Things Come Up (October 18, 2015)

Remember the first day of school? For some of you this happened just a couple of months ago, for most of us it’s been a good number of years. But I bet we all remember that feeling- new teachers, new classes, maybe a new backpack if we are lucky. It’s an exciting and/or terrifying time, because the year has so much potential- and so much is unknown. By this time in the year much of the newness has worn off and potential becomes cold hard reality.

 We all start off the year with the same text books, the same teacher, the same lessons. It seems like we should all be able to achieve the same results, like we should be learning the same thing. But eventually each one of us stumbles over obstacles we may not even be able to identify. A young woman works hard at reading but just can’t seem to master it; it turns out she has dyslexia and reading is never going to be as easy for her as it is for the classmate that spends her playground time under a tree reading for fun. Perhaps that classmate spends her recess reading because the social relationships that come so easy for her classmate mystify her. I was one of those kids who was always picked last in gym class. I was the youngest and shortest in my class, and tended to cower and shield my face when a ball was thrown right at me. It turned out I have poor eye hand coordination.

We all have limits. Some of us have limits that are visible to others, like if you wear glasses, or carry a cane. Some limits are invisible to anyone but ourselves. As we get older our physical limits become more and more apparent. As children we may have thought we ourselves would always have complete freedom of mind and body, part of becoming and adult is realizing that everybody has physical limits, and that physical limits change over time. This is part of being human -- part of being mortal. This is one of the primary existential questions and one of the most important theological questions. This is the issue that religion must address or be irrelevant. 

For those of us who are out of school and maybe haven't been in school for a very long time, we might still have that back to school experience at the beginning of the new year, or new project; we have such visions and plans for our future.

Then our car breaks down or the furnace breaks or we become very ill or maybe we lose somebody close to us that we lean on and count on. ( I have this metaphoric image in my mind of all of us running a race together, and suddenly one of us hits an invisible wall they cannot cross, a wall that doesn’t appear to be stopping any of our fellow racers.) In truth there will never be enough time in our lives to do all we can imagine even if we live to be very very old. Our UU faith teaches us that these realities-- these existential limits -- are not a punishment for something down wrong. Some limits will slow us down or stop us all together no matter how hard we try. This is what it means to be human, this is what it means to be mortal.

Running into any of our limits is frustrating. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to grieve. Sometimes that anger, that frustration gives us the energy we need to do a hard thing- to learn to read despite being dyslexic, to make it through the rounds of chemo therapy , to care for our children alone after our partner is gone. But denying the reality of our limits, as natural a response as that is, doesn’t honor the wholeness of who we are. I was practicing yoga with an injury a few years back, and feeling like my injury was keeping me from my yoga practice. The yoga teacher reframed it for us: Yoga is not something we do when we are healthy, not something we try to do in spite of injuries, but yoga is a practice we bring our whole self to-- injuries, weaknesses and all. Our spiritual lives are like that too, as is our life together as a beloved community. The spiritual journey is not about overcoming our limits, but becoming fully who we are- the parts of ourselves we enjoy and are proud of, as well as the limits with which we struggle. 

Most of the images of the divine we are familiar with are about perfection, and it’s easy to leap to the conclusion that if the divine is perfect, and we humans are imperfect, then our imperfections are less than holy. As Universalists, however, we believe that there are no humans who are separated from divine love, no matter how imperfect we are. A Universalist God embraces everyone and everything - including everything that we are and everything we are not.

I want to make a distinction here between being conscious of your limits and integrating them into your sense of self and allowing your limits to define you. Many years ago I was an adult literacy tutor to a fellow who, despite having already been in tutoring for 6 months, could not master the sounds of the alphabet. Imagine the strength of will on this guy to stick with it for 6 months without getting any closer to reading! I finally turned to my supervisor for help, knowing I’d hit my own limit as a tutor, and a trained volunteer tested his learning capacities. It turns out that he was having trouble with oral closure (which means c at was never going to become “cat”) but had a college level verbal recognition (which means he could memorize and learn to recognize the whole word “cat” when he saw it). So we abandoned phonics all together, and switched over to sight words. he read his first story that very day. When we own the reality of both our limits and our gifts, we can use our strengths to support our weaknesses rather wishing we were something other than who we are. Both your limits and your strengths are part of the unique and irreplaceable person you are. 

Never forget, though, that part of being human is changing and growing. Our limits change as we change. Think about all the limits you experienced as a child that don’t trouble you at all as an adult. Did anyone else find learning to tie your show kind of maddening? Or long division? I thought I was NEVER going to get Long division. Some limits change suddenly or rapidly, others grow so slowly you can barely notice them growing. When Eric and I were newly married, we had this beloved dog Waldo who became paraplegic at the age of 6. His surgeon explained how slow nerve regrowth was, and said though he would never walk again, we should be on the lookout for slow changes. Well after his surgery Waldo’s fur grew back, and his wound healed, and his scar faded bit by bit. He never did walk again, but his pain and depression faded. He learned to use wheelchair and could run across a field faster than we could chase him. And darned if after 3 or 4 years, he wasn’t able to get a bit of a tail wag going. At first we didn’t believe it- surely we were imagining things, but that tail wag grew in strength and frequency until it was undeniable. We are always changing and growing, and should never assume our limits are where we left them. Think about the societal change that's possible. Think about the progress that’s been made on marriage equality, and let that give you courage and hope to keep testing, keep working to grow as individuals and as a society. 

And when you reach the limit of what you can do, remember you are not alone. When you have tried and tried, and don’t seem to be getting anywhere. When the limits feel so much stronger than you feel, and you are ready to give up, remember that we are part of an interdependent web that is much larger than ourselves. For theists, and agnostics, this is a moment to call out in our despair, in our frustration to the divine. We acknowledge our limits, our finitude, our mortality. We acknowledge that we need help. We never know how that help may come, but a true cry of the soul is honored in theistic religions the world over.

The Sufi poet Rumi writes:

“Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.
Just a little beginning-whimper,
and she's there.
God created the child, that is , your wanting,
so that it might cry out, so that milk might come.
Cry out! Don't be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of loving flow into you.”[i]

To whom, you might well ask, does the Atheist cry out? Without a faith in God, where do we put our faith when we are at our limit? This is at the core of what humanism is all about- we have faith in one another, in our community. This is why we bring a casserole to one who is sick, or bounce a colicky infant on our knee. We know that we have no choice sometimes but to rely on this web of life of which we are a part, and it is up to us to keep that web strong. Whether or not you believe in god, you are not alone.  

Independence is valued highly in our society, but truly none of us will ever be independent. Even Thoreau who made his own food, and built his own cabin and lived off the grid for months still relied on the generosity of his friend Emerson for the land he lived on. He relied on the plants and the trees and the animals to feed and shelter him. It is hard to say to your community “I can’t do this- I need help” but in fact that is the reality. In every moment of any day, we are relying on one another.

When you are frustrated about your limits- that you had to stop running because of your knees, that right now the needs of your body are keeping you from doing something you would really like to do, that your empty bank account is keeping you from doing something you really need to do. Remember you are not alone. When you are watching the news, and hear about the imperfections of our world- that the state of Pennsylvania still does not protect the rights of GLBT persons from discrimination by employers or landlords, when you hear words of hate and bigotry against immigrants or Muslims. Maybe you think to yourself, as I do, what can my one letter to my state representative do? How can I face this overwhelming societal limit? remember you are not alone. Remember that no one person could have turned the tide on Marriage Equality. When you visit your representative you are not alone. When you send a letter to your senator you are not alone. When you screw up the courage to speak up to a relative across the holiday table who says the racist thing- “I have to disagree with you on that” you are not alone. When we wonder “how can our little church survive in this huge ever-changing world” know that we are not alone. We exist in a web of neighbors and friends, and people we have never met, of plants and animals and forces of nature we don’t even fully understand. Like a single tile in a mosaic, or strand in a weaving, we don’t need to be everything, because we are woven into a much larger whole.

