All in it Together

This year more people have returned to Tomas’ village. The death threats have not stopped, nor has the illegal poaching of macaw chicks. When we shared our year's research results with the village, I told the leaders that if any more parrot chicks were lost, even one more year of it, that might be the end of macaws in Honduras. So the leaders held a community meeting and decided, on their own, to organize daily parrot patrols to protect the remaining nests.

They have no money and their lives are in danger, but they elected to spend their resources to protect parrots. And they did. They prevented a lot of poaching, and when they didn’t prevent it, they were often able to catch the poachers and confiscate the chicks, which they raised themselves in the middle of nowhere with no electricity and no training in avian husbandry, and barely enough food for themselves.

Eventually eleven of the giant, red, long-tailed parrots were released and they now fly free, intermixing with their wild family members. Every day the juvenile birds return to eat rice and beans in the village.

Two months ago an armed group of 10 men came to the village and robbed it of nearly everything of value. The people are still there not giving up, and the birds are still flying free. The people know that if the birds can remain free, they can too. Liberating the birds is liberating themselves. Saving the birds is saving themselves.

These are ordinary people. They fuss with each other, strain their relationships, and give into desires that cause harm. But what they have learned is that there is no special place of privilege on this planet. We are all in it together, and if one doesn't make it, none of us do. So they aren't saints. They are looking after themselves.

Food choices are like that. Whatever we do with what and how we eat, it is the precious work of saving ourselves and our earth. We are all in the club called the predator-prey cycle.

We evolved to take care of ourselves, which means harm to others. I've always thought we needed another principle/purpose - we must harm to survive. With that existential knowledge always in mind, we could be a lot more accepting of others and a lot less denying of what it means to be human in communities of mixed species. As the first sentence of the Ethical Eating Statement of Conscience (click here) reminds us:

“Aware of our interdependence, we acknowledge that eating ethically requires us to be mindful of the miracle of life we share with all beings.”

Such awareness of independence and mindfulness of the miraculous moves us from privilege to humility and gratitude; from loneliness and alienation to radical hospitality. The Statement of Conscience goes on to say:

“Unitarian Universalists aspire to radical hospitality and developing the beloved community. Therefore, we affirm that the natural world exists not for the sole benefit of one nation, one race, one gender, one religion, or even one species, but for all. Working in the defense of mutual interests, Unitarian Universalists acknowledge and accept the challenge of enlarging our circle of moral concern to include all living creatures.”

Our passions are consuming the world. We were born to do so. Our compassion can save the world. We were born to do so. How to do this tough work? To be fed not just by our passions, but by the fulfilling sense of reverence for all of life, and gratitude.

The Statement’s last sentence is:

“With gratitude and reverence for all life, we savor food mindful of all that has contributed to it. We commit ourselves to a more equitable sharing of the earth's bounty.”

Here, then, is a recipe for succulent dish to feed us all: Equal parts gratitude and reverence. Mix well. Let sit until humility and interconnection settle. Sift out privilege. Dash liberally with commitment. Serve immediately, and eat with mouth full of compassion. Yields infinite servings.

* * * * *
By LoraKim Joyner
6th and last part of "Consuming Passions"
Previous: Part 5: LoraKim: "Vice Versa"
Beginning: Part 1: Meredith & LoraKim: "The Eating Conscience"

And Vice Versa

There is something about the long cold nights of winter that turns us all into foodies. This is exacerbated by sharing it with others. Research shows that when you eat with one friend, you'll eat about 35 percent more. With a group of seven, you'll eat 96 percent more. We better chow down before anyone else gets it - it's competition.

Competition is very real - we were born to be that way. Food resources may be scarce, so when food is available and others are all eating, don't relate, eat. Don't talk with your mouth full and keep your mouth full!

The myth is that this is our only choice. We can talk with our mouths full, of compassion. We can relate, interconnect, share - we were born to be that way. Mindful eating, ethical eating, is about seeing we have a choice. We can consume both passionately and compassionately.

But it's a tough choice - there is so much fun and pleasure around food. My best times have been dinner parties I've thrown. One time, when I was in veterinary school, I had a whole freezer full of mutton. I had worked at the state fair and a couple of us took home two ewes, and we killed them and butchered them ourselves. We thought doing so made us manly veterinary students. I invited everyone I knew over to help me eat the food, but I got called away at the start of it to go fight a forest fire. When I returned, days later, my friends said it was the best dinner party I ever threw, and I wasn't even there!

Though it was a good time I decided I didn't want to kill any more sheep, and if I wasn't willing to kill them myself and insure they had a good life, I decided to stop eating them. That was hard to do because in those days vets were meat eaters. They understood that they served people first, and nonhuman animals second.

