as human beings part of nature, part of the interdependent web. A poem by Larry Smith evokes this for me:
Driving Up the
Trees breathe colors in afternoon light
turning the river into a slate of sky.
My wife and I drive a
beside the long waters, by an old railroad track.
Fields of alfalfa bordered in brush turn golden brown
as we pass again old faces of houses,
the dark brick and windows of abandoned factories
that lead into quiet towns a few blocks long.
Two old men talk on a street corner,
point to the ground, the sky;
a woman carries her baby and grocery bag
to a blue pick-up truck as evening comes on.
Life flows on like a river apart
from the roadways and bridges.
A sign in a beauty shop reads, "Come on in,"
and we wish we could enter more deeply here.
But we have those slow miles before sleep.
Our car drinks them in passing.
So little we really know, so much we share—
driving up river, heading home.
The poem, the leaves of autumn are an invitation to return to nature, to accept once again that we as human are natural.
Our Halloween parade earlier is a remnant of ancient rituals that embedded us more thoroughly in nature. Halloween is a trivialization of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. Samhain, the Celtic end of summer festival was celebrated at the time October turns into November. Today’s Wiccans, pagans, earth based- spiritualists celebrate Samhain as a reminder of richer and deeper roots than dominant faiths celebrate.
One of the leading spokespersons for the Wiccan movement, Starhawk, writes this of the meaning of Samhain:
For Pagans, death and birth are intertwined. Our goddesses and gods all represent aspects of the cycle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. Every good gardener knows that fertility is born out of decay. Every fallen leaf becomes part of the soil that feeds the roots of growing trees. Starhawk http://www.beliefnet.com/story/46/story_4639_1.html
Here we find the same intimacy, closeness with our natural being that we heard expressed in the readings from the indigenous Americans people. Such spirituality accepts our intimacy, our embeddedness in nature. Through such celebrations we affirm we are part of nature.
Starhawk’s remarks on the meaning of Samhain immediately bring us face to face with why we often deny we are part of nature. She speaks of death and birth being linked, that fertility is born out of decay. Birth we like, death and decay we push way from. We deny that we decay, we deny that we die. And having made these denials, we have denied that we are natural, part of nature, part of the interdependent web of all existence.
A reverence for life begins with our eyes open wide to the stunning abundance of all the forms of nature: the myriad colored trees, that wide diversity of animal and plant life, life that swims beneath the seas, the walks the earth. The rain forest is overwhelming in its wealth of biodiversity. And its overwhelming mess can be scary, -- far worse than the wide variety of spooks and goblins that knock upon our doors on Halloween.
The poet Tennyson spoke of the scariness of the abundance of nature in his poem on the death of his closest friend, IN MEMORIAM:
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
Birth and death, fecundity and decay are woven fine in nature. Let us affirm our naturalness, that we are a part of nature. Let us not deny our nature
In our reading this morning Albert Schweitzer refers to this denial of naturalness, saying “Objection is made to this ethic that sets too high a value on natural life.” Schweitzer does not think it possible to set too high a value on natural life. How could that be possible if we are part of nature? Yes, as he writes, life is the mysterious value with which we have to deal. Let us have a reverence for life. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They too are valued as are the sparrows of the field.
I think that Schweitzer’s values are the same as set forth by Starhawk and other earth based forms of spirituality. Schweitzer’s reverence for life is a fine expression for a set of values and spirituality that cherishes our life together on this blue green dot we call earth.
The name of Schweitzer was far more common when I went to
college. I graduated college in 1964 and
Schweitzer died in 1965. By that time
his name dominated several fields. His
THE QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS dominated biblical studies, an obstacle that
would not be overcome until the discovery of ancient manuscripts at
And Schweitzer was a Unitarian. Not just in name, but he was a member of our,
then mail order church, now our internet church, the Church of the Larger Fellowship. The church was founded by George
Marshall.
Perhaps the only appropriate response to that is another remark by another great Unitarian Universalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Neither Emerson nor Schweitzer had little minds.
