Memories of Things Past

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Remembrances

On this day, Memorial Day, we take time to remember those who have died in the past year. We pause now to remember those from this church community who have died since Memorial Day in 2005; and we pause to remember those from our own lives who have died since Memorial Day in 2005.

In the past year, several members and friends of this congregation have died. I will read the names of members and friends of this church who died in the past year, followed by a moment of silent meditation:

Phyllis Grosswendt
Patricia Tansey
Philemon Pete Truesdale

In the past year, someone you knew may have died. If you would like, in a moment I’ll ask you to speak the name of that person, or those people, aloud; and you may say that name aloud at any time, when your heart moves you to do so, not worrying if someone else is also saying a name at the same time.

To say these names aloud is to keep alive the memory of that person. So it is that I invite you to say the name of persons you knew who have died since last May; or to sit in communal silence as any names are spoken….

We pause to remember the dead; may remembrance help to bring peace, may it help to heal. Amen.

Readings

The first reading this morning is Orphic Hymn no. 76, as translated in 1792 by Thomas Taylor. This is a hymn to Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory.

“The Fumigation from Frankincense.
The consort I invoke of Jove divine,
source of the holy, sweetly-speaking Nine;
Free from th’ oblivion of the fallen mind,
by whom the soul with intellect is join’d:
Reason’s increase, and thought to thee belong,
all-powerful, pleasant, vigilant, and strong:
‘Tis thine, to waken from lethargic rest
all thoughts deposited within the breast;
And nought neglecting, vigorous to excite
the mental eye from dark oblivion’s night.
Come, blessed power, thy mystic’s mem’ry wake
to holy rites, and Lethe’s fetters break.”

…

The second reading this morning is from Marcel Proust’s book Swann’s Way, as translated by Lydia Davis:

It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon [the past], all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect….

…One day in winter, as I returned home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little tea. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump cakes called petites madeleines that look as though they have been molded in the grooved valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of another sad day to follow, I carried to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather, this essence was not merely inside me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Where could it have come from — this powerful joy? I sense that it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it went infinitely far beyond it, could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I grasp it? I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third that gives me a little less than the second. It is time for me to stop, the virtue of the drink seems to be diminishing. Clearly, the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me….

[Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1. Trans. Lydia Davis, pp. 44-45.]

Sermon

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a holiday originated by the African American community of Charleston, South Carolina, as a way of remembering those who had died in the Civil War fighting to end slavery. Since its origins as a holiday meant to commemorate the Union soldiers of the Civil War, the scope of Memorial Day has broadened. It is now a day on which we commemorate all those family, friends, and loved ones who have died. The central purpose of Memorial Day is captured in its name: Memorial Day is a day to remember.

So it is that Memorial Day and religion overlap. One of the central functions of religion, and of religious organizations, is to help us remember. This is true on a very broad scale — for example, one of the main purposes of the Christian religion is to keep alive the memory of Jesus of Nazareth. This is true on the local level — part of what our church, First Unitarian in New Bedford, does is to keep alive the memories of what liberal religion has accomplished in New Bedford; which is why it is important for us to celebrate our 300th anniversary this year. And this is also true at the personal level — our religion can help us to remember key moments in our lives, moments like birth and marriage; and to remember key persons in our lives who have died.

The ancient Greeks personified memory into a minor goddess, the goddess Mnemosyne; her opposite was the goddess Lethe, the goddess of forgetfulness. As we heard in the first reading this morning, Mnemosyne was supposed to link the intellect with the soul; she was the goddess of reason and thoughtfulness; it was she who could break us free from the bonds of the dark oblivion of forgetfulness. Because of her ties to reason and thoughtfulness, I think of Mnemosyne as the Greek goddess who is of perhaps greatest interest to those of us who are religious liberals today. Memory links our souls, our spiritual selves, with our intellect and our reasoning selves.

1. A dozen years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet Barbara Marshman. A lifelong Universalist, Barbara became a religious educator, an ordained minister of religious education. She was perhaps the most creative and interesting religious educator I have known, and she had a deep insight into children.

Once I went to a workshop that Barbara led, where she said that her key to success was to ask children in her Sunday schools, “What do you remember?” Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools do not require children to memorize Bible verses, nor would we count our Sunday school a success if the children memorized lots of Bible verses; nor do we have formal testing, for we don’t require children to memorize facts about religion. We want children to learn how to lead religious lives, and from a pedagogical standpoint it’s an interesting problem to figure out how to test them to see if they’ve learned what we hope for them to learn. So pedagogically speaking, when Barbara Marshman asked children what they remembered, she was testing them to see if they had learned what we hope for them to learn. But asking children what they remember is more than some kind of test.

