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Mark Skrabacz
Pastor – UU Church of the Hill Country
April 18, 2010
One morning, long, long ago—in fact, 120 million years ago, something incredible happened here on Earth: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opened up to receive the rays of the sun. Prior to this momentous event, the planet had been covered in vegetation for millions of years but none had ever before flowered. I imagine that this first flower probably didn’t survive for long, since conditions were not quite yet favorable for a widespread flowering to occur. One day, however, such conditions came about. A critical threshold was reached, and our planet became filled with an explosion of color and scent. It was an evolutionary transformation in the life of plants and all life.
Much later, flowers would come to play an essential part in the evolution of consciousness of another species: us! Think about it: over the years, flowers have provided inspiration and insight to countless artists, poets, teachers, and mystics. In the New Testament, for example, Jesus, himself, tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from them how to live. And the Buddha is said to have once given a “silent sermon” during which he held up a flower and simply gazed at it. After a while, one monk began to smile. It is said that this monk was the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (which has been interpreted over the years as “awakening”), that smile was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and became the origin of Zen.
So it is no accident that flowers are included in so much Buddhist art. Seeing the beauty in a flower can awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of our own innermost being, as the Buddha called it, our original face — our true nature.
This is one of the reasons why many of us like to garden and work with plants. They are serene and their energy is infectious.
This is all described by Eckhart Tolle in his book, A New Earth. Tolle raises the possibility that important religious teachers like the Buddha and Jesus were some of humanity’s “early flowers,” so to speak. That is to say, they were our precursors. They were rare and precious beings who were as revolutionary in their day as was that first flower 120 million years ago. And when they appeared on Earth, conditions were not yet favorable for widespread comprehension of their messages. This, argues Tolle, is because humanity wasn’t evolved enough, hadn’t yet reached a critical threshold of understanding to grasp the teachings. Thus, these great teachers were largely misunderstood by their peers.
This raises the question: are we more evolved now, some 2,000-2,500 years since the Buddha and Jesus were alive? How many of us think that we are? Although this evolutionary growth of consciousness has seemed to come in fits and spurts—and even seems to regress at times.
In these days of population growth and climate change, of industrialization and shrinking natural habitats, the question becomes whether or not are we evolving quickly enough to preserve life as we know it?
I want to be clear: this is not going to be a doomsday Earth Day sermon. Rather, I want to share with you this morning why it is that I am feeling hopeful in spite of the many problems threatening the health and future of our Mother Earth.
Let me start with the assertion that we already possess the technical knowledge, the communication tools, the ability to educate our fellow humans about population control, and the material resources to grow enough food, ensure clean air and water, and meet the rational energy needs of all of us. We have everything we need to survive and thrive for generations to come. Everything, that is, except for the required shift of consciousness that will inspire us to implement changes on a global scale. Many of us are still plagued by the old habits and understandings that have caused the mess in which we now find ourselves.
“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Thus began the famed astronomer Carl Sagan’s majestic 1980 television series, Cosmos. The epic grandeur of Sagan’s Cosmos—suffused with “billions upon billions” of planets, stars, and galaxies—captivated the imagination of viewers everywhere. But despite the almost sacred reverence for existence that permeated the series, some still took issue with its strictly scientific bias, finding little room for the numinous or the transcendent in Sagan’s naturalistic worldview.
Fifteen years later, the integral philosopher Ken Wilber issued an 800-page response to concerns such as these. Titled Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Wilber’s grand tome argued for a more holistic conception of the universe—one that would honor the profound revelations of science and religion alike. He called the Universe “the Kosmos” (with a “K” from the Greek). So when some use the term “Kosmos,” with a “k”, it’s not only to affirm our appreciation for Sagan’s extraordinary universe but also to restore the spiritual depth and transcendent mysticism that the ancient Greek philosophers, who coined the word, duly acknowledged and revered.
Perhaps a more realistic synthesis of the two comes from renowned systems thinker Gregory Bateson,
“If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation, and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself (Arrogate, from the latin arrogatus defined as claiming or seizing without justification.) Continuing with Bateson: as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races, and the brutes and vegetables. If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or simply of overpopulation and overgrazing.” Sounds daunting and all to familiar.
Here is the good news: although still relatively small, there is a rapidly growing percentage of humanity that is experiencing a shift in consciousness that many deem necessary if we are going to survive as a human species. Some associate the shift to the theories and proofs of quantum physics. Others attribute it to the emergence of the internet—which has brought connections and ideas into our homes from all over the world — our global village. Still others see it as a natural result of the end of imperialism or of the 2500 year epoch of the dark ages. I personally think that all of these things are having their impact. Just go to any bookstore and you’ll to find a number of books on the subject, some written by notable scholars such as Joanna Macy and David Korten.
These two writers differ greatly in their fields of expertise—Joanna Macy is a Buddhist scholar, and David Korten is an expert in business and economics. But both are currently telling us the same thing: that we are now living in a defining moment in the course of our history. That the era of cheap oil is ending, climate change is undeniably real, and economies can no longer rest on the unsustainable foundation of financial and environmental debt. Out of necessity, they tell us, we are collectively entering a new era. We are moving away from the life-killing political economy birthed by the Industrial Revolution and we’re moving towards a sustainable, life-enhancing political economy that exists in harmony with the Earth. They both refer to it by the same name. They call it “The Great Turning.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it.
Simply put, this concept of The Great Turning encompasses all the actions currently being taken to honor, care for and preserve life on Earth these days—and there are lots of them. But it is more than these, too. It involves a new understanding of who we are and what we need to be happy. In large numbers, people are learning the falsehood of the old paradigm that there is an isolated, competitive, solid self. In its stead, we are beginning to embrace a new paradigm in which our selfish and solid separateness is seen for what it really is: an illusion. We are discovering our inter-connectedness to everything, our mutual belonging in the web of life. So despite centuries of mechanistic Newtonian conditioning, we are slowly learning to name, once again, this world—and everything in it—as sacred, as whole.