This is changing. A new program in the American Veterinary Medical Association called “One Health” (click here) aims to raise awareness that the health of humans is inextricably interconnected with the health of nonhuman animals.

Humans need healthy ecological communities. And vice versa. The new myth we are coming into is that we don't have to choose between animals and people, or those with power and privilege, and those without. That recognition is reflected in our Ethical Eating Statement of Conscience (click here). It's about environmental justice. It’s about taking care of people, and the planet, and all species, together.

It can be done. I've seen the miracle of commitment that our species can rise too.

Last June, I was in Honduras working with the indigenous communities there. My goal is to help support their efforts to preserve the last 150 Scarlet Macaws left that fly over their ancestral lands. There used to be thousands of them throughout the country, but no more.

People want to steal the birds to make money. They take the young chicks from their families to sell them to people with power and privilege. There is terrible pressure on not just their ecological community, but also their human community. People with money and power are stealing their land, sometimes killing the indigenous people to take what they want.

Tomas, an elder of the village, tried to stop the illegal poaching, logging, and cattle ranching. For his efforts, he was ambushed him one day and shot four times. He nearly died. His whole village fled because they were likewise threatened. Yet, four months later Tomas returned to the ghost-like village to work with me and others on parrot conservation. We had to hire a squad of soldiers from the National Militarily to accompany us and keep us safe.

I asked Tomas why he was willing to risk his life. And he said,

"Everything is at risk so I am willing to risk everything. If we lose the parrots, we lose our way of life."

And he is not alone. This year more people have returned to his village. The macaws need these people protecting them.

* * * * *
By Rev. LoraKim Joyner
Part 5 of "Consuming Passions"
Next: Part 6: LoraKim: "All in it Together"
Previous: Part 4: Meredith: "Hard Questions"
Beginning: Part 1: Meredith & LoraKim: "The Eating Conscience"

Hard Questions

What do we – we of liberal religious persuasion – in fact value, in word and in deed? What can we articulate about ourselves and our values that could help us live with greater integrity?

We value respect for interdependence, awareness of the miracle of life, protecting the environment, a fair and livable wage for agriculture workers. We value greater equality, both in enjoying the bounty of our earth and in bearing the burdens of pollutants. We value food, and healthy food, and consumer product safety for food. We value reducing unnecessary pain.

Can we live with a greater integrity with those values? How would our lives be if we relied less on those skills for handling cognitive dissonance when it comes to those values?

Each of us must work out with diligence our own integrity. The first step is to simply notice – and notice as nonjudgmentally as possible: Where does cognitive dissonance arise for you? Where do you notice that yourself not living by your values? Maybe it’s not possible to live by them, or maybe the values need to be adjusted. Before you get to those questions, just neutrally observe the experience of dissonance.

The Statement of Conscience on Ethical Eating (click here) opens some issues, but does not give us all the answers. Thus, the statement says:

“Some of us believe that it is ethical only to eat plants while others of us believe that it is ethical to eat both plants and animals. We do not call here for a single dietary approach. We encourage a knowledgeable choice of food based on understanding the demands of feeding a growing world population, the health effects of particular foods, and the consequences of production, worker treatment, and transportation methods.”

Each of us must work out our own integrity, but that doesn’t mean that it must be a lonely and solitary task. You don’t have to go it alone. We can help each other think about issues whether or not we begin – or end – agreeing with each other. This is the call of conscience – the call of this Statement of Conscience: to engage each other in conversations to encourage us each toward our own integrity.

I believe, moreover, that there is such a thing as “our” integrity. There’s your integrity, my integrity, her integrity, and his integrity – and there’s also our integrity. There is a community integrity that is more than the sum of its individual members’ integrities.

The Statement of Conscience has a section on congregational actions. It asks us to consider the sort of food we have at congregational events – whether catered or potluck. Radical hospitality (see blog series on “Radical Hospitality”: starts here) calls on us to welcome whatever you bring to a potluck. Yet we can rightfully take pride in locally produced food, fair trade foods, organic foods, and in more plant-based dishes. We can engage in direct action in solidarity with workers and labor advocacy groups to support agricultural and food workers – and the other actions the Statement suggests for congregations.

Would that represent a greater community integrity for this Fellowship? What is your path of integrity? What is mine? What is ours?

Those are hard questions – questions worthy of our reflection and engagement.

When the questions get hard, here’s one thing I do:

I ask my wife.