I remember the first time I tried asking a group of children what they remembered. It was a Memorial Day weekend, and I gathered together the few children who actually came to Sunday school and sat down with them and asked them what they remembered from a year at church. Of course, I anticipated that they would tell me things they had learned in their Sunday school classes. Well, it took a little while to explain to some of the younger children what I wanted, and to remind them that the church year started in September, and when September was. Then an eight-year old girl raised her hand and said, “Do we have to talk about the things we did in Sunday school, or can we talk about anything?” Somewhat surprised, I replied, “You can talk about anything, I suppose.” And then they began to raise their hands to tell me what they remembered from church. I still vividly remember that the first child who raised her hand remembered seeing a baby get dedicated during a church service. And I also remember that less than half the children remembered something they learned during Sunday school.

Over the years, I have continued to ask children what they remember from going to church, often on Memorial Day weekend. I still some notes I took a few years ago when I asked children this question at another church. Here are some of the things those children remembered from a year at that church: they remembered singing the doxology every week during the worship service; they remembered playing card games at an intergenerational potluck dinner; they remembered acting as an usher with their parents and greeting people coming into the worship service; they remembered lighting the flaming chalice during a worship service; they remembered participating in the no-rehearsal Christmas pageant; they remembered helping to take the offering during the worship service. What strikes me about what children remember is that they have the most vivid memories of participating in worship services, and they also have vivid memories of times when they are allowed to participate with adults in various church events. In short, one of the most important things children learn at church is that they are a part of a community.

Now these children also remembered specific church school lessons as well. But I have noticed that the lessons children seem to remember best are the lessons when they are doing something together with others. When we tell them a story, they may or may not remember that story; but if we help them to act out the story together, they are far more likely to remember it. They remember games, and they remember cooperative projects that they do together. Here again, the children are learning what it means to be a part of a religious community.

Barbara Marshman said to ask children what they remember about church, and what they seem to remember best is the communal aspects of church. To be entirely honest with you, I don’t think we Unitarian Universalists are very good at getting children to learn what is popularly known as “Bible literacy,” that is, characters and stories and facts from the Bible. Nor have we been very good at getting children to know much about world religions, nor much about Unitarian Universalist history. But in the past couple of decades, I think we have been very good at teaching children how they can be a vital part of a religious community, which is a far more difficult thing to teach them — and, I think, far more important in the long run. I don’t care as much about Bible literacy as I want children to know that this church is safe community for them; I want children to know that there are lots of caring adults out there besides their parents, adults who want them to succeed in becoming wonderful human beings. Those memories will shape them, shape them in positive ways, shape them for years to come in ways we can barely imagine.

The same is true of us adults, too. Think about your own religious past; and think about how those memories have shaped you; and think about how you can shape those memories as you move forward in your spiritual journey. And then think about the times this church has provided a safe community for you; a safe place to reflect on who you are; the times when this church has been a community which supported you as you strive to become the best person you can become.

To put it another way: we become our memories. Thus one of the most important religious acts is the act of shaping our memories, such that we turn ourselves towards wholeness and becoming the best persons we can become.

2. Part of moving towards wholeness is not just remembering, but also learning how to keep our memories from taking over our lives. An obvious example of this would be the person who has suffered serious grief, the worst grief you can imagine. It would be easy to let an unbearable grief take over your life; but letting grief take over your entire life is unlikely to lead towards spiritual wholeness. This is an extreme example, but there are less extreme examples.

In the second reading this morning, we heard a charming anecdote written by Marcel Proust. Proust tells us that one day when he was an adult, his mother served him tea with a little cake called a petite madeleine; he dipped the cake into his tea and when he tasted it, something he hadn’t tasted since childhood, that taste released a whole horde of childhood memories. Tastes and smells seem to prompt old memories; you’ll taste or smell something and suddenly you’re transported back in memory to another time. For Proust, this initial memory led him to start writing a massive six-volume novel, a project that took him the rest of his life to finish. The fact that Proust lived with his parents until they died, and never really went out on his own, and spent the last years of his life in a sound-proofed bedroom, may make us view him with a little bit of alarm: yes, he was a great artist, and yes he wrote great books, but I’m not sure I would want my memories to take over my life like that.

Yet this does happen to many of us. Sometimes our memories take over our lives. I don’t think it’s a good thing to have memories take over our lives; it’s just as bad as forgetting completely. So what I’d like to do is to talk with you for a bit about grief, and how memory and grief are linked together.

