Environmental Justice struggles with a news cycle that may report a disaster, may revisit on the one year anniversary, but often abandons a community in the struggle of daily life. The media reported the Freedom Industries Chemical Spill in Charleston, first detected January 9th for about 72 hours. Maybe next January we will hear about it again…
In the meantime, the impact of the spill is ongoing. It is deeply uncertain when the water will actually be truly safe to drink and use again. Humans are born 75% water and are still more than 50% water in our final years. Water is not optional. It is essential.
Just this week, Rev. Joan Van Becelaere, Congregational Life Consultant & Regional Lead for the Unitarian Universalist Central East Regional Group (CERG), wrote:
Since the call went out, the situation has not improved.
People are still afraid to go to restaurants and service workers are feeling the brunt of that.
Pregnant women and small children are still being urged not to drink tap water and must buy bottled water.
Parents have been bathing their children in melted snow.
But adults are finding it difficult, too, and have bad reactions to the water.
Many, many folk are drinking bottled water – or trying to when they can afford it.
And yet folk are getting billed for water usage at standard usage rates.
The state government still is unable to guarantee the safety of the water.
And folk are still protesting.
I was just down there a week and half ago visiting our Charleston WV congregation.
They are still collecting funds to help pay for folks water bills, pay for home water system cleanup, helping service workers pay their bills, and buy lots and lots of bottled water for everyone.
If you have financial resources to share, please do. The Charleston congregation is committed to using your donations well; and thanks you for your care and support. Checks should be made out to: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Charleston (UUC) with the notation “Water Relief.”
Please mail to:
UU Congregation of Charleston
520 Kanawha Blvd W.
Charleston, WV 25302
I invite us all to stand on the side of love with West Virginia. Please spread the word about the on-going struggle, call on accountability from Freedom Industries and the EPA, let the people of West Virginia know that they are not alone, not forgotten. Beloveds, we are all in this together.
In the world of super heroes, it’s called an “origin story,” that trauma that led to the super hero being super.
Poor little Bruce Wayne watches helplessly as his parents are murdered. Superman rockets off the planet Krypton, sent away by his father moments before the planet explodes, only to find himself in Kansas where a loving couple adopts him and imbues him with truth, justice, and the American Way. Magneto and Professor X start out as just normal . . . mutants . . . but life experience sends one on to found the good-guy X-Men and the other to . . . electrical evil.
Clearly, the creators of super heroes believe that nurture trumps nature in that long debate between nature and nurture. But the more we know about genetics, the more we have to ask, is that true? Do our genes make us do it, whatever the “it” might be?
Science has been known to give us answers that we are not culturally capable of understanding. The most egregious moment of that in the Twentieth Century was the eugenics movement, that is, the belief that “better babies” could be produced by selective human breeding; and the corollary belief that those born with disabilities and those of races not of Western European origin, were inferior.
Liberal preachers preached it. Liberal people practiced it. It was part-and-parcel of the early birth control movement. And of course it led ultimately to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
It also led, in the US, to immigration laws barring most people not of Western European origin, and the forced-sterilization of thousands of people. Proponents believed they could eradicate mental disorders though eugenics; they believed they could eradicate alcoholism. Forced sterilization for those in mental institutions was a practice upheld by the US Supreme Court. Thousands of poor people were forcibly sterilized. And the practice of requiring sterilization as a pre-condition for receiving welfare checks continued in some states into the 1970s.
Their motto was, “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.”
Fact is, the Nazis got many of their ideas from the United States and used the example of the US to justify their actions to other nations all through the 1930s.
Today, we know this behavior well as the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and some far-out right-wing politicians. But liberals?
I don’t want to in any way justify these beliefs. They are despicable. Yet dismissing these ideas as something from the dark past is a very bad idea. Rather, we should look to that terrible chapter of American history as a cautionary tale. Because, besides being based in the most virulent forms of racism and ableism, political progressives also saw eugenics as good science: the latest in scientific knowledge. That’s the cautionary tale: Eugenics appealed to the very people who were most open to the theory of natural selection.