Whether these understandings come through Gaia theory, systems theory, chaos theory, or through liberation theology, shamanic practices, the evolutionary theology of UCC minister Michael Dowd, engaged Buddhism,or even Unitarian Universalism, such insights and experiences are now freeing growing numbers of us from the grip of the industrial-corporate-growth society. They are offering us nobler goals and deeper pleasures. They are redefining our wealth and our worth, thus liberating us—finally—from compulsions to consume and control everything in sight.
To me, I view this trend as a natural emergence of the Feminine (or Yin) Principle in a world that has been strongly skewed toward the Masculine (or Yang) Principle. But however you view it, there is no denying the fact that something is sparking a transition around the world and it is giving me hope!
That’s because one of the best aspects of this shift is that there is less room for panic or self-pity. No, with these new understandings of who we really are, it is gratitude that generally arises, not fear. We become grateful to be alive at this moment, when—for all the darkness around us—blessings and awakenings abound. The Great Turning helps us stay mindful and steady, helping us join hands in community to find the ways the world self-heals — like our Sanctuary Garden and Hands on Housing. The present chaos, then, doesn’t doom us but becomes a seedbed for a better, more sacredly connected, future.
This is a very exciting time to be alive: we have so much potential; we can make such a difference! Of course that’s not to say that these coming years will be easy. One can always expect resistance to change, especially when it affects profitability and patterns of dominance. No, we are now encountering times of great suffering and uncertainty. And at times our grief will seem overwhelming—like the type of grief so many of us are currently feeling about war, and genocide, and natural disasters, and over-population, of species extinction, and so many more disasters.
But like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So today — this Earth Day — we offer some balance to the paralysis of analysis and its intense anguish that we might be feeling these days. These responses arise from the depth of our caring and the truth of our interconnectedness with all beings. After all, “to suffer with” is the literal meaning of compassion. And this world could use a lot more compassion.
What if we were to understand our relation to nature and our environment in sacred terms or poetic terms or, with Emerson and Thoreau, in good old American transcendentalist terms, but there is no broadly shared language with which to do this. So we are forced to resort to what is, in fact, a lower common denominator: the languages of science and bureaucracy. These languages have broad legitimacy in our culture, a legitimacy they possess largely because of the thoroughness with which they discredited religious discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But many babies went out with the bath water of religious dogma and superstition. One of these was morality. Even now, science can’t say why we ought not to harm the environment except to say that we shouldn’t be self-destructive. Another of these lost sacred children was our very relation as human beings to the mystery of existence, as such. As the philosopher G. W. Leibniz famously wondered, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
For St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, this was the fundamental religious question. In the place of a medieval and renaissance relation to the world that was founded on this mystery, we have a mechanical relation that is objective and data driven. We no longer have a forest; we have “board feet.” We no longer have a landscape, a world that is our own; we have “valuable natural resources.” Avowed Christians have been slow to recall this sacred relationship to the world. For example, only recently have American evangelicals begun thinking of the environment in terms of what they call “creation care.” We don’t have to be born again to agree with evangelicals that one of the most powerful arguments missing from the 21st century environmentalist’s case is reverence for what simply IS. One of the heroes of Goethe’s Faust was a character called Care (Sorge), who showed to Faust the unscrupulousness of his actions and led him to salvation. Environmentalism has made a Faustian pact with quantitative reasoning; science has given it power but it cannot provide deliverance. If environmentalism truly wishes, as it claims, to want to “save” something—the planet, a species, itself—it needs to rediscover a common language of Care.
Here’s a valuable learning: you cannot defeat something that you imagine to be an external threat to you when it is, in fact, internal to you, when its life is your life. The truth is, these so-called external threats are actually a great convenience to us. It is convenient that we can imagine a power beyond us because that means we don’t have to spend much time examining our own lives. And it is very convenient that we can hand the hard work of our resistance to these so-called externals over to scientists, our designated national problem solvers.
Environmentalism should stop depending solely on its alliance with science for its sense of itself. It should look to create a common language of care (a reverence for and a commitment to the astonishing fact of flowers and plants and existence) through which it could begin to create alternative principles by which we might live. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in his famous essay “My Religion,” faith is not about obedience to church dogma, and it is not about “submission to established authority.” A people’s religion are “the principles by which they live.”
I’ll close with this: The establishment of these principles by which we might live would begin with three questions. First, what does it mean to be a human being? Second, what is my relation to other human beings? And third, what is my relation to existence as such, the ongoing “miracle” that there is something rather than nothing? If the answer to these questions is that the purpose of being human is “the pursuit ofhappiness” (understood as success, which is understood as the accumulation of money); and if our relation to others is a relation to mere things (with nothing to offer but what they can do for us); and if our relation to the world is only to “resources” (that we should exploit for profit); then we should be very comfortable with the world we have. If this world goes to perdition at least we can say that we acted in “good faith.” But if, on the other hand, we answer that there should be a greater sense of self-worth in being a human, more justice in our relation to others, and more reverence for existence as a sacred Whole, then we must either live in bad faith with market-driven capitalism and other systemic “givens,” or begin describing a future whose fundamental values and whose daily activities are radically different from what we currently endure. The risk I propose, as our choir sang, is for us to rise to the nobility of a star. We should refuse to be mere functions of a system that we cannot in good conscience defend. And we should insist on living a new story, one that re-cognizes the mystery, the miracle, and the dignity of things, from flowers to frogs to forests to our fellow humans, simply because they are.
Happy Earth Day!
