"Live for Today - Or Tomorrow?"

READING INTRODUCTION

Edward O. Wilson, biology professor, authority on ants, and passionate advocate for the conservation ethic, has written a new book. Called "The Creation," it is a long letter to a Southern Baptist pastor, "an appeal to save life on earth." Wilson, a secular humanist, grew up in Alabama.

READING

(According to archaeological evidence, we strayed from Nature with the beginning of civilization roughly ten thousand years ago. That quantum leap beguiled us with an illusion of freedom from the world that had given us birth. It nourished the belief that the human spirit can be molded into something new to fit changes in the environment and culture, and as a result the timetables of history desynchronized. A wiser intelligence might now truthfully say of us at this point: here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its own long-term survival.)

There seems no better way to explain why so many smart people remain passive while the precious remnants of the natural world disappear. They are evidently unaware that ecological services provided scot-free by wild environments, by Eden, are approximately equal in dollar value to the gross world product. They choose to remain innocent of the historical principle that civilizations collapse when their environments are ruined. Most troubling of all, our leaders, including those of the great religions, have done little to protect the living world in the midst of its sharp decline. They have ignored the command of the Abrahamic God on the fourth day of the world's birth to "let the waters teem with countless living creatures, and let birds fly over the land across the vault of heaven."

SERMON

The tension, as E.O. Wilson describes it, is clear enough. We human beings, an odd mix of "stone age emotion, medieval self-image, and god-like technology"[i] have real trouble when it comes to survival. We may be adept at self-preservation in the short run, but the long-term outlook is dim even for our own species. Like the baboon who cuts holes in his umbrella to let in the sunshine, we don't think about the future enough.[ii] There persists a catastrophic gap between indulging our personal desires and realizing the consequences.

This tension plays itself out on the world stage and in our kitchens at home. This week we heard that the leaders of the largest industrial nations, at a meeting in Germany, agreed "to consider seriously" reducing our emissions by the year 2050[iii] - a line that actually drew laughs on late-night TV. But what were we doing as we laughed? I was standing at my sink glumly washing out the dog food can - something our dog walker shamed me into doing - and thinking about how much time I would actually have to spend running an environmentally correct household.

Oh, I've made many inroads, influenced by the green movement here in our own church. But it's a struggle, approaching every chore with a new awareness, washing things that I used to throw away. "There is no away," I remind myself.

E.O. Wilson may have arrived at a conclusion that is even broader in its indictment of human nature than we realize. I've always associated pollution with unrestrained consumerism, global warming with industrialization. Bad habits, not bad genes, I thought.

But then I remembered Bali, where David and I traveled on a study leave a few years ago. According to Balinese religious tradition - a combination of Hinduism and local animist lore - the beaches and oceans are sacred trash receptacles. The Balinese people are mystified why others travel great distances to surf their waves or lie in their sand. They prefer to live in the cooler upland area at the center of their island. The only time they travel to the ocean is to dump cremation remains - not finely ground powder, like we have here - but charred flesh and bones and all the paraphernalia from the funeral, all of which is impure from the Balinese perspective. While the Balinese people live simply, and get by with few possessions, they too succumb to the notion that they can throw away what they no longer need.

This appears to be a universal human impulse. We are unable to think very far into the future about the consequences of our actions. So we have work to do. We have to reconcile our tendency to live for ourselves today with the need to change our ways before tomorrow. And it doesn't come naturally.

That makes me feel somewhat relieved. My complaining about how much work it is to change habits of all kinds - beginning with what to do with the trash - is part of human nature. My higher task as a human being is to stop that complaining and change.

Change is difficult because we suffer from a misplaced sense of urgency. We have invoked "live for today" for every purpose, good and bad, since we were teenagers. Just to help everyone my age who is now trying to remember the song, it was "Live For Today," by the Grass Roots. "Don't worry about tomorrow . . . . We'll take the most from living, have pleasure while we can . . . ." Sung by a young man to his girlfriend.

