"Common Ground"

It's been a long time since I have turned to biblical scripture to inspire a Sunday sermon. At some point, many years ago, I slipped through the portal and left the old tradition behind. And I've long stopped asking myself if that makes me less religious somehow. My faith is rooted in my experience of life.

To function in a religious setting, however, or in an interfaith setting as a Unitarian Universalist, it helps to be familiar with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, as well as others. One current example is the interfaith campaign for the struggle of immigrant hotel workers against the giant corporations they serve. The campaign is called "David and Goliath." It's an apt metaphor and one that anyone familiar with the bible will understand.

I had just enough education to appreciate such references, but they have never served as a guide for my faith. Biblical scripture has always seemed to me to be an ancient artifact, difficult to translate into lessons to guide us in these times. Instead I turn to secular sources, from "Harper's" magazine to poetry, or to contemporary spiritual writing by teachers like Pema Chodron and Thich Nhat Hanh.

And yet, when people tell me that they don't hear much about God at our church, I'm always a little surprised, strangely enough. To me, church and worship and spirituality are always about God. Isn't everything we love and cherish about God, whether we use God's name or simply speak, as we tend to do, of what we love.

We don't need to invoke scripture about God to know what God means to us. The God I know is the one I meet in daily life, in the people I love and the places I cherish, in the mountains and the ocean, in true words and beautiful music, in acts of peace-making and compassion. In Unitarian teaching, God is never finished with revelation. Every new day brings a new awareness. For all these reasons, I read Jack Hitt's essay, "A Gospel According to the Earth," as revelation for today. Jack Hitt takes a theological look at today's environmental movement - at the practices of composting, recycling, tree-sitting and gardening. He finds that the environmental movement presents many similarities to traditional religion.

Some environmentalists have a fervor comparable to the devotion of religious ascetics. "Off-gridders" and monks "both resist the comforts of urban living, whether electricity or a comfy bed," writes Jack Hitt. "Both groups try to integrate into the world around them ideas they have about living a just life." They hope that by doing so, they will come closer to the source of life itself, Nature or God, depending on their world-view.

It isn't necessary to look that far afield for subtler, closer-to-home examples. Take recycling. Jack Hitt describes a familiar scene in his Connecticut neighborhood. Early in the morning, people carrying out their trash, neatly separated and tied into bundles, appear to be placing votive offerings in front of their homes.

"Try describing the purpose of recycling," Jack Hitt writes, "to a five-year-old daughter and you find yourself suddenly toiling like a second-year seminarian with a fresh allegory. Recycling is about redeeming old waste by transfiguring it into something new. The theological potential is almost too easy."

Never mind that "The New York Times" had reported that "there are much more efficient market systems that would dispose of our trash without all that individual participation. Worse," Jack Hitt adds, are "other reports that in many locales those newspaper bundles - bound with twine at a tremendous cost of hassle, if not of time - are just trucked to the dump and bulldozed into the steaming offal." He'd be seriously tempted to give it all up, were it not for the fact that his children have all learned "the little story about bad things being turned into good things." It's become a parable for these times; its truth transcends the facts.

Environmental awareness may well be a new religious faith. Whether it comes in time to reverse global warming or plug the hole in the ozone, we may never know. But it may do a better job of giving us connections - to all living things and to the earth - than our biblical faiths have done so far. And it has re-enchanted our world with a sense of spirituality everywhere.

The poet Wallace Stevens wrote words to that effect: "Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow: Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn night; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul." We can, if we choose to, see our world as a spiritual place. The great shift that environmentalism has brought about is how we see the earth. According to biblical tradition, God gave humanity dominion over the earth and all its creatures. We somehow took this to mean that we could do whatever we wanted, without regard for the consequences. We thought of animals as lesser beings and trees as building materials; everything existed to serve our needs and our purposes.

We no longer look at the earth that way. We cannot afford to. And we know it, even if some of our old habits die hard.

But environmentalism is more than guilt and hand-wringing, although there is certainly a powerful lesson there about human arrogance and the need for atonement. It is about developing a personal relationship with nature. That relationship is a spiritual experience.

For some people it is a contemplative activity, as the little boy learned in the story "Grandad's Prayers of the Earth." His grandfather taught him how to feel a connection to each living thing, because "each living thing gives its life to the beauty of all life." When it comes time for the little boy to mourn the loss of his grandfather, it is nature that gives him solace.

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake," wrote Wallace Stevens. Think about all the ways we routinely turn to nature to help us live our lives. How many walks by the ocean front have we taken, and come home cheered up, with life in perspective? It's not something to take for granted.

Concern about the way humanity has imperiled the earth and undervalued our relationship to it has prompted an international movement to bring people together to step up to our responsibility. In 1987, the United Nations called for the creation of an "Earth Charter," which "would set forth fundamental principles for sustainable development." Officially launched in 2000, the Earth Charter is a comprehensive statement, describing sustainability as rooted in respect and care for the community of all life, ecological integrity, social and economic justice, democracy, nonviolence, and peace.

Perhaps we can take a closer look at the Earth Charter and what we can do to support its initiatives. For the future of the earth depends on our finding common ground with the people of the earth, and we're not making much progress on the religious front. With fundamentalism of all kinds pulling humanity further apart by the day, we religious liberals must consider seriously how our faith can make a difference. Quite possibly the difference we can make is by leaving the traditional religious quarrels behind. For the only faith worth having is the one that saves us all.

This faith may not, at least at first glance, bear much resemblance to what we know as religion. Yet its urgency and its passion are not all that different from other faiths in other times. And it is relevant. Today's faith tells us it is time to build a world that will survive the future.

Jack Hitt recalls an enlightening conversation with a composting expert. This man described how the food he grows using his special compost is better, superior, to the food you can buy at the market. "The vegetables from my garden," he said, "are actually structurally different . . . I believe they actually are changing the cellular structure of my body. They're turning me into something different. When I eat now, it's like I'm consuming something sacred, something holy, something divine."

Jack Hitt writes that after that conversation, he never again "thought of environmentalism as a movement about the politics of land." For what the composting expert had described was nothing less than communion. "No ceremony, no interpretation, just the thing itself," Jack Hitt observes.

Somehow I think that we will find our future when we leave behind the ceremony and the interpretation, the traditional expressions of religion that have divided us for far too long. And when all we have left is "the thing itself" - the immediate, universal, and sacred relationship to all that gives us life, we will find that we are standing together on the common ground we seek. On that common ground we may meet the people of this beautiful earth for we have arrived at the place where we are one.

References in this sermon include "A Gospel According to the Earth," by Jack Hitt, in "Harper's Magazine," July, 2003, and "Grandad's Prayers of the Earth," by Douglas Wood (Candlewick Press: Cambridge, MA 1999). For more information about the Earth Charter, go to http://www.earthcharter.org.