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© Davidson Loehr

January 28, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER

Let us fall into life – kicking, screaming, laughing, loving, let us fall into life.

Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the too comfortable, let us fall into life.

Let us land upright in life and go forward to try and make love more likely, understanding less underrated, peace more possible, violence more rare.

We have a favor to repay. For we have received as a gift of life – everything. Our life, love, hope, compassion, our feeling for those who suffer, the feeling that wants to help, to reweave the torn tapestry of life. All of these come with the gift of life which we have received.

All this and more have we received. And life asks that we return the favor, and give life, hope, love and peace to others, to all others we can reach.

Let us answer by saying, “We are here. We hear you. We feel you coursing through our veins. We feel the love of life; we are the love of life.”

Let us fall into life, fully alive, for more than anything our world needs people who have come alive.

Amen.

SERMON

I want to talk about emotions in us animals today: love, attachment, and grieving, passions from the heart of life. This is an area where it’s easy to find religious stories, fables, myths and children’s stories talking about these things, because They’re so important to us. You think of a saying like “God is Love,” “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” or Jesus” saying that the quality of your faith is judged by how you treat “the least among you,” whatever group that happens to be for you.

But you almost never hear these sayings applied to animals, just other people – and history shows the religious teachings haven’t done much there either. Just think of our wars, present and past.

Other cultures, formed in part by other religions, have a more natural inclusion of other animals as our kin. In Japan, there is a famous park called the Deer Park of Nara. It was set aside centuries ago as a sanctuary to experience the kinship of all living creatures. In this park, deer walk side by side with people.

In a pond near the Deer Park, Japanese Buddhists buy and release small fish in an ancient ceremony of setting life free. Small children come to the edge of the pond carrying a bowl containing a tiny goldfish. Parents and Grandparents stand by giving their blessings and encouragement as the children gently release the fish into the pond. In a flash of golden light the fish vanish. The children’s faces are full of wonder, for they have given the gift of freedom as the fish swim among their companions in the natural wonder of the pond. (Sharon Callahan, from http://www.anaflora.com/articles/oth-sharon/animal-bud.htm) And when I was in Thailand a few years ago, we visited a temple where people bought birds, in order to let them out of their cages.

But we have been taught that animals have neither intentions nor feelings, and that saying something like “the dog wants to go out,” or – even worse! – “my dog loves me” is committing one of science’s cardinal sins: anthropomorphizing. In other words, it’s ascribing to animals feelings that only humans could possibly have. As silly as this is, it has been with us and in our sciences for a long time. Most people trace it back to Rene Descartes. Animals, declared Descartes, are merely automata, responding mechanically to whatever stimuli confront them. Feelings are no part of the equation. (Humans are different, he said, because of the “ghost in the machine” – a divine inspiration that informs our nature, and ours alone.) (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 22)

Even today, in biomedical and other experiments done to dogs, monkeys, chimpanzees and other animals, it is easy to find scientists saying They’re sure the animals feel no pain.

Our blindness to our deep kinship with other species lets us treat them in awful ways – and, in the factory farms of cows, calves, chickens and others, in positively vulgar ways. But it also cuts us off from the connection with a larger picture of life that we need. I read part of an interview that Frans de Waal did with the NY Times several years back, and was struck when he said, “Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, “Doesn’t this guy have a dog?”” (Frans de Waal, interview, New York Times, 26 June 2001, from Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 102)

Do animals really have feelings like ours? Don’t ask a scientist, ask a pet-owner. Ask someone who’s been loved by a dog, and loved it back. Animals love, form attachments, and grieve at the loss of the one they loved, sometimes dying of grief. They can recognize and respond to the distress and loss of others, and seek to comfort them, and welcome reciprocal comfort. This is the Golden Rule in action, tens or hundreds of million years before there were humans.

In the last few years we have learned that there may be more communication between the human fetus and the mother than was previously thought possible. We know that the fetus hears sounds in the womb: similarly, in chickens information is communicated by the embryos inside the egg to the incubating hen. Even before birth the chick is capable of making sounds both of distress and of pleasure, to which the mother hen reacts. A day or so before hatching, the chick often utters distress peeps. The mother hen then moves her body on the eggs or makes a reassuring call to the embryo, which is followed by a pleasure call on the part of the chick. In other words, the bond between the chicks and the mother hen starts before birth. So it makes sense that a chick responds immediately after birth only to the calls of his mother. He recognizes her voice. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon p. 65)

A mother duck is usually silent while sitting on her eggs. But as soon as her unhatched chick inside the egg begins to peep, she too makes a quiet squeaking noise. Ducklings and mother ducks respond to each other’s calls before the eggs hatch. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 189)

And what about the odd fact that a dog only wags his tail for something that has life? (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 187) You can have a machine give the dog its food, and the dog will eat the food, but won’t wag its tail at the machine. But it will wag its tail at people, even those who don’t give it food.

People who train dogs to do rescue work, such as finding people buried under an avalanche, or under rubble when a building collapses, say that the dogs need to find a certain number of people alive or they become so disappointed that they refuse to work any longer. After the bombing in Oklahoma City, a rescue worker found that her rescue dogs were becoming depressed at having no success, so she decided to plant a live person in the ruins for her dogs to find. This cheered the dogs up considerably, and they were happy to go back to work. The dogs weren’t doing the work just for treats: they wanted and needed to feel that they were saving live people. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 109)

What about love? It’s hard to say whether animals love, but sometimes it’s even hard to say whether people love. Perhaps the best we have to go on is the behaviors we can see.

Take the matter of long-term loving relationships. More than 90 percent of bird species are monogamous, and in many of them the pairs mate for life”. Fewer mammals are monogamous, and the nonhuman primates appear comparatively callous when it comes to commitment. Chimpanzee males, for example, don’t spend much time courting, mating, or remaining with a female whose young they’ve fathered. And if divorce statistics in our society are any indication (about half the marriages in the US dissolve), we ourselves are hardly role models of committed love. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 30)

Some animals are also good at keeping romance alive. In some monogamous species in which the same male and female breed from year to year, courtship is prolonged and vows need to be renewed. In coyotes and wolves, for example, males and females who mated previously may act like strangers the following mating season, and a new round of courtship and companionship is in order before they pair off again, rejecting all other suitors. Once their young are born they stay together, forming a true family unit, until next breeding time. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, pp. 30-31) Here, there seems to be an awareness of attraction, mixed with a spark that keeps it alive by insisting on a fresh courtship cycle every year. Sounds pretty advanced!

