Climate Change is a Spiritual Issue
a sermon by Carol Cole-Lewis

My mother, my father and I were sitting down one evening after dinner not that many years ago enjoying a nice cup of tea after one of my mother’s fantastic Italian feasts. The discussion wandered around to the Prius I had just purchased. “Why do you own one of those things?” my father asked (my father, as many of you know, was quite a conservative kinda’ guy....). I can’t exactly remember my initial reply, but then I asked him a question: “If you could buy any car you wanted, which car would it be?” He thought a few moments, then replied, “a Humvee”. “But why, Dad? You live in a fairly suburban area, and the gas mileage of that huge, originally military vehicle is measured in single digits.” He looked at me straight in the eye, squared his shoulders and proudly declared “Because I can.”

Because I can.
​
Americans have been blessed over the last two hundred or so years. We came from all parts of the world to seek a place where lives could be lived in peace and freedom, and wealth seemed to flow out of the very cracks of the rich fertile soils that covered our lands. Our mouths were quenched by the clean, cool pure waters of our rivers and streams. Our lungs were filled with the sweet air laced with the scents of thousands of varieties of wild flowers. Our eyes feasted on herds upon herds of deer, elk, buffalo and countless other species of fur or fowl that graced the seemingly unlimited expanse of plains and mountains. Ah, The American Dream!

“Actually, the phrase “American Dream” was invented during the Great Depression. It comes from a popular 1931 book by the historian James Truslow Adams, who defined it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone”.

In the decades that followed, the dream for many Americans became a reality. Thanks to rapid, widely shared economic growth, nearly all children grew up to achieve the most basic definition of a better life – earning more money and enjoying higher living standards than their parents had.”1

Now, I’m all in favor of living in comfort. I like a warm house and a cozy fire with a cat on my lap as much as any other cat lover out there. However, no matter what your vision is of the American Dream, the problems start to arise when we forget what we were trying to achieve by living the American Dream in the first place.
What do YOU think ­ What do YOU really want to achieve in your life? I’m going to make the assumption that what everyone really REALLY wants in the deepest part of their being is to be

HAPPY .

We want happiness for ourselves, our children, our friends, our loved ones. Indeed, if everyone WAS happy, would there ever be a reason for violence or war? I don’t think you can be fearful or angry at the same time you’re happy, can you?

So, as human beings, we seek happiness and flee pain. 

Think back to your childhood. I don’t know if your mother did what mine did, but I can remember in the summertime, if my sister and I were really, really good, she would give us a quarter to get ice cream from Freddy ­ the Good Humor Ice Cream salesman that used to drive down our street. That ice cream sure tasted good, though it was gone in a flash, and the happiness that it brought me melted away with it. There had to be a better, more permanent way to happiness than this.

And I suppose it was a good thing I asked myself that question. Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan, in their 1996 study “Further Examining the American Dream: Differential Correlates of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Goals”2  suggested that LOWER well­being is associated with individuals having goals focused on external rewards or praise, in comparison to those people whose goals were more internal and not based on the approval of others. People who have aspirations for financial success, an appealing appearance, and social recognition actually were associated with “lower vitality and self­-actualization” and had more physical symptoms. Conversely, an individual seeking internal self­-acceptance, and an ability to embrace community showed higher states of well­being and less distress.

Susan Linn is the director of the Campaign for a Commercial­Free Childhood and is the author of “The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World.” She says in a recent New York Times Article that “Children need opportunities to find joy and meaning in what can’t be bought, like friendship, creativity, love and the natural world.”3

Consuming more is not the answer to happiness. Yet, we consume because it makes us feel good. A few years ago I was a part of a team implementing a Community Transformation Grant in Lake County. This grant was awarded to improve the health of Lake County residents. One of the focus areas of the grant was smoking cessation. Through the course of working on various brochures and programs designed to address this focus area, I learned something very important about the habit of smoking: people smoke because there is a real benefit for them to do so – it meets a deep generally unconscious need that is so overpowering that even after they watch a loved one suffer a horrible death due to lung cancer, they continue to puff away. The only way one can truly stop smoking is when you can fill that deep void that smoking fills with something else ­ something more beneficial. No “stop smoking billboards” or laws prohibiting smoking will have an effect on the committed smoker.

