Nonviolent Social Change

On the third Monday of January, we honor Martin Luther King, Jr. King’s legacy is most clearly and publicly embodied in The King Center in Atlanta: The Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. It’s not the center for civil rights; it’s not the center for advancement of minorities; it’s not the center for anti-racism and multiculturalism; it’s not the center for civil disobedience; or even the center for justice – though King stood for all of those. It’s the center for nonviolent social change.

(King Center web site: click here.)

In honoring the work and the heart of this human being today, I want to look at this idea of Nonviolent Social Change. Building from King’s life and work, what have we learned since his time? King had a dream of peace and justice. Are there resources available to us that weren't available to him for realizing that dream?

In the years just before and just after Martin Luther King's death in 1968, the Unitarian Universalist efforts to address racial justice tore us apart. We were, and are, proud of our presence and support in Selma in 1965. Five hundred Unitarian Universalists participated with Dr. King in that march from Selma to Montgomery, including over 140 Unitarian Universalist clergy -- 20 percent of all UU ministers in final fellowship at that time. We seemed -- to ourselves -- so clearly to be on the "right" side. The line between us (the good guys) and them (the racists) seemed well-established.

Then, in 1967, 135 UUs came to New York for an "Emergency Conference on Unitarian Universalist Response to the Black Rebellion." Almost as soon as the meeting was called to order, 30 of the 37 African American delegates withdrew to form a Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus (BUUC). They developed a list of what they called "non-negotiable demands" to be submitted to the conference and, ultimately, the UU Association's Board of Trustees. The core demand was that the board establish a Black Affairs Council (BAC), to be appointed by the BUUC and funded for four years at $250,000 a year -- which would have then been 12 percent of the UUA's entire budget. The next General Assembly approved these demands. Then the General Assembly after that, finding that funds had grown tighter, wanted to spread the million dollars over five years at $200,000 a year instead of four years at $250,000 a year. The BUUC seemed heavy-handed to some, and another group, "Black and White Action" (BAWA), formed -- also sincerely wanting to advance the cause of civil rights.

Very hard feelings erupted on the floor of the General Assembly 1969 in Boston. Almost all of the 200-300 black delegates there got up and walked out. The BUUC folks denounced the BAWA folks. Our denomination, over 42 years later, is still struggling to come to terms with the events of that General Assembly and the issues raised. Yes, it seems the leadership of the UUA had some paternalistic civil rights attitudes. And, yes, the BUUC leaders might have chosen to be content with recognition and funding and not vindictively insisted on "not one penny for BAWA." And, too, the BAWA supporters might not have reacted against the BUUC as if their lives depended on it.

As I read the accounts about that awful fighting, it almost makes me cry.

(read Warren Ross's article here; 

and read Mark Morrison-Reed's illuminating reflection here)

We so wanted to fight for justice. And we so didn't know how. We didn't have the skills, the resources, to hear each other with compassion.

Do we now? It is with our specific Unitarian Universalist history in mind that I ask this question: are there resources for nonviolent social change -- for hearing each other in compassion -- that weren't available in King's time? On the day when King would have been celebrating his 83rd birthday, and almost 44 years since his death, how stand the prospects for nonviolent social change?

As we gather here for worship today, hoping to open our hearts to an experience of something that some of us call sacred, I know we bring with us our awareness of this unique moment in history. This time when Time magazine’s person of the year was “The Protestor” – when the Arab spring toppled regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and appears possibly on the verge of bringing regime change in several other countries – this time when, in recent months, we have seen the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the country and to other countries – what now have we learned, are we learning, about nonviolent social change?

(for Time's article, click here)

The collective composite person Time calls “The Protestor” has sometimes been quite violent this last year – yet the influence of the nonviolent ideal can also be seen at work, both in the Middle East and in our Occupy movement.

This is also a time when, this week, we learned about a video of US marines urinating on the bodies of dead enemy fighters. A much less publicized story I also came across this week is that another video has emerged that shows a soldier beating a sheep apparently to death with a baseball bat to the whoops and laughter of other soldiers looking on. That article also mentioned that last year a video appeared that shows a US marine throwing a puppy off a cliff.

Oh, my. I would have liked us – us as a species – to have that not included in our accounting of ourselves on Dr. King’s 83rd birthday.

The shortest poem in Mary Oliver’s considerable body of work is just 20 words, 21 syllables:

That God had a plan, I do not doubt
But what if the plan was that we would do better?

OK, the plan is that we do better – and videos like these show some of us not doing better. I don’t bring this up just to bemoan the fact. I mention these videos because they, and the reaction to them, tell us something about the nature of violence and nonviolence.

The news coverage about the desecration of bodies also covers the attention it’s getting. We see that the Afghans, all the US military and political leaders, and, indeed, the world community all condemn this act. We are all horrified and appalled. Why? Why do we think it’s OK to shoot people – but certain things done to their bodies when they themselves are beyond caring are off limits? How could being urinated on be worse than being shot dead?

We react the way we do, I believe, because at a visceral level we recognize an important truth. The essence of violence is in the heart.

The essence of violence is in the heart.

Bombing people, shooting people, gassing, stabbing, clubbing, hitting, and torturing people are not the core of what violence is. Those things are merely the manifestations of a heart that is disconnected. We are shocked – rightfully shocked – by desecration because it reveals to us an essence of violence – a dehumanizing hatred behind the shooting and killing – an essence that we had preferred to pretend wasn’t there.

But, of course, it is there. Young men in their teens and twenties are not the most serenely wise demographic to begin with, and when you throw them into nerve-racking battle for months at a time, when you ask them to fight and kill and be in harm’s way, they are going to find hating and dehumanizing expedient for the task. So desecrating enemy bodies is as old as war. Its shock value is part of the conscious or unconscious strategy to demoralize the enemy side and harden our own side to be able to keep up the killing.

What this latest episode reminds us is that nonviolence is not merely refraining from shooting, stabbing, clubbing, kicking or hitting others – as important a step as that is. Nonviolence is a heart committed to softening instead of hardening. Nonviolence is a heart that loves, that respects, that reveres life, that connects and wants to connect. And we are violent to each other – whether we ever raise a hand or raise our voice to each other – whenever we fail to respond to each other out of reverence for the wonder of the life that is before us.

The heroes of nonviolence pictured on the right -- Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aung San Su Kyi – weren’t just effective political organizers who happened to tell their followers, "Oh, and, by the way, no hitting." They were at the forefront of social change that we call nonviolent because they understood that the essence of violence is in the heart.

Before Gandhi, massive opposition to a prevailing government was called revolution if it succeeded and rebellion if it didn’t, and it involved weapons and fighting and lots of violence. Such a scale of opposition had never been nonviolent.

Martin Luther King picked up Gandhi’s ideas and brought them to the civil rights struggle in our country. Again and again he urged his followers and all those working for justice to set aside the impulse to riot, to burn, to strike back. Keep the righteous energy of anger without letting that anger make its home in hatred. Martin Luther King, Jr. told us:

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”

Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi continues the tradition of nonviolent social change. Her work for democratization of Burma led to her being under house arrest for 15 of the last 22 years. The Nobel Committee, in awarding her the peace prize, cited her nonviolent struggle against the oppressive military junta as

“one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades.”

Each of these three was or is deeply grounded in a religious tradition.

Gandhi was practicing what his Hindu faith teaches of ahimsa: the principle that all living things are connected and form a unity requiring respect and kindness.

King was practicing what his Christian faith teaches of love – often referenced as the Latin caritas, or the Greek agape: a spiritual love. Agape, as one theologian puts it, is “an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being.” King took to heart Jesus’ words, “love your enemy,” and his faith tradition taught him to answer hatred with love.

Aung San Suu Kyi is practicing what her Buddhist faith teaches of karuna (compassion), and anatta (no self). There is no self separate from others; each of us is all of us; we cannot truly want to hurt them.

So who is that guy in the fourth picture? That’s a man whose work is not confronting political regimes, doesn’t give rousing speeches at political rallies, or organize marches, boycotts, sit-ins, or hunger strikes. Yet his work treats of the essence of violence and nonviolence, and it paves the way for profound social change. He is psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, the developer of nonviolent communication and the founder of the center for nonviolent communication.

Rosenberg has outlined a simple – deceptively simple, for it is very challenging -- four-step process for both speaking and listening. To learn and implement nonviolent communication takes both a lot of desire to address the violence in our hearts and in our relationships, and also a lot of skill.

• Observation
• Feeling
• Need
• Request.