It’s also hard to imagine anything more tender than the nurturing that many animals lavish on their babies. To begin to grasp the depth of parental love, we need only watch a gorilla mother ceaselessly grooming and cuddling her infant, or a cat bathing her newborn kittens, or whales tirelessly escorting their calves and protecting them from predators. Animal mothers and in some species fathers, older siblings, aunts, uncles, and even cousins will feed youngsters, retrieve them if they stray, patiently teach them the skills they’ll need to survive. Their devotion is selfless and unflagging. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 31)

There have also been stories of animal emotions in the popular press. In one story, a troop of about one hundred rhesus monkeys in India, brought traffic to a halt after a baby monkey was hit by a car. The monkeys encircled the injured infant, whose hind legs were crushed and who lay in the road unable to move, and blocked all traffic. A government official reported that the monkeys were angry, and a local shopkeeper was quoted as saying, “It was very emotional – some of them massaged its legs. Finally, they left the scene carrying the injured baby with them.” (Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of animal play” p. 635)

In another incident, baboons in Saudi Arabia waited for three days on the side of a road to take revenge on a driver who had killed a member of their troop. The baboons lay in waiting and ambushed the driver after one baboon screamed when the driver passed by them. The angry baboons threw stones at the car and broke its windshield. (Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of Animal Play,” p. 635)

Did the monkeys love their baby? Did the baboons have a sense of outrage, justice or vengeance against the human who killed one of theirs? Is the Pope Catholic?

And if monkeys, baboons and others show behaviors we would call loving, what about love that extends not only to their kind, but even to other species? That’s going well beyond even the Golden Rule. Here’s a story about Joanne and Lulu. Joanne was a human, and Lulu was her 200 lb. pet Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.

Joanne was in her kitchen one afternoon, feeling unwell, when Lulu charged out of a doggie door made for a 20-pound dog, scraping her sides raw to the point of drawing blood. Running into the street, Lulu proceeded to draw attention by lying down in the middle of the road until a car stopped. Then she led the driver to her owner’s house, where Joanne had suffered a heart attack. She was rushed to the hospital, and the ASPCA awarded Lulu a gold medal for her heroism. Joanne knows in her bones that Lulu’s sixth sense saved her life.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 27)

But was it really heroism? Isn’t it simpler to call it love? That’s what we”d call it if Lulu were a human.

What did it require for Lulu to do what she did for Joanne? Obviously a commitment to her friend, some awareness of how to bring help, the desire to do so, and the ability. It seems unlikely that all this could have happened without conscious awareness of how to bring help, the desire to do so, and the ability. Yet we are unwilling to credit the pig with a thought like: “Oh dear, Joanne is in serious trouble. At whatever cost to my own well-being, I must bring her the kind of help that can save her life.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 27) But her behavior showed that those sensitivities, concerns, motives and abilities existed in her, as they have existed in animals for tens of millions of years before we came along.

And what if Lulu hadn’t been able to save Joanne? Do you think she would have grieved? Of course she would have. Animals have been grieving forever, as farmers and pet-owners have always known.

Konrad Lorenz, the great Austrian naturalist who spent his whole life living with and studying animals, once wrote that you can’t really do a good job of studying an animal unless you love it. He was famous for his experiment on imprinting, where he got a whole batch of baby greylag geese to imprint on him and follow him around as though he were their mother. After years of studying them, he wrote that “A greylag goose that has lost its partner shows all the symptoms that John Bowlby has described in young human children in his famous book Infant Grief”. The eyes sink deep into their sockets, and the individual has an overall drooping experience, literally letting the head hang.” (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 113)

There are a lot of stories of animals grieving, and we seem to recognize what They’re feeling immediately.

For example, here’s an interesting paragraph by Alexander Skutch, who at ninety-seven years of age was still conducting field research on birds in Costa Rica. In his book The Minds of Birds, Skutch wrote:

“It is remarkable how often the sounds that birds make suggest the emotions that we might feel in similar circumstances: soft notes like lullabies while calmly warming their eggs or nestlings; mournful cries while helplessly watching an intruder at their nests; harsh or grating sounds while threatening or attacking an enemy”. Birds so frequently respond to events in tones such as we might use that we suspect their emotions are similar to our own.” (Alexander Skutch, The Minds of Birds, 1996, pp. 41-42) from Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of Animal Play“

It’s how it sounds to some who work with birds. In the Rocky Mountains, biologist Marcy Cottrell Houle was observing the eyrie of two peregrine falcons, Arthur and Jenny, as both parents busily fed their five nestlings. One morning only the male falcon visited the nest. Jenny did not appear at all, and Arthur’s behavior changed markedly. When he arrived with food, he waited by the eyrie for as much as an hour before flying off to hunt again, something he had never done before. He called out again and again and listened for his mate’s answer. House struggled not to interpret his behavior as expectation and disappointment. Jenny did not appear the next day or the next. Late on the third day, perched by the eyrie, Arthur uttered an unfamiliar sound, “a cry like the screeching moan of a wounded animal, the cry of a creature in suffering.” The shocked House wrote, “The sadness in the outcry was unmistakable; having heard it, I will never doubt that an animal can suffer emotions that we humans think belong to our species alone.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 91)

Cynthia Moss, who has studied elephants in Africa for over 35 years, describes (in Elephant Memories) the response of elephants in Amboseli National Park when a poacher’s bullet entered the lungs of a young female, Tina. After the herd had escaped from danger, Tina’s knees started to buckle, and the others leaned into her so as to keep her upright. She slipped beneath them nonetheless, and died with a shudder.

Teresia and Trista, her mother and sister, became frantic and knelt down and tried to lift her up. They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and one even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth.

Afterward, the others sprinkled earth over the carcass, then went of into the surrounding bushes to break off branches, which they placed over Tina’s body. By nightfall the corpse was almost completely buried. When the herd moved off next morning, Teresia was the last one to leave. Facing the others with her back to her dead daughter, she reached behind herself and felt Tina’s body with her hind foot several times before she very reluctantly moved off. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, pp. 53-54)

Marc Bekoff, another scholar who teaches at the University of Colorado and has lived in Boulder for three decades, works mostly with wolves and coyotes. He wrote about a pair of foxes that lives near him, had been together for several years. One day as he was leaving, he saw that some animal had killed the male fox, and the female was digging dirt on it, to cover it. Several hours later when he returned, she had completely covered the body of her dead mate. It looks like we didn’t invent the idea of burying our dead, doesn’t it?