Why? One reason is that they applied the idea of natural selection—still not well understood by most people in the early Twentieth Century—to an idea most Americans knew very well at the time—the selective breeding of animals. Remember the motto I mentioned: “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.” Nowadays most people who look at the matter know that natural selection can’t be self-selected—the time frame is way too long for human beings to affect, or even comprehend, for that matter. But, most people did not know that at the time.
Here’s how the fatal error occurred: We have cats and dogs and ridable horses because of selective breeding. People figured this out a loooong time ago. My grandparents, who could barely read and write, were experts at selective breeding. Most farmers were.
People knew that traits can be affected in a short time among animals, and so they assumed that human genetics could be affected in a short time. And that simply isn’t true—not in animals such as human beings that have long lives, anyway. Fruit flies are a different story. As is the famous case of the tube (subway) mice in London that have evolved in about a century and a half to have grey coats that exactly match the color of paint used on the bottom of the London train tunnels. But people aren’t fruit flies or mice. Scientific ideas often become dangerous when they are applied to culture or human life on a micro-level.
Remember that Charles Darwin knew almost nothing about genetics: Mendel’s work on peas was in existence in Darwin’s lifetime, but Darwin never encountered the studies.
Remember that the structure of DNA was not discovered until 1953, well after the horrors of Nazism. The first draft of the the human genome appeared in 2001.
To that we must add that the overt racist and ableist assumptions in the US at the time made for the perfect environment for the eugenics movement. Racism and ableism permeated US society—from outright segregationist to progressives to just about everybody. Heck, even the Homeopathy Society supported eugenics.
We see the same sort of misapplication of science today: Despite what New Age gurus might claim, people are not lonely because we live in an expanding universe. We can’t walk through walls because there is lots of space between atoms. We don’t vibrate with cosmic vibrations because of String Theory.
And you don’t speed up natural selection through eugenics. The time scales of the two are completely different. All these are the realm of hucksters. And, in the case of eugenics, racists.
Take away: when science appears to support your preconceptions and prejudices, watch out!
No, there isn’t really a super hero who became Spider-Man because he was bitten by an irradiated spider. But here are some things that are real science that we easily forget:
Genetic research has taught us that the entire concept of race is a fiction. A mistake. There are no genetically identifiable races. Homo-Sapiens developed along about 200,000 years ago and some homo-sapiens began leaving Africa something along about 80,000 years ago. Human generations are roughly 25 years, which means that some homo-sapiens left Africa about 3000 generations ago; other homo-sapiens, such as our Somali neighbors, left in this generation. We’re all immigrants out of Africa.
Despite what the racists of the early-Twentieth Century believed, there is no “race” in the homo-sapiens population, only separation by time and cultural difference.
You may have read that President Obama is related to Harry Truman, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Brad Pitt. This is not urban legend. But it doesn’t prove a whole lot either, except that human beings are all related, and that we tend to notice the famous ones and not the infamous or un-famous ones.
Until everyone understands this, we will have not only the egregious lunatics such as the Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, but also the casual cliches that still permeate our culture and destroy the lives of too many people.
Poor little Bruce Wayne. He could have been a man of leisure. Superman might have hung out on Krypton (or at least Kansas). And there’s no telling what nature might have had Magneto and Professor X doing. As for us, we will have to continue wondering and speculating just how much of what we do is up to us and how much is up to our stars . . . and our genes. All will be well, so long as we remember humility in the face of a very large universe.
Apparently it is all the rage these days for state legislatures to introduce “religious freedom” bills that would allow people to refuse to do business with someone if it would go against their sincerely held religious beliefs. Clearly we are to understand these bills as a means for people who disapprove of same-sex weddings to not have to provide services for those weddings. On the one hand, this seems like not such a big deal. Who really wants an appalled photographer or caterer harshing the vibe at your wedding? Why should people have to participate in something that they disapprove of? Would I be willing to serve canapés at a dog fighting ring or a KKK rally?
But the proposed laws don’t state that no one should have to provide services that run counter to their conscience. They don’t suggest that it would be appropriate to refuse to do business with BP because you’re still mad about their massive oil spill from a criminally flawed deep water drill, or that we as a society get it if you don’t want to take photographs for the catalog of a clothing company complicit in the abuse of Bangladeshi workers. No, these bills are about religious freedom.
