Monthly Archives: March 2006

Gulls

Last week, I was walking up William Street towards the church when I saw two Herring gulls standing together in the bright morning sun, right in the middle of Achusnet Avenue. The one was an adult gull, and the other a brownish first year gull. The first year gull had hunched itself down and was trying to peck at the red gonys spot on the bottom of the adult’s bill, all the while making a high-pitched call note. The adult, its bright gray and white plumage looking quite dapper in comparison with the dirty brown of the younger bird, had its head pulled back, dodging and keeping its bill out of reach of the young gull.

We are told that young Herring gulls on the nest will peck at the red gonys spot, stimulating the adult to regurgitate food for them. At this point in the year, the young gulls should be able to forage for themselves, but here was this gull engaging in what seems to be immature behavior. The two gulls were oblivious to the car rumbling along the paving stones towards them, the young gull still trying to hit that red spot, the older gull moving its beak out of the way but not flying away either. The car came to a complete stop a foot from the young gull. The adult immediately flew away, and the young gull hesitated for just a moment, and then fled.

Gulls live their own lives in this city, and seem to pay little attention to human beings. The roof tops of the tall downtown buildings are their domains. You can hear them calling ten stories up, you can see them wheeling around, settling in, gathering in little groups at the edges of the building roofs. The Elm Street parking garage is never full, and the fifth and top level, open to the sky, is littered with shell fragments where gulls have dropped shellfish to crack them open. The gulls swoop down into the streets to rifle through garbage cans, or to pull open particularly fragrant garbage bags on trash collection days. From a gull’s point of view, human beings must seem to be little more than annoyances who sometimes come along to drive them away from garbage cans, or from pecking at the red spot on an adult’s bill. If all the humans went away, the gulls would miss the garbage we produce, but aside from that I doubt they’d notice we were gone.

Six months after Katrina

Someone I know went down to Mississippi a couple of weeks ago, to do a week’s worth of volunteer clean-up work with the youth group from her Unitarian Universalist church, the Winchester Unitarian Society. The photos her group brought back show a devastated landscape: ruined buildings, smashed cars, huge piles of junk surrounding what used to be a middle-class houses. Volunteers in hazmat suits, with faces hidden behind respirators. Desiccated carcasses of dogs. These pictures shook me up. They show a devastated landscape, one that should not be this devastated by now.

A few of these photos can be seen on the Winchester Unitarian Society Web site [link], along with some comments from youth who went on the trip. Two of the comments:

“I think people need to understand the extent of the damage that we saw. It wasn’t just one road or neighborhood, but actually miles and miles and towns and towns of obliterated houses and lives. The damage is ineffable, and you need to know that even though Katrina may not be on the front page anymore, it doesn’t mean that it’s anywhere near taken care of.”

“New Orleans is hurting just as badly, or worse, than everybody says it is. Also, it’s virtually empty of assistance to the naked eye. There’s no one there. Just residents trying to rebuild their lives. Who’s going to help them?”

Six months ago, my sister Jean asked the rhetorical question: How would the federal government have responded if Katrina had hit Connecticut? Let’s ask another version of that rhetorical question today: If Katrina had hit Connecticut, what would Connecticut look like today, six months afterwards?

The Little Tree Spirit

Another excerpt from a work-in-progress, a book of stories for liberal religious kids. This one is still pretty rough, my version of a Jataka tale, that is, a tale of one of Buddha’s previous incarnations. This little-known tale is unusual in that Buddha is incarnated as a tree. An essay on Jataka tales in the book Buddhism and Ecology, part of the Harvard University series on ecology and religions of the world, mentioned this story as having implications for a Buddhist ecological theology.

Be forewarned: Some browsers may have problems with the Pali diacritical marks in the proper names.

The Little Tree-Spirit

One day, some of Buddha’s followers, or bhikkus, were sitting in the Hall of Truth. They were talking about three other bhikkus, Kokālika and his friends Sāriputta and Moggallāna. The three friends didn’t seem to know how to get along with each other. Just that day, Kokālika had asked his two friends to travel with him back to his own country, and they had refused — rather rudely, too.

Buddha came and and heard the bhikkus talking about the three Kokālika, Sāriputta, and Moggallāna. One bhikku said, “That Kokālika can’t live without his two friends, but he can’t live with them, either.”

“That reminds me of a story,” said Buddha, joining the conversation….

*****

Once upon a time, two tree-spirits lived in a forest. One of the tree-spirits lived in a small, modest tree; the other tree-spirit lived in a huge old tree that towered over the other trees.

Now in that same forest there lived a ferocious tiger and a fearsome lion. This lion and this tiger used to kill and eat every large animal they could get. Because of this, no human beings dared set foot in the forest, nor were there very many other animals left. Worse yet, the lion and the tiger were very messy eaters, leaving chunks of meat on the forest floor to rot. The whole forest was filled with the smell of their rotting food.

The smaller tree-spirit had no common sense, and got the idea that the lion and the tiger had to leave the forest. He said to his neighbor, the great tree-spirit, “I have decided to drive the ferocious tiger and the fearsome lion out of our forest!”

“My friend,” said the great tree-spirit, “don’t you see that it is because of these two creatures that our beloved forest is protected? If the tiger and the lion leave the forest, human beings will come and cut all the trees down.” And the great tree-spirit recited part of an old poem:

When you feel a friend
Might bring an end
To your peace of mind,
Watch what you say,
Remain kind.

One day, that friend might prove
Worth the love
That you should offer anyway
To all living beings
In every way.

But the little tree-spirit didn’t listen to the great tree spirit, and the very next day assumed the shape of a large and terrible monster, and drove the ferocious tiger and the fearsome lion out of the forest.

