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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 15, 2012
Our seventh principle is that we affirm and promote “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”… What does it mean to respect that web, to be a part of it?
Mary Oliver wrote:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Since I started preaching here, I’ve been doing a series on our seven UU Principles. Today we are on the seventh and last one, which urges us to promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. There is a description of a web in the Hindu scriptures:
Far away in the heavenly abode of the Great God Indra, there is a wonderful net … stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like starts of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so the process of reflection is infinite.
Our seventh principle calls us to act as if we are all connected. We are told by all religion that what affects one affects us all. The truth expressed by mystics of every religion is that your life and mine are part of a whole, and our dogs’ and cats’ lives, and the dolphins and the birds and insects, and the life of the trees you see out these windows.
As we walk our seventh principle, we try to be aware that we are in the web, that our carbon footprint is a matter of importance to our walking in faith. For many among us, this sense that we are connected leads to recycling as much as we can, or to swearing off Styrofoam, to building greener homes and churches. For many it leads to asking questions about ethical eating: we may try to buy products from chickens who are not treated cruelly– some don’t eat meat at all. Can we get through life without killing? My friend Ben lives in California. He is a vegan, which means he eats no meat or animal products like eggs or milk. He won’t wear leather shoes. He rides his bike everywhere. He dresses in organic cotton. I would admire him more if he weren’t so self-righteous and evangelical about his lifestyle, but every movement has fundamentalists. Even Ben, though, has to live with insects being killed so the soybeans and wheat and cotton and cherry trees can grow. How do we make our peace with this? A UU entomology professor at the University of Wyoming named Jeffrey Lockwood has written a book called Grasshopper Dreaming. Because he spends time with his students studying the grasshoppers on the ranges of Wyoming in order to discern how better to control their population, i.e. kill them, he has complicated philosophical thoughts about his work. The book is subtitled “Reflections on Loving and Killing.”
Apparently many of his peers take grasshoppers to a lab, spray them with something, and if they die, that’s a successful experiment. He felt called to go to where they live, kneel on the rocky scrub and watch them with the idea that if he got to know the grasshoppers it would make him better able to do his job. He found out enough about them so that, since 1990, he has been able to control the grasshopper population on the grasslands with 90% fewer pesticides, and safer ones.
Watching the hundreds of hours of video they took of the grasshoppers over a summer, the first thing that struck him was how much time the grasshoppers spent doing nothing. Previous theories had supposed that they were in the sun heating up, or in the shade cooling off. Not really. As it turns out they were just doing nothing.
If you use a human filter to interpret their behavior, it makes no sense. They have a high mortality rate: 2 percent a day. They spend only 3 minutes of each hour eating, and are not much interested in reproduction. This is despite their high mortality rate – 2 percent daily – which in the human world might result in a desperate competition for survival.
Lockwood writes, “If we humans were short of resources, we would surely battle for our share. We’d scurry about attempting to vanquish competitors, hoard supplies, mate feverishly, and well, do much of what we seem to do in the modern world. But grasshoppers aren’t humans.” He says the idea of competition for survival is an assumption that is inherent to much ecology and evolution. Yet the grasshoppers sit around. Maybe they are praying for world peace.
When a scientist is allowed to slow down, when that scientist has a philosophical bent, he or she may come up with surprising and helpful shifts in perspective. We’re all familiar with the way the museums of natural history had to rearrange their exhibits of lions when some finally took the risk and the time to actually observe pride behavior. Because of the way American society was structured, with the male going out of the house to work to bring home the bacon, the exhibits had been arranged to show the male lion going out hunting, then bringing back the kill for his family. In real lion life, it’s the females who hunt and bring back the kill. All of the tableaus had to be rearranged. Archeologists used to look at a structure in Crete that contained a small room with an observation hole, so someone could look in, a table freestanding in the middle of the room, with runnels at the end of it as if to catch blood. It was obvious to them that this was a chamber of sacrifice. When more female architects entered the field and looked at the same room, it was obvious to them that this was a room where a mother went to give birth.
We bring our experiences to our interpretations of the things we see. We are all blind to our own blind spots, so you can’t just say “I won’t have any blind spots.” It’s difficult to learn about other people. Mostly just watching, observing, hanging out, talking to different people who think differently – those are methods for overcoming our blindness. Seeing ourselves as the center of the universe is a pretty common blind spot. Michael Pollan wrote a book subtitled “A plants-eye view of the world” (The Botany of Desire) He talks about the onset of agriculture, and how we think of ourselves, central, in charge, as having domesticated plants and animals. This, he says, “leaves the erroneous impression that we’re in charge. We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests.” So one way of describing the introduction of agriculture ten thousand years ago is that some plants “refined their basic put-the-animals-to-work (by sticking to their coats) strategy to take advantage of one particular animal that had evolved not only to move freely around the earth, but to think and trade complicated thoughts. These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn)that incited humans to cut down vast forests and make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty they would inspire human beings to seed, transport, [and] extol … them…. It makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.”
Lockwood is constantly living in the tension between getting to know these beings intimately and understanding that he is getting to know them in order to kill them. He says he goes away from his students in the field to pray. He talks about his four year old son not understanding pronouns yet, communicating a very spiritual and connected stance in the world by saying “My blanket who I sleep with,” and “the tree who I am looking at.” Philosopher Martin Buber talked about having an “I-Thou” relationship with everything and everyone, which would make a better world than an “I-it” relationship. My spell-check for this sermon didn’t want me to say “the predators who…” or “the chickens who.” It wanted me to say “the predators that.” So Lockwood goes to pray, having developed an “I-thou” relationship with the grasshoppers. He hopes that he can find a way for the killing to be less thoughtless, less destructive. He and his students noticed over the years how widely the grasshoppers wander within the range of their territory. They noticed that they are cannibals; they eat their dead. So he began experimenting with applying the neurotoxins in narrow stripes across the rangeland, instead of blanketing the whole area. In these stripes, the grasshoppers would die, then grasshoppers from the non-treated areas would come eat them, and die. The natural predators who helped keep the grasshopper population down would be left alive in the non-treated strips. Then he switched to less dangerous growth-inhibiting chemicals rather than neuro-toxins, applying them in the same narrow strips. They worked just as well, and more safely for the environment as a whole, including the cattle and the humans who use the rangelands. He admits that he values human lives and human purposes more than grasshopper lives and purposes. He reminds us that the interdependent web of life is predatory. Species eat other species and plants to live. It is natural for us to value our species more highly than others. All life kills in order to live. That’s the way nature is. It’s not smart to be too squeamish to be part of nature. Living is muddy, and we just have to do our best. It does not pay to feel too righteous. May we feel alive instead.