Like a smoker, we, too, are addicted. We are addicted as a culture to oil and coal. The problem is ­ this issue is not just one person, or one community ­ it’s the entire human race (even those who don’t yet have much, still lust for the riches of the west)

Why is it so difficult for us to take care of our bodies, our planet?? Is it because of a deep spiritual crisis ­ a lack of understanding of who we truly are and how we look for God and/or happiness? A deep self­ hatred and loathing that causes us to want to destroy? We need to cure the root of this problem ­ but this may not be possible until we hit rock bottom. We ALL have to find a way to fill the void and find happiness ­ true happiness ­ or our planet is doomed.

Spiritual teachings and teachers have a good deal to say about our inner void and how to find this true happiness.
In “The Art of Happiness”, the Dalai Lama gives us some clues. He says, “we need to learn how to want what we have NOT to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness.”4

Eckhart Tolle, who in 2011 was listed by Watkins Review as the most spiritually influential person in the world, says “The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.”5

The Reverend Forrest Church was a minister of a very large Unitarian Universalist church in New York. When he learned he had cancer, Reverend Church decided to document his trip through this part of his life by writing the book “Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow”. Forrest found the real answer to living a joyful and happy life was based in three simple things. These three thing became his mantra: Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are.”

Michael Singer, the author of the highly successful book, “The Untethered Soul” has an interesting view on life and happiness. He says:

“The highest spiritual path is life itself. If you know how to live daily life, it all becomes a liberating experience. But first you have to approach life properly, or it can be very confusing. To begin with, you have to realize that you really only have one choice in this life, and it’s not about your career, whom you want to marry, or whether you want to seek God. People tend to burden themselves with so many choices. But, in the end, you can throw it all away and just make one basic, underlying decision: Do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy? It’s really that simple. Once you make that choice, your path through life becomes totally clear.” 

Most people don’t dare give themselves that choice because they think it’s not under their control. Someone might say, “Well, of course I want to be happy but my wife left me.” In other words, they want to be happy, but not if their wife leaves them. But that wasn’t the question. The question was, very simply, “Do you want to be happy or not?” If you keep it that simple, you will see that it really is under your control. It’s just that you have a deep­seated set of preferences that get in the way.” 6

Spiritual teachers also have a thing or two to directly say about our collective approach to life on our planet. As many of you know, I tend to be more Christian in my Unitarian faith than my husband. My hero, Father Richard Rohr, has allowed me to reclaim my Christian heritage and has shown me the deeper meanings of the Bible and how it is entirely congruent with my current spiritual path. This excerpt is from a recent daily meditation of his I subscribe to:

Christ is the Archetype and Model for the rest of creation as Scripture clearly teaches. Yet Christians have instead focused on proving that Jesus is “God,” which felt necessary to put our group out in front and to solidify our own ranks. We were more eager to make Jesus the “top” than to make him the “whole,” and thus we ended up with a religion largely concerned with exclusion.

If the Eternal Christ is forgotten or ignored, Jesus becomes far too small, a mere local “god” instead of a universal principle. Many Christians still see the universe as incoherent, without inherent sacredness, a center, direction, or purpose beyond personal survival itself. Many Christians focus on “saving their own soul” with little care for the world as a whole. Massive disbelief is the result. It is hard to feel privately holy or good when the universe is neither holy nor good.

No wonder science and reason have now taken over as “the major explainers” of meaning for much of the world. Jesus was indeed a deep and life­ changing encounter for some people, but the official Church often showed little evidence of his universal love. Christians brought Jesus to the “New World,” but hardly ever Christ, as we see from our treatment of indigenous peoples and the earth. Most slave owners and proponents of apartheid fully identified as “Christians.” Lots of mop ­up work is required of Christianity for the rest of history, after we dragged poor Jesus through our mud.

We failed to offer the world universal meaning, and now we live in a postmodern and largely post­Christian world that denies any “big story line” or purpose to existence. So instead of universal hope, we live inside of cosmic cynicism and we retreat into small identity politics. This is a major crisis and loss of inherent dignity to the whole human project. All the extravagances, technologies, and entertainments will never be able to fill such a foundational hole in the human psyche. In other words, the world—even most of the Christian world—has yet to hear the Gospel! 

