06.01.08
Posted in Sermons at 7:30 am
Michael Bess, Ph.D.
May 25, 2008
Michael Bess, Chancellor’s Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, was our guest speaker on May 25th. For those interested, a more detailed version can be found online in vol. 49 no. 1 of Technology and Culture. What follows is the sermon he gave at our church.
Thank you for inviting me to join you today.
My talk today is about major technological watersheds in human history: the great tectonic shifts that mark the transition from one epoch to another. I believe that we are entering one of these epochal transitions today, in our contemporary world, and that our society is not at all prepared for the swift and radical changes we are about to experience.
The great transformation we are embarking upon, as the 21st century begins, has to do with applying technology to the human body and mind, in order to boost or alter our capabilities. We are applying our technological ingenuity to the challenge of redesigning ourselves, redesigning our own physical and mental abilities.
One fascinating feature of this phenomenon is how much it all sounds like science fiction. The bionic woman, the clone armies, the intelligent robot, the genetic mutant who becomes a superhero: these are all characters and images that have come into common currency in contemporary culture. And yet, this link with science fiction is potentially misleading. Precisely because we associate human enhancement with the often bizarre futuristic worlds depicted in novels and movies, we tend to dismiss the evidence that is steadily accumulating all around us. The technologies of human enhancement are gradually, incrementally, becoming a reality in today’s society, but we don’t connect the dots. Each new breakthrough in genetics, robotics, prosthetics, neuroscience, nanotechnology, psychopharmacology, brain-machine interfaces, and similar fields, is seen as an isolated “futuristic” event taking place in an otherwise unaltered landscape. We read with interest about it, then return to business as usual, assuming that the world has not fundamentally changed. What we miss, when we do this, is the cumulative importance of all these developments, taken together.
Let me just briefly sketch what is happening today in the three major areas of enhancement science.
I’ll start with pharmaceuticals. People are using chemicals in increasingly sophisticated and powerful ways to reshape their bodies and minds. I need not belabor the importance of chemicals such as steroids, which enhance physical traits like speed, strength, and endurance. These types of enhancements have shaken the world of competitive athletics to its foundations, and the end is nowhere in sight.
But the realms of human cognition, learning, and emotion are being shaken up in equally profound ways. Behavioral traits such as distractedness and short attention span, which used to be treated as problems of character and will power, are now being medicalized, and redefined as treatable illnesses for which powerful pharmaceuticals like Ritalin can be prescribed. Conditions such as depression, which used to be approached through endless hours on the psychiatric couch, are increasingly being handled through the administration of an ever-growing array of neurotransmitters, hormones, and other mood-altering chemicals.
The leading science journal, Nature, just conducted a poll among its readers last month. How many of you, it asked, are using Ritalin or other such ADHD drugs, not to restore normal function, but rather to boost your cognitive capacities above your normal range? A whopping 20 percent of the scientists replied that they were doing just that. This is today. Where will this trend be, 30 years from now, when the drugs will presumably have become even more effective?
A second important area of human enhancement lies in the field of neuroscience and its intersection with the technologies of prosthetics, robotics, informatics, and artificial intelligence. Let me give you an example of how far we’ve already come today. In 2002, a brain researcher named William Dobelle made headlines by partially restoring sight to a fully blind patient. Dobelle implanted electrodes in the man’s visual cortex and linked them through a portable computer to a tiny video camera mounted on the man’s glasses: the result was grainy blurred vision – but vision nonetheless. Dr. Dobelle’s blind patients could see well enough to drive a car around a parking lot (slowly!) and carry out simple everyday tasks.
What’s particularly striking about this story is what it reveals about the line between therapeutics and enhancement. It turns out that there is no such line. The technologies of healing are inseparable from the technologies of boosting, tweaking, augmenting. If I can put a functional artificial eye into a blind man, restoring his sight, then it is a short step, technologically speaking, to include additional features in the implanted device, such as a telescopic lens or an infrared sensor. So now we have a formerly blind person who can not only see normally, but who can also zoom in clearly on very distant objects and see extremely well at night. He can see “better than well.” If this technology becomes safe and affordable, it would be remarkable if some people with normal vision did not start hankering to have their own optical sensorium tweaked with a similar enhancement.
Not all the bioelectronic research in these fields will bear fruit, of course. There will be many setbacks, as our society goes down this road. But this should not obscure the broader point: we are gaining ever more sophisticated understanding of how the human brain works, how the nervous system and sensory organs function; we are building ever more powerful robotic and informatic devices; and we are getting better and better at linking these two realms, human and machine, and teaching them to work as one. Over the next few decades, these functional bioelectronic hybrids will become more and more a part of our lives.
The third major area of human enhancement is of course genetics. It is potentially the most powerful form of enhancement, because it can modify not just individual persons in the here and now, but entire lineages down through the generations.
Most geneticists today believe that both nature and nurture – genes and environment – are critically important in making us who we are. Nevertheless, scientists have also discovered that, by altering individual components in certain systems of genes, we can directly affect complex and intangible traits in predictable ways. Let’s take intelligence and learning as an example. In 1999 a biologist at Princeton, Joe Tsien, modified a single gene in laboratory mice, a gene that controls the production of a chemical known as NGF, or nerve growth factor. Tsien tweaked the gene so that it boosted the production of NGF. To his astonishment, the NGF-enhanced mice performed up to five times better than normal mice in tests of memory, learning, and intelligence. Other biologists such as Eric Kandel and Tim Tully have tinkered with a different gene, responsible for the production of a chemical that strengthens brain synapses: through genetic manipulation they have significantly boosted the learning abilities of mice, fruit flies, and sea slugs.