What happens when someone close to us dies? If you know someone close to you — a family member, friend, or loved one — is going to die, grieving might start even before that person is dead. When someone close to you does die, most people experience numbness for about three months. Of course, everyone is different, and there are no absolute rules. But for most of us, when someone dies, you’re numb, and you don’t feel much or think much or remember much. Because they are numb, some people make the mistake of thinking the grief is over, they no longer need to remember, and they can just get on with life.

Usually, after about three months of numbness, serious grieving sets in. More than one person reports that they think they’re doing fine when suddenly they start crying for no apparent reason — it’s not uncommon to be driving by yourself in the car, when suddenly you burst into tears; for some people the crying is so violent that they have to pull over to the side of the road. However it happens, the real deep grief begins. It is a peculiar state of affairs; as I have both witnessed it and experienced it, this deep grief mixes up recent memories, often of the last month or day of the loved one’s death, and much older memories. I believe this is may be because the pain of deep grief is so intense that the memories get all jumbled up.

Most people experience at least a year of deep grief when someone close to them dies, and then another year of serious grief when the memories really start to bubble up. Thus, grieving is a time to feel sad, and it is also a time to devote oneself to remembering, a time to let memories bubble up, a time to come to terms with memories. This intensive time spent remembering can and should be a time to deal with powerful memories; which is another way of saying, it is a time to deal with our deepest selves, and to grow spiritually and emotionally.

I want to be sure to acknowledge that there are other kinds of loss besides losing someone to death:– there’s the loss of innocence, there’s the loss of self, there’s the loss that comes with the end of a relationship. Each kind of loss requires a greater or lesser amount of grief. I am told that the death of one’s child leads to the greatest grief possible; but I have also seen other kinds of loss, the loss of innocence for example, lead to debilitating grief; so I refuse to predict or judge which loss will cause how much grief. I also want to acknowledge that loss and the memories that come with loss can be unmanageable, and more often than not we have to accept help from those around us in order to deal with grief, loss, and the associated memories.

I also wish to say that I worry when people get frozen in grief, loss, or memories. Unfortunately, the wider culture prompts us to become frozen in one of two ways. On the one hand, the surrounding culture tells us that we should ignore grief. On the other hand, the dominant Christian culture that obsesses on the death and execution of Jesus while ignoring his life can prompt us to cling to death or loss while ignoring life. Neither extreme is productive; both extremes are life-denying.

Thus it seems to me that a central purpose of a religious community should be to help us cherish our memories, while making sure we don’t get frozen in the past. On the grand scale, religion should help us remember a great religious prophet like Jesus, but above all religion should help us remember the living teachings of that prophet rather than the manner of his death. On the communal scale, religion should help us remember the whole story of our religious community — in our case, all three hundred years of our story — so that we may remember how our religious community has successfully lived out our values in the world, rather than dwelling on whatever defeats we may have suffered. Finally, on the personal scale, religion and religious community can help us remember the lives and deeds of those who went before us so that we may live out the best in their lives.

3. On the personal scale, one of the most important functions of a religious community is to help us remember the dead. To remember the dead is, of course, an intensely personal act. But it is also a communal matter. When we hold memorial services in this church, what we try to do above all is to remember the person who has died — that’s why we call it a memorial service. In other religious traditions, there are different customs: thus, in the dominant religious culture of our immediate area, it seems to be very important to have the dead body present during the funeral service, and it seems to be very important to talk about abstract beliefs in God; this is because in many religions what is most important is to focus on the fact of death, and relate that fact of death to belief in God and the afterlife. This is perfectly fine, but I prefer what our religious tradition generally does, which is to focus less on the fact of death and instead focus more on how that person lived his or her life; rather than focusing on one moment of death, we try to focus on a lifetime of memories.

And we do that in a communal setting. What is most powerful to me about our memorial services are the people of the religious community that show up, often at an inconvenient time, to bear witness to the memories. So it is that those memories take on a larger significance.

What we’re really doing at a memorial service is telling the story of someone who has just died. These stories are powerful, powerful things: these stories pass on the stored memories of other people; these stories pass on the accumulated wisdom of our religious community. And this, by the way, is what we’re doing with our children in the Sunday school: we are preparing them to take their place in the religious community, to become a part of this community of memory, so that they can pass along the stories to the next generation.

A trend that I have observed I find very encouraging : and that is the trend of asking people to tell their own stories before they die — preferably long before they die! I don’t know about you, but more than once I have walked out of a memorial service thinking, I wish I had known more about that person before she or he died. So I am encouraged when I see things like small groups ministries where people can tell their stories, or spiritual autobiography classes, or times in worship services where each week someone get two or three minutes to tell their own story.