And just like us, every neighbor and friend and tree and bird and river has real limits they run up against every day. Be compassionate to yourself and to those around you when we reach our growing edge. And when we meet our limits, we need not feel that we are less than whole, because we are part of a larger wholeness that holds us all.

Endnotes

[i] Source: Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maulana. The Essential Rumi / Translated by Coleman Barks, New Expanded Edition. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY. 1995. Excerpts from “Cry Out in Your Weakness,” pages 156-167.

Staying Home? (October 11, 2015)

At the end of the environmentalist’s presentation, he took questions from the audience. A young voice in the back of the room asked “What’s the most important thing we can do to help the environment?” and the expert answers “Stay Home.”

By this I believe he meant two things- first, travel has a significant carbon footprint, whether we are driving or flying, we need to carefully consider our impact on our eco system.

The second thing he was getting at was that in this highly mobile culture we under-value our commitment to place. There is a cultural expectation that, for example, as we move forward in our education or in our career, this so far outweighs our connection to place, to our web of relationships, that moving away from them is a natural and inevitable thing. Let me give an example from my own life. Although I had spent my whole life in Wayne Pennsylvania, (a town about half an hour outside Philadelphia) I chose a college a 12 hour drive away in Indiana based only on the quality of the music program, I moved again to Baltimore for Grad school, and a couple of years later and I moved to The San Francisco Bay Area for Seminary. In California it seemed like everyone we met was in the same situation- apparently less than half the residents of California had been born there. It was a highly mobile culture to which people migrated from around the world, mostly to work in the booming technology industry. But it turns out this is a nation wide trend- only half of adults 25 and older in this country still reside in the state of their birth[i].

It wasn’t until I became involved with the environmental movement that I realized all this migration might have a negative effect. I learned about native plants of California, which are tolerant of the long dry summers and short rainy winters, and began to notice all the Maple trees, rosebushes and other imports in my neighborhood that required daily watering. Almost every family had installed a sprinkler system to support these imported plants. You see, each family had brought with them the expectations and habits of their home ecosystems. People who moved to California from the North East planted all their favorite plants to make their adopted place feel more like home.  We treated our new home like a blank canvas waiting to be filled.

In my first 5 years in California I moved 6 times- tossed about by the volatile real estate market. Most of those times we moved I never did register to vote. I certainly didn’t know who my local elected officials were, or where my drinking water came from. In each new home I would plant a few plants, and just hope when we left that the new residents would notice them and care for them.

As I finished my seminary training, I realized I was training for a career in which it was expected that I would be willing to move every 3-7 years to whatever part of the country needed a UU minister. Yet everything my UU values were showing me was that both our eco-systems and our human communities needed a loyalty to place. Those of you who garden know that any time you move a plant, this is a stressful and dangerous moment in the life of the plant and disruptive to the garden. You have to be very careful to dig a wide circumference to get as much of the root structure as possible, and we humans who only have metaphorical roots often underestimate how far and deep those plant roots go. Then we must dig a hole for the new plant big enough to make room for all its roots and for new roots to grow. Then we water every day until it is established, because the compromised roots can’t yet do the job all by themselves. Even so , the plant will probably loose leaves or flowers as it uses all its energy to make the transition.

Part of the reason this environmental leader wanted us to “stay home” was so we could develop a sense of place. We would notice the things you only see when you live in a place year after year- that apple trees do great here and lemon trees struggle, that you just can’t plant certain things in the spring until the very last danger of frost is past. Why does that matter? Because the more closely we observe and know our local ecosystem, the better chance that we will act in harmony with that system. We will notice that it's not a blank canvas, but a living system.  When we know where our water comes from, we can keep an eye on it as the volunteers in our local water monitoring project are doing, making sure it stays clean and that if it is contaminated we notice and can do something about it. If we know what ward we are in, and when the city council meets, we can have a conversation with our city council person about the things that are important to us.


When we commit to a particular place, we have a chance to know a place deeply, we put down roots. And just like the deep rooted plants in any eco system, our metaphorical human roots not only provide us better access to the resources we need to live, as trees and plants have better access to water and nutrients when their roots are mature and healthy. But those deep-rooted plants and trees also help hold the eco system together, they prevent a disaster like the dust bowl of the 1930s[ii] and are helping to heal desertification of Africa[iii] So by putting down roots we preserve and protect the places we know and care about.

When we moved to Ithaca, I made a commitment to myself and my partner that we would try to stay in this area at least until Nick graduated from High School. It seemed crazy at the time- we’d never been able to stay any place for 12 years before. But we wanted to try. We wanted to know our trees, our creeks, our neighbors, our city council people in a way that only happens when you “stay home.” And after being in this area for 8 years, I can see both the gifts of growing these connections slowly over time, and also how much more I have to learn, how much deeper roots could be.

But healthy systems need not only those who stay, but those who move -- no community is self-sufficient. Migration is a natural part of life for many species, for many people. A tree cannot migrate, but its seeds can be carried in the bodies of migrating birds as far as those species can travel. Think of those people who move as carrying the seeds of ideas. How many great ideas have come into this community from people who brought those ideas with them.

Migrators are able to follow the availability of food through the seasons. In the same way modern humans follow jobs as our ancestors used to follow the ripening fruits or the animals they hunted for food. Our current political rhetoric ignores the fact that humans have migrated since their birth as a species, to the fill the planet as we see today. [iv] In fact, some of the places where we have erected national borders are right through traditional human migration paths. Think about the Valley- how folks here think of the Valley as one community, and how odd it feels that neighbors on one side of the community have access to certain food banks, for example, and neighbors in the another part of the community do not. That state line that runs through the Valley does not describe how people here have always lived.

Or let’s take the massively controversial issue of migrant farm workers. Anyone who has ever worked on a farm knows that when a crop is ready, there is a surge of work that needs to be done RIGHT NOW or the crop will rot in the fields. No farmer can keep enough hands on staff at their farm all year round to handle that surge. Each year as I look forward to peach season, I pay attention to the sticker on my produce that tells me where it comes from. I notice how my peaches start out in Georgia, then move to Pennsylvania, before our local orchards in Ithaca start bringing them to the farmer’s market. The most natural thing in the world is for workers who pick peaches to follow the fruit as it ripens. Many industries need workers to move  when the work moves.  If there is a shortage of nurses in rural towns, we surely want some nurses to move where the need is greatest.

Sadly, not everyone has the choice to stay. Just this year so many people I care about lost their funding, grants came to an end, jobs disappeared. People who love this place had to sever their roots, their connections and move, often very far away. As we read about the rising ocean waters, or the growing severity of storms -- scientist, economists agree that many of the places where people have grown their roots for years are just not going to support them anymore. It seems very sensible after a storm like Sandy, or these floods in South Carolina,  to say “maybe we shouldn’t rebuild those areas which are just going to be destroyed again.” But realize that when we say that, we are saying that people who have put down deep roots for years, or sometimes for generations, are going to have to cut those life- sustaining roots and move someplace where they have to start again. It occurred to me that “staying home” is not only a virtue, but it is also a privilege which an increasing number of people in this world will be denied by the realities of changing weather, changing economies, and by war.