So I call bullshit. Your religion sets boundaries on how you live your life. It may tell you that it is wrong to be in a relationship with a person of the same sex, or to eat pork or to eat beef or to touch a woman who is menstruating. It may tell you that you should wear special underwear or a special hat or to wash your hands and feet before you pray. And no one has the right to interfere with your choices around any of those or a hundred or a thousand more ways of expressing your sincere religious beliefs.
But we don’t need any extra laws to say that. We have one already, called the First Amendment. Got it covered. So then the question is whether we need laws to protect you from in any way condoning other people doing things that are counter to your religious beliefs. Let me give you the short answer. No.
If you are Catholic and you disapprove of birth control, that means you shouldn’t use it. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have to comply with an insurance mandate to cover it for other people. How other people prevent pregnancy is not part of your religious practice. If your religion forbids your eating pork, or mixing milk and meat, don’t do it. But your religion doesn’t forbid you from taking pictures of people eating cheeseburgers with bacon. If you don’t think gay people should get married, then don’t marry a person of your gender. Who you bake a cake for is not part of your religious practice. Your religious beliefs apply to you, and if your God is going to judge you for standing by while other people live out their own religious lives, then your God needs to get a grip.
Of course, the reality of these laws has nothing to do with freedom of religious practice. Their function is merely to serve as a way for people who are losing a legal and cultural battle to try to exert control over something that has already escaped them. It is a place to put all the rage over losing the privilege of being able to assume that the way they see the world is the way everyone sees it. And everyone is entitled to their own rage, as well as their own religious beliefs. But like religious beliefs, no one is entitled to impose their rage on someone else. That’s the law.
I suppose everybody has a favorite founding document for a religion or a nation. Mine is “Farewell at Delfshaven,” a sermon given by Rev. John Robinson to a group of his Separatist congregation who were taking ship for the Western Hemisphere. Part of the sermon goes like this:
I Charge you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth from my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word.
The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His will our God has revealed to Calvin, they (Lutherans) will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented.
For though they were precious shining lights in their time, yet God has not revealed his whole will to them. And were they now living, they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as they had received.
The way Unitarian Universalists “do church” comes directly from the protestant movements that eventually led to the English Civil War and the decision by some of the radicals that it was perfectly acceptable to God that they supplant the aristocracy and remove their king’s head. . . Radical. It isn’t surprising that the royalty of the day weren’t particularly keen on keeping those sorts around. And perhaps it isn’t surprising that these most protesting of Protestants eventually set up theocracies and felt justified in clearing the land of its native inhabitants.
Yet these radicals—known to us nowadays as Pilgrims, Puritans, and Separatists—were up some positive things as well, such as what we call democracy. And the best of their thought is exemplified by these last words that Rev. Robinson said to members of his congregation as they sailed to England to join another group of dissenters and board the Mayflower.
These parishioners settled in what they called Plymouth, Massachusetts to build what is today a Unitarian Universalist church, which indicates that the beliefs that Rev. Robinson preached, plus about four-hundred years, equals Unitarian Universalism. The deepest beliefs of those religious seekers are the DNA of Unitarian Universalism (for good and ill).
Notice some things about this little sermon: yes, there’s the usual unfortunate bashing of other denominations—in this case Lutherans and Calvinists—but Rev. Robinson was saying two very radical, and I think positive, things.
The first is: “follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ.” This is still an expectation in the Unitarian Universalist movement: we don’t ordain ministers and then think those ministers are somehow levitating or holy. We don’t think our ministers are special—we expect our ministers to walk the walk . . . all the time, but a minister is just like the rest of us folks.
The other radical thing that Rev. Robinson preached is the very core of the tradition: that truth continues to be revealed. Or, more radically, that we human beings continue to find more and more truth, and we must continue to modify our beliefs according to these new truths.
The Separatists did not “do church” as did most of the Christian groups of the time (and still today). Roman Catholicism had developed along the lines of the political systems of the day: emperors, kings, men in charge. Some protestant groups—Lutherans and Anglicans for example—created state religions. These groups saw themselves—dangerously as Rev. Robinson pointed out—as founded on eternal truths. This justified building hierarchies. Top down.