It doesn’t seem that complicated or hard. Our lives subject us to stresses and conflicts – and while I hope that for you they are a much milder form than what our soldiers are subjected to – we respond with an analogous form of heart-hardening that is no easy matter to train out of us.

• Observation: to notice without mixing in evaluation of what we’re seeing;
• Feeling: to identify a true emotion without mixing in blame or criticism;
• Need: to separate the universal human desires, the things everyone wants, from particular strategies for getting them;
• Request: to be able to ask and not demand.

These are subtle skills. It’s no wonder that our Gandhis, our Martin Luther Kings, our Aung San Suu Kyis have been so rare in human history. The extensive spiritual training and depth they each had allowed their hearts to soften and become wise enough to lead their heads. The world, is full of Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Unitarian Universalists, and others whose hearts are not where Gandhi’s, King’s, and Suu Kyi’s were or are. The teachings of a faith tradition alone don’t magically make it happen. It also takes deep commitment to the vision the teachings point to. Otherwise folks hear the teachings, nod, and proceed to largely ignore them.

Or – I see this a lot, have you noticed it? – some wonderful, inspiring teaching is presented, and afterward I hear people saying, “That was great. I sure wish my in-laws would learn that," – or, "wouldn’t it be nice if our politicians knew that," – or, "I’d like my boss to have heard that.”

I am so prone to that myself. When I am studying or hearing the important teachings about peace, justice, loving-kindness, I have to remind myself over and over – yes, I may want to try to offer this teaching to others, for that is a role my calling includes, but first and primarily, it is for me. It would be nice if I would learn this. I pray for courage to remember that that’s always first.

The four-step process – observation, feeling, need, request – is one more teaching to nod at and forget – one more thing for us to wish other people would learn – unless our hearts truly yearn for the vision this teaching points to. The vision is creating a quality of connection among people that supports getting needs met through natural giving. The vision is a focus on two questions: what is alive in me and alive in you – and how can we contribute to making our lives wonderful.

There are resources available to us that weren’t available in Martin Luther King’s time for realizing his dream of peace and justice – and the resources of the teachings and methods and commitments of Marshall Rosenberg and his team at the Center for Nonviolent Communication are, to my mind, the most significant, and the most promising hope for nonviolent social change. There is much to learn here – a lot to take in and practice and internalize – that I can’t go into today.

(See the web site for the Center for Nonviolent Communication here, 

and order the first and primary text of Nonviolent Communication here. 

For info on Florida's only certified trainer in Nonviolent 

Communication, Rev. LoraKim Joyner, see here.)

I’ll share one story to convey a small taste of it. This is Marshall Rosenberg in his book, Speak Peace in a World of Conflict:

“I was working with a team of minority citizens who wanted to change hiring practices in the health services department of the city of San Francisco. These citizens felt that the hiring practices were oppressive because they discriminated against certain people. They wanted me to show them how Nonviolent Communication could be helpful to them in getting their needs better met. For three days I showed them the process and how it could be used – and then they were to go out that afternoon and come back the next morning, and we would see how it went.

The next morning they came back very discouraged, and one of them said, ‘We knew it wouldn’t work. There’s no way to change the system.’

I said, ‘OK. I can see you’re really discouraged.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘So, tell me what happened so we can learn from this.’

The team of six of them had gone into an administrator’s office, and they told me how they had used Nonviolent Communication very well. They hadn’t gone in and diagnosed the system as oppressive. Rather, first they had made a real clear observation of what was going on. They identified the law that they felt was discriminatory because it didn’t allow for the hiring of certain people. Second, they expressed their feelings, how painful it was for them because they needed work and equality. They believed they could do this work, and it was painful for them to be excluded. They made a clear request of the administrator, saying exactly how they would like to see the hiring practices changed to better allow for them to be hired.

They told me how they said it, and I was very pleased. They incorporated beautifully the training we had gone through. They had stated clearly what their needs were, what their requests were, and they didn’t use insulting language.

I said, ‘I like how you expressed that. What was his response?’

And they said, “Oh, he was very nice, you know. He even thanked us for coming in. He said it’s very important in a democracy that the citizens express themselves, and we encourage that in this organization, but at the moment your request is quite unrealistic, and I’m sorry that it won’t be possible right now, but thank you for coming in.’

And I said, ‘Then what did you do?’

‘Well, we left.’

I said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What about the other half that I showed you? How to hear behind the bureaucratic-ese to what was in his heart, what he was feeling, what his needs were? Where was that human being in relationship to what you wanted?’

One of them said, ‘We know what was going on in him. He wanted us to get out of there.’

‘Well, even if that’s true, was going on in him? What was he feeling? What were his needs? He’s a human being. What was that human being feeling and needing?’

They forgot to see his humanness because he is within a structure. And within the structure he was speaking structure language, not human language. As Walter Wink points out, organizations, structures, and governments have their own spirituality. And within those environments people communicate in a way that supports that spirituality. Nonviolent Communication shows us a way, no matter what the structure, to cut through it and see the human being within it.

I could see that I hadn’t trained them well enough on how to do that, so we practiced. We practiced how to hear the needs behind all that bureaucratic language, how to see the human being and make a connection that strengthens our ability to work toward social change with that person. After our training at that level, they made another appointment with this man. And they came back the next morning delighted.

When they saw what was behind his messages, they saw that he was scared. He actually shared their needs – he didn’t like to see how this law was discriminatory – but he had another need: to protect himself. And he knew that his boss would be very upset with this suggestion, because his boss was vehemently opposed to what they were after. He had a need to protect himself, and didn’t want to go to the boss and help them make the change.

Once this team of citizens saw what his needs were, they worked together, but in a way that got everybody’s needs met. What happened is that he mentored them. He led them through what they would need to go through to get what they wanted, and they met his need by protecting him, by not letting anybody know that he was mentoring them. Eventually, they all got the change in the structure that they wanted.

Effective social change requires connections with others in which we avoid seeing people within these structures as enemies – and we try to hear the needs of the human beings within. Then we persist in keeping the flow of communication going so that everybody’s needs get met.”

Last night at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship we had a gathering and dinner to welcome prospective members. I was fielding questions. One of the questions was, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist about the way the world is going?"

I don’t know which to be. There is so much in the bud that seems so promising. And then, every week the news brings some further reason also to despair of our species. I am in awe of what we have learned, and almost simultaneously have the sinking feeling that we haven’t learned anything.

So I make no predictions. Instead, I am hopeful. The plan, as Mary Oliver intimated, is that we do better.
God’s plan, the plan for which the divine spark in our hearts is trying to shine us the way, is for connection, for equally caring for everyone’s needs, for self-understanding and compassion beyond judgments of right-doing and wrong-doing.

I don’t know if this nonviolent social change will happen, but I know that it could. And I know that if it does – if we shall overcome -- it will happen one heart at a time.

Let it begin with me. Let it begin with us. Let it begin right now.

Amen.

Who Are We?

"Who am I?" "Who are we?" We hunger for an account of ourselves, a story about what sort of being we are. We seek such an accounting to help us discern what is ours to do, and to help us come to terms with our life and our world. To be at peace, we perceive, entails being at peace with who we are. Who, then, are we?

Arriving at self definition involves the interplay of sameness and difference. What category am I in, and what are the features that the members of this category share? And, within my category, what makes me distinct? Each of us belongs to many categories: we are female or male; we have a nationality, or a mix of nationalities; we have ethnicity, or a mix of ethnicities; we are members of a political party, or call ourselves "independent," we have a religious identity, which might be "none." We are human, ape, primate, mammal, vertebrate, animal, alive. Though there are times when we rightfully resist categorization -- when the confines of a group identity are constraining and the advantage of what the category label reveals is outweighed by the disadvantages of what it obscures of our individual uniqueness -- we also depend on what we see in "others like us" to learn about ourselves.

For much of human history, "others like us" meant the other members of our tribe. What we might or might not have in common with members of other tribes seemed largely beside the point. In the last two or three millennia, more of us began to see our identity as humans as increasingly important. "What does it mean to be human?" grew into a compelling question for many philosophers, poets, and other writers and thinkers.

In the 1970s and 80s, I was a philosophy student: undergraduate, then graduate. I remember that the question, "What does it mean to be human?" made me feel in the presence of something vital and important. The question seemed to matter because whatever it was that was unique to our species would therefore be a precious and sacred thing, something to cultivate. If reason is what makes us human, then we ought to try hard to be rational in all things. If use of ethical principles is the defining feature, then those principles take on grand significance. Or if humor and laughter make us human, then it behooves us to laugh. Presumably, whatever is uniquely human is something of which we humans should want to have more, or should, at least, vigilantly guard our store – lest some horrible result occur, called “forfeiting one’s humanity,” or “becoming inhuman.”

