Rev. Linda Simmons
Eco-theology
June 6, 2014
None of us are immune to the effects of climate change. John Stanley and David Joy
in their article, At the Edge of the Roof: The Evolutionary Crisis of the Human Spirit
note that in 2012, the world crossed an ominous threshold. A reading of 400 parts
per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide were recorded by monitoring stations
across the Artic. That is at least 50 ppm higher than the maximum concentration
during the last 12,000 years. It was also a year in which the Artic sea-ice melted to
55% of its 1990 extent, and America was engulfed by a massive and prolonged
drought that destroyed much of its wheat and soybean crops. Stanley and David
write, “Chaotic climate change has become the new normal.”
There is a letter to the editor in this week’s Inky entitled: Cooperation needed on
challenges of sea-level rise. In it, D. Annie Atherton paraphrases Robert Young, the
director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. Young commented
that dealing with climate change can have a pernicious effect, tearing the fabric of
communities and pitting neighbor against neighbor.
This is a specter that haunts us all. As resources diminish, ocean fronts erode, we are
pushed ever closer together with ever fewer resources to distribute. The media fills
us with tales of the future that include anarchy, guns, brutality and a survival of the
fittest in a way that Darwin could not have imagined. We have not yet built a
language that allows us to imagine another possibility.
I wonder if climate change has other possibilities, other invitations. I wonder if
climate change can contribute to our interconnectedness, our capacity for
cooperation and care, our willingness to adapt.
Darwin’s theories that insist that the fittest, strongest, and most capable survive are
often interpreted using the lens of brute strength, cunning, entrepreneurship,
competiveness but some suggest that this theory could be speaking to a different
kind of fitness. What if to be fit, strong and capable means to be cooperative, able to
compromise, understand and live into interdependence? What if these are the life
forms that survive, whose genes are passed on, whose characteristics are inherited
and it is we, interpreting through the lens of our economic and social system, who
are spurred on to dominate, eliminate, win and so be the weakest links, the least fit?
When I consider climate change I feel beat up, depressed, overwhelmed, inadequate,
guilty, helpless…none of which make me want to continue the reflection to say the
least. What can I do, I lament? It’s too big. It’s the fault of huge corporations spun out
of control in a capitalism grown so big it is now feasting on the very means of our
survival. Do you feel any of that? How can we enter the conversation about climate
change with hope, agency, encouragement, excitement? Is it possible?
1
Biologist Lynn Margulis writes about evolution as a complex interaction and
integration of organisms with their total environment. She argues that we did not
descend from earlier life forms but that our existence is a result of the cooperative,
symbiotic merging of earlier life forms.
Margulis reminds us that we are made up of life forms within each cell called
mitochondria which transform chemicals into usable energy in our bodies.
Mitochondria have their own DNA, their own reproductive processes and life cycles.
She argues that early life forms ingested mitochondria which became part of the life
of cells and began to supply energy to their hosts allowing for new life forms to
emerge. In this way, earlier life forms were not cast off, overcome, defeated or
outgrown but were incorporated into new life forms. Margulis reminds us that the
bacterium from which life emerged is still with us, still part of our own cells. We all
contain the beginning of life, the very history of life within our mitochondria.
This means that all living things carry a memory that is continuous. This means that
we not only come from each other, we share each other, we depend on each other
symbiotically.
This is a new way to look at evolution, way that asks us to reflect, to live into our
interconnectedness that whispers codes of adaptation- cell to cell.
The degradation of the climate is the degradation of our bodies, our souls, our very
being. We are of this earth. We are the environment.
And what have we done with this inheritance?
The grief that is involved in accepting that our species has participated in destroying
the earth is beyond comprehension, discussion and often expression. I read an
article in Orion magazine recently that discussed the psychological changes we are
undergoing due to climate change. We have always been able to imagine that when
we die that we will become part of all that is, the wind, the stars, the rivers and seas
and mountains…that the whispers of time will combine our ashes to the ashes of our
ancestors. The depth of a grief that can imagine the loss of the rivers and seas and
mountains is one that keeps so many of us frozen, lost to each other and ourselves
and the earth, numb.
Brene Brown whom I have spoken about before, author of Daring Greatly: How the
Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead writes,
"You cannot selectively numb emotion. When we numb [hard feelings], we numb
joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness.”
As human beings, we make meaning through the stories we tell. We are story tellers.
We remember through our stories. The grief compounded in the idea that we will
not be remembered because the earth that remembers so much of who we are and
the people, our family and communities that hold us as ancestors will be irrevocably
2
altered is unspeakable. This grief is numbing us to the changes that we can make,
that we must make, that will lift us from our grief into a new story. We have more
storytelling to do.
I invite us into another way of considering climate change. I believe that the crisis in
our climate is not only asking us to become but forcing us to become who our poets,
social activist leaders, ministers and mystics, philosophers and prophets have long
called us to be: interdependent, aware that we connected so deeply that the actions
of each of us affect each other irrevocably. We are related one to another through
our very cells.
It means that my needs cannot trump yours. It means we have to play, have to show
up even when our needs are not being met fully. We are used to packing up and
going home when we feel unseen and unaffirmed, saying to ourselves that if this is
how it’s going to be, then we just cannot participate. We are being asked to get
bigger than this.
We are being asked to really live in covenant, the sacred contract we make to each
other to live in relationship, as if our lives depended on it, and they do.