Now, this does not mean that genetic enhancement of human intelligence is just around the corner. But it does suggest something that should get our full attention: genetic enhancement of basic human traits is no longer a topic of fantasy, of science fiction. The pieces of the scientific and technological puzzle are coming together, in real developments happening today. Neuroscience and psychology are telling us more and more about the electrochemical basis of how brains function, and how brains produce specific states of mind. Genetics is telling us more and more about how particular genes regulate the production of certain brain chemicals. Our technological ability to modify individual genes is growing rapidly.
When you put these pieces together, you have a recipe for powerful genetic interventions to redesign human bodies and minds. The time frame, depending on which expert you listen to, is probably a matter of two to five decades. At some point around that time – within the lifetime of today’s college seniors – our society is going to face some tough choices about whether to use, and how to use, these extraordinary genetic powers.
So. I’ve described three main areas of human enhancement: pharmaceutical, bioelectronic, and genetic. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that a majority of U.S. citizens were to decide today that human enhancement is a bad road, and that our society should refuse to go down it. Could we stop these technologies from being developed? What would such a policy of relinquishment require?
The answer is sobering. Bringing the enterprise of human enhancement to a halt would require a draconian system of surveillance and regulation governing vast areas of science, technology, and medicine. Precisely because the technologies of healing and the technologies of enhancement are intrinsically connected with each other, a ban on enhancement would prove ineffectual unless it severely curtailed research in such areas as computers and informatics, genetics, robotics, neuroscience, nanotechnology, cognitive psychology, pharmaceuticals, and many fields of contemporary medicine. Moreover, it would require this highly restrictive system to be imposed equally rigorously in all the world’s nations at the same time – or you would find the research and innovation simply migrating overseas to the least-regulated regions of the planet. The chances of such a coordinated global relinquishment happening are very small indeed.
Nevertheless, to admit that we cannot stop this process altogether does not mean that we are powerless to exert any control at all over it. We may not be able to prevent the river from flowing, but we can, perhaps, channel it along a course we prefer. I see four main issues that these developments will compel us to confront.
1. First, there is what I call the “slippery slope” factor. Human enhancement is going to be very hard to resist, once you and I personally are offered it. It not only taps into our instinct for self-preservation, but also draws on some of our most laudable impulses: our concern for those we love.
Most parents go to extreme lengths to give their children the greatest possible chances of leading healthy, educated, and fulfilled lives. If biotechnology offers parents a product, or a procedure, that safely boosts those chances, how many will be able to resist? And how much greater the pressure will be on those parents, when they know that their children will be surrounded by large numbers of other children whose capabilities will have been augmented in a variety of ways.
The net result will be a social context in which the very meaning of the word “normal” is constantly shifting. What was normal last year becomes slightly sub-par this year. What was normal ten years ago is completely obsolete today. Once enhancement technologies become widespread, people will have to accept a continual, unending process of upgrades and boosts, simply to keep up with the ever-shifting baseline of “normal” human performance. This will not be something we can easily opt out of. It is inherent in the very nature of technological innovation.
2. My second point has to do with what this future is going to look like. I suspect it’s going to be a lot weirder, a lot more unsettling, than most of us are ready for. And popular science fiction has not been much help, in this regard. From Star Trek to Star Wars, we see a lot of strange critters running around: intelligent robots, not-so-intelligent robots, bizarre species from galaxies far far away. But all these strange critters exist alongside a bunch of perfectly ordinary-looking human beings. For the most part, the only humans who are profoundly modified are the evil ones, like Darth Vader in Star Wars or the Borg in Star Trek.
I think this is a telling point. It indicates that we are psychologically unprepared for what is actually far more likely to happen. Over the coming century, some of us – perhaps many of us – will be increasingly merging with our machines, while at the same time modifying our own biology in ever deeper ways. By the year 2050, our society is likely to be populated by a wide variety of truly hybrid beings, part genetically-modified human, part-machine.
To be sure, some individuals, and some entire family lines, will no doubt have followed a conservative path, rejecting major modifications. But we can safely assume that many other individuals and families will have opted to push their enhancement possibilities to the max. No one can foresee today what those more aggressively modified people will look or act like. But I suspect that, from today’s standpoint, they would be deeply unsettling to behold, both when they are at rest and when they do the things they do. Many of their behaviors will lie well beyond the range of current human capabilities. We should not underestimate the sheer strangeness of the future that awaits us, just a few decades down the road.
3. Which brings me to my third point. The social disruptive potential of the technologies I have been describing is hard to overstate. They hold out the possibility of liberating humans from many of their millennial constraints and afflictions; but they also hold out the possibility of dividing humankind more radically than at any time in recorded history.
It is not at all clear whether a population of highly enhanced humans can coexist peacefully alongside a population of unmodified humans. There will be plenty of opportunities for prejudice, resentment, and dehumanizing stereotypes – going both ways. From one side, we may hear insults like “monster,” “freak,” “abomination.” From the other side, the insults may run more along the lines of “weakling,” “moron,” “pathetic relic.”