And a little mind is not what we need to give reverence to life. We need our minds to be open to revere life and to address the ethical issues that confront us. Schweitzer was ahead of his times in seeing the ethical issues that press upon us.
He warns us that with an ethic other than reverence for life, all life, we expand the “category of worthless life [which comes] to include, according to circumstance, different kinds of insects, or primitive peoples.” Primitive peoples, some say, may be descended from apes, from gorillas, but not us, not civilized human beings.
Holding to the ethic of reverence for life, there is no simple answer to moral conflicts. Schweitzer urges us to make distinctions only as each situation calls for response; for example when we might have to decide which of two lives to sacrifice that the other may live.
An ethic of the reverence for life would not find a simple answer, for example, for people such as Terry Schiavo, those in a persistent vegetative sate. Life is not just about breathing, but about a certain vitality, a creativity, which when gone, means that all life is ebbing away. Denying that we are part of nature, denying the reality of death, we think we can hold death at bay through extreme medical means. Anyone who has had to decide that a loved one no longer inhabits the physical frame so familiar knows how painful this is. Schweitzer reminds us of Jesus’ parable of the good shepherd who saved not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. Yet, when the soul is not merely lost but gone, when we can no longer touch the soul of a loved one, the body is not long to follow.
So too with the question of choice in abortion. Must a mother condemn her children to a life of poverty because abortion is illegal? Should she not have the choice to decide? Palpitating flesh is not all that makes up a life. All too often parents sacrifice their children on the altar of their own ego. On the altar of their own principles, not asking what is best for all impacted by their decision. But a reverence for life acknowledges the fullness of life. The fullness of life, as Tennyson reminds us, calls upon us to make fearful decisions.
We are a part of nature; we are natural, part of the interdependent web of all existence. We make decisions in the flow of life, the ebb and flow of birth and death, the circle of life in fertility and decay.
The reverence for life, the view that all life is sacred is not, then, an easy ethic. It’s a green ethic. And has been said, being green isn’t easy.
Today, a reverence for life becomes a reverence for the entire planet earth. A Green perspective is not just about this plant or that animal. As we talk about globalization, we acknowledge that the entire planet has become one ecosystem. Humanity, we, in a strange way by denying that we are part of nature and can fiddle with it as we want, have brought nature back, and we must make a green ethic for the planet, for our species and all species, for our children and children all over the earth.
A New York Times columnist put it well I thought in a column this past week. Thomas Freidman holds up a vision for us to consider:
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western allies have been asking: What will replace the threat of communism as the cement that holds together the Atlantic alliance? Some have argued terrorism, but I don’t think so. I think my German friends have the best idea: the issue that will and should unite the West is energy and all its challenges.
After all, nothing is a bigger threat today to the Western way of life and quality of life than the combination of climate change, pollution, species loss, and Islamist radicalism and petro-authoritarianism — all fueled by our energy addictions. And no solution is possible to these problems without concerted government actions to reduce emissions, to inspire green innovation and to shift from oil to renewable power. http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/opinion/27friedman.html?hp
Freidman calls upon
The sweet fields of autumn call to us, reminding us that we are a part of nature. To be fully human, to be fully alive, to be filled with life, we need to renaturalize ourselves, become green, in heart mind and soul. At this time of year when the myriad dancing colors of autumn call to us, blowing bits of orange, red and yellow hustle their way to the compost heap, we are caught up ourselves in the dance of the seasons, the eternal call of nature’s renewal.
Starhawk offers this as a Samhain chant:
This year may we
renew the earth
This year may we renew the earth
Let it begin with each step we take
And let it begin with each change we make
And let it begin with each chain we break
And let it begin every time we awake.
May this harvest season be time when we celebrate the circle of life, of death and birth. May this harvest season as the wind catches the leaves of yellow and orange, may we be reminded that we are natural, each one of us part of the interdependent web of all existence. In this harvest season, if we are to have harvest of hope, let us listen to the call of our planet for renewal. Let us give our hearts and hands to making our lives green. Let us all have reverence for life, a sense of the sacredness of all life.
Peace