I no longer feel like I can stand in this pulpit and ask you all to “stay home.” I know that some of you did just that; you live within 10 or 20 or 100 miles of the place where you were born. Others of you have adopted your current home and put down roots here. Some of us have just arrived. We may be loved by this community for a few months or years, and then we may be on our way again a for work or family or even a love of adventure. Both staying and moving is necessary for a healthy society. Most of us have been or will be both movers and stayers at some point in our lives. They are polarities on a continuum that includes us all. So we need an ethic both when we are staying and when we are moving.

In this mobile society, we need an ethic for movers. If you are new to this area, or thinking of moving some place new, I encourage you to develop a sense of place. Before you plant the tree that reminds you of home, spend a year watching the trees around you , the plants, the critters, the weather. Learn where your food comes from and where your waste goes. I encourage you to meet your neighbors. For introverts this is kind of a challenge, but as we discussed last Sunday, just knowing the names and the faces of the people who live to your right, to your left and across the street will enable you to help one another in storm or fire. If you know your neighbors, they can bring back your dog when he digs under the fence (for which I was very grateful) or let in your cat on a cold afternoon (as I do for my neighbor cat who has figured out I have this power). 

I challenge you who are movers to be open to the inner wisdom of a your new place, your new community. I remember at my first minister’s retreat in this area thinking it was strange that they didn’t have a winter meeting like we did in California. I made this suggestion and they all burst out laughing- “you’re not from around here” they said. I surely do understand now, 8 years later, why you schedule any driving adventures in February at your own risk.  

Finally, be open to being changed by your new home but Honor your own traditions and wisdom as well- Consider our children’s story from this morning. The Jewish tradition of honoring the Sabbath was developed during a period of exile and grounds Jewish families around the world in their religion and heritage no matter where they may move or stay.

There are ethics for those who stay as well. First, meet your neighbors. The old tradition of bringing a pie to the neighbors who move in is a good one. It not only makes the new folks feel welcome, but it gives you an excuse to introduce yourself and get to know them a little bit, and help them begin to root in the local network of relationships.

Second, make the local rules and traditions explicit. In communities like this one where some people have lived here for generations, we don’t always realize that what we think is “just the way it’s done” is in fact simply “the way we do things here.” For example, we’ve been doing “check in” so long in this congregation it wasn’t until a brave newcomer asked us to explain the rules that I even realized that there were rules that needed explaining. A master teacher once suggested that the key to classroom management was to clearly explain the rules, rituals and expectations the first day of class, and to revisit those rules any time someone new joined the class. 

Third, be open to being changed by the newcomers- they bring the seeds of new things that may be just what you needed.

Finally, remember that stayers occupy a privileged place. This really hit home when we started hearing reports about the Syrian Refugees. Here are shopkeepers, teachers, doctors, farmers, mothers, fathers, children arriving tired and broken sometimes with only the clothes on their backs. Ripped from their roots, looking for a place to start again. 

When Iceland offered to take in 50 refugees, Icelandic radio reports that “a local children's book author, Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir created a Facebook page asking for people to take refugees into their homes. Over the weekend, 12,000 people out of Iceland's population of just over 300,000 signed up and now Iceland's government says it will consider taking in more Syrians. One woman Wrote:

Dear Eyglo  I can take care of children, I can take them to preschool and to school and everything that is needed. I can offer people food in my house, and I can show them friendship and warmth. I can also pay for airline tickets for one little family, and I can put my knowledge into helping pregnant women.[v]

Wow. What amazing generosity. When I imagine a family of refugees staying in my own home, I am really humbled by her offer. Not all of us are in a position to pay for airline tickets, or invite a family into our homes, but this refugee crisis invites us to reconsider our ethic of place. Whenever people are displaced from their homes through war or hurricane or fire, it is up to those of us who have the privilege of being rooted in community to consider -- what is our moral responsibility? And whenever we ourselves are pulling up roots and moving our home, it is ours to ask, what ethical responsibility do I have to my new home? How do I care for my temporary home so that it can be home for all the beings who will call this place home long after I am gone? Whether we are movers or stayers, we have a responsibility to all the places we live.

Endnotes
[i] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/California-shows-increase-in-native-population-3163810.php
[ii] http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/dustbowl.htm
[iii] http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/stopping-desertification-in-africa-with-a-great-green-wall.htm
[iv] http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/human-migration3.htm
[v] http://www.npr.org/2015/09/02/436820838/iceland-considers-taking-in-more-syrian-refugees

Where Superman Got it Wrong (September 27, 2015)

For generations Super Man has been the ultimate role model. He’s polite, clean cut, humble, and devotes his life to helping others in their greatest need. And this despite the fact he’s not even from around here, his own planet having been destroyed when he was just a baby. At his best, Super Man is a story that calls each of us to selflessly help friends and strangers when they are in crisis, even when that may mean putting ourselves in unpleasant situations.

There are some who say that history is made by great men -- individuals with talent, character, charisma, who shape our destiny. This is called, not surprisingly “the Great Man Theory. ” The theory was put forward in the 1840s by Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle. This must have been the theory behind history books we read in High school- the names and dates of kings and generals and presidents. But a couple of decades later Herbert Spencer put forward a counter-argument that kind of blew my mind; Spencer said that “great men are the products of their societies, and that their actions would be impossible without the social conditions built before their lifetimes”.[i] 

Let’s take the Super Man story itself . It was originally created in the 1930s by 2 high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and over the years the comic book has had 5 different writers, 10 different pencillers, 4 different inkers, and that doesn’t count “the Adventures of superman” series. If it hadn’t touched something important in our collective imaginations, if we hadn’t been buying the comics all those years, Superman would not be who he is today. His story has been told by TV shoes, video games, Broadway musicals and movies, and none of that would have been possible with out “the social conditions built before [his] lifetime.”

Consider the movies -- the 1978 one with Christopher Reeve that I watched when I was a kid, or that “Man of Steel” one that came out just a couple of years ago. If you look these films up online, the title usually appears with the name of the director, or the name of the star. But have you ever sat through movie credits all the way to the end. Like, ALL the way to the end? That’s a LOT of people who work on those movies. No one could create something that big alone.

That’s why I like the Avengers movies that have been coming out lately. Has anyone seen any of these movies? This is a group of Super Heroes from the Marvel Universe -- Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, and Thor, black widow, Hawkeye are all recruited by SHEILD to guard us against threats to our safety and liberty. Director Fury quips “there was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, so that when we needed them they could fight the battles that we never could” Naturally these strong-egoed super heroes are unwilling to work together at first, but eventually must put their own egos aside to save humankind. I like the fact that they work as a team -- that collaboration is held up as a value for the modern superhero.

The dark side of the superhero archetype, whether our superheroes are working alone or as a team, is the implication that “they could fight the battles that we never could.” It encourages us to look outside ourselves, outside our community for someone who will come out of nowhere in the nick of time to save us. Because these Avengers films still show us, the ordinary earthlings, mostly running and screaming, and slow to do anything to save ourselves. When the Avengers drop in from above, they immediately yell for all the ordinary people to get out of the way so the super heroes can do their work. 

As my family and I walked out of the theater after seeing Avengers; The age of Ultron this summer, I wondered how all these super hero movies that are so popular right now are effecting our sense of who we are, and what we are called to do in this world. It worries me that it divides the world into Super Heroes, Super Villains, and everyone else who needs to run and hide or else be crushed. 

Consider the footage we see after a natural disaster- outside agencies rushing in from around the world, relief teams pulling a child from the wreckage days after the disaster, when all hope was lost. A recent interview [by I forget who] with a reporter who was deconstructing our media coverage of disasters, noted that part of the reason we see the images that we see is because it takes a while for both the media and the outside agencies to arrive on the scene. By the time the Red Cross or MSNBC arrive, they have missed much of the story.

