Sermon – Part 1 “One World, Divided”
Introduction – Population Risk
When we read the responsive reading, “The Body is Humankind” (SLT 651), I asked you to correct the text, to replace four billion cells with seven billion cells, for there are currently about seven billion people in the world. That’s three billion more than just 35 years ago, when the piece was written. The United Nations now expects population growth to peak at over 11 billion people by the end of this century[1].
Can the world support that many people? That’s a question for another time, though we note that recent events — like this week’s announcement that much of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is now dead[2] — hint that the answer is no. We’re overrunning the place. We’re putting everyone, and the world itself, at increasing risk.
Our theme this month is “what does it mean to be a community of risk?”, so today we explore a world at risk.
This is the sixth of seven sermons in which we consider how our Seven Principles might guide us in these troubled times. Today we explore our sixth principle, in which we affirm the goal of world community, with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
World Community
World Community. It’s hard to imagine today, but there have been times when people have actually dreamed of a true world community, with a unified world government, or at least a strong United Nations, working to assure peace, liberty and justice for all.
The idea has even been mainstream at times. Just after World War II, opinion polling by the United Nations found the idea of a unified world government favored by a majority of respondents in six European countries; however, it was rejected by respondents in the United States.[3]
Earlier thinkers also imagined unified world government. Dante yearned for a world united under the biblical proposition:
“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity![4]”
We just sang the hymn, “Our World is One World” (SLT 134). The lyrics, by the great Romantic poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, imagined a “parliament of freedom, federation of the world”. He offers a vision of a world united, of all of humanity working together in peace toward a common vision for the world. It’s a marvelous dream, and one I still carry in my heart, even if we must dip far into the future, farther than our eyes can see.
The World Today
For we know the world we live in today is increasingly divided. The European Union is under threat, post Brexit, with other countries thinking of running for the door — think Grexit, or Frexit, or perhaps Quitaly. Associations like NATO may become TooLate-O, NAFTA may be Past-a, and worldwide treaty obligations may be unraveling.
Today, a world government is hardly imaginable. Even the idea of a world full of nations co-existing peaceably, offering expansive liberty and justice for their citizens seems to be a fading dream.
Democracy is Dying
Last week I encountered an article titled “Democracy is dying around the world.”[5] The author, Brian Klass, a political scientist, points out that “In each year since 2006, the world has become less democratic.” The piece notes that countries like the United States have contributed to this decline in democracy by supporting dictatorships when they fit our national interests. We’ve been willing to support regimes in such places as Saudi Arabia or Madagascar, and in the past, we’ve helped the enemies of democracy crush democratic governments in places like Nicaragua and Iran and Chile. We’ve been willing to look the other way, and pretend that some of these places are democratic when they are not. Klass illustrates counterfeit democracy with this brief personal story:
In Madagascar, a few years ago, I met with the head of a political party who told me:
“Unlike the other parties, we are a party of values.”
“Okay,” I responded, “which values?”
A look of panic crossed his face.
“I left the values in the car. Someone go get the values for the American.”
Problems at Home
Of course, we have our own problems with democracy here. According to the Intelligence Unit of the Economist magazine, the United States has been demoted from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy,” because of an erosion in trust of government. And that erosion didn’t just start with the current president — though he’s working hard to accelerate the trend. Trust in our government has been eroding for years. It was nearly 80% in the early 1960s, but little things like the Vietnam War, Watergate, the wars in the Middle East, and gridlock in Washington, have driven trust in our government down to just 20%.[6]
So we have a cheery picture of our government, a government that people don’t trust, often working in opposition to democratic countries, in a world that is facing ecological disaster due to human overpopulation.
Such is our country, such is our world. And you thought you came to church today for an uplifting message. Welcome, we’re glad you’re here.
How to Respond – To Be Good
So… How to climb out of this pit of depression. We know that to sit idly by just leads to despair. For as the great radical activist Dorothy Day told us,
“No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much to do.”[7]
There’s too much to do. And you — many of you — you’ve been doing much to resuscitate democracy in the United States.. You’ve been writing letters to congresspeople, or calling, or sending emails. You’ve struck fear in the re-election teams of many of our sitting leaders. You’ve gone to rallies, and in your numbers shown where the majority in this country truly exists. You’ve bugged our current president’s telephone. No, no, there’s no evidence you did that! No matter what he says!
But you’ve been working to organize, to connect with other groups, to do the hard work of collaborating, of creating a movement, in the valley, and nationwide, and ultimately in the world.
But even so, it can feel like less than enough. With the continuous daily onslaught of bad news, the incessant flow of posts, of tweets, of memes, we can easily lose hope, and feel our efforts are not enough. We can feel the issues before us are too big. We can feel inconsequential, that our actions are just tiny blips in the cosmic order of things.