Moreover, the notion of "our shared human condition" appeared to promise a grounding for values that we could share and build upon to create a more just and peaceful world. The more we could discern and discover about the content of our shared human condition, the better our prospects for peace and justice.

What many of us have begun to see in the last 40 years is that what it means to be human is more deeply tied up with what it means to be animal than we had imagined. More of us have noticed that understanding who we are has more to do with grasping our commonality with other species than with distinguishing ourselves from them. The prospects for peace and justice call for attention to our shared human condition -- and also for attention to our shared animal condition. The task of self-understanding before us since Socrates urged, “know thyself,” is to bring awareness and presence to all of what and who we are. We are now better situated to see that this means not merely attending to our human nature, but to our animal nature.

There are some things we humans are really good at: like communicating learning and preserving it so we can build on it. We’re not the only ones that do that, but we are really good at it. Other things, humans are not so good at. Other species have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs live in a world of smells that we can but dimly imagine, and bats and dolphins live in a world of echolocation that we imagine, if at all, even more dimly. There are various differences between any two species.

Quite a large part of what I am, however, lies in the connections and similarities I have with all mammals, with all warm-blooded animals, with all vertebrates. I’m not going to truly know myself by picking out one or a few unusual skills. I know myself by grasping the inheritance I share with the gorilla, gazelle, goose, and gopher tortoise. My world is taken in through eyes and ears that work pretty much like theirs do. Many of them live in, and are guided by, a world of smells that I am mostly oblivious to – but not entirely. The fast-track connection between the olfactory and memory is something my brain also has. I hunger as they do, I am susceptible to the same the fight-or-flight adrenaline surges.

I do have a thin neocortex layer on top of the older paleomammalian system (the amygdala and the rest of the limbic system of emotions) and even older reptilian system (brainstem and cerebellum), yet I remain largely driven by those brain systems that all mammals have – and even those that all vertebrates have. The cognitive processes of the neocortex govern me much less than the neocortex likes to believe. Indeed, perhaps the neocortex’s greatest glory, ironically, is that it has, over the many millennia since its emergence, developed the means to investigate itself and reveal its own relative insignificance.

For centuries in the West, the prevailing attitude has been, roughly, that nonhuman animals are basically machines, their behavior merely conditioned responses, while humans are more than that: free, capable of exercising intention and forming responses that transcend conditioning. Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), for instance, influentially declared that nonhuman animals were complex organic machines without the immaterial mind or soul that only humans have. Since the 20th century, however, research has been steadily closing the gap between our conception of humans and our conception of other animals. Studies have noticed, or elicited, elaborate, intentional, and apparently creative behavior in various species. Other studies come at the gap from the other direction: revealing that humans are not nearly as intentional as we often think we are. On this latter point, findings by Benjamin Libet and Michael Gazzaniga are especially instructive.

The Libet Experiments. In 1983, Benjamin Libet and others at the University of California, San Francisco, published the striking results of their experiments. In the study, participants were asked to voluntarily flex their wrist at a time of their choosing. Libet found that the neural signals for motion preceded the conscious awareness of intention to move by 300 to 500 milliseconds. “Put simply, the brain prepared a movement before a subject consciously decided to move!” Conscious intentions to move aren’t what cause our movements. This begs the question: why do our brains bother to create for us this illusion of conscious intentional control? Janet Kwasniak suggests that “the conscious feeling of intent is simply a marker indicating that we own the action.” She suggests that “this marker is very important so that our episodic memory shows whether actions” were “ours” or just happened. The memory of an event that came from me influences my neurons for the future -- we do learn from our actions and their results. If I get a pain from something I did, my neural wiring makes me less likely to do that again. But if the pain “just happened,” the effects on my wiring are different. Thus, what we call “volition” is a perception of our own behavior rather than a generator of it. The illusion of intention (or, more precisely, the illusion that intentions precede and determine action), might be an illusion that human brains generate more strongly and consistently than any other species -- that remains to be seen -- but it is, in any case, a by-product of the systems that all animal brains have for learning from experience. We can no longer plausibly claim, “We humans are in control of ourselves while nonhumans are machinelike bundles of conditioned responses.” Either they are not machines, or we are too.

The Gazzaniga Experiments. Psychologist Michael Gazzaniga flashed two different images at the same time into the subject’s visual field. One image was in the part of the field that could only be seen by the left visual cortex, and the other only by the right visual cortex. The right brain saw a picture of snow covering a house and car. The left brain, at the same instant, saw a picture of a chicken claw. Gazzaniga then asked the subjects what they saw. The left brain has the language centers, so the left brain can articulate what it saw. “I saw a chicken claw,” reported the subjects. So instead of asking for words, Gazzaniga then presented an array of pictures and asked subjects to point to what they saw. Subjects’ right hands (controlled by their left brains) pointed to the picture of the chicken claw that the left brain saw. At the same time, subjects’ left hands (controlled by their right brains) pointed to the picture of the snow-covered scene that the right brain saw.

Gazzaniga then asked each hand to point to a picture of something that goes with the picture seen. The left brain saw a chicken claw, so subjects' right hands pointed to a picture of a chicken. Chicken claw goes with chicken. The right brain saw a snow-covered house and car, so subjects' left hands pointed to a shovel. Finally, Gazzaniga asked his subjects, "why is your left hand pointing to a shovel?" Now we’re in the language realm where only the left brain can express itself. If left-brain knew the truth, it could say, "I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel. It must be something you showed my right brain." Instead, the left brain instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, "Oh, that’s easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."

Our brains create a running commentary on whatever we are doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of our behavior. When Gazzaniga flashed the word "walk" to just the right hemisphere, many subjects stood and walked away. When asked why they were getting up, subjects had no problem giving a reason. "I’m going to get a Coke," they might say. Our inner interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing it has done so.

My language centers and neocortex notice my behavior, and they make up a story about this character named “Meredith” who is heroic, yet with certain endearing foibles. At each moment of the day this “Meredith” can be found deliberately and intentionally acting. Whatever it is he’s doing is a reasonable part of his pursuit of reasonable purposes. This is an after-the-fact story. The behavior came first, we now know.

In discerning who we are, this is a crucial understanding: our story about ourselves as intentional, purposeful, and rational is made up after the fact. My neocortex and forebrain and language centers are really, really good at making up stories to rationalize whatever it is they notice I’m doing. But that’s not where the doing came from. Yet my brain makes it seem to me that everything I did was just what I “meant” to do. That’s the delusion I live in.

We cannot dispel, once and for all, the illusions of control, and the rationalizing stories of ourselves that our brains concoct. We can, however, better understand the ways we are fooled, and how our fundamental animal nature is at work. This understanding helps us begin to befriend our animality, our selves.

I am made, as many species are, to walk the savannas and woodlands of this wild earth. It is where deep parts of me find their greatest comfort and ease. Human social systems eventually yielded our technological systems, and between the two, I often find myself sitting indoors in front of a computer for hours at a time. If I am in touch with all of myself, then I feel those other parts biding their time, quietly yearning for their element. David Abram writes of “becoming more deeply human by acknowledging, affirming, and growing into our animality.”

I do not disparage the fine things my neocortex can do, nor the level of detail of envisioning the future that my more developed forebrain can do, nor the wonders of language produced and comprehended by my human versions of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. These functions are great. They are only a small part of who I am, and they are a part that raises challenges. The language centers can generate powerful narratives that hold me enthralled and leave me oblivious to nonlinguistic awareness of the world around me.

Descartes posited a dualism of immaterial mind and material body. For Descartes, the complex organic machine of the body determined most of human behavior and all of nonhuman behavior. The immaterial mind/soul unique to humans guided only a small part of what humans do, Descartes acknowledged, yet that immaterial mind was the crucial separator of humans from all other animals. A “naturalized,” updated version of Descartes' thesis might replace Descartes’ concept of a special immaterial mind with a concept of special material brain parts. The point that these brain parts are only a small part of what we are would then seem to parallel Descartes’ acknowledgment that the complex organic machine he called “body” determines most of human behavior.

To understand who we are, I believe we must go beyond Descartes, even in a naturalized version. Certainly, the human brain is distinct from any other species. After all, every species' brain is distinct. The distinctions are matters of degree, not of kind – and the distinctions of degree to which the human brain can lay claim are slight. Other mammals have versions of the forebrain that imagines the future, the neocortex that cognizes, and Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, the human versions of which comprehend language. The human versions are as animal as the nonhuman versions, and as animal as our bones and guts are. Our animality, then, is not merely most of what we are; it is all of what we are.