The Separatists, however, believed in the individual discovery (or revelation) of truth. Therefore, they could not accept hierarchy within the congregation. Each member of the congregation was on a separate path toward truth, and as likely as any other member (including clergy) to find it.
As a corollary, the churches the “pilgrims,” and eventually Puritans, set up in Massachusetts were all individual as well. Each congregation discovered truth for itself. This is one reason the Separatist movement eventually fractured into Trinitarian and Unitarian congregations.
Still today, each congregation in the Unitarian Universalist Association is on its own, to choose leaders, to find their own way toward truth. And the “power,” whatever that is, lies within the congregation, not the association of congregations.
Not an ideal way to run a collection of congregations, a “denomination,” of course, but a great way to encourage freedom of conscience and thought.
Yes, the radical protestant movements of Europe were “precious shining lights in their time,” but nowadays, the belief systems they were founded on are for the most part relics of the past, products of minds “who yet saw not all things.” And, as Rev. Robinson said, “This is a misery much to be lamented.” I, for example, as a minister, don’t use the terms “God” or “Christ” at all in my historically humanist congregation. The light has shown my congregation a different path.
That’s the genius of the idea Rev. Robinson preached: truth just keeps on coming.
“By not finding Dunn guilty of murder, the jury could not unanimously conclude that one white man’s imagination was worth more than one black teen’s life.” -Aura Bogado, Jordan Davis: What We’ve Come to Expect, http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/02/what_weve_come_to_expect.html
“Colorlines publisher and executive director of Race Forward, Rinku Sen, was a guest on the Melissa Harris-Perry show to discuss the dimensions of the Michael Dunn case on Sunday. “What Michael Dunn expected from that interaction was not respect but submission,” she said quoting Tonyaa Weathersbee. “Stand Your Ground laws codify that expectation of submission from young black people to white men.” Rinku goes on to explain how the prosecution’s failure to acknowledge that prevents us from truly highlighting the racial dimensions of this case.” http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/02/fighting_stand_your_ground_law_is_the_anti-lynching_movement_of_our_time.html
No one deserves to die
because a White person is
afraid of not being in control.
Source of all that is holy and true,
heart broken by the dis-ease of racism
infecting this nation,
I am calling out this morning.
Calling out beloveds
whose own humanity has been displaced
by the White supremacist culture of America.
Yeah. All my White people.
Calling us in
to revision this country.
Because our own humanity is lost
when we deny it to another.
Because this is no way to live.
Remember?
On a blazingly sunny January morning, I marched into a sanctuary outside of Denver, Colorado behind three huge paper maché puppets.
They were elaborately fashioned, built on backpacks so they could be carried on the backs of their puppeteers:
A brown skinned grandmother, two white braids and a kerchief, a coat hanger twisted into a pair of wire rimmed glasses on her kind face.
A smiling mama, her cheeks pink and a bright red mouth up turned at the sides
A huge little baby, wrapped in a swaddling blanket, paper maché pacifier in her mouth
Behind the puppets, people carried banners: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The colors of the rainbow waving: “Welcome, welcome all and all whom you love.”
Behind the banners marched the ministers and religious educators who had come from down the street and across the country, from East and West, North and South, to celebrate the ministry of a young woman, my colleague and dear friend, Kierstin Homblette.
Kierstin, now Rev. Kierstin, is a community minister serving our Unitarian Universalist Association as the Beloved Community Coordinator for the Denver-Boulder Cluster – seven congregations working together to affect social change in the Rocky Mountains.
Rev. Kierstin’s work includes advocating for Immigration Reform – the puppets are carried by Unitarian Universalists and their community partners in rallies and demonstrations to remind supporters and anti-immigration activists and, perhaps most importantly, lawmakers, that Immigration Reform is about families: about babies and mamas (and daddies) and grandmothers.
Rev. Kierstin also works for full equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer people and families. The rainbow banners, with their waving welcome, celebrating the inherent worth and dignity of all people, reminding us that our communities have work to do to ensure that all are equal. And so people are working together to legalize civil unions (as they recently did in Colorado) and marriage (they are still fighting for that) and caring for LGBTQ youth who are at far greater risk of homelessness, and working to safeguard the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming people, remembering that we are all worthy of a life without fear, and working together to ensure a life of dignity and protection under the law for all people.