So elephant mothers and whole communities grieve for the loss of a young one. Orphan elephants who saw their mothers being killed often wake up screaming. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 113)

And perhaps the most important part of this is that the love, attachment, and grieving aren’t restricted to their own species. They seem to happen with whatever we have loved or been loved by. Some of these stories come from animals that bonded with animals of another species – like some of the chimpanzees that were raised by humans back in the 1970s when this was in vogue.

Roger Fouts, the man who began teaching the chimpanzee Washoe American Sign Language in 1967 and is still with her at his university in Washington state, tells several stories of watching young chimpanzees raised by humans dying of grief, or a terminal kind of separation anxiety.

“I had been teaching Maybelle for about nine months when her foster mother, Vera Gatch, decided to leave her chimpanzee daughter for the very first time. Vera was one of Lemmon’s students and a psychotherapist with her own private practice and a teaching post at the university. She had raised Maybelle from infancy and had never left her daughter alone even for one night. Now that Maybelle was four, Vera felt the time was right to attend a conference out of town, and she arranged for someone Maybelle knew to stay with her in her home.

“As soon as Vera was gone a full day, Maybelle went to pieces. She developed terrible diarrhea and a respiratory infection. Those of us who knew Maybelle set up shifts to care for her around the clock. Day after day we sat at her bedside administering fluids and trying to get her fever down, but poor Maybelle was wasting away before my very eyes and I felt utterly powerless to save her. Her diarrhea became dysentery and her lung infection turned to full-blown pneumonia. The doctor came but there was nothing he could do. By the time her mother returned home, Maybelle was dead. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 168)

“Nearly two years later I watched my youngest pupil, barely older than a baby, also shrivel up and die in the absence of her human mother. Salome began learning sign language at four months of age, about the same age when deaf children begin signing. Thanks to her precociousness she appeared in the 1972 LIFE magazine spread with Lucy and other famous chimps. Salome was raised by a married human couple. Just when Salome was out of infancy, Susie became pregnant. After the baby was born, the couple decided to take a vacation with their new child, and immediately Salome lapsed into pneumonia and was close to death. Her adoptive human parents rushed home and Salome recovered from her grief-induced illness. Shortly thereafter, they decided to try another vacation. But this time Salome didn’t make it. She died within a few days.” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 168) The grief looks like the same grief that Flint showed when his mother Flo died, in that story from Jane Goodall, and we recognize it immediately.

And Jane Goodall, who has been observing wild chimpanzees in Africa for over forty years, has many stories of grief. Here’s one poignant and often-quoted story about an eight-year-old male chimp named Flint, who was thrown into the deepest grief after his mother Flo died:

Never shall I forget watching as, three days after Flo’s death, Flint climbed slowly into a tall tree near the stream. He walked along one of the branches, then stopped and stood motionless, staring down at an empty nest. After about two minutes he turned away and, with the movements of an old man, climbed down, walked a few steps, then lay, wide eyes staring ahead. The nest was one which he and Flo had shared a short while before Flo died”. In the presence of his big brother [Figan], [Flint] had seemed to shake off a little of his depression. But then he suddenly left the group and raced back to the place where Flo had died and there sank into ever-deeper depression”. Flint became increasingly lethargic, refused food and, with his immune system thus weakened, fell sick. The last time I saw him alive, he was hollow-eyed, gaunt and utterly depressed, huddled in the vegetation close to where Flo had died”. The last short journey he made, pausing to rest every few feet, was to the very place where Flo’s body had lain. There he stayed for several hours, sometimes staring and staring into the water. He struggled on a little further, then curled up – and never moved again.

– Jane Goodall, Through a Window

I don’t want you to feel like rescue dogs who aren’t finding any live ones, so here’s one more story about the care of a dying young creature with a happier ending.

Barbara Smuts writes, “Near the research station where I lived, an adult female baboon was found dead in a poacher’s snare. Her baby, cloaked in the velvety black fur of newborns, was still clinging to his mother’s cold body. Another researcher brought the baby home, fed him milk, put him in a cage in a warm room, and then forgot about him. I stumbled over him the next morning.

“He was barely alive. His eyes were cloudy, unfocused, and swollen half shut. His body was cold, his breathing almost undetectable. I removed him from the cage, remembering all I’d learned about how infant primates respond to maternal loss. I held him close, groomed him, and carried him everywhere for the rest of the day. Although I thought he was too ill to make it through the night, I wanted to comfort him during his last hours. That evening he went to sleep lying on my chest, his head against my heart. In the middle of the night I was awakened by a rambunctious baby baboon who wanted to play!

“The next morning, clear-eyed, he stayed close to me, venturing only a few cautious steps away when I sat down. But if I removed him when he was clinging to me, he threw a tantrum, writhing on the ground and screaming, just as baboon infants do with their mothers. And like the baboon mothers, I couldn’t bear his suffering, so I would pick him up again. Immediately calm, he would then gaze at me with utter devotion.

“When we took Hilary (she named him) to the Nairobi drive-in, we had to pay for him. In response to our protests, we were told, “Well, He’s going to watch the movie, isn’t he?” And in fact he did.” (by Barbara Smuts, “Child of Mine,” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, pp. 151-152)

Since animals can’t speak English, some people think we can’t ever really know whether they feel as we do. But some of the apes who learned to communicate through sign language or keyboards can communicate directly with us, so we can know.

Roger Fouts tells a story about Washoe, the most famous of the chimps who use sign language – still alive at age 42, which is getting old for a chimpanzee. Fouts required all the volunteers who worked with the chimps to learn sign language, and he told the story of one of them, a woman named Kat, who had worked with Washoe. Kat was pregnant, and Washoe was very interested in the woman’s belly, always asking about her BABY.

Unfortunately, Kat had a miscarriage, and afterwards, she didn’t come in to the lab for several days. When she finally came back Washoe greeted her warmly but then moved away and let Kat know she was upset that she’d been gone. Knowing that Washoe had lost two of her own children, Kat decided to tell her the truth.