William Bridges wrote a book called, Managing Transitions, Making the Most Out of
Change. In this book, Bridges talks about what he calls the neutral zone, that place
after a change has been made, one we chose or one forced upon us, but before what
comes next has occurred. He says that in this place we are anxious, blaming,
unaccountable, pining for what was lost, looking for quick fixes, rushing toward the
next outcome as if it can be determined through careful planning alone. Yet it is in
this very place that creativity lives, that possibilities we could not foresee are born,
that- if we have the stamina and can build and foster the trust-future possibilities
come manifest in ways we could not have determined by following outlines, lists,
and flow charts.
I think we are in the neutral zone now and that if we can, right here and right now,
build the stamina to trust each other and ourselves, to trust the process by living
with integrity- we might just be on the brink of possibilities we do not yet even have
a language for, possibilities that author stories we have not yet heard.
So, what does this look like, this building trust, this living with integrity, this leaning
into our mitochondria in which all life forms have an echo, practicing
interdependence and vulnerability?
I am not sure. But I am beginning to sense how to get to this knowing.
I don’t know how many of you know of our new social action group, grassroots
nantucket. We are a UU supported community initiative, as we call ourselves. Our
mission reads, We, the members of grassroots nantucket, declare our commitment
to inclusivity for all people, citizen engagement, open and honest discussion,
3
responsible stewardship of our earth, and the belief that strong community is the
foundation for action.
Since our inception in January, we have led a voter registration drive by setting up
tables at Stop N Shop and offering registration forms in Portuguese, English and
Spanish.
We have had several potlucks with Faro de Luz, the Spanish speaking Christian
denomination that meets here 3 times a week, we are in the process of developing a
Spanish-English exchange group where we speak Spanish for an hour and English
for an hour around a topic we can all blab about like children, work, partnership,
pets, loss.
We do all of this not for the outcomes generated. We do all of this because we came
to the realization when talking that we do not know what is needed but we do know
that the answer lies in community, in sharing food, in walking beside each other, in
learning each other’s languages, in listening until we all learn what is needed
through learning how to love each other, the earth, this time and place.
Our latest initiative involved starting a garden at my garden plot at the community
garden plot with the goal of sharing food with each other and our neighbors, to tend
the earth, to plant and receive the gifts of seed and sun.
But it is more than that. It is to learn how to work together, to share the load, to
respond to requests, to figure out who has what to give, to listen, care, show up. So
far, we are stumbling. We are too few and we are not always great at showing up
and following through. The rabbits have eaten too much of what we planted and
some of our plants are not yet in the ground. But you see, none of this is the point.
What matters is that we haven’t given up. We have all stayed in the game. We have
another workday at the community garden this coming Wednesday at 1 if you
would like to join us.
We are not just harvesting food to share with the community, thank goodness as we
will not have much to share, you can all look forward to at least one tomato and
basil leaf, we are learning how to live differently together, we are learning how to
fail and to still show up, how to lean on each other and to give more than we thought
we had and less than we thought we had and to keep giving anyway. We are
learning how to be disappointed and judgmental and tired, and to still care, still
walk together, still believe in each other. We are learning how to live
interdependently, to not give up on each other or ourselves.
Climate change is heart breaking, grief filled and devastating and it is here and we
are here. When we are able to piece together the words of a new language in
response to all of this that includes learning to live in relation to the earth and each
other in new ways, this grief can include possibility.
4
We can all be very proud of our Unitarian Universalist Association and our delegates
here, Lora Stewart and Gary Langley, who voted that the UUA divest from fossil
fuels. The UUA also issued a challenge to all congregations to consider divestment
from fossil fuels. This challenge will go to our finance committee and then to our
board and then to all of you for a decision.
Unitarian Universalism is not just about being here together in our lovely sanctuary
each Sunday. It is also about leaving the world better than we found it.
The work of living into climate change and all other social change is religious work
when religion comes from religio, meaning to bind. Religion at its best means to
walk together toward who we are and who we dream we might be with faith in the
process, in the journey, in the pain and in the love, in ourselves and each other.
Religion, our religion of Unitarian Universalism, calls us to remember that
everything we do has the power to give birth to the possibility or destruction of life.
We are one with all things.
We are not encapsulated, separated, isolated beings. Whatever we are, the universe
is. We are an incarnation of the stars, the earth, the seeds of life.
I have left some handouts on the tables in the entryway about what we can do about
climate change in some practical ways. Please take one if you like. There is also
notice for what is being called The People’s Climate March in New York City on
September 20th when world leaders are coming for a UN summit on the climate
crisis. It's being called the largest climate march in history.
Maybe some of us would like to go together? Let’s talk more about this again.
There is much to learn about climate change. This is not the last time I will preach
about it. As I grow and learn from walking with all of you on this journey, I will tell
new stories.
Today, right here and now, knowing as much or as little as we each know, the work
of living into a new time can begin.
Let’s join together in committing to think, act, assess, react and collaborate in new
ways, in ways we do not yet understand how to live into but can clear the ground for
by questioning all we are sure we know about ourselves and each other, by opening
some room in our minds and hearts to change, allowing ourselves to be fed by and
to feed each other even when, especially when, we are sure we cannot agree.
We have much to learn. Will you join me in this neutral zone, in this place of
vulnerability and therefore possibility? We are all needed.
5
Come, come whoever you are.
The work begins here and now.
Amen.
6