Let me end by telling you a story about a Sunday school class from another church:

There was a Sunday school class for fifth and sixth graders. Three adults signed up to teach that Sunday school class, including one retired man who had never taught Sunday school before — he told me that the main reason he signed up was that he was trying to get over the death of his wife, who had died a year previously. Well, these three adults planned everything very carefully, and took their responsibilities very seriously, and they were all prepared on the opening day of Sunday school — and only one child showed up. They came to me afterwards, and said that maybe they had better let that one boy join another Sunday school class. But we asked him, and he said he had a pretty good time, and that he would be back. But the teachers had to change all their lesson plans, for they had planned for a big class. The retired man taught the next class, and he devoted the whole class to field grass, something he cared deeply about since he had been a botanist who spent his career studying field grass — of course, what he was really talking about was himself, he was telling that boy who he was. Time went on, and I discovered that the boy’s father was suffering from a debilitating disease that took about ten or fifteen years to kill. And at the end of the church year, that boy went to Sunday school just about every Sunday, and when we asked him what he remembered best about church that year, he said — the class when we talked about grass.

So we move forward through the ages, learning from the generations that precede us, bringing up the generations that follow us.

Creation Speculation

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is probably familiar to you. It is from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible, in the poetic King James translation:

1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13 And the evening and the morning were the third day….”

…

The second reading is from the Mahabharata, the central book of the Hindu tradition, in the new University of Chicago translation:

Poets have told it before, poets are telling it now, other poets shall tell this history on earth in the future….

When all this was without light and unillumined, and on all its sides covered by darkness, there arose one large Egg, the inexhaustible seed of all creatures. They say this was the great divine cause, in the beginning of the Eon; and that on which it rests is revealed as the true Light, the everlasting Brahman. Wondrous it was and beyond all imagining, in perfect balance in all its parts, this unmanifest subtle cause that is that which is and that which is not.

From it was born the Grandfather, the Sole Lord Prajāpati, who is known as Brahmā, as the Preceptor of the Gods, as Sthāṇu, Manu, Ka, and Parameṣṭhin. From him sprang Dakṣa, son of Pracetas, and thence the seven sons of Dakṣa, and from them came forth the twenty-one Lords of Creation. And the Person of immeasurable soul, the One whom the seers know as the universe; and the Viśve Devas, and the Ādityas as well as the Vasus and the two Aśvins. Yakṣas, Sādhyas, Piśācas, Guyakas, and the Ancestors were born from it, and the wise and impeccable Seers. So also the many royal seers, endowed with every virtue. Water, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Atmosphere, and Space, the year, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, and days and nights in turn, and whatever else, has all come forth as witnessed by the world. Whatever is found to exist, moving and unmoving, it is all again thrown together, all this world, when the destruction of the Eon has struck. Just as with the change of the season all the various signs of the season appear, so also these beings at the beginning of each Eon. Thus, without beginning and without end, rolls the wheel of existence around in this world, causing origin and destruction, beginningless and endless.

There are thirty-three thousand, thirty-three hundred, and thirty-three Gods — this is the summing up of creation.

[Mahābhārta 1.25-39, trans. J. A. B. van Buitenen in “The Mahābhārta, vol. 1: The Book of the Beginning”, University of Chicago, p. 21.]

Sermon

Recently, I realized that I have never given a sermon addressing creationism or “intelligent design.” I never saw the need to do so. There’s no real need for one Unitarian Universalist to stand up in front of a bunch of other Unitarian Universalists and state that intelligent design, or “creation science,” or whatever they’re calling it these days, is nothing more than religious dogma barely covered with a thin veneer of alleged science. Everyone here knows that “intelligent design” is not science. If a proponent of intelligent design says to us, “But evolution is just a theory,” we all know enough to say, “Yeah, and the theory of gravity is just a theory, but if you throw yourself at the floor it’s going to hurt all the same.” For a Unitarian Universalist to preach a sermon against intelligent design is about as sporting as shooting fish in a barrel.

At the same time, those creationists — sorry, those proponents of intelligent design — are so loud and insistent that they tend to drown us out. Something like a third of all adults in the United States believe evolution is false, and although we take great joy in pointing out that all those people are perfectly willing to take advantage of the advances of medical science, which are firmly based on evolutionary theory, the fact remains that all those people are injecting their dogmatic theology into our lives. And that forces us to spend quite a bit of our precious time debunking the Bible, to the point where we often get sick and tired of the Bible. We get so sick of hearing people say, “But God created the earth in seven days, it says so right in the Bible, so the scientists must be wrong” — that we just want to do away with the Bible altogether.