* * * * *
By Rev. Meredith Garmon
Part 4 of "Consuming Passions"
Next: Part 5: LoraKim: "And Vice Versa"
Previous: Part 3: Meredith: "Integrity"
Beginning: Part 1: Meredith & LoraKim: "The Eating Conscience"

Integrity

I was at a seafood restaurant a week ago. I ordered flounder. This is not something that I do very often. I identify as a vegetarian, and 363 or 364 days out of a year, I am. In the last couple years, though, once or twice a year, I’ve had fish.

So there was some cognitive dissonance for me in ordering that flounder. We humans have strategies for dealing with cognitive dissonance. I am as adept at those strategies as anyone. When it comes to “not thinking about it,” as I proceed to do something that the better angels of my nature wish I would think about, my skills have not been formally measured, but I guess they are at least average.

Our passions – or just our comforts, and our habits – pull us this way and that, often leaving our cognition, well, dissonant. In some other churches, they express this by saying, “what sinners we are.” I’m not sure that’s the best way to put it, because I’m not terribly confident I know what’s a sin and what isn’t. I do know that we are all struggling with how to live a life of integrity. I know we often fail. I know I do.

“Integrity” is an important word – a helpful guiding concept, and it’s helpful to see where the word comes from. Integrity means integrating. Integrity is about our opinions, values, and actions, all integrating with each other. A life of integrity is a life that is coherent, that coheres. Integrity has to be dynamic, because we’re always learning, growing, changing, revising our opinions, developing deeper understanding of our values. The work of integrating our values with each other and with our actions is never finished.

Let me offer an analogy: grammar. Suppose you have the job of composing a grammar textbook for a language that has never had a grammar book, and has no tradition of grammar instruction. The native speakers have come to you to help them better understand and use their own language, and you have agreed to take on this extensive task.

Your research will be focused on two questions:
1. The descriptive question: how do people speak?
2. The prescriptive question: How should people speak?

You must begin with the descriptive. What are the norms? What are the nouns and verbs and how are they normally arranged and inflected varied to signify plurals or tense? Only out of the deep, deep descriptive work can a prescriptive guide emerge. When we’ve identified how we do usually speak, then – and only then – can we identify the aberrations.

Grammar instruction, you see, is about integrity: coherence and consistency in the principles that guide our speaking. Ethics works the same way. The ethicist’s first and primary job is to delve deeply into what we actually do – what decisions we make, how we really behave. From that grounding in descriptive work, the ethicist can notice ways that we deviate from our own norms.

Ethical inquiry is about trying to work toward a greater integrity.

When Unitarian Universalists engaged the question of ethical eating, the first question, as with any ethical issue, was: what do we in fact value, in word and in deed? And second: What can we articulate about our values that could help us live with greater integrity?

* * * * *
By Meredith Garmon
Part 3 of "Consuming Pasions"
Next: Part 4: Meredith: "Hard Questions"
Previous: Part 2: LoraKim: "Planet Chalice"
Beginning: Part 1: Meredith & LoraKim: "The Eating Conscience"

Planet Chalice: Children's Story

Once upon a time there was land where all the animals were shaped like chalices. Some were round chalices; some were thin chalices. There were tall chalices and short chalices. Some had fur, some had feathers, some had fairly bare skin. Some chalices would swim, some would climb, some would run, and some would burrow. Some chalices liked to eat plants, and some liked to eat each other. You would think that since they were all chalices, they would get along.

But they didn't.

In fact, the planet was about to tear itself apart from conflict between the chalices, when a space ship appeared. The chalices thought it was a god because it had a chalice emblem emblazoned on the outside. It wasn't a god. It was a spaceship from Earth, in the far future, when the Unitarian Universalist Association had its own space program. Unitarian Universalist Astronauts went on missions for the UUSC (Unitarian Universalist Space Committee).

The chalice folk called a temporary truce from their fighting so they could greet the space ship. The ship's doors opened, and, instead of a chalice emerging, there was a very different sort of animal. You and I would recognize it as a human being, but the creatures of Planet Chalice didn't recognize it at all.

One of the chalice folk said, "Look, it's not a god after all!"

And another said, "It is too a god!"

One chalice said, "We should kill it."

Other chalices said, "We should save it."

Soon the chalices were all fighting again.

The human cried, "Stop! What is this?"

One of the chalices paused in the midst of aiming a bite at another chalice. "It's fighting," she answered. "Don't you have it on your planet?"

"We used to," said the human. "But we stopped."

"How did you stop it?"

"It's complicated," said the human, trying to remember the history she had studied of the many centuries in which wars came and went, gradually getting smaller and further apart.

"Oh."

"Well, actually, basically, it was simple."

