When Doubting is an Act of Faith

Reading: "Cherish Your Doubts "By Robert T Weston

Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the attendant of truth.
Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge; it is the servant of discovery.
A belief which may not be questioned binds us to error, for there is incompleteness and imperfection in every belief.
Doubt is the touchstone of truth; it is an acid which eats away the false.
Let no one fear the truth, that doubt may consume it; for doubt is a testing of belief.
The truth stands boldly and unafraid; it is not shaken by the testing:
For truth, if it be truth, arises from each testing stronger, more secure.
Those that would silence doubt are filled with fear; their houses are built on shifting sands.
But those who fear not doubt, and know its use, are founded on rock.
They shall walk in the light of growing knowledge; the work of their hands shall endure.
Therefore let us not fear doubt, but let us rejoice in its help:
It is to be the wise as a staff to the blind; doubt is the attendant of truth.

Reflection: 

That reading  is one I remember from the Unitarian Universalist church of my childhood. In that congregation many had come from other faith traditions where they had doubted and questioned what was taught, and perhaps had been told explicitly or implicitly that doubt was not okay. How wonderful to find a UU church where we were encouraged to “cherish our doubts” and believed that truth could stand up to doubt, could stand up to testing. This theme, this willingness to doubt goes all the way back to the beginning of the Unitarian tradition- Consider Michael Servetus, a 16th century physician and early thinker of Unitarianism who wrote a book questioning the trinitarian dogma of the church called “On Errors of the Trinity” which got him in a lot of trouble for questioning church doctrine. If you’ve got doubts, you are in the right place.

In my childhood home we had a creek in our backyard and the neighborhood kids loved to walk from rock to rock across the creek. You learn after a few stumbles to test each rock as you go- how solid and stable is it? I think growing up UU gives me a sort of confidence, a faith that it’s worth testing and sorting through what we assume to be true -- like walking across the stones in the creek. It’s in our 4th principle: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning. I came across this perfect exchange in my novel this week- 2 scientists talking about what they are learning form their research:

One says --“We knew that, though.”
The other replies -- “We suspected it.”
“Do we know it now?”
“We suspect it harder,” “We’re scientists We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.” [Leviathan Falls p. 151]

I confess to you that the events of the past few years have got me doubting a lot of things that I thought were settled truth in my own mind. It’s not comfortable to see the bedrock beliefs you were standing on suddenly seem shaky and cracked, “why-- if that’s not true, what else isn’t true?” As unsettling as this time has been, continues to be, that testing becomes more and more important- what is real, now even after all that change. What can we count on? And what has changed, and what did we get wrong?

The wisdom story we shared this morning, The Scared Little Rabbit from the Buddhist tradition, reminds us that it really is important to inquire and investigate the assumptions that drive our actions. “never be led by hearsay, test all things for yourself.”

But doubt is a double-edged sword. We see in our culture today a knee jerk or reflexive doubting that is not “a servant of discovery” but a blunt weapon. One person I know battled Covid for weeks in the hospital and when he was finally sent home told his circle “I don’t believe I really ever had Covid” I know a lot of us have had similar experiences- friends, neighbors and family who believe what they read on social media over what their own doctors tell them, over the evidence of their own bodies.

Or consider how destabilizing it is for our democracy for the results of every election is doubted even after independent investigations, and close scrutiny of data and facts show that the results are sound.

In h The Tibetan book of Living and Dying Sogyal Rimpoche writes, 

“our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh and least useful aspects of our intelligence. We have become so falsely “sophisticated” and neurotic that we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt that is nothing more than ego’s desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom is deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge. … not the open-souled and generous doubt that Buddha assured us was necessary for testing and probing the worth of the teachings, but a destructive form of doubt that leaves us nothing to believe in, nothing to hope for, and nothing to live by.” [p. 123]

This calls to mind our 5th source is -- “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.” I think part of what Sogyal Rimpoche is saying is that doubt itself can become an idolatry.

“Doubt is the touchstone of truth; it is an acid which eats away the false.” To extend that metaphor, acid eats away a lot of things, some of which are quite important to us.

Consider democracy: Clearly our system of government privileges some voices over others. If democracy is going to live up to our values, we must use our questioning, doubting minds to create a more equal government for all. At the same time- who knew democracy was so fragile? Who knew that it relied so heavily on all of us agreeing that it was important, that we wanted it to succeed, that if we all agreed on the rules of the game and followed those same rules we could trust the outcome?

