"An Inconvenient
Truth"
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Reading: From An Inconvenient Truth by Al
Gore
To this day, if you ask doctors and
scientists to describe in intricate detail the exact process by which smoking
cigarettes leads to lung cancer, they will give you an overall picture and tell
you they know for sure that there is a deadly causative link. But if you push
them hard enough on some of the minor details, you will soon reach a point at
which they will have to say, "Well, we don't know exactly how that
particular relationship works."…
I know from this experience [of the death of his sister Nancy from lung cancer] that it sometimes takes time to connect all the dots when accepted habits and behaviors are first found to be harmful. Bu tI also learned that a day of reckoning might come when you very much wish that you had connected the dots more quickly.
Now of course, just as the scientists of 1964
clearly told us that smoking kills people by causing lung cancer and other
diseases, the best scientist of the 21st century are telling us even more
urgently that the global warming pollution we're pumping into Earth's atmosphere
is harming the planet's climate and putting the future of human civilization at
grave risk. And once again, we are taking our time - too much time - in
connecting the dots.
Sermon:
Probably you already have some idea what
today's sermon is about, don't you? So if I told you right now that it's not
about global warming you'd even be a little disappointed. It is about global
warming, but it's about a way of understanding the fact of it as a religious
responsibility.
This week some of you saw the film. So did a few thousand other people in Illinois - and a few thousand more will before the end of the month. There is a profound curiosity at work in the country right now about this film, the inconvenient truth about global warming, and how people in religious communities might respond to it.
I'm both surprised and encouraged by the numbers. But if you did see the film and you paid attention you know that we don't have a lot of time to solve this problem, and that the changes we need to make in order to solve it are not small. The human and non-human suffering involved in not solving it is immense. We will either experience that suffering directly or we will experience it indirectly - watching others suffer is a lesser form of suffering. If we do not change the way we think about things and interact on this planet things will get much worse here for all of us.
So this sermon is about global warming but it really isn't about global warming. It's about how a religious person unpacks and responds to a really big religious problem.
In the movie you may have caught Gore talking about how some people, when they see the data in his presentation, go straight from denial to despair. I think we can all see how that might happen - especially those of us who saw the film. I live in this data all the time, but I still found those charts with the lines that start to go straight up in the air pretty overwhelming. And the photos showing the retreat of all the glaciers everywhere are undeniable and deeply sobering.
So what we need to think about as people of faith is how we can learn the discipline of lingering in the middle - between denial and despair. What tools do we need in order to be able to stare the ugly truth right in the face, and go on living hopefully, joyfully, lovingly and responsibly.
What tools do we need to live well and fully with the inconvenient truth?
Well, I would say one tool we need is the truth itself. We need the facts, clear and uncluttered by agenda. We need to cultivate a sort of scientific detachment, that doesn't ask the facts to be any worse than they are to satisfy a sort of perverse desire for drama - and to prove that our position was the right one. But we also don't want to approach them fearfully, and try to talk our way past how truly awful the future will be if our behavior doesn't alter it.
We need a political awareness, as we search for facts in a world that is increasingly filled with information, much of which is politically driven, and, consequently, wrong. We need to know who is paying for research and what kind of tune may be called by he who pays the piper.
We need, to put it in seminary parlance, a hermeneutical strategy. Hermeneutics refers to the study of the messenger - Hermes was the messenger of the Greek gods - it is the study of the relativity of truth. We need to understand that even something as relatively hard as scientific data can be shaped by those who have another purpose to be served than simply delivering the truth. This is how many Americans continue to believe that there is scientific disagreement within the scientific community about global warming when in fact there is none. Because one of the messengers was more interested in creating doubt for a political purpose than in responsibly disseminating the best available data.
We need a hermeneutical strategy that teaches us the sort of relativity of any human-carried truth, but that also allows us to be satisfied with best available data. That's the best we can do - that's as much as we can know - we need to be able to be comfortable acting before the final word is in - because at that point it's way, way too late.
I'm personally pretty comfortable with the relativity of truth. I believe that there is such a thing as truth, but I also believe that it's pretty hard for a human to know in any absolute sense what it is. But I think the 85% fact is good enough to push me to action as long as I also keep one ear out for new information, in case the correction I'm embarked on turns out to make the problem worse. There's absolutely nothing wrong with acting this way, from either a moral or a scientific point of view. In fact, in either view, it's probably going to be as good as it ever gets for us.
But to be religious people responding to bad news we need a lot more than an accurate view of the news. We need a cultivated ability to maintain calmness in the face of that news. This is what the Stoics would have referred to as equanimity in the face of death - which was a big part of their discipline. They would perform the meditation on death as a daily act of preparation and a mental exercise.
Accepting the inevitability of one's own death fully and calmly is a very important religious task. Once you know that you are going to die, a lot of other things fall into place. It's really outstandingly better to figure this out sooner rather than later. Does this sound like a very strange thing to say? I think that if it does it's only because we live in such a tragically death-denying culture.
To live in this world takes hope and it takes courage. But the hope cannot be the hope of immortality, and the courage is the kind that comes when we know that we do not live only for ourselves but for those around us and particularly for those after us.
Everything in this life takes courage to experience fully. To love someone without holding yourself back requires an acceptance that if you are separated by nothing else you will someday be separated by death. To love the earth our home with clarity and without reservation is to accept the possibility of its death, or the possibility of the death of our species. It is not to hope for that - it is simply to continue to act in the face of the possibility. It is to continue to love in the face of the inevitability of loss.