MY BABY DIED, Kat signed to her. Washoe looked down to the ground. Then she looked into Kat’s eyes and signed CRY, touching her cheek just below her eye. That single word, CRY, Kat later said, told her more about Washoe than all of her longer, more grammatically perfect sentences. When Kat had to leave that day, Washoe wouldn’t let her go. PLEASE PERSON HUG, she signed. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 291)

Reading these animal stories and others like them has convinced me that one of the worst stories ever told about the human condition is that Christian story about all of us being born in a state of original sin: sinners to the core, needing the intervention of the church and its priests. It’s an evil story, and wrong all the way down. It’s a story designed more to ensnare us than to empower us. We need a better and more true story out of which to live.

We are born embedded in a world of living, feeling beings who can feel joy and sorrow, who can love and lose, and who can reach out to others, sometimes with just a single gesture, like CRY, that offers us a reconnection with the force of life itself.

But we have taught ourselves bad stories, unfeeling stories that glorify selfishness, greed, invasion and occupation of another country, stealing their oil and murdering their people. Today, when the cries and screams of agony and grieving arise, they most often arise because of our armies, our economic policies, our official heartlessness.

Think of those little goldfish the children set free in Japan’s Deer Park, or the small birds that Thai Buddhists set free as acts of liberation and piety. Those are messages from the heart of life: life telling us what it needs from us. We too can set life free. Within and around us, we can set life free. Let’s do.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

January 21, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

We want to reweave the lost connections in our world. Those feelings of warmth and kinship we did have or might have – we want to reweave them.

The gentle feelings that we can feel at times even for strangers, that knowledge beyond all argument that we are one, that we are indeed all in this together, flesh of one flesh and blood of one blood – where do they come from, those gentle feelings, and how can we get them back?

Sometimes we feel a more immediate and warmer compassion for a stray animal we”ve never seen before than we can muster for the other human beings with whom we live. Why is that? Can it really be that familiarity breeds only contempt? It seems so sour a view of closeness, we vote No.

Yet something, over time, seems to breed at least indifference, and the indifference can kill the spirit of life itself, left to fester. Something can seem to die, even in the very relationships we most cherish. How did it happen? And can what seems wounded be brought back to full health?

These questions run through our relationships, our jobs, our families, our nation and our world. Everywhere, so much has come undone. We want to reweave the lost connections in our world. Those feelings of warmth and kinship we did have or might have – we want to reweave them. We will need all the help we can get . Let us seek that help, within and among our selves and our precious relationships with others. Amen.

SERMON

When the foundations of our Western religion were laid, when Yahweh, the main God of the ancient Hebrews, was created a few thousand years ago, he was created specifically to oppose the nature deities of the Canaanite culture in which the ancient Hebrews originated.

The Canaanites saw us as absolutely embedded in nature, because they were farmers. The Hebrews were sheep-herders, and created a religion that pretended we had no deep connection with nature at all, only with their God, who was created as a kind of tribal chief.

Yet we are profoundly children of nature. And that means that some of the biases in our religions have profoundly misidentified us and misled us. The real ground of our being is in our deep relationships with all other life on earth, and with the earth itself, not with authoritative voices from on high, or wishful and distracting poetry.

That’s why I think it’s worth trying to take a more serious look at who we are and where we came from, because Life knows a lot. There are a lot of deep and clear patterns that can help show us who we are, what we need, what we love, and how we can live more fulfilled lives.

So I want to look at some of the things life seems to know, by looking at some animal stories – today, stories from monkeys and the two apes who are our closest relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos, plus a few stories about dogs, elephants, bulls and pigs.

One of the most important things these stories show us is how much other animals can think like us, find the same kind of solution to their problems that we might seek.

Modern study of animals” inventive problem-solving began in 1953, when a Japanese observer studying a troop of Japanese macaque monkeys, noticed that a young female she had named Imo, had suddenly solved a problem the rest of her troop hadn’t been able to solve.

Researchers were giving the monkeys sweet potatoes, which the monkeys liked a lot. But the potatoes were covered in sand and dirt, and you can imagine the feeling of chewing a potato covered in sand and dirt, what would you do? I can tell you what the monkeys did. The one named Imo, just a year and a half old, took her potato into the ocean, and scrubbed the dirt off in the ocean water. Three years later, Imo came up with a second brilliant idea, when she figured out how to separate all the sand from rice they found on the beach. What would you do? Imo solved it by tossing handfuls of the rice and sand mixture into the water, letting the sand sink, and eating the rice that stayed on the surface, now lightly salted by the ocean water.

Before too long, the other monkeys in her community had learned to wash their potatoes and their rice, and now more than a half century later, long after Imo has died, the whole culture of monkeys still does these things, and teaches their children how to do them. Imo’s ideas have become a part of monkey culture.

Chimpanzees have done even more impressive things.

In Africa, they have devised a hammer and anvil technique to break open very hard Coula and Panda nuts. They will carry these nuts to a special tree root or rock with an indentation in it, put the nut in the indentation, then with a heavy stick or rock, crush it enough to get the nut out of the inside. They can get about 3800 calories a day this way, and many have become very good at it. It’s a skill that can take a decade to learn well. Children learn the skill from their elders, and it has been part of their chimpanzee culture for a long time now. (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi, p. 29)

The human natives living in the area also eat those nuts, and have their own hammer and anvil stations in their villages that look like those the chimps have hidden deep in the jungle. So it looks like the chimps and the humans thought alike, and figured out the same solution to the same problem, and we’re always impressed with an animal’s intelligence if they think like we do.

We used chimpanzees in the early years of our space program, in ways many Americans may not know today. In the late 50s, our US Air Force bought about 65 chimps from Africa and began training them to operate the controls inside space capsules. Some of you will remember – from history books if not from newspapers – that the first living things we fired into space were chimpanzees.

They trained the young chimps through a reward and punishment system, giving them banana pellets for correct moves and electric shocks to their feet for wrong moves, because they assumed that chimps could only care about rewards and punishments.

But the second chimp we sent into space showed us something different. His name was Enos, and after his Atlas rocket blasted off in November 1961, the machinery malfunctioned once he got into orbit. A fuel line stuck open, wasting fuel and sending the capsule into a dangerous wobble. He had to correct the wobble, and help bring the thing back to earth. Now remember, this was a five-year-old chimpanzee. It was like sending a 3- or 4-year-old boy into space, and expecting him to help correct the flight of an errant spaceship. Even worse, the reward and punishment system went haywire, and began giving banana pellets for wrong responses, and giving electric shocks for correct moves.