Consider relationships: how constant doubting the loyalty, affection, friendship of the other can corrode the trust between you. It’s the plot of just about every Rom-com that one protagonist doubts, and so the other doubts. I think most people at one time or another have defended their tender hearts by doubting everyone, keeping at bay connections that might have been supportive and compassionate. This is the kind of heavy-handed doubt Sogyal Rinpoche is talking about. But this is the very nature of friendship, of love -- to risk putting weight on the relationship like reaching out your toe to that rock in the stream. We risk opening our heart, and hope the other does too. When we meet all people with skepticism, we limit and put at risk our relationships. We give each other the benefit of the doubt, (interesting phrase that) relationship becomes possible.

Consider our sense of self, our own worthiness. Teacher and Poet John O’Donohue writes:

Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

I can’t offer you any proof that each person has inherent worth and dignity, and I’ll get real with you for a moment here, there are definitely times when I wonder- what is my worth? But if I try to head off my fears using doubt as a defense mechanism, I could easily dim that “hesitant light”. Instead we can try a more subtle use of doubt, like an experiment. If we have an old voice of judgement in our minds, that says “you’re no good” can we bring our skillful doubt to that, and ask “really? How do I know that? Where does that question come from? What other conclusions are possible given the facts of this moment?” What if we lived our lives as if we had inherent worth and dignity, investigating and exploring questions about what the worth of our lives have been to myself and to our community. Such an experiment could help us grow in self knowledge and wisdom.

Sogyal Rinpoche tells us: 

“The Buddha summons us to another kind of doubt, ‘like analyzing gold, scorching, cutting and rubbing it to tests its purity.’ ... In the place of our contemporary nihilistic form of doubt, then, I would ask you to put what I call a “noble doubt” the kind of doubt that is an integral part of the path toward enlightenment” [p. 124]

Consider Community: Because of our human capacity to co-regulate, to effect each others nervous systems unconsciously, both anxiety and resilience are sort of infectious. Feeling trust and safety or feeling distrust and fear are both contagious. Our distrust can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a way we make our community trustworthy by deciding together, as a collective that it is trustworthy. I have seen this beloved community month after month, year after year, discuss heavy and challenging things together, and when we start from that gracious assumption of good intent the discussions are deep and meaningful. I’ve also seen meetings where there is a deep distrust in one another, a suspicion that infects the relationship. I’ve seen communities rooted in distrust tear themselves apart. There’s a paradox there- trust has to be earned, but it can’t be earned if we don’t risk. Also, trust is a subtle and complex thing, just as doubt is. Trust is specific and personal. For example, I had a friend who was often 45 minutes late for our get-togethers. I could have painted with a broad stroke, assumed “she untrustworthy” but if I used a finer stroke I noticed the many ways she was trustworthy, and in fact she was quite reliable about always being late. I decided I would always meet her at my place or hers and bring a book in case she was running behind. Like the fine brushes of an archeologist, we brush away the dust until what is true and solid emerges.

As I was looking for hymns this week, I sung through #293 “O Star of Truth”. The tune is nice but it ends with the phrase “though I be lone and weary” and I thought, that’s not the kind of doubt I want to encourage today- doubt that isolates us and makes us weary. I am talking about the kind of doubt that can happen within beloved community – our community can help us be accountable, challenge us. We aspire to be that kind of community that can say “I have a different point of view”

And of course when we have evidence to the contrary- for example the wrong link is in the newsletter, the preacher uses the wrong word for something -- we try to again assume good intent behind the mistake, and also to make course corrections as we go. We know for a fact our leaders, or members, our tradition is fallible. Rev. Rebecca Parker once said what she admired most about UUs was that we understood something about what it is to be human. We know that we make mistakes, and we know that we learn and grow. We come together in community as fallible, growing, evolving humans, and part of the reason I love this congregation is because I trust that if I make a mistake, you will ask me about it in a gentle loving way- “the 28th is a Tuesday, did you mean worship would be on a Tuesday, or that it will be on Sunday the 26th?”

Sogyal Rinpoche writes: 

“Don’t let us take doubts with exaggerated seriousness, or let them grow out of proportion, or become black-and-white or fanatical about them. What we need to learn is how slowly to change our culturally conditioned and passionate involvement with doubt into a free humorous and compassionate one. This means giving doubts time, and giving ourselves time to find answers to our questions that are not merely intellectual or “philosophical” but living and real and genuine and workable. Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately; but if we are patient a space can be created within us, in which doubts can be carefully and objectively examined, unraveled, dissolved and healed.”