"Oh?"

"We realized that we were all different kinds of bodies and beliefs, but that, like a chalice, we all carried the divine light within. Just like you?"

"Just like us?" exclaimed the chalices. "What are you talking about? What divine light?"

"Look closely," said the human. "I can see it in each of you. It's so beautiful, as are each of you."

The chalices looked at each other. They looked and looked. And they saw the light within. They saw that each of them was a vessel to carry the light of interconnection. They were amazed.

"My work here is through," said the Unitarian Universalist astronaut, as she went back into her ship and took off.

Over the next years -- and decades -- and centuries on Planet Chalice, there continued to be arguments and conflicts. There continued to be sad times. Yet it was never so bad as it had been in the days before one simple insight of appreciation happened to be dropped by a foreign visitor. From that moment forward, the chalices never went into any problems, no matter how complex, without always seeing the light within.

* * * * *
By LoraKim Joyner
Part 2 of "Consuming Passions"
Next: Part 3: Meredith: "Integrity"
Previous: Part 1: Meredith & LoraKim: "The Eating Conscience"

The Eating Conscience

Meredith:

At our 2008 annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association held in Fort Lauderdale, the delegates selected one issue to be the study and action issue for 2008 – 2012.

Our process, for about the last decade, has been to select just one issue every two years. The selected issue is then the subject of nationwide focus among Unitarian Universalists for the next four years. We always have two issues before us at any given time. We are always in the first two years of one issue while in the last two years of a second issue.

For instance, the issue for 2006-2010 was “Creating Peace” (for the Statement of Conscience that resulted, click here).
The issue for 2004-2008 was “Moral Values for a Pluralistic Society” (for the resulting Statement of Conscience: click here).

Five proposed issues were on the ballot in Fort Lauderdale. The one that emerged with a majority of votes was: “Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice.”

For the next three years, Unitarian Universalists across the country engaged in various study and action, utilizing a resource guide assembled by the Unitarian Universalist Commission on Social Witness, and other resources they found or created. Through debate and discussion at the 2009 General Assembly in Salt Lake City, and the 2010 General Assembly in Minneapolis, Unitarian Universalists worked toward articulating our stance.

Last summer, at our 2011 General Assembly in Charlotte, North Carolina, a draft Statement of Conscience was further debated, amended, revised, and ultimately approved by much more than the required two-thirds of all delegates. (Read the Ethical Eating Statement of Conscience: click here.)

One product of our four-year process has been the creation of a wonderful and helpful website:
ethicaleating.uua.org. Check it out!

Our own – and my own -- Rev. LoraKim Joyner was active in that process from the beginning. She now serves on the Unitarian Universalist Association’s President’s Advisory Council for Ethical Eating.

LoraKim:
(See lorakimjoyner.com)

I was on the Core Team that shepherded the Ethical Eating issue through many hours of “Mini-Assemblies” at our 2009, 2010, and 2011 General Assemblies. Those Mini-Asemblies voiced and heard information, reasoning, concerns; considered and debated and amended the language of the Statement of Conscience that would ultimately go to the floor for the entire General Assembly to further debate and amend.

It was a bit tough going for a while. People really didn't know what to do with the nonhuman animal piece - how do we care for them, and also care for all the human animals? We understood that environmental justice was the predominant issue -- which means not relegating the less powerful and privileged to unhealthy environments. It was like people had to choose humans over nonhumans, or had to choose to choose for themselves or for others people. Everyone was wondering if they would have to give up grandma’s special recipe that had been in the family for generations.

By the time we came to amend the statement, things had shifted. We had mixed our conversation about ethical eating in with our learnings about Compassionate Communication which helps us stay engaged when we are uncomfortable, triggered, and in conflict. And we had done the religious work.

You see it’s not about making a well articulated argument or gathering all the information we possibly could to convince someone else. It’s about opening our hearts to let in enough beauty, and enough tragedy. So people weren't so worried about the animal piece or dictating diet rules for anyone. Instead there was a sense of living into the question: How do we help each other live meaningful lives interconnected to all of life, preserving as much life as possible?

Unitarian Universalists do not have a univocal answer to that question. We still don’t. What has happened in the last three and half years is that we have lived into that question. A little.

Ethical Eating is complicated. It is a hot enough of a topic to sear the soul. But that’s just about the right temperature so that together we can whip up a heck of a batch of good eats – good for us and good for the planet.

* * * * *
Part 1 of "Consuming Passions" (Rev. Meredith Garmon and Rev. LoraKim Joyner)
Next: Part 2: LoraKim: "Planet Chalice: Children's Story"