Closer contact with, and awareness of, the animal in me engenders a greater respect for my fellow beings who share the burdens and the glories of the human condition -- and those beings who share the burdens and glories of the mammalian condition, or of the warm-blooded condition, or of the vertebrate condition. Heightened self-awareness leads to greater respect for my fellow vertebrates, and greater respect for my fellow vertebrates heightens self-awareness.

Where will deepened awareness of our animality take us? There is an emerging theology of nature that seeks to honor wildness as sacred. An earlier time described the material world as fallen, sinful, or, at best, crass. Then the scientific view has encouraged seeing the world as mechanical and inert. The emerging ecospirituality connects in wonder to the aliveness of the world. Connecting to our own animality – attending to, honoring, and loving what in us is wild and unpredictable – is of a piece with connecting to our world as well as understanding who we are.

Both ancient and medieval theology and modern science have told us that our senses are not to be trusted – that the true reality of gods, God, Platonic forms, or of quarks, quasars, and black holes was not to be grasped by the senses. Yet it is corporal sensations that offer us the enchantment of birdsong or the wonder of the moon. The ever-shifting reality in which our animality resides resists any finished theory, refuses the would-be tyranny of our concepts, and loosens the constraint of experience into expected categories. To consciously cultivate self-awareness of animality is to become more present, to become more open to the nuances of the unexpected in experience.

We humans have for so long defined ourselves only as members of the category human. I have spoken of the value and necessity of recognizing and connecting more deeply to other categories: primate, mammal, warm-blooded, vertebrate. In this essay, I have stopped at vertebrate in order to focus on expanding our self-awareness and identification that far. It’s a start. Yet this delimitation, too, is finally false. Ultimately, what I am is also the crustaceans, the arachnids, the insects. In the end, each of us is also the oak trees, the algae, and the bacteria. In the end as in the beginning, we are the mountains and rivers, stones and dirt, air and clouds, moon and stars.

Unitarian Universalists covenant to respect the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. It remains to us to grasp that we are not part of this interdependent web. Each one of us is the whole thing.

Oliver-Berry Reading

READER 1: "The Peace of Wild Things," by Wendell Berry.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

READER 2: "Wild Geese," by Mary Oliver.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

[READER 1: left justified plain text. READER 2: right justified italics. BOTH: Centered ALL-CAPS]

The Peace of 

WILD 

Geese

Things

BY

Mary Oliver.

Wendell Berry.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about

When 

DESPAIR 

for the world grows in me

yours,

AND I 

will tell you mine.

awake in the night at the least sound 

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I

Meanwhile the world

GO(es) 

on

and lie down

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water 

and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of

Meanwhile the

WILD 

geese

things, who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water and

high in the clean blue air,

I feel above me the day-blind stars

are heading home again.

waiting with their light. For a time I rest

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

in the grace of 

THE WORLD 

offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

and am free.

Saturdao 9

Dao De Jing, verse 5b

16 translations

1. James Legge (1891):

May not the space between heaven and earth be compared to a bellows?
'Tis emptied, yet it loses not its power;
'Tis moved again, and sends forth air the more.
Much speech to swift exhaustion lead we see;
Your inner being guard, and keep it free.

2. Archie Bahm (1958):

No matter how deeply natures are torn by opposition, Nature itself remains unchanged.
In conflicts between opposites, the more one attacks his seeming opponent (upon which he really depends for his completion), the more he defeats himself (and thereby demonstrates that only Nature, and not any opposite abstracted from existence is self-sufficient.)
So, likewise, no matter how much debaters argue, their argument proves nothing.
Things are what they are, regardless of how much we disagree about them.

3. Frank MacHovec (1962):

The universe is like a bellows: empty, yet quite full. As it proceeds, it produces. Much talk, much exhaustion. Keep your thoughts within!

4. D. C. Lau (1963):

Is not the space between heaven and earth like a bellows?
It is empty without being exhausted:
The more it works the more comes out.
Much speech leads inevitably to silence.
Better to hold fast to the void.

5. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (1972):

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the center.

6. Stan Rosenthal (1984):

The sage retains tranquility, and is not by speech or thought disturbed,
and even less by action which is contrived.
His actions are spontaneous, as are his deeds towards his fellow men.
By this means he is empty of desire, and his energy is not drained from him.

7. Jacob Trapp (1987):

The universe, like empty bellows,
Is ever giving forth;
The more it yields the greater the supply.
Who knows the meaning of all this?
To argue, to be overly concerned,
Is to exhaust one’s wits to no purpose.
Things are what they are regardless.
Better to let things be, to be still at the core of one’s being.

Stephen Mitchell

8. Stephen Mitchell (1988):

The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.
Hold on to the center.

9. Victor Mair (1990):

The space between heaven and earth,
how like a bellows it is!
Empty but never exhausted,
The more it pumps, the more comes out.
Hearing too much leads to utter exhaustion;
Better to remain in the center.

10. Michael LaFargue (1992):

The space between heaven and earth
isn't it like a bellows?
Empty, but not shrivelled up,
set it in motion and always more comes out.
Much talking, quickly exhausted.
It can't compare to watching over what is inside.

11. Peter Merel (1995):

Nature is like a bellows,
Empty, yet never ceasing its supply.
The more it moves, the more it yields;
So the sage draws upon experience
And cannot be exhausted.

12. Ursula LeGuin (1997):

Heaven and earth
act as a bellows:
Empty yet structured,
it moves, inexhaustibly giving.

13. Ron Hogan (2002):

Lao Tzu said Tao is like a bellows:
It's empty,
but it could help set the world on fire.
If you keep using Tao, it works better.
If you keep talking about it,
it won't make any sense.
Be cool.

14. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (2003):

The space between the heavens and the earth –
Isn’t it just like a bellows!
Even though empty it is not vacuous.
Pump it and more and more comes out.
It is better to safeguard what you have within
Than to learn a great deal that so often goes nowhere.

15. Yasuhiko Genku Kimura (2004):

Manifesting the Tao Eteranl,
The kosmic space is like a bellows.
Empty, yet inexhaustible.
The more one activates it, the more it generates.
Being full, too many words lead one nowhere;
Impartially, keep to the silent core of emptiness.

16. Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo (2007):

Yet Heaven and Earth
And all the space between
Are like a bellows:
Empty but inexhaustible,
Always producing more.
Longwinded speech is exhausting
Better to stay centered.

Move! Get going. Empty yourself out. That is: (1) give everything you have, hold nothing back, bestow all that you have upon the world; and (2) become an emptied person, empty of desire and judgment.

I'm reminded of Yeshua/Jesus saying, in the Gospel of Thomas, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." (The canonical Jesus sounds a similar theme as when he urges us not to put our light under a basket, and in the parables of the talents [Luke 19:12-27 and Matt 25.14-20], which urge putting our "talents" to use rather than keeping them safe and hidden.)

We are afraid this will exhaust us. Way-making teaches that in the giving-forth motion, our power grows. But talking about it -- like this! -- that's what's really exhausting. Especially, excited or prolonged talking agitates the mind and makes us "full" rather than calm and empty.

* * *
See: Saturdao Index.

Parts of Speech, Parts of God

When it comes to God-talk, there are a lot of different conceptions. It’s a common reply, when someone says they don’t believe in God, to answer: “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in, because I probably don’t believe in that one either.” However many conceptions of God you don’t believe in, there are further conceptions available – and maybe some of them, you do believe in.

Imagine a survey that presented respondents with a list of various sentences about God and asked them to mark each one “true” or “false” (in their opinion). If we make the survey long enough and finely worded enough, we can well imagine that no two people would have matching answers all the way down. Even people the same age, raised in the same church, sitting next to each other in the pew every Sunday for their whole lives will have some different conceptions of God. In fact, the same person’s conception of God varies over time, depending on her recent experiences, what book he’s just read, what movie she’s just seen, or what sermon he’s just heard.

Flimer Dirthus Schleckentay

There are so many ways that people have and do think about God. Of course, we all have slightly different associations with any word. Yet, by and large, we more or less manage to communicate with most of our terms. “God,” however, is so variable – a term used to assert so many divergent and incompatible things – that to simply assert God’s existence or nonexistence doesn’t say anything. Such assertions serve only to affirm the speaker’s group identification: “I’m in the group that says God exists,” or, “I’m in the group that says God doesn’t exist.”

Both “God exists,” and “God doesn’t exist,” are like the foreign-language motto of a club in which every member recites the motto, but the last member who knew what the phrase meant died a century ago. Every time they get together, they say, “Flimer Dirthus Schleckentay,” and the words have no meaning at all except for re-affirming to each other their shared group identity and loyalty.