The rocket scientists assumed Enos would begin making wrong moves in order to get his banana pellets. Instead, he did the moves he knew were right, even though he got an electric shock for every right response. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, pp. 40-41) We talk of the joy of doing a job well, and the Germans have the term funktionslust, meaning the love of what we can do well. It plays a big role in self-fulfillment for many people. But also for many other animals. Those who work with seeing-eye dogs or rescue dogs talk of the dogs” delight, the dogs” satisfaction, in being good at what they do. It’s the healthy kind of pride, not to be confused with the kind that goes before a fall.

In post-flight tests the scientists could barely match the chimp’s in-flight performance, and none of them were receiving shocks. Thanks to the space exploits of our Astrochimps, NASA made 250 safety and comfort modifications to improve Friendship 7, the spacecraft that would carry John Glenn around the earth three times in February 1962. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 42)

But impressive as all this is, there are much more interesting things that other animals have to teach us about life. They’re more about animals showing us what living things need: things that we need too, and which may be some of the fundamental needs of all life, or at least most animals. Today I’ll talk about what life seems to know that it needs – what we can learn from the “mind of Life,” to put it poetically. Next week I’ll focus more on the heart of life: some of the emotional dimensions of life that are clearly recognizable to us even in species separated from us by tens or hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

Today, I want to share some animal stories that show us things we know about ourselves, but may not know are deep parts of what almost all animals need. The stories tell us that life needs

Health or wholeness (one meaning of “salvation”)

Freedom and dignity

A safe place

Fairness, or justice

These are needs that we have encased in our religions and our laws, but they are far older than gods, religions or laws.

1. Life seeks health, wholeness (“salvation”)

Seeking health and wholeness is very close to what is meant by the word “salvation” in Western theology. The word comes from a Latin word for “to save,” but it is also the root of our word “salve.” Salvation is a healthy kind of wholeness, and the desire for it predates the gods by millions of years. And we know, to a small or large extent, what we need to feel healthy and whole.

We all know that dogs and cats will lick their wounds, to clean and heal themselves. And cats will eat grass to help with their digestive system. But you may not have known about the evidence that chimpanzees in the jungle self-medicate. Some self-medication is widespread in all sort of animals, such as the eating of clay, which contains absorbent components resembling Kaopectate, or cats eating grass to aid their digestive system. But apes are also known to chew the bitter pith of certain plants, which cures worm infestations and dysentery. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 254)

Another discovery is that apes do what is called leaf-swallowing. Chimpanzees tend to swallow them in the morning, before foraging for food. They don’t chew them, they carefully fold them over so they can be swallowed whole. The leaves move through their system like brooms, expelling parasites from their intestines. Leaf swallowing has been identified in a lot of chimpanzee populations across Africa, involving over thirty different plant species. (The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 255)

Some of the human tribes living in those areas use many of the same plants for the same purposes, and Western doctors are now studying the chimpanzee knowledge of natural plant remedies. We seem to think a lot alike.

2. Life needs freedom and dignity

A second need we animals have is the need for freedom and dignity. Nobody likes to be “dissed,” and feeling disrespected has led to many fights and wars. But a lot of animals won’t put up with it.

If you’ve owned a dog, you know that they do not like to be laughed at. They will often look at you and give you that “Rowr-rown-rowr-rowr!” noise, if you tease them. And you know just what they mean: “Stop it! Stop teasing me!” And maybe even, “I’ve got teeth, you know!”

A 19th century writer told a story about his terrier, who loved to snap at flies on the windowpane. When the owner noticed one day that the dog wasn’t actually catching any flies, he began making fun of him, laughing and pointing to the flies. The dog promptly snapped at thin air, pretended to have caught a fly, and chewed the imaginary fly up really good. And then I suspect he snorted and walked away with his head held high. (story from George Romanes in Animal Intelligence, 1886, from Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs, p. 105)

Nobody liked to be “dissed.” When I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta last November, I talked with a scientist named Sarah Brosnan who said she could only do behavioral experiments with the chimpanzees when they were in the mood. She said chimps are very smart. They can easily figure out what you are trying to test in your experiments, and if you don’t respect their moods and strong wishes, they will simply sabotage you! She had run many experiments in “match-to-object” tests with an adolescent female chimp named Rita, and Rita always scored about 90% recognition. Then Rita came into estrus, and didn’t want to be taken away from the boys. Sarah persisted, and managed to remove Rita anyway, and take her to the testing room. Suddenly, Rita couldn’t do better than 10% recognition. A few weeks later, when she was through with the boys, she immediately returned to her 90% recognition rate. How much like teen-agers does that sound?

Let’s take a much heavier and more tragic story.

The state of New Hampshire’s motto is “Live free or die,” (the full quote from General Stark in 1809 was “Live free or die! Death is not the worst of evils.”) And we all know Patrick Henry’s famous battle cry, “Give me liberty or give me death!” We may think this shows a life-or-death devotion to abstract ideals like freedom and dignity that only we humans are capable of, because we never hear animals talking about concepts like freedom or dignity. But here too, we only put words to a feeling shared by thousands of animals for millions of years before we came along.

Just this week, one of the scientists with whom I’ve been in e-mail contact (Marc Bekoff, an ethologist from the University of Colorado in Boulder) sent me a story from a newspaper in Thailand, about the training program for the elephants they use to perform for tourists, and take people for elephant rides. The training is more brutal than I had wanted to know. It is called “crushing,” meaning crushing the elephant’s spirit, and about half the elephants die during the training, as They’re chained in small pens and abused.

But some of the elephants, they say, are committing suicide by standing on their own trunks and suffocating themselves, rather than suffer through the abuse. (from a Thai newspaper, reprinted as “Small is Huge” by David Neff in “Christianity Today,” February 2006)

I rode one of those elephants for about three hours, and watched others perform when I was in Thailand several years ago, and learning this has forever changed the feel of that experience.

Living things must have their dignity, their spirit. Techniques that seek to crush it – including a lot of the “breaking” of horses or the Calvinistic child-rearing programs designed to break the child’s spirit, may be deep crimes against the very spirit of life.