On another level, "live for today" is an existentialist declaration. The only way to face our fear of death is to live fully - in the present. Indeed, living fully in the present may be the only way to experience eternity. This goal is the foundation of many spiritual practices, such as meditation, yoga, and contemplative prayer. To live for today is to be aware of the present moment.

And that is as difficult as saving the environment. I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets to the end of yoga class, when we lie on our backs, close our eyes, assume the corpse pose, savasana, and immediately starts to make lists. Usually about what I am going to buy for dinner. This is not what is supposed to happen.

According to yoga advisor Richard Rosen, the point is to "surrender any and all psychological effort." He advises, "Remember the words of the great sage Abhinavagupta: 'Abandon nothing. Take up nothing. Rest, abide in yourself, just as you are.'"[iv] Excellent advice; difficult to implement, but one good way to live for today.

It is just as hard to live for today as it is to live for tomorrow. Our misplaced sense of urgency tells us that the rush and stress of every day is all we can handle - and in many ways, that's true. Racing from one commitment to another is one way of staying in the present moment - but with little benefit for ourselves or others. It keeps us from looking at what we need to do - what we know we need to do - to become better stewards of the future. And it's a lot more than agreeing to take it seriously.

I've convinced myself that the environmental crisis we face will cause us to look not only at what we have done to the earth but what we are doing to ourselves. We will have to slow down if we care about tomorrow. If only because it takes so much time to wash out all our dog food cans.

Beyond the individual challenge of overcoming our selfish urges, however, remains the larger challenge of responding to needs that go beyond ourselves, in space and in time. In the relative privacy of our own kitchens, our decision about what to do with the trash remains individual - and private. We trust ourselves and each other to do our best, which is usually not enough. And until that day when there is adequate legislation, provision, and time for all the recycling we need to do, we all need help in doing the right thing. Left on our own, as E.O. Wilson suggests, we probably won't. "Smart people remain passive," writes E.O. Wilson, "while the precious remnants of the natural world disappear." Maybe we're not so smart. Perhaps our much vaunted individualism, with its "live for today" soundtrack, is laying the groundwork for our ruin.

Individual urges are selfish and short-sighted. What we all need is a community to call out our capacity, shaky though it may be, to express and live up to our ideals. Whether that community is a congregation such as this one, an extended family, network of colleagues, neighbors, or twelve-steppers, we need each other to save ourselves.

I must admit, I sometimes wonder why people need religion. But I don't wonder why people need religious community. We are desperate - literally - to nurture some collective ideals and practices to go with them. We need constant reminders that the world does not revolve around our unexamined wants and impulses, and that we must become more intentional in our care of the world.

Over twenty years ago, E.O. Wilson, worried about the future of the environment, wrote a book called "Biophilia." In it he broached the idea that "the future of the conservation movement depends on an advance in moral reasoning."[v] "Values are time-dependent," he writes, "making them all the more difficult to carve in stone. We want health, security, freedom, and pleasure for ourselves and our families. For distant generations we wish the same but not at any great personal cost. The difficulty created for the conservation ethic is that natural selection has programmed people to think mostly in physiological time. . . . Only through an unusual amount of education and reflective thought do people come to respond emotionally to far-off events and hence place a high premium on posterity."[vi]

We are living in tense times. Knowing intellectually that we must change our ways to save the world has not equipped us with the moral fiber to make it happen. Not only do we need education and reflective thought, we need communities to support us - and leaders to lead us - as we struggle to change not just our ways, but ourselves, Together - with any luck - we may learn that to live for today is to live for tomorrow. May the community we share give us the will and show us the way.
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[i] E.O. Wilson, "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth"  (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 10.
[ii] Arnold Lobel, "The Baboon’s Umbrella," in "Fables" (HarperCollins, 1980), p. 12.
[iii] James Gerstenzang, "G-8 joins Bush in compromise on global warming," in "Los Angeles Times," Friday, June 8, 2007, p. A3.
[iv] Richard Rosen, http://www.yogajournal.com/practice/185_1.cfm
[v] E.O. Wilson, "Biophilia" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 118.
[vi] Ibid., p. 120.