So although we don’t need a sermon debunking creationism, I do think it’s worth preaching a sermon about the value of religious creation stories. I’m not going to try to convince you to read the Bible, but I am going to try to convince you that the creation story contained in the Bible is a worthwhile part of our religious inheritance.

1. To begin with, let us be clear what the Bible is, and what it is not. The Bible is a collection of books which includes many books full of stories. The book of Genesis contains several dramatic and arresting stories: the story of Noah and the flood, the story of Abraham and Isaac, the story of Joseph and his technicolor dream coat, the story of Eve and Adam,– and the story of how God created the universe. All these stories are strung together in a more-or-less coherent narrative that begins at the beginning, and winds up with the establishment of the people of Israel as the chosen people of their God.

When you think about it this way, it’s obvious that the book of Genesis has more in common with a novel than with a collection of scientific treatises. The creation story in Genesis is not a systematic scientific explanation for how the universe came to be; it’s a story that reveals something about the character of God and humanity. It is not a book full of precise scientific proofs. The philosopher Aristotle tells us that it is the mark of an educated person “to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.” [Nich. Eth. I.2, 1094b] We know that it is foolish to read the book of Genesis looking for the kind of certainty science can bring to certain subjects; but we should be equally clear that the Bible can reveal to us something of the poetic truth about our human selves, and something of the poetic truth about our place in the universe; topics which do not allow the same kind of precise scientific knowledge.

Religion is meant to help us find meaning in life (among other things). A scientist might be able to look at a flower and tell us its place in a taxonomic scheme, reveal to us its place in the wider ecosystem, show us its inner anatomy; we may well feel a sense of wonder at this but we are unlikely to feel enough emotion that we need to wipe tears from our eyes. A poet can look at the same flower, and write for us a poem that will cause us to weep, or to rejoice, or discover profound feelings or thoughts about that flower; and we may well need to wipe tears from our eyes after the poet speaks to us. But the poet and the scientist do not contradict each other; they only reveal to us a different aspect of the same flower. Religion is yet another way of knowing the flower: religion may help us to look at that flower and know our relationship to it, and so help us to understand our place in the universe and the flower’s place in the universe; not through the precise taxonomic understanding used by the scientist, nor through the metaphorical and emotional understanding used by the poet, but through an understanding of how everything is connected and bound together. The book of Genesis locates that connection in the personage of God; the New Testament locates that connectedness in the Kingdom of Heaven; but we could simply call it the Web of Life through which we are connected with all that is living and non-living.

That, in fact, is what the creation story in the book of Genesis tells us. Genesis tells us about a God that created everything, including us human beings. Genesis tells us that we are connected through God to all that is: the sun and moon and stars and sky and plants and animals and the other human beings. A literal reading of Genesis would try to tell us that there is a literal personage called God who created all these things; but such a literal interpretation of God immediately runs into all kinds of logical inconsistencies; such a literal interpretation tries to turn Genesis into precise scientific knowledge, when it is really religious understanding.

An equally literal reading of Genesis would dismiss the whole book out of hand because it does not conform to scientific facts and theories as we know them. Many of the Bible-debunkers who are active today fall into this intellectual trap; they accept the arguments made by creationists and literalists that the Bible is literally true. Such literal interpretations try to turn Genesis into science, when it is really religion. It would be far more accurate to understand God, not as a literal personage, and not as a scientific explanation, but as the Web of Life through which we feel and know a deep connection to all life and to all that is.

2. We can gain a deeper understanding of the creation story in Genesis if we take the time to look at other creation stories from other world religions. I happen to love the imagery in the creation story of the Mahabharata:– the one large Egg which arose, from which time began, and out of which came everything in the universe. From that great Egg came Brahmā, and from that came all the gods, and the ancestors, and the seers and sages;– and “Water, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Atmosphere, and Space, the year, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, and days and nights in turn, and whatever else, has all come forth” from that Egg.

In this Hindu story of creation, just as in the creation story in Genesis, we learn of the connectedness of all things. The details of the Hindu creation story are quite different from those in the Hebrew creation story. But both tell of the Web of Life that connects us human beings with the earth and sky, with water and wind, with all beings including all human beings.

Back when my mother was teaching Sunday school in a Unitarian church in the 1950s, there was a curriculum called Beginnings of Earth and Sky, which presented a number of different creation stories to school-aged children; and today we still teach our Unitarian Universalist children a variety of creation stories. We do this for good reason. Of course we want our children to know the creation story in Genesis, a story that is central to our own religious inheritance; but we want them to know other creation stories as well, so they can begin to understand how all religions begin with a sense of wonder at the universe, a sense of how everything is interconnected through the one Web of Life; indeed, we want them to have a sense of how all religions are utterly different while remaining deeply connected. All these creation stories, all these religions, are different, but each can help human beings to understand who we are and where we are situated in the universe, and so lead us to find meaning and connection in our lives.