3. Living things need a safe space

A third thing all animals seem to need is a safe space. There is a Spanish word, querencia (kuh-den-see-uh), that I first learned in the context of bullfighting. The querencia is that place in the ring where the bull feels most safe. It is a different place for each bull. Online, you can find that the word is also used as the name for all kinds of upscale resorts, offering patrons a safe, comfortable place. Whatever we call it, all life needs this kind of place, this querencia.

Some species, including ours, make their own querencias. Both chimpanzees and bonobos build nests. Bonobos build nests in the trees for the night, but also for resting, grooming, or play in the daytime. These nests represent a private area that cannot be infringed upon, not even by the nest maker’s closest companions. For example, youngsters do not enter their mother’s nest uninvited, but wait at the edge, requesting access by means of facial expressions and distress calls. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 158)

Females use the sanctity of their nests to help wean their young, by not giving them permission to enter. Other apes will make quick nests from a couple branches, then sit inside to eat special foods without being disturbed. And sometimes adult males will escape the threatening charge of another male by climbing up a tree and building a nest. In response, the charging males have been observed stopping at the base of the tree and moving away. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 158) In our species, we say our home is our castle, and breaking and entering someone’s home is a crime. But the concept and the need are as old as most life.

4. Many animals expect fairness and justice

Sarah Brosnan at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center who I mentioned earlier, conducted a fairly famous experiment with capuchin monkeys which seems to show that they have a very strong sense of fairness, and won’t play a game that isn’t fair to them. Capuchins like cucumbers, but they really like grapes a lot better. Sarah put two capuchins in adjoining cages, led the first one through a task, and gave it a slice of cucumber when it completed the task correctly, while the second capuchin watched. Then she gave the second monkey the same task, and the same reward, a slice of cucumber. All went well until on a new task, she rewarded the first monkey with a grape, but when the second monkey did the same task, she just gave it a cucumber. In test after test, the monkey threw the cucumber down on the floor refused to eat it, and threw a tantrum. It wasn’t fair. (Sarah did point out that each capuchin only seems to be concerned about whether it’s fair to them. None seem upset if they get the grape and the other monkey gets the cucumber.)

There’s another story about a Norwegian farmer who learned an important lesson from his big sow. Extremely fond of people, the pig liked to lie with her head on top of the metal railing around her pen when there were people in the barn. Those passing her would speak kindly to her and pat her head. One day the farmer had to repair a rotten board on the floor of her stall. The pig was curious and kept nudging and poking him as he worked. He got annoyed, and smacked her with his hammer. “I should not have done that,” he said later, “for immediately she took my thigh into her big mouth and locked it completely between her jaws, though she did not bite. She probably only wanted to warn me not to do such a thing to her ever again. She found it intolerable that I would do something unkind to her.” This story shows a sophisticated sensitivity on the part of the pig. She had a sense of justice and of the consequences of breaking certain rules of behavior, but also of making allowance for a slow but otherwise decent human who could not be expected to have mastered all the fine points of fairness. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, pp. 29-30)

I’ll close with one more story about how deeply embedded in us is the knowledge that life needs health, respect, and freedom – and that playing fair with others sometimes asks that we figure out how to help them.

It’s the story of a bonobo ape named Kuni, who one day caught a starling who had landed on her island in the Twycross Zoo in England. The bird seemed stunned but otherwise ok, and the trainers tried to get the ape to give them the bird so she wouldn’t hurt it. Instead, Kuni held the starling in her left hand, and climbed up the tallest tree on the island. Then, holding on to the tree with her feet, she carefully took the bird’s wing tips in her hands, spread them out as though the bird were in flight, and tossed the starling high into the air. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 156)

This is a much bigger, broader, deeper and more compassionate picture of the human condition than that presented by most religions, especially the three Western religions.

Our minds look at and structure much of life in ways very similar to animals separated from us by millions or tens of millions of years in evolutionary time. Yet here are all the parables we could need of noble, caring, gentle and decent behavior. Something bigger than God is calling to us, and not with a harsh voice. It is the voice of life, speaking through the mind of life, reminding us of who we are, what we’re like, how many living relatives we really have, and what a rich world it can be, if only we’ll remember our true heritage, our breeding.

Some of these stories are as profound as any religious parables I know. Think of how much about dignity, freedom, respect and justice the pig and the bonobos seemed to know intuitively. Then think about us. Do we really want to admit that we will settle for less?

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© Davidson Loehr

January 14, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

We pray from within our human condition, wanting some help in getting it together. We have done things we should not have done, as we have left undone things we should have done. We are capable of more compassion and courage than we often show.

We come to be opened by visions that can enlist us in larger causes and more caring actions. We come to hear stories that might take us into a deeper kind of integrity and reconnect us with the better angels of our nature.

They are simple dreams, yet they seem forever beyond us, for we do this week after week, and still we are not there.

And so once more, we pray that we may listen for – and perhaps even hear – words, stories and images of the kind of wholeness and authenticity we seek. For the fact that we know to seek it tells us we are capable of becoming that which we seek, of being who we want and need to be, and of treating others in ways that make us a blessing to our world, each in our own way.

It would seem so little that we seek. Yet it is so very much. And so we seek this warmer fullness with all our heart, mind and soul. Amen.

SERMON

we’re living in a time when popular religion has become too degraded to trust. Don’t take my word for it. Ask people like Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, or Bill Moyers, or others who have always been friendly to religion but now have almost nothing good to say about it. They ask why sermons are so trivial, why the pulpits are so silent about our slide into fascism, the removal of laws like the Writ of Habeas Corpus or the suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act, the “signing statements” that let a president simply ignore any laws he doesn’t like, the illegal invasion of Iraq about which the media still mislead us by calling it a war, and a dozen other things that healthy religion should protest loudly and without ceasing. But the healthy fire is gone from the religions, it seems. They have too easily and eagerly sold out to power, or silenced themselves so as not to disturb anyone.

A whole host of critics are saying that the “God” of our Western religions has too often become little more than a mute hand puppet of the worst religious, political and military leaders among us. This includes not only Christian evangelical support of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the predicted coming nuclear attacks on Iran. It also includes Israel’s murderous actions toward Palestinians and Muslims, and fundamentalist Islam’s sanctioning the murders of innocent people. There isn’t a God in any of these pictures worth worshiping. Too often today, religions call us to our lowest selves rather than helping us reach our higher possibilities.