Some people put a little silver plastic fish symbol on their car. What does that mean? It means: “I’m in the tribe that puts little fish symbols on their cars.” Some people put a little fish with legs, and the word “Darwin” or “evolve” inside the fish. What does that mean? It means: “I’m in the tribe that takes umbrage at the tribal assertions of that fish tribe.” Myself, I have a silver plastic big fat fish with the word “Buddha” in it. Rather than put it on my car, I decided to put it on my filing cabinet at home. I do have a silver plastic chalice symbol on my car. What does that mean? Most people who see that have no more idea of what it means than “flimer dirthus schleckentay,” but we know what the chalice symbol means, don’t we? It means: “We’re in the tribe that would like all this tribal stuff to just be done with, but in the meantime, we do have our tribe, too.”

"Ladybug" by Joan Mitchell.
Possible product of theological debate?

When I interact with varying conceptions, I find that appropriation works better than opposition. I try to find a way to keep the baby when throwing out the bathwater – even if my idea of what’s baby and what’s bathwater may itself be a matter of difference. Speaking of babies, for example: Instead of saying Jesus isn’t our redeemer, instead of rejecting the concept of a redeemer born in flesh among us, we say every child born is one more redeemer. Our strategy is to slip in, take the stone arrowheads off their weapons, and replace them with rubber suction-cups. Or, maybe, replace the tips with paint brushes, and dip them into different colors, so that when they are fired, instead of harming each other, we create beautiful bright-colored abstract art on one another. Wouldn’t that be more fun?

So when it comes to differing conceptions of God, if we’re going to be a tribe, instead of being a tribe that puts its energy into refuting and defeating “false” conceptions, let’s be the tribe that delights in proliferating conceptions of God. After all, if God is the creator, then our divinity is in our creativity, so let us be playful and joyful in finding new, creative, poetic insightful ways to invoke “God.”

Billy Jonas

Billy Jonas’ song, “God Is In” (the lyrics of which we used as a reading earlier in the service) is one example of such delightful playfulness. (For both the lyrics and audio of this song: click here.)

There are infinite variations on the noun, “God,” but let us not restrict ourselves to the realm of nouns. God can be thought of as any part of speech. Do you remember your grammar – the “parts of speech”? There are eight of them, right? Let’s see . . . Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen . . . No, not those eight. The eight parts of speech are: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, interjections.

God the Noun

God the noun is the most common, of course, but, here, too, there’s still new territory to explore. A noun is a person, place, or thing. Person, or person-like, is the usual idea. Suppose God were a place, and the other name of that place is “here.” Suppose God were a thing, and the other name of that thing is “this.” What does that do – regarding every “here” and every “this” as God?

God the Pronoun

Goddess In

Then there’s God the pronoun. What pronoun refers to God? “He” and “him” are the traditional ones in the Western monotheism. For polytheism, the pronoun is “they.” Using “she” and “her” remind us of the feminine aspect of the divine, and that’s important. There are still times when referring to God as “she” can be a radical subversion of conceptions of God that reinforce patriarchy.

Let’s go further. Rather than merely looking at what pronoun to use to refer to God, what if “God” were itself the pronoun? Pronouns refer to a noun antecedent. If God were a pronoun, what would the antecedent be? God as a pronoun would have everything as its antecedent, wouldn’t it? We would say, “The universe unfolds in God’s own way” not to imply a separate intentionality – but as an alternative way of saying “The universe unfolds in its own way.”

Instead of saying, “Billy forgot his pencil,” we would replace the possessive pronoun “his” and say, “Billy forgot God’s pencil.”

“Maybe he’ll remember it tomorrow,” becomes “Maybe God’ll remember God tomorrow.”

Here are some sentences from this morning’s newspaper (Sunday December 18), replacing the pronouns with “God”:

“Flash floods devastated a region of the southern Philippines unaccustomed to serious storms, killing at least 450 people while God slept, rousting hundreds of others to God’s rooftops.”

And:

“Egypt’s military rulers escalated a bloody crackdown on street protesters on Saturday, beating God and setting God’s tents ablaze.”

We would also get:

“The Denver quarterback, now dubbed the Mile High Messiah after leading God’s Broncos to seven wins in eight games . . .”

God the pronoun provides some interesting perspectives, doesn’t it?

God the Verb

Buckminster Fuller

Then there’s God the verb. There’s been considerable work on this one. Buckminster Fuller in 1940 wrote:

“God to me, it seems,
is a verb
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.”

In the last century a many scholars have written of ways of thinking about God as a verb. Process theologians and Naturalist theologians have produced such an extensive body of work that they’ve shifted the English language meaning of the word “God.”

Jean-Claude Koven

A tenet of process theology is that “reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events.” Author Jean-Claude Koven writing a few years ago (2005) expounded:

“God is . . . the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. . . . Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God's voice; when I listened, it was with God's heart. As you begin to view God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, you'll discover God in everything you see – including yourself.”

Nice. Thinking of God as an active verb emphasizes the time during which the actions take place. It puts God in time, rather than removed from time. It invites us to perceive the holy in change, rather than imagining it in changelessness. My colleague Unitarian Universalist minister Stephen Phinney writes,

Rev. Stephen Phinney

“I believe that the holy is in the process of giving and taking of the love we have.  In other words, the holy or God is the process of interchanging love.”

Calling God a verb is a way of alluding to its active doing. A reality of events rather than substances suggests a more dynamic quality, but you may have noticed that “event,” “process,” and “creativity,” and “unfoldment” are still nouns. Suppose we take “God is a verb” strictly. How would that go? If God is the verb, what’s the subject of the sentence? The universe, perhaps. So we would say:
“The universe Gods.”
“There’s the vast cosmos, quietly, grandly Godding along through the ages.”
“Reality Gods.”
Anything and everything is the subject. I God, you God, he she it Gods, we God, you God, they God. All God’s children God.

And what sort of activity is it to “to God”? Following the lead of the process and the creativity theologians, to God is to unfold, like an infinite flower opening its petals; to develop through a process of interaction with all the rest of the Godding universe. To God is to become transparent to the creativity of the universe shining through you. To God is to fandango across the ballroom of oneness, to trip the light fantastic, not with, but as, the mountains and rivers and great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars. To God is to “laugh at the word two” (Hafiz). It is to swim in the sea of mystery, and quaff from the cup of abundance. To God is to lose all sense of yourself as a separate being in a creative project, or the creative encounter, in total freedom, with each moment.

Call that Godding to help you remember that everything we do and are is a part of the whole, a part of the dance, the mystery of creativity, the unpredictable unfolding of new things under the sun.

We have been exploring God as an intransitive verb. Suppose God were a transitive verb -- the abiding transit between subject and direct object, doer and done-unto. If reality Gods, then what does it God? The universe Gods you, and me. Reality Gods the Republicans and the Democrats alike. It Gods Muammar Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad as well as Desmond Tutu and Thich Nhat Hanh.

Henry Nelson Wieman

There is, in other words, an activity of relationship between all things, an active connection of each thing with all things. Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman says that the “universe becomes spiritual” as

“more events become signs, as these signs take on richer content of qualitative meanings, as these meanings form a network of interconnective events comprehending all that is happening in the world.” (Wieman 23)

It would seem, to carry Wieman to his logical conclusion, that the universe will have attained full spirituality when everything signifies everything else. This is also where God-as-transitive-verb takes us. Everything Gods everything else. The butterfly in China Gods the rain in Omaha. You God the stars, and the stars God you.

God the Conjunction

Conjunctions, you’ll remember, hook up words and phrases and clauses. That makes sense: God connects things.

The two main conjunctions are “and” and “or.” Sometimes God is an “and”; sometimes God is an “or”; which is to say, God is the inclusive embrace, and God is the fact of choice.

God the Preposition

Prepositions describe a relationship: on, under, with, for. It might be helpful to think of relationship itself as Godly.

God the Adjective (My Favorite!)

Might not the word “God” be used, not to make a controversial empirical claim about what is, but to draw our attention, as a good poet does, to certain qualities of existence – qualities which are not subjects about which to dispute, but are a felt reality momentarily overlooked? This present moment – if we truly show up for it – is so sweet and so delicious that we need words like “holy” and “divine” and “God” to help us notice it.

