All is Connected
©2009 Prof. John E. Carroll

            We have come from dust (dirt, soil) and into dust (dirt, soil) we shall return, Christians are told on Ash Wednesday. What could be a more powerful ecological statement? And a fundamental religious and spiritual belief! You have come, therefore, from the lives of others, plant and animal, and you will return to make up the lives of others. Resurrection, everywhere we look.

            There is an old Sanskrit apothegm or saying, “God sleeps in minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man”. We could, of course, substitute the word “Nature” for the word “God”.

            Thomas Berry, the great contemporary American ecotheologian, asks, “Who is the human?” And answers, “The human is the universe reflecting upon itself.”        

            In my tradition, The Baltimore Catechism, basic book of instruction, basic guide for American Catholicism for over 100 years, the voice of conventional wisdom and the established order in the Catholic Church in America, asks the question, “Where is God?” And answers “God is everywhere.” Everywhere means everywhere – a profound statement which establishes the equality of the theological concept of immanence, of God in all, the Creator in the Created – on an equal plane with and not in any way contradictory to the theological concept of transcendence, of God separate from and greater than all, of God inscrutable, a sky-god in Protestant theologian Sallie McFague’s term. (This concept of transcendence, as it is called, has been given much more attention in recent centuries than immanence, a situation which has provided a convenient excuse for looking away from nature, and therefore it becomes our excuse to use our ego, our pride, and our self-centeredness to destroy nature.)

     So what might this mean for Unitarians? Unitarians may wish to consider, as I think they often have, that sacrality is everywhere, that ALL is sacred. This is a fundamental Hindu and Jain belief, and a fundamental Native American belief as well.

In the words of the great 19^th century English Christian poet, Francis Thompson,

“All things by immortal power, near or far…

To each other linked are,

That thou canst not stir a flower,

Without troubling of a star.”

            Students of environment are told that the word “ecology”, which comes from the Greek “oikos”, the home, is the study of our home, the planetary and local ecosystem, and our place in that home. Fewer people know the very similar true meaning of the word “religion”, which comes from the Latin “religio”, meaning a binding together of all into one, a unitary whole, and a binding together of us with our origin, with our Creator. There is not much difference between the word “ecology” and the true meaning of the word “religion”. Sadly, the common usage of the word “religion” has been distorted and reduced to mere dogma and institutions.

            I wrote a book called Sustainability and Spirituality. In doing that, I came to recognize that more than 99% of our usage of the word “sustainability” is a shallow, superficial, cosmetic usage which leads to no sustainability at all. Real and true sustainability is rare. A monk of my acquaintance refers to sustainability as a “conversion experience” – yes, it is that radical. It calls for a change of heart, an entirely different outlook on life from the one we know, a change in the very values we hold. True sustainability involves changing not simply how we do things but changing the value presupposition of why we do things – that is a conversion of the deepest kind. Real sustainability demands so much of us that it cannot be achieved without the support of spirituality, of a faith belief in something bigger than we are. And what is “spirituality”? That is the condition of being of the spirit, that part of us which animates us, which gives us life. It is that part of us which seeks transcendence, mystery, the other, that which seeks the BIG picture. It provides an essential faith in the future, a grounding for hope. It gives us the determination to persist and prevail. When we lose our cosmology, our relation to the whole, to that BIG picture, we get small and settle for shopping malls.

            It is not possible to live sustainably without living faithfully, a necessity if inner conversion is to be achieved. An entire change of values is at stake, especially for we North Americans. And given what we know today about the state of the planet, the state of this Creation in our hands, we who are Christian now find  that we have a new obligation. For to pollute, to desecrate, is to sin, in the Christian context of that word. Orthodox Christians were perhaps the first to achieve this understanding, but Protestant and Catholic Christians have now arrived at this realization as well. Therefore, what any who are Christan  do in response, as a congregation and as individuals, may not be limited to a desire to be good citizens or for any other superficial reason. It springs from their Christian obligation. We now understand the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps the most essential statement of Christianity to be found anywhere, to be a fundamentally ecological statement of how we are to live in God’s Creation. (I have a doctoral student at UNH who wrote her dissertation on the ecological essence of the Sermon on the Mount. She is now a UCC minister and pastor.)