But that’s not all. Within the population of the enhanced, we are also likely to see ever-growing levels of heterogeneity, ever-increasing degrees of physical and mental divergence, the likes of which human society has never before experienced.
As I drive around town there is a bumper sticker I see from time to time: it says, “Embrace Diversity”. The diversity of the year 2050 is likely to challenge our capabilities for “embracing” – our tolerance and respect for others – to an unprecedented extent. If human enhancement becomes widespread, then the people of that era will not only look far more different from each other than they do today, they will also possess a much wider variety of physical and mental powers. Diversity, in such a context, will be based on varying biologies, dissimilar machine components, sharply contrasting abilities. And so the question is: Will we have a culture that can absorb that level of riotous heterogeneity among its members?
4. This brings me to my fourth and final point. Our responsibility as citizens requires that we start preparing ourselves today, as best we can, for the new civilization of enhancement that’s headed our way.
This will demand a great deal from us. It will require that we educate ourselves about the underlying science, and monitor closely the ongoing developments in all the fields I’ve described. We will need to address basic issues of safety, devising effective ways to regulate the new enhancement technologies. Equally important will be the question of fairness: ensuring that opportunities for enhancement do not become the exclusive prerogative of a select few – ensuring, in other words, basic equality of access to these technologies. If we fail in this, and some social groups gain preferential access to the most potent enhancements, we will witness a further widening of the cruel gap that separates people into haves and have-nots. But this time around, that gap will not merely be reflected outwardly in material possessions, social status, and power: it will be written in biology itself.
Another challenge will center on the commodification of humans. Enhancement technologies pose a serious risk to human dignity, precisely because they tempt us to think of people as entities that can be “improved.” As soon as you take this step, you are (whether intentionally or not) breaking down human personhood into a series of quantifiable traits to be boosted or tweaked – physical traits like coordination or stamina; mental traits like intelligence or sociability. The danger in doing this lies in reducing individuals to the status of products, artifacts, to be modified and reshaped according to our own preferences, like any commodity. And in this act, inevitably, we risk losing touch with the quality of intrinsic value that all humans share equally, no matter what their traits may be. This dehumanizing, commodifying tendency is inherent in the technologies of enhancement. We will need to be ready to deal with it.
Finally there is the challenge of social fragmentation: creating a civic culture that can respond constructively to ever-deepening physical and mental diversity among our population. In the end, this will probably require nothing less than a new ethics of personhood: an expanded conception of moral solidarity, a more generous understanding of the word “us.” I will need to be able to stand before you, acknowledge how radically different you are from me – in your looks, your behaviors, and above all your capabilities – and still feel that, underneath it all, we are members of a common family of beings.
The public debates over these questions and challenges have already begun. We will all, in the coming years, find it increasingly difficult to stay on the sidelines: the technologies themselves will reach into our lives and compel us to respond. Amid all the perplexities and uncertainties, there is one thing of which we can be reasonably sure: we’re in for an exhilarating ride.
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05.23.08
Posted in Rev. Gail Seavey, Sermons at 8:27 pm
The Rev. Gail Seavey
May 11, 2008
Mother’s Day was started by Unitarian Julia Ward Howe, as part of an international peace movement after the United States Civil War. Of course, this was long before Hallmark cards got hold of the holiday. Howe believed that mothers understood the real losses of war, the brutal and needless deaths of their children, and that their understanding and passion for life could unite mothers across nationalistic lines to put an end to needless suffering.
Today, many of us here—women and men, mothers or not—are moved by our care for others to work for peace and justice in the world. But there are limits to our ability to relieve human suffering. Even if we were able to end all wars and murders, we would have to face suffering and death. And there is no worse suffering, it is said, than that which a mother feels upon the death of her child.
Mothering requires that we face both life and death daily, in matters great and small. Those of us who nurture others, whether we are called mother or not, give birth to life from symbiosis, from connection. We preserve life by making sandwiches, giving lots of hugs, teaching toddlers not to run in the street, teaching school children to work as a team, or organizing communities to maintain civil order.
But birth and life are profoundly bound up with death and destruction. Mothering requires that we set limits, let go, accept our losses, and grieve many deaths. Each birth is completed by the cutting of the umbilical cord. For every sandwich made, a plot of wheat has been chopped down and ground. For every hug, there is a release and a backing away. For every moment of shared intimacy, there is a private dream that is impossible to share. For every community successful in protecting our children from harm, there is a community struggling to grieve its losses. For each life ends in death.
One does not have to be a mother or a woman to understand the profound connection between life and death, love and loss. But, risking the wrath of those who would call me a biological determinist, I think women have one common experience that reminds us of this connection periodically for decades. When we start to menstruate, we think of ourselves as women for the first time. Our bodies prepare monthly for the creation of new life, and most months, new life does not begin—blood flows from our bodies and preparation for a new life begins again.
We participate, month after month, in the potential for holding on and letting go of life. Some call this cycle “the curse.” At times, women have cried bitterly when the blood started to flow, in disappointment that new life had not begun. But, just as often, women are relieved when the monthly flow begins. Our responses may have changed from month to month, but we’ve each had to accept our participation with life and death.