A few months ago, Denise Rushing and I were enjoying the beauty of our Dancing Treepeople Farm. We were sitting around a fire pit which we use for spiritual ritual and for the routine necessity of burning broken branches that fall from our walnut trees as we started to discuss climate change and paganism. She shared with me profound thoughts from Thomas Berry, Matthew Fox, Brian Swimme and others. One particular viewpoint she shared hit me as squarely between the eyes as enlightenment struck the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. I’m going to paraphrase it here, but I think I’ve captured the essence of what she told me:

One of the reasons our planet is in the shape it is in is because the dominant and most affluent countries adhere to a worldview that is based on a Fundamental Christianity. When you believe this way, you are taught you are “In” the world and not “Of” it. You are told your treasure is in heaven and not on earth. The focus is on salvation away from the evils of this world. Is it any surprise that a culture that believes this way could never see creation as sacred, and therefore would NOT see dealing with climate change as a priority.

I attended the People’s Climate March in Sacramento yesterday. I do love going to these marches. I love lending my body and voice to thousands of other like minded people as we demonstrate our dissent towards this administration’s agenda of attacking climate action and promoting fossil fuel development. And this type of protest is important, as I believe large scale protests like these can have an affect on the hearts and minds of our elected officials as they seek to keep their jobs by serving the citizens they are sworn to represent.

Yes, Governments and Corporations may be guilty of atrocious environmental calamities that have damaged the lives of many people (and especially the poor who usually bear the brunt of toxic fallout). And, with third world nations striving to compete with the consumption of the west, they must turn to cheaper coal and other polluting fuels as they seek their version of the “American Dream”.

Ultimately, though, corporations and governments won’t change until the people who are their customers and citizens change ­ WE ­ Change Ourselves. We must find a more effective way than consumption to fill the void of existence ­ we must make the choice to be happy. We must make the choice to recognize and value the importance of right relationship with each other. We must choose to see our God as One with, and not separate from, Creation. When we deeply know these things and are truly happy, we will naturally stop consuming our precious planet, and the words “climate change” will take on an entirely new and hopeful meaning. 

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1 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/opinion/the­american­dream­quantified­at­last.html
2https://www.researchgate.net/publication/246276634_Further_Examining_the_American_Dream_Differen tial_Correlates_of_Intrinsic_and_Extrinsic_Goals 
3 https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/20/how­should­children­learn­to­shop/consumption­is­th e­last­thing­children­need­to­learn
4https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1651617­the­art­of­happiness­a­handbook­for­living 
5 https://andreastevens.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/inner­climate­change­by­e­tolle/
6 http://untetheredsoul.com/ 

A sermon by Linda Laskowski. 
Download pdf here.  Listen to sermon here.

A house is on fire. A baby is inside. Do you save the baby? A house is on fire. Adolf Hitler is inside. Do you save Hitler? A house is on fire. A baby named Adolf Hitler is inside. Do you save baby Hitler?
​[end of quote from Nate Walker]

What does our Universalist heritage call us to do? Eat all the guns and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table? Or save baby Hitler?

Universalism believes that a God of love is too good to damn us. In the first 300 years of the Christian church, early Christians could choose from a variety of beliefs, including the ideas that Jesus was an entity sent by God rather than part of a trinity, and that no one would be condemned by God to die in a fiery pit. That all changed in 325 CE with the Council of Nicea, whose purpose it was to choose a single set of beliefs, keeping Christianity “pure”.

For centuries afterward, anyone who strayed from the chosen set was persecuted – including my ancestor Nicolas Erb who came to what is now Pennsylvania at the invitation of William Penn in the late 17th century to escape persecution in Switzerland. My great ++ grandfather was a Mennonite, a sect that believed, among others things, in non-violence, separation of church and state, and faith by consent, whereby one was not baptized until they reached the age to decide for themselves. Penn was a Quaker, but one inclined to believe in the Universalist view of salvation.

Universalism developed in America out of many of these liberal sects, including liberal Methodists. Among other things, its adherents did not accept the Calvinist doctrine of eternal punishment, and read their Bibles to say God lovingly redeemed all. They also led the battle to separate church and state, and reached out to people often marginalized by society. The first Universalist Church, in Gloucester, MA, included a freed slave as one of its charter members in 1779. Elhanan Winchester organized a Universalist Baptist congregation in 1781 in Philadelphia that preached to both black and white – and was excommunicated by the Baptists shortly thereafter.
Universalists were the first to ordain women, Olympia Brown in 1863. Other Universalists who put their faith into action included Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross; Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing; and some say Abraham Lincoln, who argued in 1833 for ““predestinated universal salvation in criticism of the orthodox doctrine of endless punishment.” At its peak in the mid 1800s, Universalism was the 9th largest Christian denomination in the United States.

