For the Love of Gaia!

Transcription

1 For the Love of Gaia! (Version 2a) A Sunday service led by the Reverend Michael Walker, Interim Minister Presented in Observance of Earth Day April 24, 2016 at the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

2 CALL TO WORSHIP (by Rev. Michael Walker) As we light our chalice this morning... We acknowledge the air that breathes life, Respiration and spirit share a root. The Breath of Life is sacred. We acknowledge the water that sustains life, The life-blood of the world. The Water of Life is sacred. We acknowledge the earth that supports life, Gaia is the ground of our being. The Earth is life, and it is sacred. Yes, today we acknowledge and remember. READING: Out of Doors, Henry David Thoreau 1 In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and we must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was need for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy, not far off geographically, May it ever be so and blessed be you all! 1 Highland, Chris, ed. Meditations of Henry David Thoreau: A Light in the Woods. Berkeley: Wilderness Press, 2002, p. 28. April 24, 2016 Page 2 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

3 There is a place beyond that flaming hill, From whence the stars their thin appearance shed, A place beyond all place, where never ill, Nor impure thought was ever harbored. OFFERING This congregation offers a liberal spiritual home to seekers from all walks of life. We are proud of the work we do in the community, the classes we offer for children and adults, for the care and concern provided by this Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature not his Father but his Mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality. From time to time she claims kindredship with us, and some globule from her veins steals up into our own. community and it s staff, and for these two beautiful campuses that have each become a spiritual home for so many. If you are here for the first time, we invite you to let the offering basket pass you by, because you are our honored guest. And if you have made this your spiritual home, we thank you for your continuing generosity. Every month, we also collect donations during the Offering to support a worthy cause. This month, our Share-the-Plate Recipient is. April 24, 2016 Page 3 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

4 If you are writing a check, please specify on the Memo line whether this is for your Pledge, an offering to For the Love of Gaia! Reverend Michael Walker UCH, or for the Share-the-Plate recipient. Thank you, all, for your generosity. This morning s offering will now be received. Every once in a while someone will exclaim, for the love of God! This is usually said in response to the craziness of human nature and the inexplicable events of life. I think we can also say that some of us have taken note of the craziness of human nature in relation to the environment and the inexplicable events of our lifetimes in which climate change is threatening everything we know. And so I say, for the love of Gaia, make it stop! I m going to go off into left field today, with this sermon. I m going to take us into some theological April 24, 2016 Page 4 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

5 reflection into the scientific and philosophical theory known as the Gaia Hypothesis. There are two versions of the Gaia Hypothesis. In 1970, an old hippie, Pagan priest, and more recent acquaintance of mine, Timothy Zell who his friends called Otter back in those days, wrote an essay entitled TheaGenesis: The Birth of the Goddess. In his essay, Otter expounded upon an entity, Holy Mother Earth, in which he described all life and all of the elements as part of a great living entity that he called Gaia, and he worships Her as the Great Goddess. Some months later and across the world, an atmospheric scientist named James Lovelock published a scientific paper about the earth s biosphere, as an interdependent living entity, which he also called Gaia. As you can imagine there has been some debate as to who can take credit for this theory, the Pagan who published his eco-spiritual essay first, or the famous British scientist who surely did not have access to the small California press that had presented the Pagan version. Both of the proponents of the Gaia Hypothesis have resorted to poetic language and mythological references to help describe their philosophical concept. In the case of the scientist, Dr. Lovelock, he has been the subject of ridicule and derision in the scientific community. Oddly enough, Dr. Lovelock is very much a secular humanist, who attempts to use his theory to make meaning of life without resorting to a supernatural entity such as God. However, for Otter Zell, the Pagan priest, the use of mythical imagery to describe an earth goddess April 24, 2016 Page 5 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