On the spiritual path we will experience doubt, I know I do. Our task then is the subtle discernment of what is trustworthy -- in our religious tradition, in our community, in ourselves. It’s an easy habit to let our doubts convince us that nothing is trustworthy, to let our cynicism coat everything with a single shade of paint. Could we instead engage with doubt in a way that is “ free, humorous and compassionate?” Could we hold our doubts like an artist’s paintbrush with subtlety and skill to reveal a living and complex reality? Your doubts are welcome here- let us support one another as we test the stones beneath our feet, and trust that which we find to be trustworthy.

Resilience

When my son was little, there was a coin operated machine at the front of grocery store that had bouncy balls in them. You could get a little ball for a quarter, and a bigger one for 2 quarters. We ended up with quite a collection over the years, which I dug out for this sermon. You never know which balls are going to be the best bouncers until you got one out of the machine and toss it at the ground. Some balls bounce so high, others would hit the ground with a thud and roll disappointingly away. Bouncy balls are all about resilience- that moment when your rubber ball hits the floor, or the wall, and kind of smushes down, deforms, and then snaps back to its regular round ball shape. Resilience makes bouncy balls bouncy.

Everything is more or less resilient. Youtube and TikTok are full of people throwing objects at the floor or wall and noticing what bounces, what splats and what shatters into a million bits.

When we are talking about humans, we use the word “resilience” in kind of a poetic way for what helps us “bounce back” body mind and spirit from the ordinary and major pressures of life. I know I’ve had moments where I feel kind of brittle and fragile, times when I land on the floor with a splat and just stay there and other times when I feel totally up to bouncing back from what life hands me. All mammals, like us, need to have a range of how “aroused” we are. For sitting in church, for example, we need to be pretty still, be able to sit quietly-ish. More quietly than, for example, playing a game of tennis. In the normal week or day we go up and down all day long.

But sometimes something happens in our lives that is so important that we have evolved the ability to shut down some of our basic maintenance functions like resting, digesting, healing, connecting with family and friends. This part of your brain notices the car that came out of nowhere and jams on the breaks before your thinking mind is even paying attention. Like in a Star Trek episode, when the captain commands “divert all power to shields”, or engines, or wherever it is needed for the current existential crisis. Sometimes it shuts us down and us be so still and quiet the danger passes us by- that’s the freeze response. Rev. Soto described that so evocatively in our reading: “when the world is heavy, like wet laundry, dragging from Your arms.”

Those are amazing adaptations that has helped us and other animals survive for millennia, but pretty quickly when the threat has passed we need to divert power back to life support. Most of the challenges we meet in our daily lives can be done without that, and in fact, we do most things better when our nervous system is in the Goldilocks zone, or what adults usually call it “the resilience zone.”

Resmaa Menakem says in My Grandmother’s Hands (which he wrote back in 2017) that one kind of event likely to cause trauma in most people is a pandemic – so we all know something about trauma in some way. If we’ve learned nothing else these past 3 years, it’s that sometimes things happen that make us feel like we “can’t even” what neuro science is helping us understand is that … you’re right. Your ability to “even” is just not available sometimes, this is because you are out of your “resilience zone”

There have been great advances in our understanding of what trauma does to the nervous system, particularly through the research at the VA about soldiers with PTSD, and the studies of adverse childhood experiences. (An important overview of this work can be found in The Body Keeps the Score.) People who have lived through many kinds of traumas get stuck in survival mode, and have a very narrow resilience zone, it doesn’t take much to make them feel like they are in danger.

The good news is that researchers are finding is that healing happens best when we can grow our resilience zone. That even folks like you and me who are not neuroscientists or clinicians, we can grow our resiliency zone for ourselves and we can help grow the resilience of our communities. The Trauma Resource Institute developed something called the “Community Resiliency Model” (CRM) based on the ideas that “People are resilient. Any person can learn self regulation skills based on science. The skills of well-being can reduce suffering.” And that each of us learn what works for us.

When in the Resilient Zone one is able to handle the stresses of life; You can be annoyed or even angry but do not feel like you will lose your head. You can feel sad without feeling like you can’t get out of bed. And because of neuroplasticity (the lifelong capacity of the brain to change and rewire itself in response to the stimulation of learning and experience) we can grow that resilience zone.

So today we focus on resilience, offering just a couple of the practices taught by the CRM and backed by science that help you get back to that ordinary middle- the resilience zone. A what I’m sharing with you today comes from Trauma Resource institute, which has gone all around the world training communities which have faced trauma. It’s a way normal people can support themselves and each others even when there is no expert around. Ordinary things you could do anywhere.