This is something we would rather not talk about. In the words from “Country Woman Elegy,” by Margaret Gibson, “Who wants to admit death’s there inside, more privy / to our secrets than any lover, and love / a kind of grief?” [*]
We have all seen each other shake fear from our eyes, straining to ignore our dead by glorifying life. Some even try to control women in an attempt to control death. It can be done with the best of intentions.
My paternal grandmother gave birth to her first child after World War I. He was born severely brain damaged, and for four years she tenderly cared for a baby who did not grow or develop. For four years, she changed diapers and boiled bottles without the excitement of a first smile, a first step, a first word. Nine months after this child died, my father was born.
My grandmother never said a word to this second son about the suffering of those first four years of motherhood, or the fear during her second pregnancy that she could be carrying death as easily as life. But somehow I think her second son knew. He was obsessed with saving babies from death. My dad told me that he became a pediatrician to save mothers from the suffering and grief of a lost child. He was a fine pediatrician indeed. But, as he turned away from his mother when she lay dying, fifty years after his birth, “straining to ignore his dead,” Grandma wondered why he could not look her in the eye. She, as a mother, had had no choice many years ago, but to “walk until she learned what she needed to learn, letting go.”
Most of us “strain to ignore our dead,” the mother “less fortunate to feel the weight of hers.” [*] We women have felt the weight of death irrationally, when a period started that we hoped wouldn’t, and we have rationally felt the weight of death, when we made the choice to have an abortion. Some of us have walked with the weight of a miscarried pregnancy or a stillborn baby. Others of us have nursed babies with fatal birth defeats, watched healthy children become deathly ill, active children struck down by senseless accidents, children in pain killing themselves, loving children killed by hateful violence. All the love, intelligent care and desire for life those mothers felt could not stop those deaths. We have cried and have not been “comforted by love or a lover’s body, by childhood or any piety.”
Thirteen years ago I sat with my sister, who was dying of cancer. She was my baby sister, whom I had cared for daily after school so many years before. As the big sister, I was expected to be an assistant mother in ways I did not understand until her illness. On that day, she was fatally ill, drifting in and out of various states of consciousness, and I was surprised by my profound sense of failure. I was a bust at assistant motherhood. I was not able to protect her from harm, teach her to care for herself, keep her within the sacred realm of life and growth and family. “Who wants to admit death’s there inside, more privy / to our secrets than any lover, and love / a kind of grief?”
“Therefore we dream.” My sister dreamed of elephants walking by the hospital window five stories above the earth. I dreamed of Kali, the Indian goddess, much like Asherah in the Hebrew Bible or Eostre in the Saxon north. I dreamed of Kali creating life as a girl, preserving life as a mature woman, and destroying life as an old woman: reaping life so that new life could be sown. When I suffered as a child, I used to dream that Kali held me in her arms. From her flowed the power of life, empowering me with the energy to live. But now I dreamed that I must hold the suffering child in my arms, empowering her to die. I could not face the terror of my sister’s death. I could not find the courage to hold her. Those who worship Kali are taught that they must face the curse of existence - the terror of death - as willingly as we accept its blessings - its beautiful, nurturing maternal aspect. No coin has one side: life cannot exist without death. But how do we find the courage to hold our children in death?
As a child, I was not taught to hold the whole cycle of nature up as that which is of highest worth. I was not taught to worship Kali in any form. My ancestors tried to cut the coin of life and death into two separate sides. They tried to cut nature into two, calling death evil and life good. They tried to cut Kali into two, calling one side a demon and the other Mother of God. How did they find the courage to hold their children in death?
Some mothers did find comfort in the image of Mary, who was shown holding her son courageously in death as well as in life, but that was not my ancestral tradition. Some, like my grandmother, learned to let go through experience and to accept death against all teachings. Others, like my father, placed their trust in science and technology, which was great when it worked, but devastating when it did not.
But not all my ancestors found the courage to hold their dying children in the stories of the split coin. Some mothers faced death by becoming as hard as steel, untouchable, preparing their children to battle life with the weapons of their bodies. Others searched their souls for what evil they had done that caused them to be punished by death. Many gave their souls away, having given up as failures.
With this dubious inheritance, I have learned the limits of nurturing only in terms of life and health and growth. I have needed to invite stories into my dreams to transport me past the boundaries of life and into the fearful territory of death. Here is one such story from the land of Kali:
A father went out to hunt for a deer, ordering his son to stay behind with his mother, within the safe walls of home. But the son wanted to be a part of the hunt. He sneaked out from his mother’s house and followed his father into the forest, hiding from him who would send him home. The father saw a rustle in the trees and shot his arrow straight and true. As he came close to the deer he had pierced through the heart, he stopped in terror as if it was he himself who had been pierced. For there on the forest floor was his own son, shot dead by his own arrow. As he tenderly wrapped his son in his cloak preparing to take him home, he was pierced by a second arrow of anguish. How could he tell his wife, the boy’s mother, of their son’s death?
When he entered the house, the mother cried in frustration, “Our son is lost, I cannot find him anywhere. I fear some harm has come to him.” The father replied, “Search for him amongst our neighbors, and invite those from each home that has lost a child to come to our house for a feast tonight. For I have shot a deer that we will all share, and by then, I trust, you will have found our son.”
The hours passed and the mother walked from house to house in her village. In each house the answer to her questions were the same. “Have you seen my son?” “No, he is not here.” “Have you ever lost a child?” “Oh yes, I have lost a child.” And so she asked each and every one of her neighbors to come share the deer.