6 was heartily embraced and became a beloved story almost like scripture in the wider Pagan community. that thinks most, will say least. We can foresee God in the coarse,... distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both Now, those who are familiar with Unitarian history may draw connections between this hypothesis and the old teachings of Transcendentalism. The Father of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote in his book, Nature, 2 The aspect of Nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship. Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions, but when man has worshiped him intellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual and strives to lead back the individual to it. In the work of Emerson, he expounded upon two aspects of reality, as he understood them. Those two aspects were: Nature and Soul. He further believed that nature and soul were connected, through this entity, this spirit, 2 Emerson, R. W., Nature, in Carl Bode & Malcolm Cowley, eds., The Portable Emerson, NY: Penguin, 1987 (reprint), p. 41. perhaps we should call it a mechanism, that he called the April 24, 2016 Page 6 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

7 Over-Soul. He said that it was the Over-Soul that connected all life to all other life. This was, very literally, the precursor of what UUs now call the interdependent web of all existence. Having said that, I want to go back to something else Emerson said. Oh, my gosh! He used the G word, God. We should be clear that Emerson was using a word that loomed large in the vocabulary of his time. He lived in an age when everyone went to church, almost without exception. But the brilliance of the Transcendentalist movement was that they redefined the very concept of God, which laid the groundwork for what evolved into the modern UU movement. See, the Transcendentalists had a very expansive view of the holy. By defining the holy as the Over-Soul, Emerson took human experience of the holy out of Christian Scripture and put it smack dab in the middle of Mother Nature. This was the revolution this was the great crisis of faith that the new Unitarian denomination experienced in the mid-1800s. Emerson was so criticized by some of the more conservative Unitarian ministers, and by the fact that his own congregation did not want to accept his reasoning for no longer offering communion, that he chose to leave the ministry and began what was to be the career he was really famous for: being a great orator and essayist. Today, we might have recognized him as a cutting-edge theologian. He was one of those people who gave up dogmas and scriptures, and instead believed that all of the Scripture he ever needed to read was written on the leaves of trees, and in the stars of the sky, and could be April 24, 2016 Page 7 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

8 heard in the breeze or the babbling of a brook. So, yes, Emerson did use the word, God. But you must understand, the God he is speaking of is not Yahweh or Yeshua, not Jehovah or Jesus. The God Emerson speaks of, we might call mother nature, or the interdependent web, or All-That-Is. how is it that so many people have such similar ideas? In fact, how is it that this hippie Pagan priest, Otter, in California and the atmospheric scientist, Dr. Lovelock in the England a world apart... and a mere couple of months apart, publishing in media that the other was not likely to have ever read, still developed the versions of the same theory, the Gaia Hypothesis?? There is one more concept, out here in left field, that I want to bring up so that I can tie all these things together. The mythographer and storyteller, Joseph Campbell, would point out all the ways in which the stories of humanity are related to each other. These are connections that exist, cross-culturally. Gaia, mother Well, Joseph Campbell liked to explain crosscultural mythological analysis using terminology from Jungian psychology. This was because Carl Jung had theorized a concept he called the collective unconscious. Here are a few words to describe the revolutionary concept that Jung taught, by Anthony Stevens: 3 nature, earth mother, God-Goddess, All-That-Is, Emerson s concept of the Over-Soul, Life Itself And 3 Stevens, Anthony. Jung: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford Univ Press, 1994, p April 24, 2016 Page 8 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

9 What Jung was proposing was no less than a fundamental concept on which the whole science of psychology could be built. Potentially, it is of comparable importance to quantum theory in physics. Just as the physicist investigates particles and waves, and the biologist genes, so Jung held it to be the business of the psychologist to investigate the collective unconscious and the functional units of which it is composed the archetypes, as he eventually called them. Archetypes are identical psychic structures common to all, which together constitute the archaic heritage of humanity. Essentially, he conceived them to be innate neuropsychic centres possessing the capacity to initiate, control, and mediate the common behavioral characteristics and typical experiences of all human beings. Thus, on appropriate occasions, archetypes give rise to similar thoughts, images, mythologems, feelings, and ideas in people, irrespective of the class, creed, race, geographical location, or historical epoch. An individual s entire archetypal endowment makes up the collective unconscious, whose authority and power is vested in a central nucleus, responsible for integrating the whole personality, which Jung termed the Self. That was a fairly long reading, but find it to be an accurate and concise description of units teaching about the collective unconscious. One might say that this was an internal mental feature that the human race evolved, as a survival mechanism, as a method for cultural April 24, 2016 Page 9 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