The people who live near the earthquake or fire are the de facto first responders. The people to your right and to your left are your best hope of help, and you are theirs. They know where the greatest need is, and they know where people disappeared and who is still missing. But, according to this journalist, when the NGO or the national guard comes in, the first thing they do is just what the Avengers do- create a perimeter and require those first responders, now categorized as “victims” to leave “ for their own safety.” 

Then, the reporter continued, when the dust has settled, and the last heroic rescue has been made, and photographed the reporters and emergency responders leave. This reminds me of a scene out of superhero movie too. You know the one, where Superman or Ironman hover in the sky looking down on the wreckage of the great battle in which they saved humanity. The ordinary people, dusty and bloody, stare up at them with teary eyed gratitude “thank you superman” they say, as superman flies off to his fortress of solitude, or his date with Lois Lane. But there in the background we see the rubble of people’s destroyed lives, we know the suffering has not ended, and that the rebuilding has just begun.

Consider the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Now 10 years later, many neighborhoods, schools, jobs have never been restored. The grief residents feel lives with them every day. The story does not end when Superman or even the Avengers stop the super villain, or avert the natural disaster; the work of healing and rebuilding continues for a long time. The work is not particularly glamorous or photo ready for the news media as ordinary people, day by day rebuild the world. As the great Adrienne Rich says:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save;
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those who age after age,
perversely with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

As the Hero in our reading, Michinori Watanabe found, it was ordinary people, you and me, who were there for one another when they needed it most. 

Around the 10th anniversary of Katrina there was a surge of reporting about the hurricane and the recovery effort. It was during that surge that I heard about that fellow Kirk Washington who has done so much over the past 10 years to help his community recover. There were countless other stories of how people really got through those dark days, and how they continue to get through them together. We know now that not all the neighborhoods survived, that not every community came together. As Aldrich found, it is the closeness of our connections, our willingness to reach out to one another that is most important to making it though such catastrophic times. This is part of what we aspire to be as a UU congregation. And I have seen you do it- I have seen you reach out to one another in crisis and tragedy, I have seen you be there for one another. It is that very ordinary kind of heroism by which we are saved.

I propose that this critique of the super hero may emerges naturally from Unitarian Universalist ideals. One of the fundamental ideas of Unitarianism, a movement founded at a time when Calvinist theologians thought of humans as fully depraved , in bondage to sin and subject to God, was the radical idea that humans also have good capacities, including conscience and freedom to act. This has made us a “role up your sleeves” type religion, believing that each human has some part to play in the building and rebuilding of our world. As the great Unitarian Preacher William Ellery Channing wrote:

whenever we think, speak, or act, with moral energy and resolute devotion to duty, be the occasion ever so humble, obscure, familiar; — then the divinity is growing within us, and we are ascending towards our Author. True religion thus blends itself with common life.

Channing was a theist, but the same principle holds for those Unitarians who are Humanists- the use of our powers in freedom is at the heart of what it means to be human and to live a life of meaning.

On the other side of our lineage, it was our Universalist founders who rebelled against the idea that only some special elect were chosen by God, and affirmed that all of us had the potential for salvation. If we extrapolate this into our day to day living, I believe that there are not simply superheroes and supervillains who make history, while the rest of us try to get out from under foot. I know that each of us has the choice, in any given moment, to help, to heal, to save, to protect. We don’t always get it right, of course --we’re human. Sometimes we hurt when we are trying to help, sometimes we miss opportunities, and of course sometimes running and hiding is exactly the right thing to do. 

Imagine us all as one big team of Avengers- every living being on this planet. We are all called to be heroes in ways large and small. And – this is just as important- we need to remember when we swoop into a scene to help, that everyone we are there to help is a hero too. Too often we make the mistake of thinking we know best, we come in from outside the situation with fresh eyes and all our resources, and we actually might undermine the capacities, the needs of the very people we are trying to help. We need to remember that when we come to help, our call is not “everybody back- I’ve got this” but “Tell me what you know. Tell me what you are already doing. Where can I be of use?”

 The next time you are listening to the news, to the stories about NGOs flying in to help distressed populations, remember the thousands of untold stories of neighbors and friends who cared for one another before the relief workers could find them. The next time you are watching a movie about Super Heroes, or a documentary about Great Men from history, remember to fill in all the ordinary people who are part of the scene too, all the neighbors and strangers who helped one another flee and shelter while the Avengers had their great battle, and who together rebuilt their community when the battle was done and the Avengers were off eating shawarma. The most important work of disaster response is done by those who live through that disaster together. The next time some disaster, large or small, strikes your community, think of yourself as a first responder, and use your super or ordinary powers to help save the day.
 

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[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

[ii] http://video.bridgeward.com/2015/08/28/burying-vera-smith-ten-years-after-hurricane-katrina/

[iii] http://www.npr.org/2011/07/04/137526401/the-key-to-disaster-survival-friends-and-neighbors

Rethinking Privacy (August 30, 3015)

For the third annual summer read I offered you 4 very different stories about privacy. The reading Nick just did is from a book called Little Brother --a book set in the very near future, where technology that you and I would recognize from our everyday lives is suddenly co-opted by the department of Homeland Security in response to a terrorist attack. The same week I got to that part in the book, I also heard the report Karen read on NPR. Having the two juxtaposed like that was wakeup call to the fact that while the story in “little Brother” is science fiction, the use of common everyday technology by to track our movements and communication is very real. 

 

When I first read 1984 in 1984 (it was very popular that year) I thought the idea of a Video Screen that could see and hear our every action was a bit far-fetched. Then a couple of years ago I heard on the news that hackers were taking over people’s webcams[i], watching them in their private moments, even sharing some of these videos on YouTube without the knowledge or consent of the person in the video[ii]. Shortly thereafter, a friend of mine works for a global high tech company, told me they were all issued a little black sticker to put over their webcam while they worked as part of the company security program. Suddenly our ordinary lives seemed like Hard Science Fiction.

 

As I walked into the Grass Roots Festival this year I noticed a sign posted to the gate. It said that such and such a company was creating documentary images of the event, and both video and photos would be taken. By crossing the gate you were giving up the right to your image irrevocably and in perpetuity. And if you did not want your image used? Just move out of the area where photos were being taken. As I gazed around the festival I noticed any direction I looked there was someone with a camera, or taking photos on their phone. By just showing up, we had given away our privacy. 

 

“Privacy is Dead. Get over it.” It turns out this quote is not from Mark Zuckerberg, president and founder of Facebook, but a paraphrase of his remarks in 2010, that the social norms around privacy have changed radically in the past decade. He said this at a time when he was defending the chances to the Facebook Privacy Policy many of us didn’t even realize was happening back in 2010.[iii] That’s the understatement of the decade. It was really exciting to find old School friends on Facebook when I first signed up. The first time the Google search engine wished me a happy birthday, the first time a lawnmower I had been shopping for online started appearing in pop up adds in my webmail, I was surprised, and a little disturbed, but now it seems totally natural that Earthlink knows what I bought on Amazon, and Google knows my birthday, and Facebook knows that I support marriage Equality and videos of Baby Goats. 

 

That all seems pretty innocent when you look at it from one angle- websites, apps, social media can use what they know about you to tailor their advertising to your interests and habits. I’m sure it costs a lot of money to run a company like Facebook, and they’ve got to make it somewhere. But once that information is out there, it’s out there. You can’t shred it like a paper document; trying to find and delete your date once you’ve pushed “enter” is like trying to catch all the germs after a sneeze. Just ask the stars whose private photos were hacked and spread worldwide like a virus without their permission. Information that we may share for the most practical reason makes it available to folks who may not have our best interests at heart.