I’m not going to try to explain the science of WHY this works, but you might look at the work of Steven Porges and the Polyvagal theory if you are curious.  [Here's another helpful summary] We already did 3:

• Coming to our senses
• Comforting Gesture (The butterfly hug is a good one)
• Grounding

But the most important starting place is that everything is optional. This goes well with our UU belief that you have an inner wisdom that is the ultimate source of authority about how it is to be you, so if I or someone else suggests anything that doesn’t feel right, feel free to skip it, or do something else that does feel right. Everyone has a different nervous system, we’ve all faced different challenges.

So the first thing is just to check in with yourself, to notice how you feel right now. Content? Anxious? Sleepy? Just notice how it feels to be you right now.

Notice someplace in your body that feels good or neutral (I'm noticing the side of my leg feels pretty neutral) and remember you can always can bring attention to that place.

The final practice I want to offer you now is called “resourcing” [this practice comes from CRM] this just means “bringing to mind Something that makes you feel calm, joyful, or contented....or confident, strong, and alive It could be.... a person, a place, an activity you enjoy, an internal strength, an external support.

Take a moment and call to mind some things that are resources for you
Now pick one and think of 3 details about your resource.
You can write them down, or draw them, or share them with a friend.
As you listen to your companion, or read over what you've written, or look at your drawing, notice what happens on the inside.

If that doesn’t sound like the right practice for you right now, I invite you to go back to a different practice that seems right to you. 

This takes practice- when we trying to grow that resilience zone, it’s like exercising a muscle. And so especially at first it’s good to practice when you are doing okay – justice notice what’s happening on the inside, offer yourself a practice that feels right to you for the situation you are in. Call to mind a resource, notice what you can seen, hear, touch, just as a reminder to our nervous system about our resilience. When we practice widening our resilience zone, then we increase our capacity to stay present with one another and stay awake to the concerns that need our attention.

The resilience zone is where learning happens, growth happens, creativity, relationship building. Resting, digesting. That’s why we gather together for memorial services, for example, so that we can help each other grieve and “be sad but not feel like you will be washed away by the river of sorrows.” Actually, many aspects of the way we do church probably evolved to help us arrive in the resilience zone. Take a moment to look around you at the beautiful tapestry of people gathered together- in person, on zoom. Remember the sounds of the beautiful music we heard earlier in the service. Resourcing is something we do a lot in church - remembering together the things that give us strength and hope. That’s part of why we share our joys and sorrows. Even social hour- eating and drinking together helps grow that resilience zone, if you having an interesting conversation, you know you’re in the zone, and if you can’t even, that’s okay too. We support one another as we learn and grow in our resilience.

Hope, Change and Evolution

Story: Learning to Eat

Did anyone eat breakfast this morning? 
How did you learn to do that? 

Have you ever seen a baby learning how to eat solid food?
Someone would offer maybe a finger or a spoon dipped in baby food, and you can see the look on the baby’s face- like WOW- WHAT IS THAT!
Then usually they spit it back out, until through a process of trial and error, they learn to swallow it.

It is a messy process. That is why babies wear bibs, because sometimes as much food ends up on the floor as gets into the baby’s mouth.

They learn how to get the applesauce off that rubber baby spoon, and eventually to hold the spoon or crust of bread in their own hand, and eventually by watching other people, with practice
and the helpful advice of parents and caregivers
they get to the point where they can eat their own breakfast and most of it gets into their mouths instead of their hair and table and clothing. It takes a long time.

Now, here’s a hard one- how did you learn how to turn breakfast into tissue- like eyes and skin and heart?
Everyone knows it, right? You don’t have to study that in school. You just… know

Not all living things eat what we eat for breakfast, but every living thing eats.

For billions of years animals and plants and bacteria have been eating,
that is to say, turning the proteins of their food into the proteins they need in their own bodies

When the first cells learned to do this, they couldn’t write it down, they didn’t have religious education classes to teach it to the young folks  

instead the special new thing one bacteria can do, is passed on to its children and to its children’s children through its DNA,
(that’s the code written in the cells of our bodies that makes us- us)

We are used to thinking of ancestors as our grandparents and our great great grandparents. We don’t often think about single celled organisms billions of years ago as our ancestors.

And these ancestors, they left us a gift, us and all their children. They left us the pattern for how to turn breakfast into, well… us.

They left it to us in our DNA, along with all the other patterns we need
to make lungs and to breathe into them,
to make blood and circulate it through our bodies,
to make brains that think and learn.

Our DNA is like the most amazing encyclopedia ever.
Everyone here in this room knows how to eat breakfast because
not only did our parents spend all those meals showing us
not only did we try and try again with applesauce on our face and spaghetti on the floor
But over millions of generations Life itself learns.