Let God be the name for the quality that existence has when we are so fully present to it that we perceive divinity there. An experience has God quality, religious quality, when it re-orients us to a greater sense of wholeness and peace. It might be brought about by devotion to a cause, by a passage of poetry, by meditation. The religious quality is felt as a sense of abundance and gratitude toward things beyond our personality, that structure of ego-defense strategies with which we identify through most of our day.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and outspoken critic of Hitler, imprisoned and eventually executed by Nazis, wrote about a religionless Christianity. In a letter from prison, Bonhoeffer wrote:

“The New Testament must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith” (329).

Religion, he said,

“is only a garment of Christianity – and even this garment has looked very different at different times.”

I think Bonhoeffer had in mind that religion denotes some set of doctrines and practices, but no one such set is necessary for giving experience God quality. Rather, a wide variety of sets of doctrines and practices can be helpful in cultivating the God quality of experience. Very different doctrines and practices – say pagan ones, or Buddhist ones – can facilitate our awareness of that which goes by many names: the oneness of reality, the divine, the ground of being, the transcendent, the awesome quality of the universe, the interbeing of everything, the interconnected web of existence -- God. Christians discarding this religion garment, said Bonhoeffer, will cease to regard themselves “as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world” (280-81).

While no particular religion is necessary for bringing that quality to experience, all of them have proven sufficient, at least some of the time for some people in opening them up to experiencing the God quality in events and things.

If God is a noun, then we have to face the question of whether God is the sort of noun that the Catholics describe, or the sort that the primitive Baptists describe, or the sort that the Eastern orthodox describe, or the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Hindu. But if God is an adjective, then it’s easy to say that quality can be found anywhere, in any faith tradition, in any activity or practice, any work and any recreation (except bungee jumping, as Billy Jonas says).

I believe in the adjectives. I believe in green and growing, dark and peaceful, loving and kind, amazing and wonderful. I believe in the beautiful and tragic quality of life. I believe in awesome, in grateful, in hopeful, in joyful. I believe in full.

I believe in earthy. I believe in wise, and compassionate. I believe in a God world: a world not of our own making that supports us and sustains us, which grounds us for the meaningful pursuit of ideals. I believe in the God life, which can be experienced by people of any religion, even those that say there is no noun, God – a life of awareness, a life of attention to the interplay of forces, a life of deep sympathy with all of them even when it does come time to take a stand against some of them.

I believe in holy, for each breath is holy. I believe in sacred, for each step is sacred: we have but to be mindful and know it.

God the noun is an ultimate cause of things. God the adjective is a quality we can perceive of the flow of all the causal forces, none of them ultimate, interacting continuously.

John Steinbeck wrote that

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the [human] mind...it is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, or the forearms. The skin tastes like air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn."

We have experienced moments with those qualities.

God the Adverb

God the adverb expands on the idea of God the adjective. While adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify verbs or adjectives or other adverbs. So things, events, experiences can have the God quality – and so can activities, and qualities themselves.

God the Interjection

Oh, God!

This is the most popular of all uses of God, isn’t it?

Interjections don’t assert, don’t make a claim, nor are they any part of the content of an assertion or claim. They just express. They are the speech of the speechless. Interjections are what we use when we are filled with something, and it wants to come out, but we don’t know what to say. They are a moan, or a yelp, or cry, beyond what we can articulate.

God is wow. God is ouch. God is yippee! God is arrgh! God is hmm. God is "yum!" and God is "ew, yuck." And certainly God is "Oh, God!"

“Oh, God!” may be the most honest -- and ultimately the most accurate -- God-talk there is. To that, I have just one further interjection:

Amen.

Saturdao 8

Dao De Jing, verse 5a
16 translations

1. James Legge (1891):

Heaven and earth do not act from (the impulse of) any wish to be
benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt
with.
The sages do not act from (any wish to be) benevolent; they
deal with the people as the dogs of grass are dealt with.

2. Archie Bahm (1958):

Opposites are not sympathetic to each other.
Each one of the many kinds of opposites acts as if it could get along without its other.
But Nature treats opposites impartially, dealing with each of every pair of opposites with the same indifference.
And the intelligent man will regard opposites in the same manner.

3. Frank MacHoven (1962):

Nature is indifferent to life. It realizes everything is as a straw dog. The truly wise are also indifferent to life. They realize humanity is as a straw dog.

4. D. C. Lau (1963):

Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs;
the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs.

5. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (1972):

Heaven and earth are ruthless;
They see the ten thousand things as dummies.
The wise are ruthless;
They see the people as dummies.

6. Stan Rosenthal (1984):

Nature acts without intent, so cannot be described
as acting with benevolence, nor malevolence to any thing.
In this respect, the Tao is just the same,
though in reality it should be said that nature follows the rule of Tao.
Therefore, even when he seems to act in manner kind or benevolent,
the sage is not acting with such intent, for in conscious matters such as these, he is amoral and indifferent.

7. Jacob Trapp (1987):

“Nature Seems Unkind”
Nature seems unkind,
As indifferent to its own offspring
As if they were but sacrificial straw dogs.
The Sage, too, seems unkind,
As impartial as Nature;
Yet, like Nature, he benefits all.

8. Stephen Mitchell (1988):

The Tao doesn't take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn't take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.

9. Victor Mair (1990):

Heaven and earth are inhumane;
they view the myriad creatures as straw dogs.
The sage is inhumane;
he views the common people as straw dogs.

10. Michael LaFargue (1992):

“Heaven and Earth are not Good
they treat the thousands of things like straw dogs.
The Wise Person is not Good
he treats the hundred clans like straw dogs.”

11. Peter Merel (1995):

“Nature”
Nature is not kind;
It treats all things impartially.
The Sage is not kind,
And treats all people impartially.

12. Ursula LeGuin (1997):

“Useful Emptiness”
Heaven and earth aren't humane.
To them the ten thousand things
are straw dogs.
Wise souls aren't humane.
To them the hundred families
are straw dogs.

13. Ron Hogan (2002):

Tao's neutral:
it doesn't worry about good or evil.
The Master's are neutral:
they treat everyone the same.

14. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (2003):

The heavens and earth are not partial to institutionalized morality.
They take things (wanwu) and treat them all as straw dogs.
Sages too are not partial to institutionalized morality.
They treat the common people as straw dogs.

15. Yasuhiko Genku Kimura (2004):

The Kosmos is not humane;
Impartially, it treats all things as transitory.
The sage is not humane;
Impartially, he treats all people as transitory.

16. Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo (2007):

Heaven and Earth are not kind:
The ten thousand things are straw dogs to them.
Sages are not kind:
People are straw dogs to them.

Eight of the 16 translations use the phrase "straw dogs." What are straw dogs anyway? Besides the title of a movie, I mean? ("Straw Dogs" is a 2011 movie with James Marsden and Kate Bosworth, which is a re-make of a 1971 movie with Dustin Hoffman and Susan George. A couple moves to a rural town and face increasingly vicious harassment from the locals. It's a psychological thriller.) In ancient China, straw dogs were ceremonial objects -- sacrificial animal-images. "These sacrificial objects are artifacts that are treated with great reverence during the sacrifice itself, and then after the ceremony, discarded to be trodden underfoot" (Ames and Hall). So when nature/reality/heaven and earth treats us as a "straw dog", are we talking about during the sacrifice itself or after? Interesting. If you find that life is treating you really well, it means you're about to be sacrificed. If life is trodding you underfoot, at least you know the sacrifice is over.

Lao Tsu begins by telling us what our parents and teachers so often repeated: Life isn't fair. Heaven and earth aren't kind. In particular, they are not "partial to institutional morality," -- which means the world isn't bound by your ideas of what's fair, or your ideas of right and wrong and good and bad.

Then Lao Tsu tells us that, if we are to be as the sages, then we, too, must treat people the same way. What does that mean? Kimura indicates this means treating them as transitory -- not getting attached to them, just as earth and sky don't appear to be attached to any particular individual. Others suggest this means treating people impartially, the same: "she welcomes both saints and sinners."

Virtue really must be its own reward. Nature won't treat you any better for it. Nor will the wise.

Likewise, it's not your job -- it isn't anybody's -- to praise and condemn, as if the world would want to change itself to accord with your judgment of what it should be.

* * *
See: Saturdao Index

A Merry Unitarian Christmas

Christmas is, after all, you know, our holiday. Unitarians made this season what it is.

Consider: what does Christmas mean? It means, of course, the mass of Christ, the celebration of the birth of a Palestinian prophet named Yeshua, or Jesus. But what exactly does that mean? Historians have no idea what time of year Yeshua was actually born. The early Christian church celebrated his birthday in April at first, and then in June for a while, before settling on a strategy of co-opting yule and solstice. The first December Christmas wasn't celebrated until around 380 CE.

In the last 200 years, Christmas has been radically transformed -- and Unitarians were at the forefront in most of the transforming.