 

For example, Americans are divided about how much information we want the government to have about each of us. Some feel that data they are collecting is a violation of the 4th amendment of the US constitution which guarantees the right to privacy:

 

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[2]

 

It has come out that the NSA is keeping data on every call we make- what numbers we call, when we call, and the duration of the call. Supporters feel that it’s fine to give up some of our rights for potential increased safety. they usually support it with a sentiment like “Innocent people have nothing to hide.” 

 

Which brings us to this morning’s question. What does privacy mean in this age of sharing, in this age of information? Is there anything about privacy that is more valuable than the ease of storing our photos and documents in the cloud? More valuable than finding the nearest restaurant on your smart phone? More important than making sure the government has in its storage banks every bit of information that could help them prosecute wrongdoing? What is privacy for anyway?

 

Think about artistic or creative expressions. For every song you hear on the radio or painting hung on the gallery wall, an artist put in hour after hour focused on the tedious work of creation. Often, when I practice a song I’m going to sing here at the Open Mic, I make some horrible sounds. Not just because I am out of practice and not yet ready to perform, but also because some of those horrible sounds are really helpful in warming up the muscles used for singing. I usually close the door to my study when I make those sounds, and I know for a fact my family appreciates that.

 

As a culture, we believe that privacy is important in certain supportive relationships as well. Our courts honor the privacy between doctor and patient- because there needs to be some place where you ask that really embarrassing question. We honor the privacy between therapist and client, between minister and parishioner, because we know everyone needs a place where you can speak the scariest truths about yourself, about your life so that you can get the help you need, or just hear a trained professional can say “that’s pretty normal.” Many times when we face grief, or despair, or a crisis of meaning, we need a little space from the noise of community to heal. 

 

And though we worship together as a beloved community, there is something deeply private about our spiritual lives. Consider the Buddha who finally found enlightenment sitting alone in meditation under the Bodhi tree. Consider Mary who, after the birth of her Son Jesus, and the arrival of the shepherds freshly visited by angels and when they all depart “Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart.”[iv] Consider the great American Poet Wendell Berry, who has for several decades gone out walking each Sunday, alone in the farmed and wild places near his home, writing some of his greatest poems on these walks. Who wrote on one such Sunday in 1995:

 

“The best reward in going to the woods

Is being lost to other people, and

Lost sometimes to myself. I’m at the end 

Of no bespeaking wire to spoil my goods;

It probably bears explain that by “bespeaking wire” he means the cord of his landline. For Berry there is something precious about those private moments in the woods where one can be wild – in the way a great Oak is wild, it answers to no one and is truly itself. Privacy is necessary sometimes to allow us to remember who we really are and what is important to us. Sometimes privacy is necessary to lose oneself, to lose the rigid persona we present to the world in our roles as minister, dad, neighbor, nurse, teacher. That is why I tend to be of the opinion that we avoid taking photos during worship. Because when worship really does its job, we might have an unguarded moment. We might shed a tear, or try something new, or entertain controversial ideas. I want worship to be a time in our week when we don’t worry about how our face is composed, or that the words we speak from our heart will be taken out of context later. 

 

But maybe we would give all that up for national security. Maybe, but I would argue that our freedom to dissent is part of what makes this country secure, is at the core of who we are as a country. Without our freedom to dissent, we quickly become that which we most fear- a totalitarian regime, a dystopian world like that in the classic and deeply disturbing novel 1984. Few of us still remember a time in this country where receiving the Socialist Party newsletter or consorting with a known communist meant you could be blacklisted, could lose your livelihood, your friends, your home. Which is why I think this is a great time to build in some privacy protections, to avoid a second McCarthy style witch-hunt in the future. We already know that if we do a google search on a question like “What is Socialism” or “what is Isis” that that data is carefully stored. That doesn’t bother us too much because no one has yet abused that data. But how easily could such data be abused, sweeping up people who just want to learn more about the world, to have good facts about socialism, about Islam (In this increasingly islamophobic time). These tools for data collection create brand new ethical considerations for us, and we as Unitarian Universalists, the people who published the Pentagon Papers, the tradition where many of our congregations gave up their tax-free status so as not to have to give names to the House Committee on Un-American activities, I believe there is a role for us here in this as well.

 

 

This is all so new, that we UUs have not yet come up with a cohesive ethical platform to guide us here, so each one of us must be part of creating those ethics together. The most important thing I hope you will bring back with you out into your week is simply an awareness of all the times each day we give away our privacy.

 

But if you do feel called to action, I suggest you let your elected representatives know that privacy is important to you. The outrage of many Americans (and foreign leaders) when we realized the extent of the information the NSA was collecting and storing drove the outrage of our public officials who took those concerns seriously when the Patriot act was re- authorized this past year.

 

 

If you want to learn more about all kinds of electronic privacy concerns, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, (which was mentioned in that NPR interview  Karen read). EFF is a non-profit that carefully tracks issues that affect our civil rights in the digital world in a way most of us just don’t have the time or technical expertise to do on our own. . In fact, EFF is working on a case called “First Unitarian Church of LA v. NSA” which is currently in the California Federal Court. The case involves an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in June of 2013 which demands “whole sale collection of every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration fo the call, and other identifying information for every phone and call for all customers of Verizon for a period of three months.” such diverse groups as 3 guns rights advocate organizations, the Council on American –Islamic Relations, and Patient Privacy Rights--A total of 22 organizations signed on to the case to protect the freedom of association, against “government access to the records of who they associate with , when, for how long and at what frequency.” [v]

 

I also invite you to consider learning which options you have to protect your personal privacy in everyday life, and we do have a few. 

• Consider using a search engine like “Duck Duck Go” which does not track your searches
• Go into your phone and look at your privacy settings, and make sure they are set in a way that makes you comfortable.
• Same with your Facebook account- any time you see the word “public” that means anyone in the world can see information about you. Consider a setting like “friends only” when privacy is important to you
• Remember what Lindsey Lohan learned the hard way, and consider how you would feel if the cloud storage you use was hacked- is there anything you wouldn’t want shared by a malicious hacker?
• For those of us who use an EZ pass to speed up getting through tolls, remember that the device transmits information about your location[vi] Remember that gray sleeve it came with? Consider storing your EZ pass in its sleeve when not in use.

Finally, let’s begin to create together some agreements about what we share. I once had a co-worker who had fled an abusive relationship, and it was very important for her personal safety that her photo not appear on that businesses’ website or social media. In today’s culture we photograph and share everything we experience as matter of course. What if we went back to the etiquette of the old photographers who asked “may I take your photo” and then the 21st century follow up “may I post that photo online?” Just a reminder- once something is posted on Facebook, legally it belongs to Facebook. Once something has gone viral, it, like virus, cannot easily be contained.

 

Although Orwell painted a pretty grim picture in his book 1984, I actually felt better when I finished it, because we do still live in a society where dissent is protected by law, where you can still put some tape over your webcam if you don’t want your every moment to appear on YouTube. We are right now in an evolving ethical landscape of what privacy means in the age of information. I suggested these books of speculative fiction as summer reading to kindle our collective imaginations. We still have the freedom to shape our world- to protect whatever privacy is important to each of us. Whether that’s the freedom to dissent, the privacy that is needed at times for spiritual and emotional growth, the freedom to dance really badly and without caring what anybody thinks, the privacy to experiment and learn without being judged, or the freedom to have irregular traffic patterns. Now is the perfect time to consider carefully what privacy is for, and what we want to keep private.