Reflection: Hope, Change and Evolution

Why do we celebrate Evolution Weekend? It’s partly because our UU sources encourage us to “heed the guidance of reason and the results of science,” and indeed our faith grew up alongside science when it was a brand new way of looking at the world. Darwin himself was raised by a Unitarian mother and went with her to her Unitarian chapel. Says the National Center of Science Education “One goal of [evolution weekend] is to … demonstrate that religious people from many different denominations and faith traditions understand that evolution is sound science, and that, properly understood as science, it poses no problem for their faith.”[i] I would go one step further and say that when we take a long loving look at the world around us, it can be a source of our faith. The body of the earth, and our bodies, and the history we all share can be a kind of scripture, to which we turn when we are troubled and need wisdom and hope.

We take part in Evolution weekend to practice that long loving look at the real, with science as our magnifying glass. We tell the story of the history of how our universe, how our ecosystems evolved through millennia because the story gives us hope, which is something we all need very much. When we look at the many real troubles of our world and feel powerless, as individual humans, and even as a people together - I know there are times when I wonder “are we up to this challenge?” In such moments we need a source of hope that is larger than our human selves. Because we are theologically diverse here, we are atheists, theists and agnostics, when we need a source of hope outside ourselves, when we feel like even all of humanity together is not enough, I am reassured to remember that life itself has been solving overwhelming problems since long before there were humans.

Because most of us are not scientists, and sometimes our eyes glaze over when we hear the word “Cytochrome-c” storytellers are trying to turn the raw facts of peer reviewed science into stories ordinary people can understand and remember and turn to for hope.

Our Universe story is full of moments when life solved overwhelming problems through the process of evolution; just one example of this is the problem of what we are going to eat. Those first living cells feasted on the chemical nutrients which were abundant until they ate them all up. This crisis was met with the stunning evolution of an ancestor who evolved to photosynthesize 3.9 million years ago, to capture photons and turn them into energy. When this new process of using the suns rays for energy, eating the light for food, produced a deadly gas --overpowering clouds of oxygen which was toxic to all life forms then on our earth. the first single celled organisms to use oxygen for fuel spontaneously adapted in response to this huge crisis.

In our story this morning, we talked about how we inherited the capacity to disassemble grains and transform them into the building blocks of our own lives. One of the tools we inherited that allows us to do this is Cytochrome-c-- an enzyme[ii] in our cells that is important in the breakdown of food molecules. It is found in large, complicated organisms like trees, alligators, and us, and also found in little one celled bacteria. It has existed for a very long time, but not always. The primal single-cell organisms first put together this very useful enzyme billions of years ago. And it was so useful that it has been handed down ever since.

But life can’t hand down a molecule the way my grandmother handed down a recipes; molecules don’t last forever. Instead the same pattern of nucleotides used by the first organisms to make Cytochrome-c was passed on to us and our bodies use that pattern today to make brand new Cytochrome-c proteins which help turn grains and bread into flesh and blood. For as long as there have been cells, even those very first primal Prokaryote cells, they have had this capacity to reproduce patterns. These patterns are tucked into our DNA[iii], and the very first pattern they had to learn was how to re-create life. Without those patterns life on earth would have been a momentary blip.

But how did our ancestors back over 2 billion years ago “learn” to turn food into useful stuff? The way scientists believe this works is that as DNA is passed on mother to child, sometimes by chance little changes happen (and what we are learning now is that not all of those changes happen by chance- some changes are sort of lying dormant in the DNA and are triggered by the environment). These slight differences in the patterns of the nucleotides lead to differences in the proteins within the cell. Huge numbers, possibly millions of such “slightly different” proteins are made this way before one of these slightly-changed patterns holds within it a unique gift that helps that cell to survive, and this genetic pattern for –say - cytochrome c, is passed on to its children and following generations until, if it is a very useful gene, it is spread throughout the population.

Much as one baby learns to eat food through trial and error, thousands of generations of living beings “learn” through living out different patterns, some successful, some unsuccessful, which patterns allow life to flourish and thrive. But unlike the baby learning to eat solid food, it is not any one individual who learns, instead it is life’s long process of adapting through trial and error, and then remembering through these patterns and so passing on what is learned to future generations.