Christmas now means we put a tree indoors, and we decorate it. It was a practice in Germany, brought to the United States in the early 1800s by Charles Follen.

Charles Follen was a Unitarian.

Christmas means dashing through the snow, one-horse open sleighs. It means bells that jingle, and it means laughing, all the way. That’s the song “Jingle Bells,” by the James Pierpont.

James Pierpont was a Unitarian.

Christmas means music. In addition to "Jingle Bells," other Christmas songs include "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Watchman Tell Us of the Night," by John Bowring, and "Do You Hear What I Hear?" by Noel Regney.

Henry Wadsworth Longgellow, John Bowring, and Noel Regney were all Unitarians.

Additionally, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," is by a Unitarian minister. More about that one later.

The instantly recognizable Ebenezeer Scrooge

Christmas means Old Ebenezeer Scrooge’s heart opens up to compassion and joy. Charles Dickens, in 1843, published A Christmas Carol, and Christmas has never been the same.

Charles Dickens was a Unitarian.

In Dickens' tale, Scrooge confronts his past, when as a young man, his need for money -- that is, we suppose, his need for security or status -- caused him to lose his fiancee, Belle. He is shown the present reality of joy in gatherings of families, whether they are poor like Bob Cratchit's or relatively well off like Scrooge's nephew Fred. Then he is brought to an awareness of his own impending death. It's not that Scrooge had explicitly believed himself immortal. It's just that he had pushed the fact that life is temporary out of his mind. In pushing away death, he had pushed away life, for the two are the same.

Dickens' novella received immediate popular and critical acclaim, and almost as immediately shifted the way that Victorians celebrated Christmas. Over the next years, Dickens received hundreds of letters from complete strangers

"writing all manner of letters about their homes and hearths, and how the Carol is read aloud there, and kept on a very little shelf by itself."

A Christmas Carol was regarded as a new gospel. Critics noted that the book was, in their experience, unique in that it actually made readers behave better.

A Christmas Carol remains the most widely read-aloud book. It is still theatrically performed in various venues around the country every year. It has been made into numerous movie versions. Other popular Christmas tales such as It's a Wonderful Life and How the Grinch Stole Christmas are but re-workings of Charles Dickens' Unitarian gospel. "According to historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol."

The Christmas gospel of generosity, gratitude, and the joy of family gathering is fundamentally Unitarian. The Christmas social gospel is also Unitarian.

Edmund Hamilton Sears
1810 - 1876

Christmas means the message of Peace on Earth, to all goodwill. In 1849, just a few years after Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, a Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears, wrote the words to "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear." With the war in Europe and the US war with Mexico weighing on his mind, Rev. Sears wrote a carol that urges us to hear the angels sing of peace on earth, to all goodwill.

The Gospel of Luke tells of angels proclaiming Peace on Earth -- but for most of the history of Christendom, that has been taken as referring to a private, personal peace. Few imagined that peace on earth actually meant we should stop killing each other.

Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears, however, was at the vanguard of a movement to understand peace on earth in social, community terms – instead of merely a personal, private peace. He called us to task for not heeding the angelic call to peace.

"Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong,
and man at war with man hears not the love song which they bring,"

he decried.

His lyrics raised objections from a number of Christian conservatives of the time. Many people said, contemptuously, that Sears’ hymn was just the sort of thing you would expect of a Unitarian.

Yes, it is.

If Christmas season today is a time when our hopes turn to ending war and truly bringing peace on earth, it is because a Unitarian minister wrote a song inviting us to imagine the day:

"when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling,
and the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing."

This is our holiday. From the Christmas tree, to the jingling bells, to the Scrooge story, to the message of peace on earth, Unitarians made Christmas what it is today.

Respond to WHOSE Love?

Text

The living tradition we share draws on many sources. . . . [including:] Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbor as ourselves.

Abstract

"God" is a difficult topic among Unitarian Universalists. Some of us resist any use of the word or concept. For others of us, God is a central part of our understanding and our life. Is this an ontological disagreement (involving competing claims about the nature of reality and what reality does and does not include)? Is it a semantic disagreement (involving competing claims about what words do and don't mean)? Or is it neither of these so much as a matter of identity and group loyalty?

Respond to Whose Love?

My Mom recently recounted to me a story from my childhood. I had no recollection of the incident or any previous retelling of it. It’s an anecdote that reveals something of my mind, and my mother’s. I was about five years old, and we were at a fair or carnival where there were helium balloons. I'd never seen such things before, and I was fascinated.

“Mom, why do they go up?” I asked – or so I’m told I did.

Mom, rational scientist that she was and is, answered, “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Things go down,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” said Mom. “Why do they go down?”

“Because of gravity,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, the balloon goes up because of levity.” And this satisfied me. What could I say?

When I heard Mom tell this story, it did not occur to me to think, “Egad, my mother lied to me!” After all, why not call it levity? Yes, it might imply a kind of Manichaean physics. (Manichaeans believe that good and evil are both substantive forces at war with each other, and in my five-year-old mind, maybe I had some inkling of a similar notion of there being two opposing physical forces named “gravity” and “levity.”) But I was also prepared to learn, had it ever come up again, that “levity” was the name for how, when something is less dense than air, gravity pulls the air down and under it, pushing the less dense object upward.

Mom wasn’t ready to explain all that – or, rather, she knew I wasn’t ready to follow such an explanation – so she me gave this word, “levity.” I delight in this new family story -- not because Mom’s answer was false, but because it’s so true. I had entirely forgotten it, but I love knowing again what apparently I first learned at age five: things go up because of levity.

The world is full of wonder. Just when I think that gravity makes everything go down, I discover that some things go up. Language is full of wonder, too. The words we select to express our experience give the experience meaning -- and sometimes delight.

The wonder of world and word comes to mind when I reflect on our text for today: the fourth source of the living tradition we share, "Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbor as ourselves." (See all of the seven principles and six sources: click here.)

“Respond to whose love?” I have heard asked. It’s a topic that calls for both gravity and levity, isn’t it?

Unitarian Universalists have different experiences of the world -- different from people in other faith traditions and different from each other. People have different stories to make sense of our world.

• Some stories about reality feature a creative force that is person-like in that it knows and it wants.
• Other stories tell of a creative force that kind of has beliefs and desires – in a rather metaphorical sense.
• Still other stories depict the forces of the universe creating and destroying utterly without anything that could be compared to knowledge, intentionality, or purpose.

We have different senses of what’s out there. Of course we do. We’ve had different experiences, so how could we not? I want a world in which that is not a problem, don’t you?

Besides different feels for what does or does not exist out there, we have different feels for how words may reasonably be used. I was poking around for definitions of "God" and I discovered that a blog up in Rhode Island had quoted me about that. It said,

Meredith Garmon . . . once observed, “The word ‘God’ points to a source of beauty and mystery; a power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; an ultimate context and basis for meaning and value; the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; a basis of ethics.” (Rev. James Ford, click here.)

After some further rummaging, I confirmed that, yes, I actually had written that some months back. OK, I’ll take it.

• Source of beauty and mystery; 
• power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; 
• ultimate context and basis for meaning and value; 
• widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; 
• a basis of ethics. 

This is what people have pretty-much-always been referring to when they said ‘God’ – regardless of whether they thought that these qualities attached to a person-like creator or not. Others, though, insist that the word ‘God’ unavoidably implies a person-like creator.

I believe that theology is a kind of poetry, not a kind of science or natural history. As poetry-making and poetry-hearing beings we need to use words creatively, to sometimes treat a peripheral association as a central meaning and ignore the meaning that had often previously been central. I want a world in which that, too, is not a problem. Don’t you? Is this so hard? A world in which different experiences of what’s real are honored, in which different styles of poetry and metaphor are honored? Why is that hard?

Call it tribalism. Tribalism was named as an issue in the controversy around Rob Bell’s 2011 book Love Wins. Reverend Bell argued, as Universalists have been arguing for over 200 years, that there is no after-life hell of eternal damnation. A loving god would not condemn creatures of God’s own making to an eternity of agony. While many Christian readers were affirmed and moved by Rob Bell’s universalism, a number of other Christians attacked Bell (as their predecessors attacked John Murray and Hosea Ballou) as a heretic. One of Bell’s defenders -- in fact, the editor of Love Wins -- decried the attacks. He wrote:

“As a young evangelical, I was socialized to see the biggest threat to the church as theological liberalism. But now I think the biggest threat is Christian tribalism, where God’s interests are reduced to and measured by those sharing your history, tradition, and beliefs, and where one needs an ‘enemy’ in order for you to feel ‘right with God.’” (Mickey Maudlin, source click here)

There is an awful lot of religion that is neither about a sense of what’s out there, nor is about a sense of the proper use of words. It’s just about: whose team are you on?

