Sustainable Spirituality: Thoughts on the 7th Principle

This sermon was presented on 28 December, 2014, by Ashley Hummel

Reading 1: Stuff from the Internet

It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it in to plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon and be done with it.

Wisdom understands that in a world of ecological connectedness, there is no such thing as “away.” We don’t throw things “away,” we simply put them someplace where they defile the land, foul, the water, pollute the air, or change the earth’s atmosphere.

Reading 2: From In Praise of Weeds by Peter Friedrich

Pity the poor dandelion.  It is, in many ways, nature’s perfect plant.  With a tap root that grows more than a foot long, it can survive in climates of scorching heat and bitter cold.  Its tender, young greens make a tasty addition to any salad, or they can be boiled like fiddleheads or as a tea infusion.  The dandelion’s leaves contain more beta-carotene than carrots and more iron than spinach.  Its blossoms, when properly fermented, perhaps with a bit of orange or lemon, make a sweet white wine.  That tap root contains medicinal properties, and can be beneficial to both the liver and the kidneys as both a diuretic and blood cleanser.  It can also be dried, roasted and ground as a coffee substitute.  The flower’s white, milky sap can be used to alleviate bee stings and to remove calluses and moles.  And then there is the dandelion’s ingenious method of reproduction.  That beautiful yellow bloom is actually a composite of hundreds of tiny blossoms that mature into the familiar white globe of seeds.  Unlike most other seeds, dandelion seeds can germinate without a period of dormancy, and the plant is self-pollinating.  Each plant contains hundreds of parachute-like seeds that, to the delight of toddlers everywhere, who pluck and blow them apart, can be carried effortlessly on the wind for miles and miles.  Yes, the dandelion is perhaps nature’s perfect plant.

Yet, plunk a dandelion down in the middle of a manicured Main Line lawn and it is treated like a terrorist.
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What, then, makes a weed?  Is a weed a weed just because we call it that?  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Saint Ralph” to we Unitarian Universalists, once said that a weed is simply a plant whose virtues we haven’t yet discovered.  But I don’t think that’s quite right.  Long ago we discovered the virtues of the dandelion and the loosestrife, yet they are a public menace.  And the pachysandra, with no particular virtue other than its persistence in growing low and slow in shady areas, is spared this label.  In his book Second Nature, author and gardener Michael Pollan describes the strict hierarchy of plants, where the top spaces are occupied by what he calls the “hypercivilized hybrids” like roses, and the bottom tier is infested with the weeds, which he calls “the plant world’s proletariat, furiously reproducing and threatening to usurp the position of their more refined horticultural betters.”  Weediness, he tells us, is determined by several factors, including how highly hybridized a plant is (the more refined and cultured, the better), the ease or difficulty of growing it (the hearty and easily adaptable larkspur is more “weedy” than, say, a fragile, delicate orchid), and, finally, its color.   (White, of course, is at the top.)  Pollan goes on to tell us that there are two primary schools of thought when it comes to weeds.  The first holds that “a weed is any plant in the wrong place” and the other defines a weed to be “any aggressive plant that competes successfully against cultivated plants.”  “The metaphysical problem of weeds,” he writes, “is not unlike the metaphysical problem of evil:  Is it an abiding property of the universe, or an invention of humanity?”

Sermon: Sustainable Spirituality: Thoughts on the 7th Principle

When we first discussed in committee the idea of a seven principles series, I said, “Oh, oh, what’s the one about the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part?! I want to do that one!” I began looking into it and found so much wonderful information, so many amazing sermons, and I don’t think that I can cover everything I want to talk about. 

I’ll start with my interest in this principle. The seven principles are a how-to-be-a-good-person guide. With or without a belief in a sentient deity, we can rely on these principles to keep us steady in a sea of moral relativism and ambiguity. In my own attempt to eliminate “right” and “wrong” as labels for behavior, I see the principles as a map to appropriate behavior in complicated situations. The seventh principle, though, is more. Many religious groups promote environmentalism, but we have it written into the closest thing to dogma we have. The seventh principle makes me comfortable here. As a pantheist, I am used to weird stares when I get too earthy. People say, “Are you like a hippie or something? Do you smoke weed?” Being able to come here and express that my god is the earth and everything in it, being validated by people around me who may call something else god, but still understand and share my affection for nature, those things make this my home. 