Brian Swimme is a professor and writer that has spent his career trying to take all that complex science information about our past and turn it into a story those of us who haven’t had a science class since high school can remember. As Swimme and Tucker say in their book The Journey of the Universe “It is life as a whole that learned to digest its various foods.” In this way, Swimme and Tucker write:

“Though life’s creativity is a groping and sometimes chaotic process it is also a learning process. The connotation in modern English of the verb “to learn” is that of an individual acquiring a new skill, but with the discovery of biological evolution, we have a new insight into the way the ancient process of evolution can be understood as a higher-level form of “learning” we can begin with a simple question “Who has learned to transform food into flesh?” We humans certainly had nothing to do with the construction of the physiological processes involved. Nor can we think of the early bacteria that first generated the cytochrome c protein as having any idea of what their invention might one day be used for. No, it was not any individual who learned this. It was rather life’s whole process of adaption and memory that was responsible for this new ability. It is life as a whole that learned to digest its various foods.  [Journey of the Universe p. 60-61]

It’s really quite amazing – the stunning intelligence of the forms life takes, from the nuclei of a single cell, to the amazing complexity of a leopard or a human body. For a long time creationists took the point of view that this beauty and complexity proved a divine entity was at work. Science took the mechanistic view that life was more like a machine, randomly creating mutations until we hit the lottery and through endless combination came up with something amazing, like photosynthesis. Today some scientists are starting to wonder- is it possible that life’s yearning, life’s striving, life’s urgent need could in some way guide our evolution? In the same way that I know I am existentially different from a toaster, could life itself have in its growing and learning and evolving something beyond the nihilism of meaningless chance?

But I digress. For things like breaking down grains into the more useful proteins that are the building blocks of our bodies, we rely on a legacy going back billions of years in our DNA. This happens entirely outside our consciousness. Not only does this story give me evidence for the hope that life can overcome great obstacles, but also that within each one of us, within our very cells is a great library of information from our ancestors. Now not every being gets a copy of every pattern. Flying, for example, is a piece of the pattern you and I did not get. Breathing air and photosynthesizing are both amazing skills critical to our balanced biosphere, but we got one and plants got the other. No one set of DNA has the learning of all our ancestors, so in a way life’s learning is a community activity. We need all this great diversity of genetic patterns present in all the living things to preserve the tremendous knowledge needed to sustain life on earth.

Humanity, life on earth, we in this congregation face challenges we’ve never faced before. So what do we do? In her book Earth Path Starhawk finds hope in how our non-human ancestors have faced the great challenges. “Those simple, one-celled beings were already experimenting with different forms. Some were long and skinny and wriggled and swam. Some were round and fat. Some adapted to hot and some to cold. And always they were trading genes, shifting forms, changing and transforming.” Like our earliest ancestors we experiment, we try stuff. All the great advances in life came from trying all kinds of things, being creative, experimenting.

Then, we learn from our experiments- we notice what worked, what didn’t work. Fortunately it’s not just our brains that do the learning, it’s our bodies too, it’s the bodies of every living thing on the planet trying to solve the problem of how life can thrive. And just as our families pass on to us the knowledge of how to bake bread, our genes pass on to our descendants how to digest it.

As much as I long to know the answers to life’s pressing problems, sometimes our job is just to experiment and try stuff, in community with all the incredibly diverse forms of life on our biosphere.

This story fills me up with gratitude and wonder for the legacy we carry in our very cells filled with the wisdom of 4 billion years of life on this earth. Our human lives are only a small chapter in this epic adventure, but life is evolving through us, and new chapters are still being written.

As people who honor the evolution of life on this planet, we know that massive change is possible, and that life strives, clings, fights for life. Joanna Macy, Buddhist teacher and activist once, remarked “Evolutionary pressures want us to survive.” Evolution is the transformation of species and eco-system to increase the odds that life in all its abundance and variety will survive. Sometimes this comes through radical change, change as radical as the first plants who photosynthesized light into food, as radical as learning to breathe air, as radical as holding the first tool. The survival of life counts on our capacity to change, to evolve as the world itself changes and evolves.Swimme and Tucker write:

 “When we today remember that the energy of our lives comes from the original flaring forth of the universe, and that the atoms of our bodies come from the explosion of ancient stars, and that the patterns of our lives come from many ancestors over billions of years, we begin to appreciate the intricate manner in which life remembers the past and brings it into fresh form today. Life adapts. Life remembers. Life Learns.” (p. 61)

We have not reached the end of our evolution as a biosphere, nor have we reached the end of our evolution as a species. I offer this as a very nerdy and concrete source of hope -- when hope is hard to find, remember that life itself wants us to succeed, to survive, to creatively overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges as we have since the dawn of life.