While any religion, at its best, can be a positive personal and social force, many people feel that we’ve passed a point of no return with the popular Western religions. Christianity is virtually dead throughout Europe because once people saw how easily the churches sold out to the fascisms of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, they never again trusted those who controlled the religious symbols. I think that will happen here. I also think the current vulgar rise of the religious right is a sunset that some have mistaken for a sunrise.

Books by Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Bishop Richard Holloway (Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics) are unanimous in their condemnation of the worst of religious delusions and hypocrisies, and these are always important critiques. Harris and Dawkins seem to think a shallow rationalism or scientism will meet the needs of humans, and it’s hard for me to understand their naivete. Bishop Holloway just argues that ethics should be a secular issue, and religion should be kept out of it because religious posturings spread heat but not light.

But it’s easier to criticize than it is to suggest a legitimate heir to these religions and their dangerous little gods.

We have been taught for centuries that religion offers the only adequate foundation for ethics, morality, and our sense of who we are and how we should live. How could we invent a new foundation to take their place? How could we invent a way to understand who we are and how we are to live that is more honest, more broad and deep, more empowering and more apt to point us in noble directions than the parodies of religion parading around today?

We seem to think, Well, here we are, and we need to know how to live, how to treat ourselves and others. So we look to philosophy, theology, psychology, law or great literature because they are, we think, our best sources of wisdom. I don’t think they are.

During November I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, and visited with Frans de Waal, the primatologist who heads the center. I had read all of his books, and wanted to talk with him about animal behavior, morality and religion. During our talks, he said It isn’t possible that religion, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and the rest of our intellectual disciplines could tell us much that’s very deep or profound about who we are. They’re simply too new! (Frans de Waal) we’re not used to thinking of traditions that are two to four thousand years old as being “new,” but they are.

Think of it this way. If the time since the Big Bang is condensed into one year, then Cro Magnon – the first recognized human – has been here about one minute. One minute out of the 525,960 minutes in a year (365.25 days). And the 4,000 years of our recorded history, including the birth of all our existing religions and the invention of their gods, go back just one one-millionth of the way to the origins of life four billion years ago. Why would we think that stories invented in the last one-millionth of the year of Life could know or tell us much about who we are, how we came to be this way and how we should live? Four thousand years is only about two hundred generations. Yet “A hundred thousand generations ago our ancestors were still recognizably human, and ages of geological time stretch back before them.” (Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1992, p. 5) There is obviously a lot that was written in nature before we appeared.

We are all descended from that first life form, four billion years ago. We are all related. And we know the fact that we are all related has implications, has shaped much of who we are and how we think and desire and behave, because we can see them all around us. Some of these animal stories may sound pretty trivial, like knowing that thumb-sucking is a universal primate behavior around weaning time (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 155). Or that some apes (bonobos), like humans, are overwhelmingly right-handed. Or think about territoriality by realizing that the dog that barks at you from behind its owners” fence is barking for the same reason the owners built the fence. OK, some of these are sort of Oprah-style stories.

But other animal stories seem to call us by name:

Snakes, for instance, are separated from us by about150 million years of evolution. Yet even among snakes there is a core of basic behavior – including dominance, territoriality, and sexual jealousy – that we have no trouble recognizing. (Carl Sagan & Anne Druyan Shadows for Forgotten Ancestors,1992, p. 204)

We recognize courtship rituals, male posturing, defense of territory, aggression and maternal instincts in thousands of species because we share them. Unless all these behaviors evolved independently and coincidentally a million times, we are all related, and our similar behaviors come through the same process as the fact that the wings of a bat, flippers of a whale and human hands have similar bone structures.

We all know instinctively to play much more gently with young children, but so do our family pets. But so do rats. People who study rats playing – there are a lot of jobs out there you never really thought of, aren’t there? – have said that when larger rats play-wrestle with smaller rats, they let the small rats win about half the time. And we’re not surprised to learn that among dogs, wolves, chimpanzees, monkeys and many other species, the adults have a different and gentler set of rules for playing with their young than they do when playing or fighting with older animals. We all seem to know the difference between “play time” and “real time.”

Some of our tenderest behaviors can be found in other animals that have been here practically forever. Crocodiles evolved during the age of the dinosaurs, about 200 million years ago, before monkeys or apes existed, even before mammals existed. A crocodile’s jaw muscles are very strong, its snout is long, and it can make a lunch of us in a minute. Yet we read about a crocodile mother taking all the newly-hatched little crocodiles into her mouth and carrying them to protect them – her babies looking out at the world through the spaces between her long teeth, and we know what she is doing and why she is doing it. She is caring for the life for which she feels a responsibility, just as we do. That reverence for life, that gentleness with the vulnerable ones for whom we feel responsible – these things are all older than the gods, older than mammals, older than we have time to count. And we are part of that grand panorama of life. We aren’t so much “children of God” – that’s awfully new and young – but we’re children of this world, of Life, with behaviors, wants, feelings, fears and yearnings that connect us with almost all other life on earth. That’s a pretty strong foundation.

This isn’t to say it’s all like Disneyworld. Nature, including human nature, isn’t all sweetness and light. Biologists have observed forcible rape not only in our species, but also in orangutans, dolphins, seals, bighorn sheep, wild horses, and some birds (ducks). (When Elephants Weep, p. 140)

And like boys throwing rocks at ducks in a pond, apes sometimes inflict pain for fun. In one game, juvenile laboratory chimpanzees enticed chickens behind a fence with bread crumbs. Each time the gullible chickens approached, the chimps hit them with a stick or poked them with a sharp piece of wire. The chimps invented this game to fight boredom. They refined it to the point that one ape would be the enticer, another the hit man. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 5)

But it’s worth noting that they did this out of sight of the adult chimps, who would have stopped it. Even the juveniles knew this was wrong, according to the moral boundaries of their troop. It was something they would not do in front of the adults.

So it isn’t all Disneyworld. But the dark sides of animal behavior can also show us important things about our own dark sides. For example, can we learn something from knowing that the only two species which routinely expand their territory by killing the males in their target territories are chimpanzees and humans? And what happens when we combine this with the fact that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, sharing more than 98% of our DNA? We pretend we kill for freedom, democracy or the American Way, but the chimps do the same things, without pretending to such high ideals. It looks more like we use language to help us rationalize doing the same selfish and vicious behaviors which we would think brutish and beneath us if we saw chimpanzees doing them.

All of this is part of the picture of who and what we are: the emotional structure and behavioral habits that show our profound kinship with more animal species than we can name.