10 transmission, as the unconscious media for human communication. You further theorized that we had in our collective unconscious, a series of patterns, images and ideas, that have meaning to humans no matter what place or time in history in which they lived. decline or even the extinction of vulnerable species around the world. At the time that Zell and Lovelock were putting out their separate versions of the Gaia Hypothesis, we did not yet know or understand climate change. But it is not an unexpected phenomenon in relation to the hypothesis. You might be wondering what an interdependent world-spanning organism, such as Gaia is theorized to be, has to do with our interdependent mental mechanism that we know as the collective unconscious. I would like to believe that a story arose in human psyches across the world to make meaning of the world around us. And many of us can look around us today, and see that the world is in danger. Gaia, our earth mother, is sick. We have polluted her air, her water, her soil, causing the The Gaia Hypothesis is about interdependence. It is about how ecosystems operate within the biosphere of our planet. It is not only about how living things relate to each other in a chain of life or a food chain, but it is also how the elements of air, water, earth and the symbolic element of fire that is sunlight, interact with all life. If you take away any of those four basic elements, life dies. If you damage or pollute one of those basic elements, living things become sick. The biosphere, Gaia, is a April 24, 2016 Page 10 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

11 complex interdependent system, at the very least. We may disagree that the system is itself a living entity, or a Goddess, but I think that we can agree at least I hope so that the various parts and elements of the biosphere are more comfortable. We will also again be witness to the fact that the biosphere, left to its own devices, is an everreplicating, reproducing system. We might say that She is immortal. necessary to life. We should also remember that the biosphere as a homeostatic system of interdependence, is self-correcting. I truly believe that some of the cataclysms of nature, some of the so-called Acts of God, are a direct result of human activity that has damaged the biosphere. If we remember this, if we work hard to address industries that pollute, nations without environmental regulations, and do everything we can to turn back the clock on climate change Then I think we In our reading from Henry David Thoreau, we heard these words: 4 Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature not his Father but his Mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality. From time to time she claims kindredship with us, and some globule from her veins steals up into our own. Thoreau spoke of nature as his mother and that her life- shall see that our biosphere returns to a more balanced status, and that our lives become, once again, a little 4 Highland, Chris, ed. Meditations of Henry David Thoreau: A Light in the Woods. Berkeley: Wilderness Press, 2002, p. 28. April 24, 2016 Page 11 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

12 blood also flows through our veins. His older teacher, Emerson, spoke about nature being connected to us through the Over-Soul that is I would call the Life- Force-Within-All. Thoreau said this is immortal, and indeed it is. I ve been known to conflate this idea with the Jungian collective unconscious, which may be confusing to some people, but I believe this is just a matter of different people in different places and times, talking about similar concepts, but using different words. Lovelock talks about the interdependent biosphere as a living entity. Zell discusses the same thing and calls It who speak of all life interdependently. I see that although these may describe slightly different things, they are all part of one whole. It is like a great gemstone with different facets you can look through it one way and see one view, look through it another way see a different view, yet when you stand back and look at it in totality you see that it is one beautiful blue gem circling in space. And She is our gem, our Gaia, our only place upon which we can live, move and breathe. And so, I say, for the love of Gaia! we need to take care of Her. May it ever be so and blessed be you all! the Goddess. Thoreau calls is immortal Nature and Emerson calls it the Over-Soul. Carl Jung describes a collective unconscious that connects all human life, which is a little more specific to humans than the others April 24, 2016 Page 12 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg

13 BENEDICTION (by Rev. Michael Walker) Whatever you theological persuasion, however you see the Earth, remember one thing: HOly Mother Earth is HOME. And we have only one let s take care of her. As you go out into the world this week, please take these words with you and share them with other children of the Earth, that we might all be aware of the pressing need we all face, together. May it ever be so and blessed be you all! April 24, 2016 Page 13 Unitarian Church of Harrisburg