Headquartered in Boston just a few blocks from each other, the Unitarians and Universalists finally joined together in 1961 with a great deal of commonality and some differences as shown in these words from Thomas Starr King. Starr King was a Unitarian and a Universalist minister who came to serve the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco in 1860, and is credited with keeping California on the Union side. Union Square is named because of his fiery speeches there:

“Universalists believe that God is too good to damn humankind, and the Unitarians believe that humankind is too good to be damned...”

Universalism shows up in our first principle: We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

This principle is not without its controversy. Former UUA president Bill Schulz, who served 12 years as the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, said one of the things torture taught him was that not all people are inherently good:

“our doctrines about human nature, such as the Unitarian Universalist Association’s affirmation of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” rest uneasily in a world full of torturers. In what sense can we defend the notion that a torturer is a person of inherent worth and dignity?”

After his stunning opening, Rev. Nate Walker goes on to describe a situation in his church, First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, founded in 1789 by Joseph Priestley, in which a racist, homophobic anti-semitic group had been booked to perform in their church, which was a popular music venue. Within 48 hours, he had been contacted by the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania State Commissions on Human Relations, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, two detectives from homeland security, and countless UUs and UU ministers across the United States, nearly all excoriating him for supporting hate speech. I was on the UUA board at the time, and we were bombarded by UUs insisting we “do something” about Nate Walker.

Yet, true to his Universalist principles, Walker handled it by applying 3 principles of what he calls “the healing power of a Ministry of Mediation rooted in Universal Love”. It may be instructive to apply those to our post-election environment - as well as our own personal lives – at the same time that we are standing on the side of love against human rights abuses.

The first principle in Walker's Universalist Ministry of Mediation is direct communication. Rather than sending a letter to cancel the concert, Walker invited the band to come and meet with him, an openly gay minister, and
discuss the difference between free speech and hate speech. Over the course of two meetings, the band ended up cancelling the event, saying “You have shown us respect so we’ll respect the church.”

It can be difficult to have direct communication with someone who believes Obama was not born in the United States, or that Hilary Clinton was responsible for the suicide of Vince Foster, or that homosexuality is an “abomination”. If you read Walker’s account of his meetings, you will see that he is not trying to convince the Skinhead band that they are wrong and he is right, nor does he back off on his own beliefs. He is appealing to the band as “individuals worthy of respect and dignity”. How can this shape our own conversations?

Marshall Rosenberg, creator of “Nonviolent Communication” did a superb job of identifying ways of approaching others in a way that allowed real communication. In my view, there are two keys to NVC: learning to separate observation from evaluation, and getting in touch with your own feelings and needs. For example “you are so inconsiderate” is probably not helpful; “I am upset that you turned the TV volume up when I am trying to sleep because I've got a tough day tomorrow” is probably more useful. I highly recommend two of his books, “NonViolent Communication, a Language of Life”, and “Speak Peace in a World of Conflict”, or taking some of the courses available on Non-Violent Communication.

The second principle is study. Walker and key leaders from his congregation studied what they could find about the band, researched their lyrics, and learned about the individuals in it. When they met, Walker was able to “meet them where they were”, being knowledgeable about the band and what they had done. They even had a respectful conversation about the complexities of homosexuality. The band leader thanked him: “Thank you for not making me out to be a monster”.

What do we know, really know, about the 63 million people who voted for Trump? Given the number of my family members and childhood friends who are among them, they are not as a group all uninformed, badly educated, un-or under employed, or stupid. Do we know enough to sit down and have a conversation about the things that matter to both of us?

Last November, Van Jones, who was the Ware Lecturer at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in 2008, ran a series called “The Messy Truth”, where he interviewed a number of Trump supporters. Clearly a left-leaning African American, Jones was able to come to common ground without violating his own integrity. The most interesting thing to me was the degree to which he listened – really listened to the people he interviewed, without judging them. He sat through vitriolic comments directed at Hilary Clinton, liberals in general, and people like him – and still managed to break through to the humanity and fear under it all. I recommend watching the series – search “messy truth” and “Van Jones”.

J.D. Vance, in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”, tells the story of white working class people in the South – his grandparents starting out poor but the family eventually living the American dream, sending J. D., the third generation, to Yale Law School. That dream disintegrated for his family, and is disintegrating for so many of working class Americans, as jobs are mostly replaced by technology, and fear of losing everything you value takes over:

there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing, and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it: It must be someone’s fault: NAFTA, the Obama administration, too much regulation, too many immigrants taking our jobs. The world is shifting underneath my feet, and no one cares. They’re turning all my daughters into Lesbians....