As the evening fell, the mother returned home, followed by all her neighbors. As she entered the house, she asked her husband, “Is our son home? You said he would be found by now but no one here has seen him.” The father unwrapped the cloak and there lay their son. “He has been found. Now we must share him with everyone.”
The mother wailed in grief and her neighbors wailed with her. They shared with the grieving parents the coin of Kali. One side is “Shakti” - the energy of life that she was given with the birth of her son. But the other side is called “Karuna” - the Treasure House of Compassion.
The dreams of Kali are painful dreams, but they are dreams that offered me courage. Sitting with my mother and father, with my brother‑in‑law, his family and son, with my other brothers and sisters and childhood friends - sitting together in the “treasure house of compassion,” I found the courage to hold my sister in death, as I held her in life. To do so, I had to let go of my dreams for her to continue to live empowered by all that was creative and new and growing. Sitting in the “treasure house of compassion,” I found the courage to “learn what I needed to learn, to let go.”
I cared for my sister, but I am not my sister’s keeper. She is kept in the arms of endless, ageless experience. I am the mother of two children ,and it was my call to care for them, but they are not my children. They belong to nature, who created them, preserves them and will destroy them. I am minister to a community that calls itself the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville. It is my call to care for you, even as it is your call to care for one another. But you are not my congregation, and I am not your minister. We each belong alike to the sacred powers of life, of compassion, and of death.
I am a mother, but mothers are not kept by life alone. Like each and every person who has cared for another, whether they are called mother or not, I have “had to walk nevermind the cold, until I learned what I needed to learn, letting go.” I have had “to admit death’s there inside, more privy to our secrets than any lover, and love a kind of grief.”
Mothers belong to Kali. I still do not face the terror of death as willingly as I accept life’s blessings of creativity, nurturing and growth. Yet Kali teaches us that we live in the realm of the sacred when we face both life and death with compassion.
I pray with all mothers, to the Great Mother
for the courage to face both life and death
again and again.
Blessed be and amen.
[*] Gibson, Margaret. “Country Woman Elegy.” In Cries of the Spirit: More Than 300 Poems in Celebration of Women’s Spirituality, edited by Marilyn Sewell, page 105. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
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05.21.08
Posted in Rev. Gail Seavey, Sermons at 5:03 pm
Flower Communion Homily
April 27, 2008
The Rev. Gail Seavey
I learned the Johnny Appleseed Song long ago in Girl Scout Camp where we sang it as a grace before every meal. Eating is a good reminder of our profound dependence upon and interdependence with the rest of nature isn’t it? I learned another grace while teaching the 3 and 4 year olds in Sunday School that we recited before snack time. I think Johnny Appleseed would have liked it.
Blessings on the flowers, blessings on the roots.
Blessings on the seeds and stems, blessings on the fruits.
Johnny Appleseed spent his whole life as a blessing on seeds and flowers, a blessing on the fruits and the people who ate of their sweetness.
Seeds were such a blessing to people that religious teachers have long used seeds to talk about sacred blessings. Quaker George Fox called God manifest in the human mind a seed, with Goodness as its fruit. Our own great teacher who lived at the same time as Johnny Appleseed, William Ellery Channing, said that the divine dimension is a seed in each person. The purpose of religion is to help cultivate that seed. Another great teacher, Henry David Thoreau, learned from both Fox and Channing to look for seeds everywhere he walked. He learned to see how seeds were connected to everything. The birds, the squirrels and insects dispersed the seeds planting new forests and ably as the farmer. They pollinated the flowers, allowing the fruits to develop and grow. He began to understand that human nature and the rest of nature planted seeds, cultivated flowers and grew fruits of sweet goodness, in the same way. “I have great faith in a seed,” he concluded. “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” (Faith In A Seed)
By studying the planting of seeds within nature and human nature, our religious teachers discovered that We are all One – we are a part of the interconnected web of all existence. They learned that blessing that Oneness showed them to love all existence as brothers and sisters – people, plants, animals, the stars and the earth – whose surface Thoreau reminded us, is “the cuticle of one living creature” (pg 16 – Faith in a seed)
We are all One. There is no such thinks as a flower or a person standing alone. There are only relationships. Those can be loving or unloving relationships. The fruits of loving relationships taste good and sweet. We plant seeds of loving relationships by caring for each other. Johnny Appleseed cared for people, animals, trees and the earth by planting the seeds of sweet fruit. Parents care for their children by feeding them healthy food. Citizens care for their community by lobbying to pass laws that increase their recycling from 20% of solid waste to 80%.
We cultivate those loving relationships by nurturing each other. Children nurture the earth, their family and the world community when they water vegetables in the Community garden. The Green Team nurtures us, the earth, and all her creatures when they help us cut our energy use at church. The Leaders of this church nurture the church community and the greater community when they teach others how to lead.
We are all one. We are all connected. We can all plant seeds of loving relationships by caring and nurturing each other, animal and vegetable families, church and community, gardens and wild places, mountains of coal, streams of water and windy skies.
Today we celebrate that we are all one by celebrating flower communion. You will bring the singular flower that represents you in all your individual nature and place it in a vase with others. For you are not alone. You are connected to everyone. You are connected to everything. Then the Leadership Development class members will give you a seed. For I have great faith in a seed. I invite you to consider what seeds of loving relationships you will plant in the days ahead. Plant a seed and I am prepared to expect wonders.