 

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[i] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22967622

[ii] http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/YouTube-Ads-Hack-Webcam-Videos-Investigation-New-York-I-Team-Glorioso-323085781.html

[iii] http://laboratorium.net/archive/2010/02/06/things_mark_zuckerberg_has_not_said

[iv] http://biblehub.com/luke/2-19.htm

[v] https://www.eff.org/cases/first-unitarian-church-los-angeles-v-nsa

[vi] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/09/12/e-zpasses-get-read-all-over-new-york-not-just-at-toll-booths/

A Safer Place (May 31, 2015)

In order to become a safe community, we have to do something that feels unsafe. We have to acknowledge that women and children and men too are physically and sexually assaulted every day. For too long churches full of caring, well-meaning people have been silent to the reality of this abuse.

Feeling safe- feeling that people will respect your boundaries, your choices, your body, your freedom – feeling safe is important everywhere. But when a violation of that safety happens in your faith community, as too many people have told us is the case, then community becomes unsafe, religion becomes unsafe. Even our relationship with the divine can be broken, sometimes beyond repair. Too many survivors have sought help from their church or from their minister and are sent back into an abusive situations counseling patience, counseling forgiveness, calling it a “cross to bear.” But the suffering of an abused woman or man or child cannot be compared to the suffering of Jesus. As Marie Fortune, who was a pioneer in equipping faith communities to address sexual and domestic violence, writes in her book Keeping the Faith, Guidance for Christian Women Facing Abuse: “the suffering of being abused in one’s family is very different. It has no good purpose. It never brings forth a greater good. It is not God’s will for our lives. To accept it as purposeful, as your cross to bear, as God’s will for you, is to allow yourself to be a victim. You don not deserve abused at the hands of a member of your family.” [p. 20] or I might add, a member of your community.

So let’s be really clear. Unitarian Universalists believe that human sexuality is part of what it means to be human. We believe that there are as many ways of expressing it as there are people. And we believe deeply in the freedom of the individual to consent and to say “yes” but just as important is the freedom to say “no.” We know that if the power differential is too great, consent is not really possible. For example a child cannot truly consent to sexual acts with an adult. We know this not just in theory, but because men and women have come forward telling us how such interactions have affected them the rest of their lives. Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, former head of St. Luke's Institute, a treatment center for clergy said in an interview that “the abuse of minors, of course, is especially abhorrent and awful, but there are more cases of sexual exploitation of adults in all the churches, and that gets less air time …”[i] We know that ministers have a special role, whether they serve congregations or as hospital chaplains, and so something that might have been within the bounds of a healthy relationship between consenting adults, in the context of clergy and congregant can be coercive and harmful. We know this because after generations when people kept such things secret, were afraid to come forward, were silenced or shamed when they did come forward, we are finally hearing their stories and hearing what the cost was to their spirits, and to whole congregations. That is why in the UU Minister’s code of conduct it says clearly: “I will not engage in sexual contact, sexualized behavior or a sexual relationship with any person I serve as a minister. “[ii] Unfortunately, when their minister is accused of abuse Joe Trull, Professor of Christian Ethics at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, says congregations usually “circle the wagons to defend the accused minister, blame the victim, or even blame the minister's wife.[iii]”

It is time for churches to become part of the solution. We began creating a safe congregations policy for this church not because we were in the middle of a crisis, but precisely because we want to prevent a crisis. Congregations which have suspected clergy or staff misconduct, congregations where a registered sex offender ask permission to attend worship, or congregations who suspected that a child in their community was being abused those congregations that had a policy and procedure in place felt more empowered to handle the situation in a way that felt safer for everyone.

We have to start by speaking the truth. As Rebecca Parker, who was the minister of a small church before becoming the president of SKSM, and was a survivor of sexual abuse as a child, described so beautifully in our opening reading, truth is important to safety and it is important to healing after abuse. 

First, we need to make this a place where people can say the truth of where your boundaries are. We get messages from a very young age that it is more important to follow societal norms than to feel safe. We tell a reluctant child “don’t be rude- hug your aunty” and we get versions of that message all our lives. Sometimes women and men end up participating in sexual acts when they don’t really feel comfortable because there is a sense of expectation, because they want to go with the flow. Or as we have seen in these clergy sexual abuse cases, and cases of employees or interns coerced into sexual relations with their supervisors, sometimes we create a culture where it feels impossible to say no. Some of you have probably heard in the news about a blog for women in the film industry in which they detail the sexual harassment they face daily in their industry[iv] Sometimes our cultural norms make speaking out to protect safe boundaries a herculean feat.

I’d like to try something, and I want you to know before I even describe this exercise that you will have an option to opt out. What I’m going to suggest is that you pick a partner, someone sitting nearby you that you might know or not know. I want you to start out about10 feet apart, and then I want whomever is older to stand still and whomever younger will walk towards their partner. The person standing still- their job is to raise their hand when their partner gets to the boundary of their personal space. And the job of the person walking is to respect that and stop.  

Now take a moment to talk to your partner about how it felt to be the person whose job it was to say stop, and how it felt to be the person who was told to stop

[pause for conversation]

Now lets all come back together

Does anyone want to share with the whole group their feelings about that exercise?

[pause for conversation]

Now a word for those folks who decided to “pass.” When I was in seminary, students loved to create innovative worship where congregants would be asked to make eye contact, or hug, or dance. I had a theology professor who always sat those things out. It was critically important, he felt, that we always have the freedom to opt out of community activities that don’t feel right to us. Is there anyone who decided to pass who wants to tell us how that felt?

[pause for conversation]

This is part of being a “safer congregation” I think -- that we can express our boundaries to one another. It needs to be culturally normative in this congregation that it is okay to say no to one another, to be able to say “here is where my boundary is.” If we can practice on the easy things, maybe it will be possible to express our boundaries when it is really difficult to do so.

Next, to be a safer congregation, our goal is to be a community where we feel safe telling someone when our boundaries have been violated. So, for example, if that exercise didn’t feel safe to you, and it didn’t feel safe to say something to everyone in the middle of the service, I would hope you could come talk to me later, or talk to the Committee on Ministry. This is what we were trying to express in the lesson for all ages earlier. And that is why there are three members of our Safe Congregations Team. You can talk to your minister, of course, but if that doesn’t feel safe, you can talk to a different member of the team- Elaine or Katie. Of course if you experience or witness “seriously harmful, abusive or harassing behavior toward any UUCAS member, friend or visitor, and you feel the behavior cannot be successfully diffused, you are asked to call 911 or the local police department, requesting immediate assistance.” 

This brings us to the third way we that speaking the truth can create the safer community we desire. We must be advocates for those who have been abused. Especially for those who have been silenced. I want to tell you about a remarkable program that was born in India. It is called “bell bajao” which is Hindi for “ring the bell.” It is a public awareness program designed to encourage men and boys in particular to “do something” when they hear or witness or suspect abuse. The message is remarkably simple- just ring the bell. I’d like to share one of these videos with you:





What I love about that video, is that the man who rings the bell is clearly nervous, he’s not an expert. He’s not an official. But just by ringing the bell he is able to interrupt the abuse he suspects. What he does requires courage, but is something any of us can do. We do need to ask “why didn’t he notify the police as his next step?” but we know that there are many places not only around the world but also in the US where police consider abuse a private matter, and will not only fail to prosecute, but will fail to protect and will even blame the victim. I believe our justice system has made great strides responding to domestic and sexual abuse in just one generation in this country, and that is why we encourage you if you see a “seriously harmful, abusive or harassing behavior” to follow up “ringing the bell” with calling authorities you trust.