As we sang and danced our way into Kierstin’s ordination, we sang the Zulu words of that now familiar song: Siyahamba, Siyahamba ekukhanyeni kwenkos’ We are marching in the light of God.
Nearly two hours later, after Kierstin had accepted the call to ordination from the seven-area congregations and had been presented with the trappings of ministry: the clerical collar she wears to the state Capitol on lobby visits, the robe, symbol of the educated ministry, and the stole, symbol of the preacher; after we had heard words from Martin Luther King Jr. telling us that the salvation of our society would come as love, and love alone; after we had heard the poet Marge Piercy’s words telling us that harvest comes; after Rev. Alicia Forde remind us in an inspired sermon that we are still far from coordinating the Beloved Community – that vision King had and we share, a community of Freedom and Justice through Love – but that we have the tools we need to do so; after we had laid our hands on Rev. Kierstin and offered her our blessings: Love, Laughter, Peace, Courage, Strength…
After all that and much more, we lifted our voices in song once again.
This time in a gospel hymn. “I need you to survive,” we sang.
I need you, you need me, we’re all a part of God’s body.
Stand with me, we sang, believe in me, we’re all a part of God’s body.
I marched out of that sanctuary feeling more alive, more inspired, and more awake to the joy, the possibilities, and the profound nature of what we are doing together in our congregations and in the world than I have felt in a long time.
There is much planting and tending ahead, but in the end, the harvest does come.
With Blessings on and Gratitude for the ministry of Rev. Kierstin Elizabeth Homblette.
The Seven Of Pentacles
by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
I grew up in the Pentecostal church. When I was ten, I knew just how the world would end: “the fire next time.” Tribulations. Seven seals. The four horsemen. Rainstorms of blood and fire. And what was more, this was coming any day now: the present terrible state of the world had been precisely prophesied in the book of Revelation in the bible. All you had to do was read it yourself.
Polls indicate that roughly half of Americans are waiting for some variation on this theme. For some, it’s the Rapture; for some the Second Coming; for others the Apocalypse, but roughly half of Americans are waiting for a supernatural end to human history and the earth.
Why do people think that? There a lots of conjectures—people who feel oppressed, marginalized, or poor often hope for an immediate end to their . . . tribulations. I also suspect the fear of aging and death figures in. After all, if the world ends today, I don’t have to go through the death process. And I suspect that it also has to do with the desire of human beings to live in extraordinary times—I’m special; the end of the world is special; therefore, the world will end while I am alive.
Then there is how we deal with the fact that the end never comes. Oddly enough, it appears to be that rather than giving up on predicting the end when the end doesn’t come, believers merely begin to reinterpret and believe all the more.
Odd. Human nature. Something we need to ponder a bit.
Jakob van Hoddis was a young man in the early part of the Twentieth Century. He was a poet. And a socialist. A German Jew. And he had some mental health issues. He began to ponder the end of the world and wrote this poem, “Weltende.”
Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,
In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei.
Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei
Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.
Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen
An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.
Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen.
Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.
The hat flies off the pointy-headed bourgeois;
in all the winds there’s an echo, like screaming.
Roof tiles fly and break in two
and on the coasts, one reads, it’s flooding.
The storm is here, the wild sea hops
onto land to crush thick dams.
Most people have runny noses.
The trains fall from the bridges.
(author translation)
Now here’s the irony: as a German Jew, as a “degenerate” poet, and as someone with mental health issues, van Hoddis had three strikes as far as the Nazis were concerned. And, indeed, in 1942, the sanitarium where van Hoddis had gone was cleared of its patients and all were killed.
End of the world, wasn’t it? But van Hoddis shows us the irony of apocalyptic literature: it’s wish fulfillment. In the book of Revelation, the bad people, who are people who persecute Christians, get what they deserve. Justice at last reigns supreme.
As a socialist, van Hoddis wanted the upper-middle class to get its comeuppance, and so in the poem, a wind blows the hat off ones pointy head.
You can see this wish-fulfillment tendency for yourself—take a peek at any apocalypse you like, and what you’ll find is the bad guys punished. Sometimes the bad guys are those who aren’t Christian. Sometimes they are warmongers. Sometimes they are the “liberal media.” Sometimes they are the “pointy-headed bourgeois.”