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05.20.08
Posted in Rev. Gail Seavey, Sermons at 7:04 pm
April 20, 2008
The Rev. Gail Seavey
Passover is remembered by telling the dramatic story of the Exodus from slavery while eating a feast of unleavened bread, the Passover Seder dinner. The ritual preparation for that dinner is carefully described in Exodus 12:15. “For Seven days you must eat unleavened bread. On the first day you are to clean all leaven out of your houses.” Many Jewish families interpret this as a call to sacred spring-cleaning. As they scrub every nook and cranny to guarantee that there are no lurking breadcrumbs they throw out everything that is broken, take everything they no longer need to the yard sale, and reflect upon the sacrifices their ancestors made to be free. Then they are ready for the Ritual Seder Dinner.
The story they tell at that dinner is not without ambivalence. Slavery in Egypt was not a clear and simple misery. The Jewish people first came to Egypt because they were starving. There they found abundant food. They were conscripted into forced labor, but they thrived. Indeed, the main complaint the Egyptians had against them was the Jewish people’s strength. In spite of harsh treatment, including threats to murder their children, the Jewish people in Egypt did not just survive. They grew in numbers and in strength. After Moses and Aaron first asked the Pharaoh for their people’s freedom the Pharaoh increased their labor. The Jewish people cried out to the brothers – leave well enough alone. We were more comfortable, had better working conditions and better pay before you stirred things up. You’re only making things worse. But Moses and Aaron weren’t interested in comfort; they wanted freedom.
Through the inevitable miseries of plagues - illness, human resistance and natural disasters - the brothers persisted. Eventually a plan of escape was hatched. The fear that galvanized the Hebrew people was fear for their children’s safety. Their children had been threatened with death before and apparently it could happen again. So one day they roasted a lamb or goat, ate well, prepared quick bread, packed their valuables, put on their traveling shoes and were ready to leave at a moments notice.
The Hebrew people were ready for death but the Egyptians were not. That night it was Egyptian children who died, and it was their deaths that convinced the Pharaoh to let the children of Israel leave. Released from slavery, they did not clean their houses before they went. They grabbed their already packed bags and ran, leaving a big mess for the Egyptians to clean up. The Jewish people clean their houses today in preparation for Passover, not because the ancestors cleaned their houses, but for some less obvious purpose.
I learned the hard way the relationship between everyday rituals of cleaning and the more explicit sacred rituals of our lives. Once upon a time I served a church that was very involved in a Transitional Housing organization. Indeed, members of the church held a housing conference to determine local need, helped form the organization, lobbied the city for zoning variances, raised money, built 20 apartments, tutored the children who moved in, and put together birthday parties for each one of them in turn. They also arranged for a local corporation to loan us three houses to use for additional homeless families. There was always someone from the church serving on its board. The year of my story, it was my turn to serve.
Not being a contractor, social worker, lawyer or fundraiser, I felt somewhat useless on their board — until the night I received a panicked phone call from another board member to turn on the local TV news. The reporters were in front of one of our houses-on-loan where lived two previously homeless families. The handcuffed mother of one family was being led by police into their car as its lights flashed in the dark. Out of confused information given to the reporters it was clear that a child was dead.
First thing the next morning the board gathered at the church for an emergency meeting. The arrested woman was accused of drowning a child from the other family in the bathtub. Her children were put into foster care, the other family was transported to the home of relatives in a nearby city and the Board President was focused on damage control. I was focused on grief, one of the few things I know anything about. The families, the staff and the board were all in shock. We arranged care and support for everyone, and then I met with the staff that worked most closely with the families. The staff wanted a memorial service for the child and they wanted to hold it in the house were the child lived and died. But they would not go in the house.
Did you ever wonder what it was like for the Egyptians after their children died in the dark of night and the Hebrew slaves left them with a big mess to clean up? Everyone, staff and families alike, had left the transitional house that awful night of death in a panic of shock. The tub was still full of water, the food was still in the refrigerator, broken toys were left on the floor. No one, absolutely no one, wanted to open the door of that deserted house and go inside.
So we planned our memorial service to include an exorcism, a sacred spring-cleaning. We went in together and began with an intentionally religious ritual. We cleared a spot in the middle of the living room, creating a wedge of beauty amongst the devastation, spreading a cloth with flowers and candles at its center and sat in a circle. There we sang and prayed sharing from each of our religious traditions and grieving each in our own way. Then we rose and circled counter clockwise around the house to drive away the negativity that seemed to settle over the house like dust. We processed, first downstairs and then up, with incense and sage, laments and sighs, brooms and garbage bags. As we circled the house we prayed and swept away souring breadcrumbs and threw rotting food into the garbage bags.
Then we circled the house clockwise, with prayers of light and songs of hope, that this house could be a safe and loving home once again for families that so needed such a home. As the staff and I left a better smelling house with re-opening hearts, several dedicated volunteers from the UU church arrived with mops and cleansers to finish with the practical ritual of a thorough and complete spring-cleaning. These complementary rituals made it possible for the staff and the volunteers to successfully serve many more families in the years that have since gone by.