Think back to the reports we heard about Penn State case. Part of what is so horrifying about that whole story, is not only that the abuse happened, but that so few had the courage to say something. [v] What could have been different if any of the many people who knew or suspected what was happening had just done what that video suggests--just let coach Sandusky know that he was being observed- making a difference in the life of a child. Think of the compound of wound on wound- to not only be assaulted but to know that people knew and would not help you. And if any of those people who knew or suspected what was going on had gone to the police- they could have made the difference in the life of many.

Finally, as Rebecca Parker suggested in her reading, as a community of faith we encourage people to speak the truth of their experience -- both survivors and those who have hurt them. When Survivors speak the truth of their experience, they facilitate not only their own healing but the healing of others. I believe it is also important for perpetrators to speak the truth. At this moment in our culture we demonize perpetrators of sexual abuse like no other kind of person. And truly there are people who have committed horrible devastating acts. But when our laws create a situation in which it is impossible for convicted sex offenders to find housing, to find jobs, to be part of community, is that really better than having a community that knows the person and can hold them accountable for their actions? Rev. Debora Haffner, director of the Religious Institute which provides guidance to congregations and people of faith around these issues, told us that 87% of sexual offenders will not reoffend after prison or treatment. She says the person who comes to church after treatment and tells you is not the primary threat to our congregations. The primary threat are those folks who still live and act in a cloak of secrecy. I believe our current process of responding to sexual abuse leaves the work of restorative justice unfinished. An act of sexual abuse or violence is not just an infraction of the law, but an injury to a person, and to the web of relationships. Jennifer Llewellyn, Viscount Bennett Professor of Law at Dalhousie and an international expert in restorative justice tells us [vi] “Restorative justice is an idea that says, at its core, justice has to be about repairing or addressing the harm caused to social relationships when wrongdoing happens.” I think “restorative justice” is a big enough topic for another sermon, but in the words of Rebecca Parker, “we told the truth about our lives because telling the truth restored us to the human community. It brought us back from the dead. ... It made us free.”

To be a safe congregation, this must be a place where we speak the truth. Where we learn to articulate our own boundaries, and support others who express their boundaries because this is how we will help prevent abuse, and how we will help in healing from abuse. In our Lesson for all ages this morning each of us was asked to think of someone to tell if something bad happened to us. I hope that each us will also aspire to be “someone to tell” so that whenever a child or a woman or a man in our community feels unsafe, that this will be a safe place to speak our truth. 

Endnotes
[i] http://www.adultsabusedbyclergy.org/UnsafeInAnyDenomination.html 
[ii] http://www.uuma.org/default.asp?page=guidelines#Ethical Standards 
[iii] http://www.adultsabusedbyclergy.org/UnsafeInAnyDenomination.htmlhttp://www.adultsabusedbyclergy.org/UnsafeInAnyDenomination.html 
[iv] http://shitpeoplesaytowomendirectors.tumblr.com/ read more about it here: http://laist.com/2015/05/28/sht_people_say_to_women_directors.php
[v] http://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142111804/penn-state-abuse-scandal-a-guide-and-timeline
[vi] http://www.restorativejustice.org/RJOB/what-is-restorative-justice

Not So Simple (May 10, 2015)

Reading- Solving for pattern by Wendell Berry

Perhaps it is not until health is set down as the aim that we come in sight of the third kind of solution: that which causes a ramifying series of solutions – as when meat animals are fed on the farm where the feed is raised, and where the feed is raised to be fed to the animals that are on the farm. Even so rudimentary a description implies a concern for pattern, for quality, which necessarily complicates the concern for production. The farmer has put plants and animals into a relationship of mutual dependence, and must perforce be concerned for balance or symmetry, a reciprocating connection in the pattern of the farm that is biological, not industrial, and that involves solutions to problems of fertility, soil husbandry, economics, sanitation - the whole complex of problems whose proper solutions add up to health: the health of the soil, of plants and animals, of farm and farmer, of farm family and farm community, all involved in the same inter-nested, interlocking pattern – or pattern of patterns.
A bad solution is bad, then, because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained. It acts destructively upon those patterns, most likely, because it is formed in ignorance or disregard of them. A bad solution solves for a single purpose or goal, such as increased production. And it is typical of such solutions that they achieve stupendous increases in production at exorbitant biological and social costs. A good solution is good because it is in harmony with those larger patterns – and this harmony will, I think, be found to have a nature of analogy. A bad solution acts within the larger pattern the way a disease or addiction acts within the body. A good solution acts within the larger pattern the way a healthy organ acts within the body. 

Sermon- Not So Simple

A couple of years back our congregation and the UU congregation up in Syracuse were getting ready to swap pulpits. Their minister, Jean, asked if I would preach about Fracking, because she knew we in Bradford County were in the thick of it, and because Elaine and Frank and I had presented a workshop on the issues of Natural Gas Development at the Social Justice conference the year before. Since we are the only congregation in the St. Lawrence District in Pennsylvania, we still are the only congregation where fracking is a reality in our lives. “Sure” I said, and started thinking about it. 

What could I say to the Syracuse UUs about Fracking, knowing that a sermon is not a workshop. It is not enough just to present the mechanics of fracking, the chemistry and economics. A sermon is supposed to be a call to ethical action. But my time serving this congregation had not shown me a clear call to action, but instead shown me that the lived reality of fracking is overwhelmingly complex.

Many of the members of this congregation have faced the ethical dilemma of what to do when the landsman comes to your door to talk with you about leasing the mineral rights to your land. And it is clear to me from listening to your stories, listening to how you grappled with the ethical issues, that there is more than one ethical position. Some folks have decided not to lease their mineral rights, believing that the environmental impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing are not worth it for the money to be made, nor for the energy to be produced. Other folks, knowing how many of us use natural gas, for example, to heat our homes- my home is heated with natural gas- don’t want to succumb to the “Not in My Backyard” thinking, leaving some other community to take the risks and bear the cost of extracting natural gas. If we are going to use Natural gas here, they reason, we should be willing to allow it to be extracted here. Still others consider the economic impact of natural Gas extraction on the region. This is not a wealthy area by any means. Bradford county is 48th out of 67 counties in PA for per capita income, and Tioga County is 57th[i] This area has always made most of its wealth from farming and resource extraction, and since the family farm has struggled so mightily in these past generations, many people hope these mineral rights leases will literally help people keep their farms or homes, would provide some economic relief. There’s a barn I pass on my way into Ithaca from points East. Maybe you’ve seen it? It is caving in you can practically see it falling apart and it has a big sign hanging on the side saying “Coming soon Natural Gas and My New Barn.” Moreover, we have met some really great people who came to town because of jobs in the gas industry, doing the best they can to support themselves and their families at a time when the minimum wage in Pennsylvania still lingers at $7.25 per hour.

For a while on my drive down here from Ithaca, I began my drive in a sea of “No fracking” signs which quite abruptly would change to a sea of “Friends of Natural Gas” or “Frack here, frack now” signs. A perfect illustration of how this incredibly complex issue has become deeply polarized. It has strained the web of relationships between neighbors, between family members. I realized recently that I haven’t spoken from the pulpit about this issue in years is because we don’t want to bring that polarization into our beloved community. You can feel the social danger of expressing certain ideas.

These past Wednesday afternoons a group of us have been talking about our distinctive UU theology. And one of the aspects of our “soteriology” that is, our theory of what saves us and what we need to be saved from, is that instead of anticipating an ultimate battle between good and evil, we know we are part of a complex web of life. As we work together to build the beloved community, it is not a gated community, but must include environmental activists, gas company executives, landowners, all the people who heat their homes in the winter, and all the beings who need water to live. In the same way Universalists long ago rejected the notion that some persons were predestined to go to heaven and others to suffer forever in hell, I would like to reframe the debate over natural gas from a battle that one side must win and another side must lose, into something more like that “tangled bank” we talked about on Evolution Sunday. If we are going to move in a life-giving direction with this tangled web of issues and problems, there is not just one final solution, but many big and little decisions that allow people to be warm in the winter, to have jobs that pay a living wage, and that preserve our beautiful agricultural land and the water we all need to survive.