The upshot is always that a power greater than ourselves sets everything right.
You’ve read and heard the descriptions:
And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. (Isaiah 11:6 ASV)
(By the way, the lion lying down with the lamb is not in the bible. That phrase is a conflation of two verses from Isaiah, the other being:)
The wolf and the lamb will graze together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox; and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain, says the Lord. (65:25)
Now wait a minute. Wolves and lambs do not get on well together. And lions don’t eat straw. But this is the problem with apocalypse: it is in its very essence magical thinking. The very nature of our world is that lions are not vegetarian.
So, back to my question: Why is apocalypse so interesting to so many?
Because long-term solutions are not interesting.
Long-term solutions are difficult. And boring. And require committees and task forces and lots and lots of charts and graphs and talking, talking, talking.
Who wants to work on a long-term solution when we can have our cake right now: the wind blows the hats from the middle class and snakes no longer do that gross thing when they digest rats. The serpents take to eating dirt. Nice world!
Unitarian Universalists are guilty too. One of our greatest hits among our hymns is “We’ll Build a Land.” I like it too but some of the lyrics go,
We’ll build a land where we’ll bind up the broken
We’ll build a land where the captives go free
Where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.
Oh, we’ll build a promised land that can be.
Wait a minute! No—it CAN’T be! Gladness does dissolve mourning, yes, but you can’t bottle that and pour it on everyone’s head. Gladness and mourning have to exist side by side, and wolves and lambs are just not going to “graze together.”
That hymn is a great way to buck ourselves up, but for real . . . it ain’t happenin’.
And quick-fixes in the real world turn more often into Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Pinochet’s Chile.
Lions can’t survive on grass. And we human beings are going to fix the problems that we have created . . . or not.
I’m not a prophet, but I can make a couple of predictions that I”m fairly certain of: One, lions will never eat straw . . . and some people will always choose a quick buck over the collective good; and two, “god” will not smite these people (at least in a timely manner). What those two things add up to is this: we are on our own. If anything is going to get fixed, it is up to us to do it. (And we know that our opponents are very content to have us curl up, get angry, and stare at our navels.)
Yet accepting “apocalypse never” liberates us to get down to the tasks at hand.
Scientific theories do not occur in a vacuum. Like poems or paintings, theories reflect the times and characters or their authors. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, far from being a stark and cold scientific theory, was—and continues to be—an impassioned cry for equality and justice. A cry far more grounded and stirring than anything available in the religions that human beings then, and into our own time, tenaciously claim to be the only source and grounding for morality.
First, a little family history: Charles Darwin’s family was passionately involved in the abolition movement. Darwin’s grandfather, the Unitarian Josiah Wedgwood—of Wedgwood china fame—bankrolled Thomas Clarkson, the great British abolitionist. Britain, due in great part to the work of Clarkson, outlawed slavery in the dominions in 1807 and the colonies in 1833.
(A bit of historical trivia: One of the chemists working in the Wedgwood factory was Joseph Priestly, discoverer of oxygen, and a Unitarian minister. )
Charles Darwin’s father, hoping to tone down the radical reputation of the family, had Charles baptized into the Church of England. But it is an interesting fact of history that the father of the theory of natural selection . . . married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a Unitarian, and considerably more radical, at least publicly, than Charles.
The fact remains that when the 22 Charles boarded HMS Beagle in 1831, he was a conventional Christian considering going to seminary and becoming a priest in the Church of England.
What changed?
For the full story, read Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. When we look at Darwin’s life from the perspective of the slavery question, it looks almost inevitable that he should call religion’s bluff concerning its monopoly on morality and show a way toward a higher morality.
In 1845 Darwin wrote,
I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have staid in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. … And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
Darwin knew very well that the appeal to religion as a basis for moral behavior would be one of the first objections to the theory of natural selection. Yes, I think he would have pursued his theory, even if it had meant that human beings had no moral guidepost. But I suspect that Darwin knew that the implications of natural selection point in exactly the opposite direction.