3. I said that we are open to learning the creation stories of other cultures and other religions. That raises an interesting question: Do we need a creation story of our own? Quite a few people would respond that yes, we do need a new creation story that is all our own. A year ago I heard two Unitarian Universalists, Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, speak about a new creation story that they think Unitarian Universalists and other religious liberals should adopt. They want us to adopt a new creation story put forth by a fellow named Brian Swimme, who tells a creation story founded on modern science, a creation story that links contemporary astronomical theories about the beginnings of the universe, with evolutionary theories about the beginnings of life on this planet.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Anyone can sit down and write their own creation story. And for some people, Brian Swimme’s creation story has become an important part of their religious understanding. I’ll admit my bias: I’m not enthralled by this or other similar modern creation stories. I’m not particularly interested in mixing my religious creation stories with science; especially considering how science has a way of evolving and moving forward; and for me science has its own beauty that will is diminished by mixing it with story-telling.

More to the point, none of these modern creation stories is anywhere near as lovely as the Genesis creation story, or the creation story in the Mahabharata. You’d have to be a pretty good poet to compete with the beauty of the poetry of the King James version of Genesis, and frankly Brian Swimme and other creators of modern creation stories are not a particularly good poets. And you’d have to be a pretty good storyteller to compete with the generations of people who told and retold and polished both the Hindu creation story and the Genesis story before they were finally set down in writing. If you’re going to come up with your own creation story, you’re facing an uphill battle to create something to equal the beauty of these age-old stories. For that matter, you’re facing an uphill battle if you’re going to compete with the beauty of scientific theories that have been honed over the decades by a whole community of scientific researchers. So if you want to create, or find, a new, modern creation story, more power to you — but I don’t give you a very good chance of making a success of it.

Personally, I prefer to stick with the creation story in Genesis. Even though the creationists and the other literalists and fundamentalists have done a pretty good job of wrecking Genesis, it has one deep strength. The central theme of Genesis, as with most of the Hebrew Bible, is the theme of justice. Genesis aims to hold us to high ethical and moral standards. Those high ethical and moral standards have been perverted at times by being inappropriately associated with guilt and shame; the same literalists who say that Genesis tells us that God created the universe in seven days also try to tell us about “original sin,” a phrase that appears nowhere in Genesis, and which is simply a figment of their imaginations. But in spite of these perversions of Genesis, it remains a book founded on the principle of equal justice for all human beings.

The real creation story in Genesis tells us that we are connected through the Web of Life with all that is; it is through this connection t hat we know our inherent worth and dignity, and thus our right to equal justice no matter who we are. Furthermore, the creation story in Genesis can give us what we’d now call an ecological approach to justice. We can read the creation story in Genesis thusly: Earth was given as a garden to human beings, and indeed to all beings. And if Earth is a garden, then we are the gardeners who are supposed to keep things growing well. As gardeners, we nurture and help things grow; and in so doing we are connected with the cycle of life and death. As gardeners, we are ethically and morally responsible for nurturing the garden so that all beings have access to life and the means for life; we have a moral responsibility to facilitate the interconnectedness of the Web of Life.

So it is that I don’t yet want to abandon the Genesis creation story. Even though the creationists have twisted Genesis to their own purposes, that doesn’t affect the true meaning of the story. Even though science presents a different truth to us, that doesn’t do away with the importance of the Genesis story. The creation story in Genesis tells us about our responsibility to nurture all life and respect all beings; through its poetry it tells us that we are connected to the entire Web of Life.

Mother of Us All

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is by James Lovelock, the person who developed the “Gaia hypothesis” that the Earth taken as a whole acts as if it is a living being:

“…Had it been known then that life and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive, and known that we cannot pollute the air or use the Earth’s skin — its forest and ocean ecosystems — as a mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes. We would have felt instinctively that those ecosystems must be left untouched because they were part of the living Earth.

“So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent….

“Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

“We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

“Perhaps the saddest thing is that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.

“We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.”

[This opinion piece by Dr. Lovelock is from The Independent (London), 16 January 2006.]

The second reading is from Homeric Hymn no. 30 to Gaia. Please excuse the gender-specific language of this old translation from ancient Greek:

To Gaia, the Mother of All.