My pantheism is a bit backwards when compared to other religious traditions. In most religions, God takes care of us. In my spiritual path, we take care of God, and God takes care of God. You could also say that God takes care of us, but it’s not an ask-and-receive relationship. It’s more like a, “Here’s a bunch of plants to eat and water to drink, don’t screw it up,” relationship. 

I don’t believe we have dominion over the earth, and, this offends some people, I don’t think we’re superior to any living creature. In fact, I find most living creatures are better people than we are. We just happen to be at the top of the food chain and have dominance at this time in Earth’s history. We have the power of creative problem solving and opposable thumbs, so I believe that we have the responsibility of stewardship, but we are still animals, not distinguishable from nature except that we produce luxuries and cook our food. We have a burden of responsibility that other animals, to my knowledge, don’t share. That being said, I want to touch on a few different points. 

The first is food. I love food. Preparing and eating food can be a spiritual exercise. Growing food can be a spiritual exercise. And, though some would disagree with me, slaughtering food can be a spiritual exercise. 

To explain a little: I have always been aware of where my food comes from. My dad’s family hunts, my mom’s family fishes, and no one was remotely concerned with shielding me from the truth of where dinner came from. I must have been six or seven when my dad took me outside to show me three plucked ducks in the back of his truck (say that three times fast). They weren’t completely cleaned yet; they still had heads and feet. My dad had me take the neck of one and roll it between my fingers. There was a lump, rather hard and round. Dad said that it was the duck’s breakfast—probably an acorn. The duck had breakfast, and we had dinner, and the wheel goes round. By the way, if anyone would like a lesson on the finer points of butchery, I’ll be happy to share my knowledge. 

For the first part of my life, it did not even occur to me that there was a meat industry. We did buy meat at the store sometimes. Beef, chicken, shrimp, and other things there’s not a hunting season for. My dad hunts on family land, where some of the relatives also raise cattle. The cattle roam free and at some point are taking for processing and sale, and I always thought it was like that everywhere. I thought all the meat from the store came from little smoke houses like the one my dad took his deer to. It didn’t occur to me that food came from factories until I started buying my own and heard about the evils of Tyson and antibiotics and corn-feed. Now, with the concerns regarding climate change, we are starting to see data on the greenhouse gas output and fossil fuel usage of modern agricultural industries.

Most of what I found on ethical eating focuses solely on a vegan lifestyle, because cattle cost more in fossil fuels to raise. There are also a lot of vegans who don’t eat meat because they detest the the brutality of the meat industry. These are valid concerns, but it is impossible to turn the world vegan as a solution. Some people, myself included, not only don’t want to be vegan, but actually can’t. In this matter, I see our dependence on environmentally damaging agricultural methods as the problem, not our food choices. The process is what we should lobby to change.  The solution that I hear most often is to vote with your dollar. This is good, but we should also remember that many people can’t afford to, and those people are also a part of our interdependent web. Grass fed beef is expensive, free range eggs cost about two dollars more than other eggs, and organic is even pricier. How can we promote the purchase of better food choices when the income gap keeps getting wider? (hint, hint, let’s regulate!) Extolling the virtues of voting with your dollar is, it seems to me, just one more way of shaming the poor. 

It is important to be conscious of where your food is coming from in a larger sense, too. How far did your oranges travel to get to your table? In the store I see California and Florida oranges—why? We can and do grow citrus right here in the valley! It takes a lot of gasoline to drive or fly from California to the valley. Buying local not only helps local farms, but reduces the fuel cost of your produce. There is also the option of growing your own food. I recommend gardening for both practical and spiritual reasons. 

I garden the pagan way. That is to say, I interact with my garden beyond just sowing and reaping. Most of the time I go out barefoot and dig in the dirt, planting and transplanting without using gloves. I feel instinctually connected to my garden and the creatures in it. I take time to admire the creatures and try to be considerate that my garden is also their home. The grub worms, bees, and spiders all have their purpose in the world, and when they take residence in a place that is also mine, I feel that I have done something right. I try to be welcoming.  I’ve even taken great strides in accepting the one bug that terrifies me, though I hope never to see it. I am aware that things live under the garden, and I am aware that this is their place. In the garden my phobia is somewhat less severe. 