In this extended series of sermons on Animal Stories, I want to sketch that bigger story of who we are and how we came to be this way. That story is grounded in hundreds of millions of years of evolution still shaping us, and it can offer some insights not from religion but from life, in response to our deepest and most enduring questions about our meaning and purpose.

The primatologist Frans de Waal is clearly right: morality, or an adequate understanding of who we are and how we should live, is not likely to come from religion – it’s just too new. Religions and gods arose as vehicles for carrying our hopes and fears forward in our culture. And when we study the origins of gods, they didn’t have very elegant births. Yahweh, the main deity in the Hebrew Scriptures (aka the “Old Testament”) was modeled on a tribal chief, and given the tasks of a tribal chief: prescribing behaviors, demanding obedience, rewarding those who served him and punishing or killing those who didn’t. That kind of a god isn’t likely to lead us toward very high places, then or now. Today, the question is whether religions are very good vehicles for leading us to our highest possibilities. Often, They’re not. Often, they teach irrelevant trivialities grounded in fear, while all around us, there are stories that can move us more deeply and show us more clearly who we are and how we should and shouldn’t live.

For a simple example, scientists have learned that rats are reluctant to press a lever to get food if doing so will also deliver an electric shock to a companion. They will invariably press the lever that will not deliver the shock, and some will even forgo food rather than hurt their friends. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs never Lie, p. 95). Similar experiments with rhesus monkeys had even more dramatic results. One monkey stopped pulling the lever for five days, and another one for twelve days after witnessing shock delivery to a companion. These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon another. (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 29, from Masserman et al. 1964) They felt an identity with that other life, and automatically volunteered for discomfort or danger to protect it.

Think of the similarities here to the story in the news last week about Wesley Autrey, the man who dove between the tracks of a New York subway, risking his life to save the life of a stranger. Doesn’t it share the same feeling for life similar to ours, the same instinctive drive to protect it? Mr. Autrey was treated like a hero, but what he said was, “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.” (NY Times, 3 January 2007)

And how different is this from the story some of you will remember from 1996, when a gorilla in Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo saved a 3-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure? That gorilla made the cover of Time magazine that year as one of Time’s “People of the Year.” It was ironic. On the one hand, we celebrated this gorilla mother because we identified her compassion with the highest of human behaviors, the kind to which we aspire. On the other hand, her behavior seemed to set her apart from the 250 million Americans who didn’t make the cover of Time for our behaviors. And as one gorilla expert said, her behavior could only surprise people who didn’t know a thing about gorillas. (Swiss gorilla expert Jurg Hess, quoted by Frans de Waal in The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 79)

It wasn’t high human behavior; it wasn’t religious behavior; it was compassionate animal behavior. And compare the gorilla’s behavior with some of our own society’s behavior that year. In 1996, our sanctions against Iraq caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, our economic policies made beggars and prostitutes of children in third-world countries, and the hateful voices of religious charlatans again called for the persecution of gays, lesbians, infidels, and pretty much every other group not in their clubs. Who would you want your children influenced by: a million religious bigots, politicians, economists and corporations turning the world’s children into beggars, prostitutes and corpses, or a gorilla who, with her own baby on her back, saved the baby of parents from another species because, I suspect, she simply felt it was the right thing to do? No wonder she made the cover of Time.

In some ways, this may seem an unusual sermon series. I”m not interested in leading you to God here – or any of the gods. I”m interested in leading us back to a much older, deeper and nobler place: the place within us that has created all the gods of history, to put us in touch with that spirit of life that can trump every little god, every self-serving religious or political ideology, that we have created. I want us to see far older and more empowering connections to all of life, the life coursing through us and the life sometimes carrying us and sometimes battering us and the kind of life we could have – not with more money or power, but with more integrity and authenticity, more caring and courage.

It is about opening us to an emotional awareness of life: ours and others. We’ll see, in these animal stories, the whole range of human behaviors shared by thousands of animals. We’ll find many stories of empathy, some of which will take your breath away. We’ll identify with chimpanzees, whose social expectations are constantly undermining the tyranny that the alpha males and their helpers are always trying to inflict. In some important ways, our species, like the chimpanzees, has a deeply subversive streak – the streak in which you find most of our liberals. We’ll see that creativity extends far beyond our species, to chimpanzees, dolphins and others. We’ll hear of pigeons who can identify Impressionistic or Cubist painters better than most of us can. We’ll see that chimpanzee politics is so identical to human politics that we won’t be surprised to learn that when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Newt Gingrich assigned a book on Chimpanzee Politics to all new congressional representatives, so they could understand the nature of politics. And always the lessons will be religious, in search of better answers to the questions of what kind of a moral order we are part of, and how we should behave. Those lessons can come from many places, including thousands of animal stories. Here’s a final story.

During his final years in exile, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote about how, at the end of the Italian campaign, a dog sat beside the body of his fallen master, licking his hand. Napoleon could never get this out of his mind, and at the end of his days wrote this:

Perhaps it was the spirit of the time and the place that affected me. But I assure you no occurrence of any of my other battlefields impressed me so keenly. I halted on my tour to gaze on the spectacle, and to reflect on its meaning.

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog”. I had looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet, here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs never Lie, pp. 165-166, from Lemish’s War Dogs, p. 4)

I”m appealing to those parts of us that reacted immediately and emotionally to this story and others like it. That part of us that can get choked up and inspired by Napoleon’s tears, gorillas saving humans or humans saving humans. That compassionate potential has been in us for tens of millions of years, and we share it with ten thousand other species.

The Romans used to say that noble humans lived as though they were living “under the gaze of eternity,” by which they meant that we should live as though all the noblest and most sensitive people who ever lived were watching us, then do only what we would do in front of that audience. I want to expand the circle to include many, many animals whose stories you’ll be hearing. Those animals are also part of that gaze of eternity. We should act in ways that are worthy of them, too – especially if we’re going to have the conceit of calling them “lower” animals!

Just listen to these words from Napoleon’s story again, as he stood looking at the fallen soldier:

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog”. I had looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet, here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog.

Those tears over the grief of one dog put Napoleon in closer touch with his noblest traits than causing the deaths of thousands. The empathy and compassion that can reconnect all of us with our larger selves are far older than God. Many of them are as old as life itself. And they call to us, they call us back to our best selves and back to life. Let us pray that we can learn to hear their calls.