This image some of you will remember from a sermon I did recently. Here is the circle that shows what we need. The circle that shows what we don’t need, and this intersecting circle showing what is possible right now. I think most of us would agree, for example, that we need energy to heat our homes and to run this industrialized world we have created. Most of us would agree that we need sources of energy that will not contribute to global climate change. But as we heard in our opening reading, we have to be careful not to create solutions that in turn create new problems. Wendell Berry tells us there are three kinds of solutions. He uses these with agricultural metaphors, but I will apply them to the whole web of issues around how we make and use energy

To quote Berry: “There is, first, the solution that causes a ramifying[ii] series of new problems, the only limiting criterion being, apparently, that the new problems should arise beyond the purview of the expertise that produced the solution.” I think a great example of this is the controversy over on Lake Seneca. Crestwood, a company based out of Texas, is planning to build a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) industrial storage facility and a methane expansion facility, and plans to store methane, propane, and butane in unlined, depleted salt caverns “that were never engineered to store anything, on the shores of Seneca Lake”.[iii] So if the problem that we are trying to solve is where to store LPG, we have set up the discussion so that issues like the effects of leaks on water or air or agricultural soil or other industries like tourism are “beyond the purview” of the engineers and staff of the gas companies. Other problems caused with this technology are seen as separate problems requiring separate solutions.

Quoting Berry again: “The second kind of solution is that which immediately worsens the problem it is intended to solve, causing a hellish symbiosis in which problem and solution reciprocally enlarge one another” Some folks, including our president, have proposed Natural Gas as a “clean energy.” We know, for example, that Natural Gas “emits 50 percent less carbon dioxide than coal when you burn it.”[iv] The complexity comes from the fact that when Natural Gas is mined, Methane escapes into the atmosphere, and Methane “ unburned, is around 70 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.”[v] If we are using natural gas to reduce greenhouse gases, this is a solution that makes that problem worse.

In the same light, it seems like stopping all natural gas production tomorrow around the world would also be a solution that makes things worse. So many people would be suddenly out of work. People who now heat with natural gas would have to quickly have their heating systems converted, and those who couldn’t afford the conversion, the poorest and most vulnerable in the world, would suffer

But says Berry, there is a third kind of solution, those “which causes a ramifying series of solutions” . In his essay Berry uses for his example example a farmer who solved the problem of a grain shortage on his farm by selling off part of his heard, by using more of the herd’s manure to increase fertility, by breeding programs that selected for cows that could eat roughage, and then by reduced the percentage of grain in the feed ration. By solving the problem of a feed shortage, in this way, he ended up with a healthier farm. 

We need to have the courage to figure out what we REALLY need. To even imagine what we really need. We are afraid that there is no solution that reduces the acceleration of global climate change, while keeping our water clean, and providing jobs for everyone. When our vision is too narrow, we miss important pieces of the big picture. We all know that humans and most other living beings on teh planet need water to survive. But it’s easy to forget, living in an area that is one of the greatest sources of fresh water in the world. [vi] It’s easy to forget that many living beings right now on the planet are suffering from a shortage of drinking water. It’s hard to imagine that fresh drinkable water which is so freely available to us, it’s hard to really comprehend and that it could ever be a scarce resource, and that it could become scarce by our own actions. 

Did you know that in China governmental reports show 60% of their fresh water has become polluted, and others suggest the government is underreporting the problem, so it may even be worse?[vii] Half of China’s population lacks safe drinking water. Nearly two thirds of China’s rural population---more than 500 million people---use water contaminated by human and industrial waste.[viii] Now, did you know that it takes roughly 4.4 million gallons of water to frack one well?[ix] These millions of gallons of water are mixed with a chemical cocktail that so far we haven’t figured out how to remove from the water after fracking is over, and so is permanently removed from the water cycle and stored as toxic waste. I suggest to you that a true solution to our energy problems does not create a new water problem to be solved. We must have the courage to imagine and to say out loud that the energy we really need is energy that does not jeopardize the water we need to live.

When the complex issues around producing safe, clean energy are reduced to whether Natural Gas development is Good or Evil, it becomes impossible to have public conversations that will make a huge difference in our children’s lives and their grandchildren’s lives. 

Right now in Bradford County, Hydraulic Fracturing is a reality. It is providing fuel, and jobs to our community and other communities around the world. While the state of New York is under a moratorium. The choice is no longer “to frack or not to frack,” but a series of ramifying choices for those of us who live in both states. Remember those methane emissions I talked about earlier? A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) concluded that “There is a need for the natural gas industry and science community to help obtain better emissions data and for increased efforts to reduce methane leakage in order to minimize the climate footprint of natural gas.” This seems like a really important issue- gathering data to track and reduce methane leakage would make the difference between natural gas being cleaner than coal, or being just as dirty as coal. In fact there are new EPA regulations that went into effect on January of 2015 that require many wells to capture some of that Methane. As an example of Solutions that lead to other solutions, the EPA projects that not only would the “new rule would reduce emissions of volatile organic compounds by 190,000 to 290,000 tons per year and toxic air pollutants by 12,000 to 20,000 tons a year…. [through a process] known as “green completions,” at the same time the industry would save $11 million to $19 million a year because drillers would be able to capture and sell the methane that is now burned off, or flared.[x]

I never did preach that sermon in Syracuse. I chickened out and decided to preach on something less controversial- the Doctrine of Discovery and whether European-Americans even have the right to live on the lands we now claim. What would I tell that congregation in Syracuse today? I would tell them there is no simple answer, we must be constantly looking for solutions that increase the health of the whole. As Berry says “Good solutions exist only in proof... Problems must be solved in work and in place, with particular knowledge, fidelity, and care, by people who will suffer the consequences of their mistakes.” Berry is suggesting that good solutions are created by people who know a place, work a place, and will suffer if the place suffers. That’s us. Whether our land is leased or not. It’s up to us to monitor our local creeks (as several volunteers in this congregation and in our community are doing) and know how the water in this very place is healthy or sick. It’s up to us to ask for good data on the emissions, and to ask our DEP to create and enforce standards that make sure our solutions are good not only for energy production, but for our health. I would probably tell the Syracuse congregation that good solutions may be different in their community than in ours. I would tell them not to settle for Solutions “which causes a ramifying series of problems,” but to keep looking for solutions “which causes a ramifying series of solutions.” Even if they don’t seem possible right now, we must keep looking for solutions together. Not necessarily a simple solution, but one in harmony with “the inter-nested, interlocking patterns of health”, the interconnected web of life of which we are a part.


Endnotes

[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pennsylvania_counties_by_per_capita_income
[ii] Ramifying-“ present participle: ramifying - form branches or offshoots; spread or branch out”
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ramify
[iii] http://gasfreeseneca.com/?page_id=142
[iv] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/is-natural-gas-clean/
[v] http://www.pnas.org/content/109/17/6435
[vi] http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/freshwater-map/ 
[vii] http://thediplomat.com/2014/11/chinas-looming-water-shortage/, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-11/19/content_18942169.htm 
[viii] http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat10/sub66/item391.html
[ix] http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2013/03/12/how-much-water-it-takes-to-frack-a-well/
[x] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/science/earth/epa-caps-emissions-at-gas-and-oil-wells.html?_r=1&ref=energy-environment