When I was growing up on a North Dakota farm, you could farm 600 acres (just under a square mile) and eke out a living. My grandparents homesteaded in North Dakota around the turn of the century, and had families of 8 and 9 children. All but 6 of the 17 aunts and uncles farmed North Dakota land. None of their children or grandchildren do today. Young people left in droves, as farming was no longer an option – not only because of technology, but because prices for crops were low, and loans were high and nearly impossible to get.

A similar situation existed in North Dakota in the 1920s, with a different result. The grain merchants in Minneapolis were paying almost nothing for grain, and the bankers were dispossessing farms and refusing to make more loans. It finally came to a head when a state legislator told a group of farmers to “go home and slop the hogs” (though he did say later that his comment had been misinterpreted).

So the good people of North Dakota formed the Non- Partisan League, a third party that dominated North Dakota state government. The NPL created a State Mill and Elevator, to buy their own wheat for flour, a state- owned brewery to buy their own barley for beer, a state- owned railroad to ship it, and a state-owned bank to fund it all. But don’t ever suggest to those North Dakota farmers that this was socialism at its finest...

Both houses and the governorship were held by the NPL. Gov. William Langer was forced out of office in 1934 after a felony conviction, whereupon he was promptly re- elected in 1936, and served as US Senator from 1940 until his death in 1959. As an isolationist, he was one of seven senators to vote against joining the United Nations. There were scandals throughout all of it – and the people loved him.

Populism is not new, and supporting deeply flawed characters as leaders is not new. And lest we think this is just history, let me remind us of a similar outcry very recently – the elites have rigged the system, which was filled with greed and corruption. People were watching everything they valued being taken away. Occupy Wall Street hit a chord with the frustration against the 1%, the widening income gap. They took out their frustration in massive demonstrations and encampments.

And Trump voters took out their very similar frustrations on the ballot box. An article in Fortune last March said:

But while different in many respects, both groups shared one common characteristic: a deep and abiding disdain—and even hostility—for the political elites and political establishment they believe betrayed them, betrayed the nation, and left them to fend for themselves. Yes, Tea Partiers are particularly bitter at what they see as an out-of-touch Republican establishment and an utterly arrogant federal bureaucracy, while Occupy Wall Street- ers have vented their frustration at what they see as the financial elites of Wall Street and multinational corporations, but the broader critique of American politics is not drastically different. For both groups, the founding principles of...government and representative democracy no longer work. The system, in their view, is broken.

The third principle in Walker’s ministry of mediation is imagination:

We use our imaginations to picture ourselves as the other. We observe how misperceptions are born and how fear is fueled. We imagine the pain that has built up over time with those who have been in conflict for over a decade. We imagine what it must be like to be raised in an environment where one is groomed to be a skinhead. We imagine what it must be like to be so fiercely committed to an anti-racist agenda that even the police and the government and churches become one’s enemy – because these are often the institutions that perpetuate systems of oppression. Our imagination leads us to a simple but terrifying truth: “hurt people hurt people.”

In his book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey tells about riding the subway home one night, sitting in the same car as a father who had three young sons. The boys were out of control – running around the train, throwing things, and being noisy. They were clearly annoying the other passengers, while the father just sat there, totally unperturbed.

Covey was irritated by the father’s lack of consideration, and as he happened to get out at the same stop as the family, he approached the father. “Excuse me, but I wonder if you realize how much your sons were bothering the other passengers.” The father looked dazed, and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I am sorry. I didn’t. We have just come from the hospital where their mother died, so I just wasn’t paying attention.”

I learned a very useful approach from NVC when I am faced with what appears to be completely wrong behavior: let’s pretend (without having to believe it) that we have this person’s world view and/or experiences. How would I act if I did? And how do I know what that person’s worldview is?

To imagine is to empathize, to sympathize and to understand. And while understanding need not imply agreement, understanding is necessary in order to heal the poison found in a heart bound by fear and to heal the poison found in a mind bound by judgments. The discriminatory mind is healed when we imagine ourselves as the other.

The Other. The need to identify with our “tribe” was honed through thousands of years of needing to know who we could trust – who had your back or who would stab it. Breaking that cycle takes courage – in any human interaction, the only behavior we control is our own.

Yet most major religions have at their heart a version of the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. Not “wait to see how they treat you, and then respond in kind" but “treat others as you would like to be treated”.

Let me close with a paraphrase of Nate’s words: A nation is on fire. There are people inside. Who do we save? 

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