 
          Reject, Resist and Replace

            So where does this lead us? We are now called upon to Reject, Resist and Replace, to reject and resist the dominant culture in which we are embedded and begin the task of replacing it with something more sustainable. Of necessity, this work will lead us through a rather uncomfortable place, through conflict and confrontation, something none of us wants.  But a true change cannot be borne without it. In our quest to avoid conflict and confrontation, we fall prey to the temptation, perhaps the sin, of tokenism. I once opened up a dialogue at a UCC church upcountry with the statement, “Beware of tokenism!” Merely changing the light bulbs won’t do.  Nor will recycling. Not bad things to do, in and of themselves. But far, far from sufficient. And the sin lies in the notion of doing such things in place of what is really needed.

            For example, do you have any idea of what it means in our daily lives to follow science’s call (and Al Gore’s call) for CO2 reductions of 80% by 2050 from the 1990 Kyoto base? Many scientists claim the needed figure is actually 90%. By 2050, and we’re already 30% above the 1990 emissions base which underlies Kyoto. All of this is a minimum of what is actually needed, and your daily life and mine would not be even recognizable under this scenario. Do you have any idea what our need for energy security, and the food security that goes with it, in a world of declining oil, will mean for you and your children? The American way of life may not be negotiable, according to  our last President and Vice President, but it’s slipping away fast. We won’t have to negotiate it.

            So, what to do? In the words of the American Franciscan, Richard Rohr, contemplation must be followed by action, and that action by further contemplation, in an endless circle. Hands-on is called for. To do what we need to do and seek true sustainability in nature, we must re-define our lives, and particularly must we re-define our concept of the Good Life. What for you is the Good Life? I assume that, if you are sane, you want the good life, the highest quality of life you can possibly have. But what constitutes for you that high quality life? And does it deprive others or include others?

            Whatever the future holds, we will have to re-localize. Our mobility will be reduced. Energy available to us for this and all other purposes will be reduced. Nature says Enough – and we have no choice but to comply. There is so much for us to learn and re-learn,

- in food and in local sustainable agriculture;

- in how to return New England to local food production and a modicum of food security through grazing and ecological agriculture;

- in how to seriously conserve energy and how to reduce our fossil fuel dependency, our addiction to cheap oil;

- in our use of all natural resources and in how to redefine our needs;

- in learning how to reject consumption and a consumptive lifestyle, and to develop sales resistance;

- in transportation and in learning how to stay put;

- in discovering or rediscovering how to walk, to travel in shared conveyances, to stop flying;

- in community, and in how to invest in and live in community, rather than living as isolated and anonymous individuals;

- in ceasing to worship the false gods of technology, consumption, the car, a high energy lifestyle, monetary accumulation.

            All of this will be challenging, no less challenging than in breaking any other addiction, for that addiction to cheap oil, cheap energy, cheap food, has led us down a bad road. Going as far as we have, it will not be easy going back and choosing another road. It will not be easy to see things differently, as we must. It will not be easy coming to terms with the better angels of our being.

     It’s important to give people a vision, a vision of what could be if we want it badly enough. Can you envision a good healthy weekly Winter Farmers Market in Portsmouth? Do you think your city should support it? Can you picture Portsmouth growing a significant amount of its own food (perhaps 20% or so) from within city limits, in community gardens, in school and institutional gardens, in private gardens. These things can be done if you want them badly enough. We had “Potato Patch Gardens” in the 1890s during an economic downturn; “Liberty Gardens” during WWI; “Relief Gardens” during the Great Depression; and “Victory Gardens” during WWII, the latter supplying us with 40% of all our vegetable consumption in 1943. We can do it again!

     I will digress for a moment from the topic at hand and will refer here to something I’ve been working on for awhile in the area of transit, and that is giving Portsmouth the opportunity to become connected to the popular and successful Downeaster Mainline, and thus for Portsmouth to be connected again to the national rail transportation system, that great   steel rail interstate. How would this happen? It would happen via nine miles of existing track, Portsmouth Downtown to Rockingham Junction near Exeter, track in use today everyday for freight, and in need of upgrade for passenger service, but useable track nevertheless. If you want it, do something to get it, In Durham, Dover, Exeter, we’ve got it. You could have it, too. This is real application of the stuff of this sermon, one of many applications you can make. We have to go a lot further than recycling and greener buildings, although serious weatherization is important. We must move to not only good local food sources but also to serious public transit, swearing off the car, and other changes of a more basic nature.