Within two weeks, the human beings who lived close by began to realize that the tiger and the lion had left for good. They moved into the forest, and cut down half the trees.

The little tree spirit was frightened, and cried out to the great tree spirit, “Oh, you were right, I should never have driven the tiger and the lion out of our forest, for now the human beings are cutting us down. Oh, great tree spirit, what can we do?”

“Go find the tiger and the lion,” said the great tree-spirit. “Apologize for your harsh treatment of them, and invite them to return to the forest. That is our only hope.”

The little tree spirit ran off and found the tiger and the lion living nearby. He greeted them, and said, “Lion and Tiger, I’m sorry I chased you out of your old home by assuming the shape of a large and terrible monster. Please come back to live in the woods once again, for once you left the human beings started to cut down the trees, and soon your old home will be gone for good.”

But the tiger and the lion just growled at the little tree spirit, and rudely said that they would never return. Within a few days, the human beings had cut down the rest of the trees, and the forest was gone.

*****

When Buddha finished telling the story, he said, “As you might have guessed, the little tree-spirit in the story was Kokālika, the lion was Sāriputta, and the tiger was Moggallāna.” And the bhikkus knew that Buddha himself was the great tree-spirit in the story.

Copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper. All rights reserved. Source: Tale 272, Vyaggha-Jātaka, from the Cowell translation of the Jataka tales (1911).

Snow

The snow moved in late this morning. At a quarter past eleven, Carol looked out the window of our apartment and exclaimed, “Snow flurries!” I went out for a walk fifteen minutes later, and the snow flurries had settled into a heavy snow fall; I got to the waterfront and I could not see the town of Fairhaven across the harbor; I got halfway across the bridge and the ground was white, by the time I returned home, and hour later, there was an inch of snow on the ground.

The visibility was poor, but I could see the usual waterfowl on the water, and the usual gulls flying overhead. The ducks never seem bothered by rain or snow, only by high winds that force them to seek refuge on the lee side of the harbor and islands. The gulls don’t seem bothered by snow, rain, or high winds.

Not only did the birds remain unfazed by the snow, but we have gone far enough through winter that humans didn’t seem bothered by it either. The traffic rushed over the bridge and across Pope’s Island the same as usual; the only difference being that the tires made a different sound because of the snow that had been melted by road salt. And I passed half a dozen pedestrians, whereas we often see no pedestrians at all on our walks over to Fairhaven. It was almost as if the weather brought out more pedestrians, more people who wanted a chance to walk through the falling snow.

What do you believe?

Duncan Howlett was minister here in New Bedford in the 1930’s, and later went on to a distinguished career as a Unitarian Universalist minister. In 1967, Howlett wrote a pamphlet for the Unitarian Universalist Association titled “What Do You Believe?” Today, in 2006, what Howlett said still rings true:

The heart of our faith, judged by the historical record, centers in things like the independence of the mind, freedom, and the pursuit of truth; in the rejection of fixed dogmas, fixed forms of worship, and ecclesiastical authority.

Therefore when a friend says, “So you have joined the Unitarian Universalists. Let’s see. What do they believe?”, our first task is to persuade the questioner that his [sic] question cannot be answered. At least, it cannot be answered the way he has asked it and the way he assumes it must be answered. His is like the old duoble question, “Do you still beat your wife?” It can’t be answered because it carries and assumption we are not willing to grant. The question, “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?” carries the assumption that we, like everyone else, have a set of theological beliefs to which we hold and by which we may be identified.

But that is just the point. We don’t. If we are going to be understood, we have to make that clear at the outset.

Today, some Unitarian Universalists have the mistaken notion that our faith has a fixed set of theological beliefs, a.k.a. “the seven principles,” which they can recite to their friends. But that’s not true. The “seven principles” are not particularly theological; they were written to apply to the Association not to individuals; and not all of us believe in them. I don’t believe in them, because, like Duncan Howlett, I don’t think it is possible to say that Unitarian Universalists can be characterized by a certain set of beliefs.

Maybe I can make this point clearer by quoting an anecdote from Howlett’s pamphlet:

One Saturday night some years back my telephone rang. It was about midnight. On the other end of the line was a young woman who had just recently joined my church. There was a good deal of noise in the background and it was easy to tell that a party was in progress. Obviously shouting, she said, “The Unitarians don’t believe in the Trinity or in the Virgin Birth or in the Divinity of Christ. That’s right, isn’t it?”

I said, “No, that’s not right.”

“Not right?” she exclaimed. “Look, I’m in a theological argument and they’ve got me cornered. What should I say?”

“Tell them,” I said, “that you can’t identify a Unitarian by his beliefs or lack of them.” There was a long pause while she thought that one over.

“But isn’t it true,” she insisted, “that we don’t believe in the Virgin Birth or the Ressurection or miracles or any of those things?”

“Yes,” I said, “it is true that most of us don’t believe those things, but you mislead people when you tell them so.”

“I don’t have to tell them,” she said, “they’re telling me. They say we don’t believe anything. Is that right? Don’t we believe anything?”

My answer to that young woman that night and later in detail in my office was this: Asked what they believe, Unitarians and Universalists have been trying to answer an unanswerable question. It can only be answered if you first take the question apart and show the questioner that he has built into it an impossible answer.

I suspect some readers of this blog will not be satisfied with Howlett’s contention, and like the young woman in the story will plead, “Surely we believe in something!” What is your response? Do Unitarian Universalists have a set of fixed beliefs? And perhaps if there’s any interest in this topic, later on I’ll post what Howlett answers when asked, “What do you believe?”

Update: Another post with Howlett’s statement of “belief” Link