Legacy Trees

The trees I see best from my front porch in downtown Ithaca are the Ginkos and honey locusts across the street on that strip of land planted by the City between sidewalk and street. They are taller by a story or 2 than the homes around them, and right now, with the branches bare of leaves, you can see large nests of several species. I know I’ve seen squirrels and Jays go in and out of those nests- and some of those nests have been there longer than I’ve lived in my house- so the nests themselves pass generation to generation. The squirrels use the canopy, a continuity of trees to travel safely out of the way of cats and cars to food and water. Last summer I watched the young squirrels first venture out of their nest in the honey locust climb out and learn travel across the street to my little Japanese Lilac, younger and smaller, where my bird feeder hangs. I watched, over the course of just a week or 2 as they grew bolder and braver and more skillful. Something about just sitting and watching the trees and all the activity of those who call them home is deeply and easily healing to my spirit.

For many of us paying attention to nature is an important spiritual practice. In her book Circle Round: Raising Children In The Goddess Traditions Diane Baker writes “One of my primary goals as a parent is to help my children revere earth, and discover the powerful correlation between loving nature and living the Goddess.” She shares her personal motto, “Studying nature is learning divinity.” … [392] So when you are staring out your window watching a squirrel scamper, we might not realize we are learning divinity. It’s a lovely spiritual practice, and one place to start paying attention to and knowing the trees around you- In that same book Starhawk writes “No Thealogy, no ritual can do as much to teach children to love nature as a friendship with a real tree. A fruit tree in your backyard, a favorite climbing tree, a host to a bird’s nest or a newly planted sapling can become a source of joy and connection for your child. I still remember the tree my friend Barry and I most loved to climb when I was nine years old. I still mourn the magnificent sycamore I could see from our kitchen window that our neighbors cut down years ago.” [p. 386]

I wonder, sometimes, as I sit there on the porch, what would happen to all those birds and squirrels, not to mention the moss and lichen and all the unseen critters and plants who depend on those trees, if that Honey Locust tree was cut down.

It is part of the job of the Ithaca City Forester makes the hard decisions about which trees need to be removed. She has to weigh things like what branches could be a danger to passing pedestrians, cars and buildings. She also has to take a long view about the urban forest as a whole- for example if you replace all the trees at one time, then the new generation will be set up to die off around the same time. I watch as they choose a couple trees in each neighborhood to cut down each summer, and replace them with young trees. By young, we probably mean at least 10 years old, taller than me. On one property where they took down the biggest oldest tree on the block, an ancient maple it would have taken at least 2 people to get their arms around in a hug, which had been dropping branches and was starting to decay in places, they carefully replaced it with a young fruit tree. Obviously this is not an even swap. Not even the smallest bird or squirrel can live in the young tree. It’s certainly not providing the same carbon sink of a big tree, or helping clean the air like a big tree. And remember much of a tree extends below where the soil, where it is an important part of the community of underground life as well. On my daily walks during this transition I could see the huge hole left by the roots of this great tree, and the comparatively tiny root ball of the new one.

The new tree provides no shade, but on the up side I think my neighbor likes all the sunshine, and you can see the rapid influx of sun loving plants that are sprouting up under the tiny fruit tree that never could have lived under that old Maple.

As hard as it is to see one old tree go down in a neighborhood full of wonderful trees in all stages of life, I appreciate that commitment to sustaining a multi-generational urban forest. When the city of Ithaca did that major reconstruction on the commons, they thought long and hard about the trees there. Ultimately they had to take out many trees to do the renovations, since their root system was right where the plumbing needed to be, they left a couple of older trees in bank alley and designed the new walkway to flow around them, preserving some of the only natural shade and habitat on the commons. You can also see the new trees, older than saplings but still shorter than the buildings around them, that are part of this multigenerational plan.

As a culture we seem to cut down trees easily. My friend Aileen lives in a part of the world where with surprising regularity she sees whole wooded areas gone in a matter of days, replaced by server farms, big industrial buildings. Even in housing developments it is common to see old trees cut down for the ease of developers who then plant saplings in the fill dirt as if this was a replacement. The new buildings go up quickly in a matter of months, but the contractors who cut down the old trees will probably not live to see the replacements grow to maturity. I tell you it breaks my heart to see an old tree taken down without thought to what really is lost.

When I walk through my local grocery store I don’t feel assuaged by their promise of “one billion trees planted”- the young tree and the mature tree are not equivalent. Planting new trees is wonderful, but without a community of elders, most fail to survive. Not cutting down a tree- protecting it and preserving it -- is much less glamorous than planting a new one but is a powerful and important contribution.

The trees invite us to think of the value of things that grow slowly, and how that slow stable steady growth can ground a whole community. I think trees can be important teachers if we let them. We don’t have many truly ancient trees nearby, all those primeval forests were cut down by the early settlers, but even the city trees, the ones old enough to shelter squirrels and birds, are older than us. They are patient and slow, and so it’s easy to overlook the decades or centuries of growth it takes to build a structure that serves not only their own species, but the whole ecosystem where they live and grow.

