Sermon - March 13, 2016 Emrys Staton Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix. Give It Up for Hope

Transcription

1 Sermon - March 13, 2016 Emrys Staton Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix 1 Give It Up for Hope So who s feeling hopeful today? Anyone struggling with feeling hopeful right now? Because that s real. We re exploring this idea of being a people of hope this month. And I ll be honest with you, I often find myself having a hard time finding hope, and then sometimes, I m just filled with hope. Life is a like a hope roller coaster, you climb up, plummet down, and sometimes go through nauseating loops. But no matter what, you know you re in for a ride - just hold on tight, or throw your arms in the air, scream, and hope that we ll get through this together. I find hope to be a hard-to-describe feeling - I never know if I should just have hope, you know, make myself hopeful on command. Or if it comes up naturally only when the conditions are just right. And this got me thinking about Buddhist mandalas. Have you seen one of these before - usually a large, colorful and intricate sand painting? My first exposure to one was during my senior year at University of Arizona. I was a newspaper reporter for the Daily Wildcat, and I was covering story about a group of Tibetan buddhist monks who were traveling the country, visiting universities, and making mandalas. They set up in our student union, sketching out an intricate design on a large, dinner-table sized board, and started filling it in with colored sand using these little funnel chop sticks called chakpurs. Four monks worked at a time, hunched over this board, for five full days. And by intricate, I mean they were making this little yin-yang symbols and lotus flowers the size of a thumbnail. Then, after they were done, they performed one final ceremony. The dissolution ceremony. They took this incredible and beautiful work of art outside, and destroyed it... just swept it away. Absolutely mind blowing for me. And illuminating.

2 2 You see, this is intentionally done as a concrete way of illustrating one of the core concepts of Buddhism - impermanence. The teaching of impermanence itself doesn t strike me as particularly deep - I get that nothing, given enough time, is permanent. But it s what we do about this reality, how we act with this awareness of impermanence. In Buddhism, clinging to the way things are, or to desired or expected outcomes - that grasping, desiring, holding on - that s what get us into trouble. Because when something doesn t turn out how we hoped it would, or wanted it to we often experience negative feelings - loss, frustration, hurt, anger. We feel pain. But if we re practicing a discipline of continually letting go, of non-attachment, then a path is cleared to be more joyful in embracing the current moment. That s the idea. The purpose of the mandala is for us to get to experience that. We can appreciate the beauty of it while it s being created, and for the short time while it is completed, and we can rejoice in its destruction - knowing that we were fully present in each of those moments, without desire or clinging. In that practice, where change is accepted as inevitable, I feel a sense of hopefulness arise. Probably because I see a lot of things that need to change When I first arrived here in Phoenix last September, I learned about this thing going on over here at the base of Camelback mountain regarding a house that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed. Mr. Wright, as I m sure many of us know, is a famous and renowned architect whose designs still impact the philosophy of architecture today. Several UU congregations have sanctuaries designed by him, and this one we re sitting in was done by one of his students. So I heard about this house over here he designed for David and Gladys Wright, his son and daughter-in-law. It s really an incredible house - one of his residential masterpieces. And several years ago, the house was, as I understand, abandoned and falling apart. It was sold to a developer who didn t really know what it was, and who had plans to demolish the house and build some newer homes on the property.

3 3 Once news of this spread, a movement was launched to save the house, and it was purchased by a private individual with the intent to restore it and convert it into a museum. I imagine that when people heard that this house was going to be demolished, it struck a deep chord inside - poking at that sensitive spot that s activated when we are confronted with the thought of losing something valuable, cherished, important. Something Priceless. Unreplaceable. It s the same genre of thoughts and feelings I had about the mandala, watching an incredible piece of art formed by skilled masters, knowing it will be destroyed. Knowing that it s impermanent. And so what if the Frank Lloyd Wright house slowly crumbled and fell apart, or was destroyed to make way for something else? Does everything need to be preserved? Or, some other questions, how do we discern what should be preserved and what can be cleared away? Is there a way of preserving something that also opens up space for new things? Is there a lesson here about hope? By chance a couple months ago, I got to meet the consultant who is helping to develop the museum component of the restored David Wright house. She shared a lot of her ideas, and was specifically exploring ways to bring some racial justice awareness into the museum. I appreciated hearing that. But I was still wondering, what does it mean that there was such a quick outcry to save the David Wright house, but when I found out that the Booker T. Washington School that provides a head-start education to mostly black and latino kids is really struggling for funding, and is at a growing risk of being pushed out of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on the east edge of Downtown Phoenix. I wondered, where s the high-profile outcry to support that school, that has meant so much to generations of families around downtown Phoenix. I wonder again, what is the real importance of saving the Wright House? Or, from a different angle, what is the difference in attachment to the Wright house and the attachment to Booker T Washington?