Consider how Darwin framed the discussion:
His first proposal, published in 1859 but written in 1837, was this:
Living things are all one: they are “netted together.” (Darwin avoided the question of the “crown of creation,” human beings, as best he could in his first book.)
Then, in 1871, Darwin dropped the bigger bombshell:
Humanity is all one.
And therefore, we must strive toward a higher morality than that which we have developed thus far. Darwin wrote, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Darwin was a naturalist. He observed the “facts on the ground.” He heard the cries of a slave being beaten. He knew that slavery persisted in the United States and many parts of the world. The conclusion was plain: Religion is not sufficient to make individuals or governments behave in moral or ethical ways.
Darwin knew that, despite pretensions, Christianity—and the other human religions— more often underwrite and condone the prejudices of societies than point in the direction of a higher morality, a more good and just society. You don’t have to be Darwin in the mid-Nineteenth Century to see that!
I’m not an extremist concerning the effects of religion because, frankly, I think people will be people, no matter what the religious or political overlay . . . on an individual level, that is. The evidence is all around us: The vast majority of human beings are basically “good,” meaning most of us don’t hurt others all that often. Most of us don’t steal things . . . all that often. Most of us behave in ways that add up to going along to get along.
Most of us aren’t Jesus. Or Gandhi. Or Martin Luther King, but we’re not Stalin or John Wayne Gacy either. Most people—Christian, Muslim, or atheist—go along to get along.
That’s on an individual level. Religions get dangerous in the aggregate—when those systems begin to say who can enslave whom; who can subjugate whom; who can kill whom for what set of reasons.
Consider again what Darwin said about slavery and the treatment of slaves:
And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
It is the aggregate that creates the evil, by “palliating”—by underwriting and condoning—the evil deeds.
But in the face of this fact Darwin saw, as perhaps no other human being had ever yet seen, that adaptations are adaptations, brain cells are brain cells. In humans. In primates. In animals. “We are all netted together,” Darwin wrote.
We are still on the frontier of this way of thinking. William Shakespeare long ago said, “A touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” It took Charles Darwin to tell us just how true this is. And we still don’t comprehend it: We are all netted together.
Where, then, is the uniqueness of human beings?
Consciousness. Not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether the sun is shining; not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether it is good or bad to sleep with particular people. The sort of consciousness that allows us to think about the thoughts of others—other people; other animals. This is the most complex form or consciousness. It is moral conscience.
Before Darwin the answer to the question, “why does consciousness exist?” was, “Poof! It’s magic! Set off by the divine spark . . .” After Darwin, the answer is not so neat and tidy. But the answer we have points the way toward a higher morality. Darwin put it this way: “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
This is the profundity of the theory of natural selection: far from making us mere animals, as the religious often claim, natural selection calls us to see beyond the limitations of our time and place. Natural selection posits a mode of being beyond the mere going along to get along. Natural selections tells us to control our basic impulses. Not because those are animal impulses—all our impulses are animal impulses—but because the sort of animal we are can see beyond our selves.
For the last couple of days my Facebook feed has been full of tributes to the late, great Pete Seeger—as well it should be. A genuinely remarkable man, Seeger spent his long life seeking justice, fighting oppression, telling the truth as he understood it, even in situations where the truth was most unwelcome. (If you haven’t seen the transcript of when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, do yourself a favor and read it.) He stood in front of the crowds to protest war, and he sailed up and down the Hudson River fighting pollution. But more than that, he had a gift for bringing people together, for turning a crowd into a community through the power of song.
He was extraordinary, but here’s what strikes me. Anybody who really wanted to could do what he did. Sure, he was a good musician, but there are lots of people with better voices—walk into any college conservatory in the country and you’ll find a singer with a rounder tone, a more operatic sound. Sure, he was good on the guitar and the banjo, but there are people in my personal acquaintance who are better. He wrote some wonderful songs, but they’re hardly models of musical sophistication. His talent was considerable, but not really anything amazing—maybe not even all that special.
What was so incredible about Pete Seeger was not any singular gift or talent. What we celebrate, what we remember, was not a man who could do things no other person could, but rather a man who spent his whole very long life walking with a whole heart toward what he believed in. Whether it was his 70-year relationship with his beloved wife Toshi or an afternoon’s connection with a crowd at a concert or a protest, Pete was fully present, fully engaged, ready to be connected. He was a man who knew the power of the people, and who used the considerable force of his personality not to draw attention to himself, but rather to engage people with each other, and with their ability to create positive change. He gave himself, and he kept giving—not as a martyr, but as someone who found great joy in the giving.