Perhaps those heritage trees can be role models for our own lives, can provide a different perspectives for our traditions and institutions in our community. We are a culture that rewards novelty and startups. I’m told there are many more grants, for example for nonprofits who are kickstarting new initiatives than grants to support older programs with deep roots in the community. As someone with pretty radical progressive views I know I have often taken a “tear it all down” attitude towards the institutions that clearly do not serve all people.

Sometimes, as I approach the anniversary of 25 years in the ministry, as we as a congregation celebrate 215 and 186 years since our founding, and over 250 years of universalism, I often wonder, how would I know when it was time to step aside and let some younger minister, some newer organization take the sunshine, space and resources I use right now?

Susan V. Bosak of the Legacy Project writes:

“Where do you think it's best to plant a young tree: a clearing in an old-growth forest or an open field? Ecologists tell us that a young tree grows better when it's planted in an area with older trees. The reason, it seems, is that the roots of the young tree are able to follow the pathways created by former trees and implant themselves more deeply. Over time, the roots of many trees may actually graft themselves to one another, creating an intricate, interdependent foundation hidden under the ground. In this way, stronger trees share resources with weaker ones so that the whole forest becomes healthier. That's legacy: an interconnection across time, with a need for those who have come before us and a responsibility to those who come after us.”

Let’s consider that for a moment- how we as a congregation need those who came before us, and our responsibility to those who come after. Consider, for example, how challenging our commitment to multi-platform worship has been. We are building new pathways in real time, or as some say building the plane while flying it. It makes me more appreciative of the pathways we inherited, those built for us by all the volunteers who came before in our churches. I stand right now in the Athens sanctuary where the curve of the pulpit area was constructed to send sound out into the sanctuary, how the light of the southern stained glass window lights us on sunny days. Little things like the fact that there is already an outlet under the pulpit, a door that closes between the pulpit and the back door, which even has a coatrack for the worship team’s coats, and a mirror in case you panic at the last moment about whether your hair is sticking up funny. If you wanted to go in the social hall right now and make coffee for yourself, for 10 people, for 100 people, everything you need is right there including written instructions. Hundreds of ways big and small that members of our congregations smoothed the way for us now. And we too building pathways now that we hope will serve in time to come – like the addition we are building to our sanctuary in Zoom space for all those who want to be with us but can’t join us in person.

Just as our city Forester must decide which trees are steady and strong, which trees need to be pruned, and when it is time for an old tree to come down and make space for the next generation, so we are called to discern. It’s easy, when you are young, to see all that needs to be changed, matched by all the fresh energy and inspiration ready to manifest. It can take the long view of older folks to see the role these older sometimes unseen institutions and traditions play in undergirding and supporting anything that will be built today. It’s not just age, of course, but perspective- if an old tree or old institution has been blocking the sun from shining on you, you can easily see the importance of taking it down. If you were supported in some nurturing way by, say a UU church, it’s easier to imagine how that church could serve those who come after.

Right now the Athens congregation is working through the sale of our Sheshequin meeting house. A beautiful old tree if ever there was one- on the national registry of historic places as a great example of federalist architecture, and a place of great meaning for many in our church and larger community. Fortunately, the fellow who is buying the place is one of those for whom the building has meaning. A new squirrel in an old nest perhaps.

Just as we might take for granted the gifts of the great old legacy trees, it’s easy to take for granted these great old traditions, like Universalism, like democracy. In honor of the new year of the tress, I invite you to bring to mind with gratitude great old heritage trees (literal and metaphoric) in your community. These old trees, old traditions, yes even us older people have something important to offer to the generations who are new, and those yet to come. It’s not always clear what that is, since the future is so uncertain, but maybe it would be fun as we are noticing our trees to ask “in what way am I like that old maple? Or like that little fruit tree? How does my being and growing and living support others in the web of life, and what big old trees that I did not plant support and shelter and make way for me?

In honor of the new year for trees, we pay attention to the trees which support and shade and provide oxygen for our own lives, with respect and gratitude. This time of year right now is a great time to see the branching frame of the tree, each one different, it’s also a great time to see nests and the critters who live in trees. Soon the buds will set and leaves will start to grow almost overnight; we’re heading into a very rewarding time to pay attention to a tree in your neighborhood. In honor of the New Year for Trees, we also keep planting seeds and sheltering the young ones. This is one of the blessings of inter-generational community- the community of trees, of beings, and our little gathered community planted long before any of us were born, and growing still.