Sermon – Part 2 “One World, United”
Personal Spiritual Practice
That great radical activist Dorothy Day reminds us:
“What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.”[8]
This is, I think, an essential message for us as progressive people. Let’s remember that our words and deeds, all those actions, may seem inconsequential, but they are like pebbles in the pond, creating ripples that flow and reach even to the far shore.
But we also need to remember that our thoughts are like that, too. Our thoughts, too, will ripple out in the pond that is the world, perhaps reaching even the antipodean point. And from our thoughts emerge our words and deeds, and these can have a worldwide effect.
So let’s talk about thought. As spiritual people, we can learn to train our thoughts, to direct our thoughts toward good, through spiritual practices like prayer or meditation. The guided meditation we just experienced was a form of a Buddhist metta mediation.
In Buddhist practice, meditation is used for more than merely calming the mind and relaxing the body, important as those may be. Meditation may be used to deeply explore, even experience, intellectual concepts like impermanence, boundlessness, interconnectedness — so that they become parts of our understanding, parts of our inner wisdom.
Meditation may also be used to nurture emotional states like compassion, loving-kindness, and joy for others. As we did in our meditation, we can cultivate these emotions by bringing to mind beings for whom we have positive emotional feelings, dwelling on those feelings, and then extending those feelings outward to others. Ideally we seek to universalize, extending the emotions to all beings everywhere.
In the Discourse on Good Will[9], the Buddha asks that all creatures everywhere be filled with lasting joy. He offers a method, inviting us to let grow within us a boundless love for all creatures. We are then invited to let this love flow out in all directions, like ripples, like wavelets, filling the universe.
As we advance in this practice, we are able to direct this love, this wish for joy and well-being, even to the people we cannot stand, even to our enemies. We come to realize that even such people — those people — want to be happy, too. But through ignorance or confusion, they seek happiness in ways that make others suffer. We can see how a person like Putin can dismantle a democracy as he seeks personal happiness through control. We even see some trying to use wealth to defy death, such as billionaire Peter Thiel, who has spent millions to researchers seeking to achieve immortality. Perhaps in this way we begin to see such people differently.
The practical benefit of our practice is not so much that we actually instill positive qualities in all beings. The practical benefit is that we may behave differently as we deal with people around us. We may find more peaceful ways to accomplish our goals. We may find skillful means, the third way, that may allow all of us to get at least some of what we want.
Unity and Black Elk
The practice of meditation may also lead us to that profound sense of unity that many of the great spiritual teachers speak of. One such mystic was Black Elk, a medicine man among the Oglala Dakota Sioux people.
As a child Black Elk had had a vision that lasted several days. Over his lifetime, he attempted to understand this vision. Near the end of his life, Black Elk shared the vision to ethnographer John Niehardt, who documents it in the book Black Elk Speaks. One pivotal moment in his vision was this:
“… I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”[10]
Circles within circles, and one great circle to hold them all. And in the center, a tree of life, a symbol that appears in many mystical traditions — in the Upanishads, in the Kabbala, in the symbolism of Jungian psychology.
Elsewhere, Black Elk describes how we might be in peace with one another:
“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells [the Great Spirit], and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations.”[11]
Thus, the sense of unity with all, with the holy, is what brings peace. This sense of oneness with all is a common thread that runs through the teachings of many mystics in almost all spiritual traditions.
If we have the sense of relationship with each other, with the all-that-is in each of us, then we can live in peace.
Now in his lifetime, Black Elk witnessed the subjugation and near destruction of his people. He was present at the Massacre at Wounded Knee, and tells of that memory.
“When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”[12]
In sorrow, Black Elk recalls his failings, saying that the nation’s hoop is now broken and scattered, there is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.[13]
But he concludes, speaking to the Great Spirit,
“Again, and maybe [for] the last time on this earth, I recall the great vision you sent me.
It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Hear me, not for myself, but for my people; I am old. Hear me that they may once more go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, the shielding tree!”[14]
And so the last words he shared in print become an invocation, a prayer for the people.
May the tree of life be restored.
May the circle of the world be repaired.
May the people of the earth live in peace.
May we all find unity in this world.
Notes:
1 https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/
2 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/science/great-barrier-reef-coral-climate-change-dieoff.html?_r=0
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_government
4 Ps 133:1
6 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/01/daily-chart-20
7 See 560 in SLT
8 Interviewed in Time (29 December 1975) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dorothy_Day
9 http://legacy.easwaran.org/sutta-nipata-discourse-on-good-will.html
10 Black Elk Speaks, p. 33
11 The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux
12 Black Elk Speaks, p. 218
13 p. 221
14 p. 221