Religion can become talismanic – a mere talisman. Consider for example a report from this week’s Christianity Today: “Americans love their Bibles. So much so that they keep them in pristine, unopened condition." Or, as Gallup and Castelli said in a widely quoted survey finding, “Americans revere the Bible but by and large they don’t read it.” Time magazine observed in a 2007 cover story that only half of U.S. adults could name one of the four Gospels. Fewer than half could identify Genesis as the Bible's first book. Jay Leno and Stephen Colbert have made sport of Americans' inability to name the Ten Commandments—even among members of Congress who have pushed to have them posted publicly. (Christianity Today, click here.)

Yet Bible sales continue at a brisk clip. For many, apparently, the Bible is a sort of talisman: an object to possess as a symbol of tribal loyalty, not a text to study and understand. In a similar way, tribal loyalties get in the way of honoring and respecting different experiences about what is real, and different poetic inclinations for choosing words. We have a hard time simply accepting our differences when those differences symbolize what team you’re on – and when team membership requires being opposed to certain other teams.

Tribalism isn’t always bad. Recall that religion fundamentally is about three things:

1. It’s about how you live -- the ethics and values that guide your life.
2. It’s about community -- who you choose to come together with and share in rituals that strengthen your sense of group connection.
3. It's about those moments of transcendence, one-ness, or mystery.

The task of faith and faith community is to bring those three functions together in such a way that each one supports, encourages, and strengthens the other two. Community is, indeed, an important part of religion. Being a part of a tribe can be a good and healthy part of the deal. We are social beings: we need community, and loyalty to our group is, by and large, a virtue.

The problem arises when the #2 function isn't facilitating either the #1 function or the #3 function -- that is, when one's tribal connection neither affirms and supports any ethic or value other than tribe loyalty, nor facilitates or helps integrate one's transcendent experiences of interconnection and peace. If the primary function of my community is to nurse a shared sense of who the enemy is, then my community isn’t healthy. People who want to post the ten commandments but don't know more than a couple of those commandments, are using the issue as a test to identify who their enemies are.

What about our own Unitarian Universalist forms of tribalism?

It's worth noting that where there are no tribal loyalties at play, we humans are generally pretty flexible about adjusting our understandings of words. For example, one of my former in-laws referred to her refrigerator as "the Frigidaire." She would say, for example, “There’s cake in the Frigidaire.” A glance at the manufacturer’s label revealed that her refrigerator was actually made by Amana. But even at my most churlish, teen-aged self, I was not inclined to say, “No, it’s not in the Frigidaire, it’s in the refrigerator, which happens to be an Amana.” Would you say that? Me neither.

We simply adjust to different ways of using words. Longfellow says, “By the shores of Gitche Gumee,” and most of us can go with that, without the annoyed feeling, "If he meant Lake Superior he should have said 'Lake Superior.'"

Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky tells us:

Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,
all mimsy were the borogoves, and ye mome raths outgrabe.

Many of the words are made-up. You can call the poem “nonsense,” but it isn't meaningless. The sound and rhythm and context they create for each other invite us into a world of imagination, and most of us can go with that.

Tribalism, however, makes it difficult to extend the same flexibility and charity to language about God. To see how this works, consider the ways that some of us find our genial adaptability beginning to stiffen dogmatically when it comes to grammar. Attitudes about grammar illustrate how attitudes about "God" work.

For example, take me (. . . please!) I am sensitive to the difference between “lie” and “lay,” and I am capable of wishing that other people were, too. I have my pet list of words not to be used as verbs. Loan is not a verb, I say. Neither are impact, mandate, or critique. These words are nouns! The perfectly good verb forms are lend, affect, require, and criticize. Even more hideous: transition. Transition is not a verb.

You might remember a Calvin and Hobbes comic in which Calvin uses verb as a verb.

I have mellowed out a bit through the years. I actually rather like the Southern expression, might could, as in, “We might could do that.” I know that grates on some ears, but isn’t it more elegant than “might be able to”?

When LoraKim and I were first dating, I was a bit of an insufferable grammar dogmatist. I think that if I had corrected her one more time after she said "with you and I," the engagement would have been off. We Grammar Nazis like to make protestations about preserving the language, facilitating clarity of thought, and guarding against language so decaying that it becomes an impediment to understanding. Those protestations are hollow. What it's really about is loyalty: tribal -- or, more precisely, class -- loyalty.

It would seem a betrayal of our grandmothers or parents or beloved English teachers if we were to allow ourselves to relax the guard against the barbarians at the gate saying “got” when they should say “have.” Those adults we admire were the upholders of our class identity. The adults who sought to instill in me good grammar were teaching me to be faithful to my socio-economic class. The hidden message of prescriptive grammar instruction is: Don’t sound like those people – the lower classes. Grammar will be emotionally important to me precisely to the degree that my class identification is emotionally important to me – the degree that I desire to preserve privilege and separation between the other and me.

I'm talking about separation between the other and me. But if it will help close that separation, then I will say, "between the other and I." Hurts a little bit.  But I can learn. If it will help me connect with others, then I will (gulp) transition to the next phase. Any noun you might could verb, go ahead. And if I don’t know what you mean, I’ll ask. It’s not like speakers of upper-class English are really, on average, a whole lot clearer.

Tribal – or class – loyalty might make us balk at some language, but we noticed that when loyalty isn’t at play, as when reading Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, it’s relatively easy to practice the gentle arts of flexibility and charity.

I’ve come to understand that whether or not I want to insist that “God” necessarily must imply an entity with awareness and intentions is mostly about my tribal loyalty, just as my grammar pet peeves are. Can we Unitarian Universalists engage in a process we identify as discerning what God is calling us to do? Can we have conversations about the question, "How do we serve God?" Yes, we can. In talking about serving God, we would be talking about serving life, and good, and the flourishing of all beings, while also reminding ourselves of the finitude and corrigibility of our own conceptions of life, good, and flourishing – which is just what I think Jews, Christians, and Moslems are talking about when they speak of serving God.

When we say, with our fourth source, that we are called to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbor as our selves, we are saying that the moments when we have felt the greatest belonging and connection inspire us to want to help our neighbors also feel connected and know they belong – which is what I think it truly means to respond to God’s love, whether or not God is conceived of as a person-like entity.

This was once hard for me to say. I was the proud "Class Atheist" at my rural Georgia public school from fourth grade through high school. To change my language seemed like a betrayal of my standards, which, of course, really meant a betrayal of my tribe: us rationalist humanists standing courageously intolerant of the language used by certain people whom we accused of intolerance.

My journey slowly and unevenly brought me to a place where I could see connecting with others as more important than separating myself from them. If they -- if even, say, you -- talk to me about your faith in God, and if you do so with certain phrases that trigger in me remembrance of enemies past, if you use religious words that conjure the battle lines in culture wars in which I have fought for much of my life, please give me just a moment, and I will dismantle my trigger. I will. That's my promise. There might be some days where it takes me a minute to remember myself, but give me that moment, and I am committed to disarming that particular reactivity in myself. I make that commitment because . . .

. . . because if I have a chance to connect with you, whoever you are, then connecting with you is more important than separating myself from you;

. . . because I know that if you and I have each felt mystery, wonder, and beauty come together with peace, compassion, and the softening of ego defenses; if we have opened our hearts to love; then we have a shared commonality that transcends both your dogmatic opinions about God and my dogmatic opinions about how wrong your dogmatic opinions are;

. . . and because that shared commonality matters more than maintaining my tribal identity.

It turns out that I can still oppose mandatory school prayer, support mandatory inclusion of evolution, favor reproductive rights, legal recognition of same-sex marriage, abolition of the death penalty, and public programs to take care of all our people -- and talk about God. I can talk about the impetus of the universe as God’s call for us to improve our understanding, respect our differences, serve life and freedom, and share God’s “preferential option for the poor.” Willing to employ "God talk" judiciously, I can be more effective than I ever could by a fastidious refusal to invoke the one word that, more clearly than any other, conveys a sense of spacious mystery tugging us toward the better angels of our nature.

I find my wholeness and healing growing the more I perform the imaginative exercise of pretending that the world might be whispering to me, calling, inviting me to love if I but listen, listen. Listen: it is God’s love calling me to respond by loving myself and my neighbor as my self. It is God’s love lifting me up . . . as levity lifts a child's balloon.

May it be so. May it be so for all of us.