During that ritual I caught a glimpse of what it must have felt like to have lived in Egypt on that awful Passover night. Some of the children were lifted up out of the water and saved but others drowned and died. Everyone was in shock, those who were freed from the trap of ambivalent comforts, and those left behind to discover the powerlessness that overshadowed their power. They all needed the comforts required to bring them out of shock – blankets wrapped around shivering shoulders, sips of water to soothe throats too dry to cry. Our ritual of cleaning gave us that comfort. It prepared us to face life on the other side of shock and comfort, a life of freedom and responsibility, a life of empowerment and powerlessness, a life of ambivalence.
And so we remember the awesome night of Passover by a ritual cleaning. Most years we are living in a metaphorical Egypt sleeping through the world’s continuing cries for freedom. In that Egypt we experience a comfort that goes beyond the necessary comforts we need to extend to one another in times of shock. It is a comfort that makes us fat, content in the midst of suffering – even our own. It is a sour comfort, a bribe, a buyoff, a deal we make to exchange our empowered responsibility for a comfortable but powerless victim-hood or for a forced labor that allows us a safe but bitter survival. We cannot remember the story of freedom in all its ambivalence without cleaning away all the dust and souring agents that leave our hearts, minds and souls a mess.
In the reading today, Taylor Branch (The New York Times Sunday Opinion April 6, 2008) reminded us of a contemporary Moses, Martin Luther King, calling us to this difficult life called freedom. Branch reminds us that the Hebrew people wandered 40 years in the desert before they started to accept the ambivalence of freedom with all its responsibilities. Branch laments that 40 years after King’s death we still do not know how to be free. He asks, “So what should we do, now that 40 years have passed? How do we restore our political culture from spin to movement, from muddle to purpose? We must take leaps, ask questions, study nonviolence, reclaim our history.”
Our history, full of metaphor, legend and story, reminds us that Branch’s lament must be revisited every spring. What should we do, now that 4,000 years have passed, 400 years have passed, 40 years have passed, 4 years have passed? How do we restore our political culture, our bodies, our souls, from spin to movement, from muddle to purpose? We must take out the brooms and garbage bags, circle our house counterclockwise, and clean out the souring agents that keep us trapped in Egypt. Only then can we circle in the other direction, tell the stories, take the leaps, ask the questions, study the right uses of power and powerlessness, and reclaim our freedom with responsibility. We must do this cleansing - this spring and next spring and every spring, for freedom’s work is never done.
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05.19.08
Posted in Rev. Gail Seavey, Sermons at 6:44 pm
April 6, 2008
The Rev. Gail Seavey
“Home reveals a Dwelling Place that teaches ritual, care, and community.”
-from Dance of the Spirit by Maria Harris
I was once a real homebody. I was nine years old the first time I ever left home to go to Girl Scout Camp for a week. The first morning I sat down in the dining hall, ate a bite of Cheerios, which I immediately threw up back into the bowl. Rushed to the infirmary, the nurse fussed over me and announced triumphantly, “A case of homesickness!” That was the first I knew that one could be quite literally homesick. At nine, I had already lived in eight apartments and houses and somehow, each one had quickly become a home.
As an adult I kept moving. I lived in friend’s attics, apartments, dormitories, houses, tents and garages transformed into cottages. Not every house I lived in became a home. I began to wonder, what made a house into a home? I have come to agree with this quote, “A house is a home when it shelters the body and comforts the soul.”
My family always found a house of worship when we moved. I experienced church as an extension of home, another place where the whole family was sheltered body and soul. Instead of the word ‘home’, however, we used the word ‘sanctuary’ at church. When we attended a church home or sanctuary I could feel us doing the work of taking care of our souls. Not every house of worship we attended, however, felt like home. Some made me home sick.
When I was 12, I began to wonder, what made a house of worship into a sanctuary. I had become old enough to think about what I heard at church, and it sounded more like soul abuse than caretaking. My youth group went to church camp during spring vacation. Our youth minister led us in worship outside. On an altar table he arranged a baseball mitt and bat, a football, a badminton racket and birdie. He preached that Jesus was present in the things we did everyday, while we played baseball, football, and badminton. This made a big impression on me. I liked the day-to-day bit, but if Jesus was just another jock, I was in big trouble. I was the kid you all remember from your own childhood, the one left after the team captains had picked everyone else for the team – the one person no team wanted to get stuck with. The playing field had never been a sanctuary for me. My soul was not comforted.
That evening we all gathered in the big barn for a talent show. As I listened to the older kids, with their rolled up undershirt sleeves, and elaborately greased ducktail haircuts sing the Everly Brothers’ “Dream Dream, Dream”. And dream I did. My mind wandered right up to the high peaked roof – there was no ceiling – took a deep breath and sighed. This barn was sanctuary. Up among the rafters, I found enough space for my endless questions, vast desires, chaotic hopes and fears. There, my body was sheltered and my soul was comforted.
Like so many of you here, I left that church when I left home, and wandered looking for sanctuary. I wandered for twelve years, until the day that I wandered into a Unitarian Universalist church, looked up at the high ceiling, took a deep breathe and sighed, “I am home.”
Our souls are always looking for a place to dwell. When spiritual literature speaks of ‘dwelling’ it is referring to just one of many spiritual experiences: we awaken, we discover, we create, we dwell. A spiritual dwelling is a symbolic center, a spiritual heart, a sanctuary where we can take a deep breath followed by a long sigh and just be ourselves. Without the experience of dwelling at the center point of spiritual experience, it is difficult to nourish, to tradition, to transform.