4 And this is interesting, because I don t want to see Booker T get swept away - so maybe my whole thought process is flawed. Even I prioritize my attachments. I feel unwilling to concede some of them. Indeed, I hope that Booker T gets the funding it needs to stay open. I admit that I m clinging to that one. 4 These questions, for me, stir up a lot of stuff inside. That stuff is a mix of guilt, curiosity, frustration, sadness, and shame - as I try to sort out my own feelings about the overlap of social justice and preserving neat things because of their symbolic value. Maybe I need another example Again I return to the image of the mandala - and the thought of all this sand meticulously placed by a master artisan. And I was thinking about the last few times I ve flown in and out of Phoenix - looking down on the sprawling metropolitan region from the air. It looks lush - trees, parks and golf courses, lakes and pools easily visible from a few thousand feet up. And the surrounding farmlands that are green almost year round with alfalfa and cotton and other crops. Then the brown desert and mountains that surround all that. It is the mandala that we live in. I can imagine, instead of monks bent over carefully designing our whole built up landscape, it was developers, engineers and investors that sketched all this out. But instead of sand, this is all, in reality, built out of water for irrigation and electricity for air conditioning. I never asked the Buddhist monks where their sand came from - it never even occurred to me to care. But I do often think about where our water and electricity come from. And two weeks ago, I learned a bit more about how I should think about it. I met Jihan Goelan, a Diné activist and community organizer. Just so we re all up to speed, Diné is the way that Navajo people call themselves - so I ll be using the word Diné, not Navajo, when referring to the people. Jihan is the executive director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, and she was one of the presenters at a workshop 2 weeks ago at Valley UU. hosted by our UU

5 5 Justice Arizona (UUJAZ) network. It was a great workshop about the intersection of race, poverty, and justice in Arizona. [Our reading talked about a person who can remain calm and lucid amid a turbulent time - someone who people will trust, some whose leadership will likely save others lives] Jihan first talked about the campaign to shut down the Mohave coal power plant outside of Laughlin, Nevada. That plant closed in and the reason her group was active in that campaign is because the coal all came from a mine on their indigenous lands. And the water that operated the mine and that transported the coal through a slurry pipeline came from an aquifer under their land - which the mine was essentially pumping for free - we call that plundering. While the common story about the Mojave plant is that it closed because of increased costs for pollution controls, the activism of both Hopi and Diné people had a lot to do with it. Now their sights are focused on the Navajo Generating Station, just outside of Page, Arizona. It also runs off of cheap coal from the Kayenta mine on Diné land. Jihan s group has two goals - one is related to shutting down that coal mine that is ripping up their land, and which also would save the water that is used by the mine and power plant. The second goal is an economic transition to replace the lost jobs with new opportunities that are more sustainable and value their indigenous culture. So what does that mean for us here in the mandala of Phoenix? For starters, 1/4th of the power generated at the Navajo plant is used to pump water out of the lower Colorado River and across the state in the Central Arizona Project Canal. In essence, shutting down the plant would make the canal far more expensive to operate, and far more expensive for us to use. I know, that some day, that canal will shut down. It has to - the Colorado river has been over-allocated and our allotment is the first to go once the reservoirs drop below a certain point. We ll either be forced to stop using the water, or we can choose to let it go. Perhaps that sounds dismal - but to me it all sounds great. Ideally, I would love for the farms and the golf courses to start phasing out now. I love that the Jihan and her organization are already working to shut the Navajo

6 plant down - and I would really love to say that we are in solidarity with them in that endeavor. 6 So, can we give a lot of this up? Can me start making some drastic changes that reflect the true impermanence of this massive urban mandala? Because that s where I find a sense of hope. Hope for Phoenix, hope for the Diné, and hope for the climate and the planet. But let s review the overall concept. I don t necessarily believe that the entirety of Phoenix and all the cities around us need to be swept away - But I do believe that some drastic changes need to happen in order for 5 million people to remain in southern Arizona. I also believe that if and when shortages come, there will be a difference in who is impacted, and how badly. The Frank Lloyd Wright house, with its air conditioning and lush, green lawn, and base of wealthy supporters, will probably fare better than Booker T. Washington child development center - unless some priorities get shifted. That s the important insight to this Buddhist teaching of impermanence. While impermanence itself is an inevitable fact for us all, it will be experienced differently based on people s access to power. The impacts of impermanence are different in places of poverty than places of wealth. I must be careful, then, when I say that letting go of clinging is part of creating hope. I can say that, because I have a lot to cling to, therefore I have a lot to let go of. But if I don t have that much to begin with, letting go to make way for hope doesn t make as much sense. I believe, deeply, that the acceptance of impermanence is vital to our spiritual health. That letting go of clinging opens up so much more possibility - especially when we are clinging to excess. Do we need cotton and golf courses and mansions? Do we need quality education for everyone and clean drinking water? Can we realistically have all those things? Should we? And in those cases that the things we are clinging to are linked to the exploitation of others? Then I think we especially have an obligation to let go and give those things up.

7 When the monks put the first grains of sand down to make their Mandala, they know it is impermanent. Even as they create it, they ve already accepted its destruction. I wonder if Frank Lloyd Wright ever imagined his houses and buildings eventually falling apart, overgrown with weeds, abandoned. I wonder if the early developers of Phoenix, as they planned and built, imagined the city eventually deserted and uninhabitable, with water too scarce and electricity too expensive to sustain millions of people in a desert. But if we, today, can embrace this impermanence, it creates the opportunity to imagine something else - something more sustainable, realistic, something with more equity and fairness. That s what Jihan taught me - if the Diné imagine the coal mines shut down and the power plants decommissioned - that s when they get the opportunity to really create a hopeful future - for themselves, for their land, and really, for all of us. I hope we can join with them, and others like them, in letting go to create more hope for ourselves and the generations to come. 7