I will sing of well-founded Gaia (Earth), mother of all, eldest of all beings. She feeds all the creatures that are in the worlds, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly: all these are fed of her store. Through you, O queen, men are blessed in their children and blessed in their harvests, and to you it belongs to give means of life to mortal men and to take it away. Happy is the man whom you delight to honour! He has all things abundantly: his fruitful land is laden with corn, his pastures are covered with cattle, and his house is filled with good things. Such men rule orderly in their cities of fair women: great riches and wealth follow them: their sons exult with everfresh delight, and their daughters in flower-laden bands play and skip merrily over the soft flowers of the field. Thus is it with those whom you honour O holy goddess, bountiful, wife of starry Heaven; freely bestow upon me for this my song substance that cheers the heart!

[Homeric Hymns, ed. & trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classics (Cambridge, Mass.: Havard Press, 1914.)

Sermon

This is the fourth and final sermon in series of sermons on Greek goddesses. You may recall that when I began this series, I said that the ancient Greek goddesses are examples of female god images from our own Western culture — these are goddesses who are an integral part of our Western cultural inheritance. For this final sermon on Greek goddesses, I would like to speak with you about Gaia, or Mother Earth. And while the previous goddesses I spoke about — Artemis, Athena, Demeter, and Persephone — are no longer all that familiar to us, we all know and are familiar with Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the goddess who comprises all living beings on the broad earth.

Furthermore, the ancient Greek goddess Gaia is of interest today because today we face vast ecological problems. These ecological problems require a religious response from us. A few of our Christian brothers and sisters do a better job — they’re the ones who talk about “creation care,” meaning that God created the earth so we better not mess it up, because if we do we’re going against God’s will. I don’t happen to feel comfortable with that theology, but I respect the fact that this a genuinely religious response to the ecological crisis.

So what might be a genuine Unitarian Universalist religious response to the ecological crisis? Of course we already promote religious respect for the Earth; people in this congregation do this in a variety of ways. Some among us are neo-pagans, and may in fact understand the Earth as worthy of religious veneration. Some among us are humanists, with a religious appreciation of the importance of scientific insights, including the insights of ecology and climate science. Some among us — and this is our oldest religious tradition — are Transcendentalists, and like Emerson and Thoreau we feel that there is some transcendent reality in Nature.

These are three of our religious approaches, and we could probably come up with several more. It would be easy to emphasize the differences among us. Instead, let’s meditate for a while on the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, a Mother goddess who is part of our Western cultural inheritance, and see where such meditation leads us.

1. To begin with, I’d like to tell you a little about that ancient Greek goddess, Gaia. In the second reading this morning, we heard an ancient Greek hymn to Gaia, extolling her many virtues. She is the “eldest of all beings,” the first to emerge from the chaos that existed at the beginning of everything. Gaia “feeds all the creatures that are in the worlds, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly.” It is she upon whom we human being depend for our very lives, and she can either bless human beings with a good harvest, or remove from them the means of life. If the ancient Greek goddess Gaia smiles upon humanity, then our farms produce good food for us, our houses are “filled with good things,” our cities are orderly, our sons “exult with everfresh delight,” and our “daughters in flower-laden bands play and skip merrily over the soft flowers of the field.”

All of which makes old Mother Earth sound like a delightful goddess indeed. But the ancient Greeks knew a Gaia who had her dark side, too; a goddess who was quite different from the sanitized versions of Mother Earth that seem to float around popular culture today. Let me tell you one of the gorier stories about Gaia:

In the beginning was Chaos, which was unformed stuff, or some say a bounded gap. Out of Chaos emerged Gaia, Mother Earth. Now after some indeterminate time, Gaia bore a son, who was named Ouranos, or the Heavens. Ouranos and Gaia had various children together, among whom was born Cronos.

Ouranos did not like some of his children, and he took his children Cottus and Briareos and Gyes and hid them away beneath the Earth. Gaia was angry at Ouranos for doing this, and she asked her other children to wreak revenge on their father. But only Cronos would follow Gaia’s plan — he took the sickle she gave him, ambushed his father, and castrated him. That was the end of Ouranos’s rule.

And there are many more rather grim stories involving Gaia: stories of monsters, stories where Gaia gets involved in a war with some other gods, more stories of revenge and hatred. There is a dark side to the ancient Greek goddess named Gaia. She was not all flowers and greenery; she was capable of wrath and destruction as well.

Our ancient Greek cultural inheritance portrays Mother Earth as a primal religious power. Gaia is not a greeting-card version of Mother Earth:– she is a powerful Mother Earth, who nurtures but who also participates fully in the total life cycle of birth and death. She is a goddess who is in some sense beyond real human comprehension. So the first part of our meditation on Mother Earth recognizes her great power.