We don’t need a spiritual home to have the experience of sanctuary. Spiritual literature from different times and cultures has referred to “dwelling” in gardens and oases, deserts and beer halls, boats and cities. A contemporary writer, Edward McDonagh, refers to “The car (which) has become a secular sanctuary for the individual, his shrine to the self, his mobile Walden Pond.” You may have felt your spiritual center in the midst of the abundant fertile beauty of nature that the writer of Walden, Thoreau, called the Garden of Eden. You may have learned to set up your tent like an escaped Hebrew slave to rest while wandering in the harsh deserts of your life. You may have found a dwelling beating at the heart of wild ecstasy that Sufi mystics call getting drunk with the divine. You may have recognized the depths of your being in the kindness of one stranger to another in the chaos of a crowded city street. And I know some of you dwell most fully in your boats, trucks or cars. I have learned to dwell in most of these places – all but the boats and trucks. But I am still a homebody.
Religious Educator Maria Harris asks us to think about those who most fully dwell at home, who find their center, their sense of being, their heart’s desire at home. Of course home is not for everyone. The story about the three stone masons that Marguerite told this morning comes to mind. Some of us find homemaking pure drudgery; others do it because it makes for a better family life. But there are some homemakers, like my mother, who discovered that housework could be fulfilling and serve a higher good in and of itself. While cooking and cleaning, caring for children, pets, partners, guests or aging parents, they create and maintain household patterns and rhythms of daily, weekly and annual routines that have healing and sustaining powers. Dinner every night at 6, laundry every Monday, Thanksgiving with one side of the family and a long drive to the other side every summer, such are the rituals that center the homemaker and create home bases for those of us who participate in those rituals.
Many of the rituals of Home center on caring for others. It is while dwelling in Home that most of us learn to care with all its serious and most dreadful implications. It is at home were most accidents occur, where children are burned and elders fall. It is often at home where we care for helpless infants round the clock, teach those who need special help, nurture those who will never be able to nurture themselves, nurse the chronically ill and comfort the dying. Home is the place were most of us learn to give and to receive care.
Home is the dwelling place for being, not just for ourselves, but being with others. Home is where we learn how to be in community. It is at home were people most often make love and make people, which takes at least 18 years. Home is the place that, even when we live alone, we take off our public masks, form families with our pets and neighbors, offer hospitality to our guests, and remember those we love. Home is where we can just be ourselves with others.
A house is made into a home, a dwelling place that shelters the body and comforts the soul, through ritual, care and community. A house of worship becomes a sanctuary, a dwelling place that shelters the soul, in much the same way. I came to Nashville looking for a church home. I walked into this house of worship and let my mind wander. It wandered up the tall windows, looked out at garden for a moment, and then traveled back up to the soaring ceiling. I took a deep breath and sighed. Here was space enough for a whole community to ask endless question, feel vast desires, sort through chaotic hopes and fears. Architecture is important. This sanctuary, this room was designed and built by people who knew how to create a space that looks and feels like a home that cares for human souls.
But the beauty of these stones and windows does not guarantee that the people who gather within are homemakers of the soul. So I have looked for what we do within these walls. Here I have found ritual. You create and maintain patterns and rhythms of daily, weekly and annual routines that have healing and sustaining powers. Eating dinner together on Wednesday nights and lighting the chalice on Sunday mornings, pouring out communal waters on the graves of our loved ones in August, making huge bouquets for Flower Communion in April, such are the rituals that center the sanctuary makers, and maintain a home base for the souls of those who participate.
Some of you have centered upon the more humble aspects of ritual care, washing the dishes after the dinner, folding the orders of service before worship, weeding the flowers over the graves or scraping the melted wax from the table under the chalice, planning the budget or earning the money to paint the children’s rooms. Many of you tell me that you wish that more of us understood how to do that, turning our attitude from that of stone masons or housekeepers doing a mean and dirty job, into home makers performing daily rituals that center our souls and by doing so create a home for others to center their souls.
Here I have found caring. People bring their joys, concerns and sorrows to the center of this room by lighting candles. But it doesn’t stop with ritual. After the worship service, people reach out to one another, responding with support, hugs, kind words, a ride, a recommendation, a meal, a visit, a good laugh, tears of sorrow, and an occasional kick in the pants. This caring crosses the generations: new babies, growing children, searching adolescents, wandering young adults, people in the thick of their careers, retired elders and venerable seniors. I have also seen you care for people beyond our walls: building a house for an immigrant family, offering hospitality to the homeless, becoming big brothers to children with parents in prison; supporting a living wage for service workers, community gardens in the city and a community center for the GLBT community. This caring over time has woven an interdependent web of relationships that is much more complex than family. It has taught many of us to widen our abilities to both give and to receive care.
Here I have found community. Through working together, celebrating ritual together, caring together, we are always forming and reforming community. This is a community where people can risk taking off their masks and try out being themselves with one another. In doing so, we sometimes feel as if we have come home. In doing so, we sometimes feel as if we have come home to ourselves. When I see one of us come home to ourselves within these walls, I know that we are do the job of taking care of souls. I recognize this space for what it really is, not simply a beautiful building of glass and stone, but a sanctuary – not just a house of worship, but a religious home.
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