He had, in short, the power of the music. Not the power of musicianship; not the prodigy talents of a Mozart or a Yo-Yo Ma. No, Pete Seeger had the power of living in his music, living through his music. He knew the power of music to tell truths in ways that people could hear them. He knew the power of music to draw folks together through the interweaving of voices. He understood the power of music to raise energy, to call forth energy, to move people forward. He sang, and invited people to sing with him, because he understood the deep connection between music and love, and between love and justice.
And he just kept on doing it, decade after decade. We’ve lost a unique spirit this week, a man who put his whole heart into everything he did, a man who had a whole heart, unbroken by cynicism or despair. But I think what he would want us to know is that any of us could do what he did. Any of us could stand up to injustice, work for peace, speak our truth, sing out and keep singing. Any of us could be an instrument of freedom, of joy, of connection and the power of the gathered will of the people. Any of us could. Pete Seeger did.
I was taught in seminary to do ministry with sacred texts in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Our theological and ethical musings are of no consequence if they cannot be applied to what is happening outside the walls of our congregations, if they do not speak to people’s lives.
As the Affordable Care Act comes into effect this month, I’d been wanting to do an in depth exploration of how our Unitarian Universalist values support the struggle for universal health care.
And then I had a baby.
And so it was in between diaper changes, that I heard NPR coverage of the botched rollout of the ACA, of website crashes and governors of some of the poorest states refusing to expand Medicaid as originally called for.
In between feedings, I caught glimpses of newspaper editorials decrying coverage gaps and lower-than-anticipated-enrollment.
As the health care debate raged on, I set up payment plans for our own hospital bills and accepted the care of family and friends who brought food and loving hands to help. I argued with my insurance company about covering portions of my prenatal care, and I applied to enroll my daughter in Connecticut’s HUSKY (Medicaid) program.
And as the pundits went at it, one of my best friends continued her battle with cancer, and another was in a horrific accident that left him in a coma with a devastating brain injury.
Over the past few months, I have seen more early morning light than ever before. As I sit up in the pre-dawn hours feeding my newborn babe, heartsick for my friends, I wrap myself in a prayer shawl, sky blue.
As my heart holds the exquisite joy of new life and the devastation of illness and loss, I sink into the softness of the shawl and the love of friends and the love of God, and I pray for healing, for wholeness, for peace.
I pray that my spouse and I might find the strength and the will to care well for the tiny person entrusted simply by her birth into our care. And, knowing full well that we cannot protect her from harm or shelter her from hurt all the days of her life, I pray that we might have the courage to be a part of creating the kind of world we would like for her to live in. I share all of this, because I have found that the topic of health care quickly becomes deeply personal. It is crucial that we move beyond facts and figures and media sound bytes, that we reflect on how we are cared for, how we care for others and what kind of society we want to create together.
When it comes to equitable health care, I start with our connectedness, our interdependence.
King wrote these words we read this morning from his cell in a Birmingham jail, calling on white clergy to join the struggle for civil rights : “We are,” he said, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” This is a spiritual understanding of human relations that compels us to care for each other – all of us, even those we might not first see as our neighbors.
Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed writes: “The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.” Understanding ourselves as connected, each to all, we know that stranger and friend alike are our neighbors, and that love and compassion are the foundation of the vision we share with King – and with so many others – a vision of a society in which all are provided for and cared for equally.
People of faith do not need to know once-and-for-all how to fix the brokenness of our health care system. We do need to continually lift up the vision of a society grounded in love of neighbor, rooted in compassion for all, and transformed by care.
We do need to hold together the joy of new life and the devastation of illness and loss, and to celebrate the wondrous love that binds us together. We do need to pray for healing, for wholeness, for peace.
I pray that as a nation, we might have the will to care for each other well.
And I pray that each of us might have the courage to be a part of building the society we dream of.
The ACA gives us a tiny nudge us toward that goal. We have a long way yet to go.
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