2. From ancient Greek myths we jump forward a few thousand years to modern science, and we find that the name “Gaia” appears in the scientific world. Perhaps you have heard of the Gaia hypothesis. First proposed by James Lovelock in the 1960s, this scientific hypothesis proposed that the earth is a self-regulating system. as I understand it, the proponents of Gaia theory state that it is possible to understand the Earth as a living being, in the very specific sense that the Earth can be understood as the complex interaction of various systems. These interactions can best be modeled using non-linear mathematics, and a serious study of these interactions require scientists to look beyond the confines of their specific disciplines, so that biologists have to consider the effects of geology, and atmospheric and hydrospheric science on life forms, and vice versa.

Lovelock is a serious scientist who has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and doctorates in medicine and biophysics. In spite of his academic credentials, his use of the name “Gaia” turned out to be quite controversial. Some scientists seemed to think that using the name of an ancient Greek goddess made it seem as if Lovelock was proposing that the self-regulating system of the earth is somehow conscious and capable of willful action. Lovelock has explicitly denied that he intended this, and he has said that he does not believe that we should consider the Earth as a thinking, feeling being. And in the ensuing years, others have begun talking about earth systems science, or geophysiology — terms which are perhaps less inflammatory.

While the term “Gaia theory” may sound imprecise to some scientists, from a metaphorical standpoint I think that name can be useful to us. We all know that widespread worship of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses has long since died out. But using the name for an ancient goddess might help us keep in mind the complexity embodied by Gaia theory — just as those ancient goddesses were complex and in some sense impossible for us humans to understand, the complexity of the relationships between the various systems of the planet Earth is beyond our current comprehension, and impossible to model with any degree of accuracy. This in turn might help us to be aware that our actions may have consequences that we cannot foresee and that we do not intend. And that should prompt us to be wary of anyone who proposes a simplistic solution to the ecological problems facing us.

We know that we should be wary of simplistic answers to complex questions; we know that human beings often do things that turn out to be pretty stupid in retrospect; and we know that the solutions to life’s problems are rarely simple. We don’t have to know anything about the non-linear mathematics behind Gaia theory to understand this. So the second part of our meditation on the goddess Gaia reminds us that while we know a lot more about how the universe works than did the ancient Greeks, there’s an awful lot that we still don’t understand.

3. And now I’d like to turn to consider our own religious tradition. For me, one of the central points of our Unitarian Universalist tradition is that we are ultimately hopeful. In spite of everything that is wrong with the world, we continue to believe that the arc of the universe tends towards justice; we continue to believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Even in the face of evidence that things are not going particularly well, we continue to believe that we can make a positive difference in the world.

Right now, there is a fair amount of evidence that things are not going particularly well. I mentioned the scientist James Lovelock earlier; in the first reading this morning, from a recent article by Lovelock, he calmly states his belief that we are already past the tipping point of global climate change. Many of us would disagree with Lovelock on this point, but even so there’s plenty of other evidence that things are not going well in the world. If you pay attention to the news you can find plenty of evidence that implies that the world is currently in a handbasket, and it is not heaven to which we are headed to in that handbasket.

It is in times like these that we need hope. I would suggest that the image of Mother Earth can serve as a powerful symbol of hopefulness. Mother Earth is a mother. By definition, mothers are mothers because they have children: whether they have biological children or other kinds of children, by definition mothers care for children, nurture them, believe in them. Referring to this image as Gaia might help remind us that this remains an image, a symbol, not reality; that we are constantly striving to turn that image into reality. But it is an image that can lead us forward in hopefulness.

Raising children is an act of hope. Whenever we see a child, whenever we see new life starting out, we have the hope that this child will be one of the ones who helps make the world a better place. In the first reading this morning, James Lovelock says that human civilization should be the heart and mind of this planet. Whenever we see a child, we have the hope that this child will participate in the great work of maintaining civilization as the heart and mind of our planet. Yes, we adults do our part, to the best of our ability: but we always hope that the children in our lives will soar beyond our own efforts.

I would say that children are central to my religious outlook, even though I have no children of my own. Caring for children is central to my religious outlook, because in caring for children lies my hope for the future. For me, a central purpose of any religious community must be to raise children to help them become good adults; to instill in them the idea that there is more to life than being a good consumer; that we human beings must always strive to reach the highest moral and ethical ideals. In this sense, religious communities act like the best of mothers: nurturing, caring for, and believing in the children in our midst. As Unitarian Universalists, we can believe whatever we wish about God; but we are religiously called to create a religious community that nurtures the rising generations. This is how we live out the essential hopefulness of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

So in closing, let me say: happy Mother’s Day. Care for the children. Care for the earth. The two are synonymous. And mothers are central to it all.