In gardening, as in many things, we humans tend to be outraged by the presence of things we didn’t plan for: insects, weeds. I used to work in a tea shop that sold iron tea pots from Asia. They sold little matching saucers shaped like leaves and some of these leaf-saucers had holes in them. It was interesting to see customers admire the leaves and, one after the other, they all rejected the leaves with holes in them. My boss, a Chinese woman named Mei, explained that in her culture, holes in the leaves signify health, because bugs only want to eat healthy plants. In my own experience—particularly with affluent white Americans—we see just the opposite. A leaf with holes in it means there is an invader and we must immediately douse the poor, victimized plant with pesticides lest our entire garden be overrun by hungry caterpillars! How did we get to that state of mind? What drives this need to control? I learned an important lesson recently when a hungry caterpillar ate every single leaf of my spearmint plant: stuff grows back. The world has had five major extinction events, but stuff keeps growing back. Nature is truly a wonder. 

When my seeds sprout, I marvel in their growth each day, and when it’s time to harvest I practice active gratitude. In most pagan traditions, it is customary to ask the spirit of a plant before you harvest anything, and to thank it once you’re finished. Even if you do not believe the trees have spirits, this is an important meditative practice. We do not need to direct gratitude towards anything mystical in order for it to be beneficial. If you have a garden, try this the next time you harvest something. Sit in front of the plant a while if it is low to the ground. Inspect it: where are the cuttings you desire, are there new buds sprouting, is anything living there that you don’t want to disturb? Observe not just the fruit, but the whole plant, and the system that helps it produce. Smell the earth, hear the birds, feel the sun and the wind. As you cut what you need, keep all this in your mind. Enjoy the harvest as a ritual instead of a duty. 

Also, make room in your garden, and maybe in your heart, for weeds. 

I wanted to talk about climate change, but I am hardly an expert, so I will refer you to Shirley and her climate change reading group that meets every other Thursday. I don’t attend this group myself, because of a hectic class schedule, which brings me to my final point: what you can do to live a greener life without breaking. 

Are you busy? Do you have responsibilities? Do you occasionally ignore reality to cope with not being able to solve all the world’s problems? Well, friends, today is your lucky day! I have a reverse offering for you! In this basket are green cards (click here for download). Each card has a tip for green living. Take one and try it out. By making just one change at a time, we can feel good about our progress without becoming overwhelmed. If you find the tip works, pass it on to others. 

While the basket goes round, here is my other advice:

If you can afford to, vote with your dollar. If you can’t, try to spend ten dollars of your grocery budget on locally sourced produce. If you don’t make your own cleaners, purchase environmentally responsible products such as Seventh Generation. Help others become environmentally conscious by giving the gift of cute, reusable shoppingbags for birthdays and holidays. If you don’t have space for a full garden, plant a window box of herbs. For a more intimate connection to your food, you can place it on the dinner table and invite guests to pick their own seasonings. Hang a birdhouse or feeder in your yard, or make a toad home in the garden, or a feral cat shelter. 

Learn about recycling programs at local stores. Office Depot has an ink and toner recycling program, Wal-Mart and HEB have plastic bag recycling programs, Staples, Lowes, and Best Buy all have battery recycling programs, and Staples will also recycle any electronic item. By being aware of these programs, we can reduce our waste output without going out of our way, and again, we can inform others of the options available. 

It is unreasonable to expect everyone to be green in every area of life, and that is ok. We can still be aware. Awareness will help us make better choices and limit our bad choices. For example, I use paper plates during the school semester because I value my sanity, but during the breaks I go back to real plates because I have the time and the energy to wash them. It is more important not to burn out on environmentalism than it is to be perfect. Respect the web, but remember that you are also a part of it and respect your need for sustenance and growth. Start small, like a seed, and we will grow a healthier world. 

I would like to close with the Beatitudes forEarth Sunday by Richard S. Gilbert

Blessed are the heavens,
for they declare the power of creation.
Blessed is the earth, our beloved home,
for she is a planet of plenitude.

Blessed are the waters thereon,
for they gave rise to living things.
Blessed is the land,
for it is the source of life abundant.

Blessed is the air we breathe,
for it fires us to life and love.
Blessed are the beasts of the field,
for they are glorious to behold.

Blessed are the birds of the air,
for they carve a graceful arc in the sky.
Blessed are the mountains and the seas and the valleys,
for their variety makes rich our habitat.

Blessed are the fields of grain, the orchards of fruit,
for they give sustenance, asking nothing in return.
Blessed are the dwellers on earth,
for they cherish the privilege of living upon it.

Blessed are they who protect the earth and all her creatures,
from the plants of the field to the trees of the forest,
for their reward shall be harmony with the web of existence.
Rejoice, and be glad,
for the earth and her people are one.