The gift of life is more enormous when we know it is temporary. We need to decide how we will live in the face of that knowledge.
To consume without the ability to be satisfied, in a manner that sucks the life out of everything including our own souls, is to buy in to the deathlessness of our culture, and, at the same time, to deny death. If we can lose the fear of our own fragility, we may be able to act instead with hope and courage and love.
I have some tools which help me to do this (which is not to suggest that I succeed in doing it all the time). This is my personal toolkit but it may be useful to you to know its contents.
God is one tool in my toolkit. God is a tool in the toolkits of many people, and we all probably mean something a little different when we use that word. It's a pretty giant placeholder, after all. Since we have the luxury of time together, we can explore what I mean when I say it further in some upcoming sermon.
For our purposes this morning, I can just say that the exercise of prayer - of saying what I want in my innermost heart, of speaking to fear, and most importantly, of saying thank you to that which is much greater than myself is part of the exercise of staying on the good side of despair.
That's how I shape the tool - you may use different language or choose a meditative practice rather than the practice of prayer. I would encourage you to be explicit with yourself however, about what you do believe (expressed positively - I'm not really interested in what you don't believe - what you don't believe is not part of your toolkit). And I would encourage the cultivation of a profound sense of gratitude. It's helpful.
And I would encourage you to acknowledge that if the limitations of the world were contiguous with the outline of your particular body the world would be a very small place indeed. So there is something here which is larger than any of us, and larger than all of us, and acknowledging it can be a good tool.
Another tool I try to keep in my toolkit is imagination. I can imagine a reality in which people really do get the message, and in which the majority of people choose to act in the most life-preserving manner - in a manner that is best not for them but for their children. I can imagine a world in which people learn to love their children more than they hate their enemies. I can imagine a world in which people love their children more than they love their luxuries.
I do not currently live in that world, but I can imagine that the ingredients for its emergence are present in the world in which I do live, and that if enough people of good will find enough points of leverage we can move this world into that one.
So. God and an active prayer life. Imagination.
Another tool that I keep in my toolkit, one that I think is universally useful, is the tool of wonder. When I'm starting to get discouraged, or to focus on the things that are terribly, terribly wrong, I can put my mind and my spirit in a different place by pulling this toolkit out of the box. That might mean walking out to look at the stars at night. A better option for those of you who live where you can actually see them than it is for me. I might choose to head over to the lake, which is a few minutes from my house. Something about all that water amazes me - takes me out of myself, leaves me better.
Wonder is a very good tool for retaining a sense of hopefulness and usefulness - to linger between denial and despair.
Let me tell you a story I hear the other evening. It should convey this to you better than my more mundane examples. It was a story about experiments being done at an extremely humane research facility in Iowa on the language abilities of the great apes, in this case some bonobos. Bonobos are our cousins - their genotype is different from ours by slightly over 1%, and they appear to have an innate language ability. But the experiments have involved a set of pictographs - more than 350 of them - each one of which stands for a word in English, and each one of which is on an elaborate computer keyboard. Two of the bonobos in this story were born at the facility, and they have been quicker to learn the pictograph system than their mother, who was born in the wild. There is much I could tell you about these animals, but let me just tell you that one night the mother, born in the wild, was in one building and the two captive born bonobos were together in another, where the woman who has conducted the experiments was also present. The mother started howling from her room down the way - a strange howl that the scientist hadn't heard before. The son, captive-born, responded to the mother's howls.
The scientist turned to the third bonobo and said "what are they talking about?" The bonobo pictographed back, "dogs." "What dogs?" asked the scientist. "Bad dogs at crisscross" signed back the bonobo. Crisscross is a pictograph which stands for a place on the reserve.
The scientist sent a staff member out to crisscross to see what was up. There was a pack of wild dogs there, which no human had yet discerned but of which the apes were fully aware.
Now this means that the captive-born bonobos speak at least two languages, depending on whether you want to count the pictograph system as English or something else. They speak bonobo - whatever communication was going on between mother and son it was in a language that the mother came in from captivity speaking - and it translates into pictographic symbols and English. English which the bonobos understand when it is spoken to them.
When you're feeling as if there is no hope in this world and no reason to redeem it, I want you to remember this story, or some other story that works for you the way this one does for me.
For me this story reminds me that we live in a world of fabulous complexity and inexpressible richness. It reminds me that there is life here in such diverse forms, and that our intelligence is so far from unique that our cousins the bonobos can translate their conversations for the benefit of those of us who have not yet learned to understand their language although they have learned to understand ours.
It reminds me as I stand outside and look at the stars that as far as we know there is precisely one planet in the entire universe on which this flowering of life of such complexity and diversity has ever taken place. And that our ability to witness it and to be part of it for any length of time at all is the pearl of great price. It is the most valuable thing we possess, though we possess it relatively briefly.
Wonder is a tool for living in the reality of our circumstances but retaining hope.
God, imagination, wonder. I take the time to think about each of them, to engage with each of them as a religious practice because it keeps it allows me to stay where the work is done - once you know the facts and before you slide into believing that nothing can be done about them.
What tools are in your toolkit? Meditation, walks in the woods, music, laughter, imagination, whatever your tools are, cultivate them and keep them where you can find them. Don't let them get rusty for lack of use.
These tools are how people in the religious community live in the world with hope and cheerfulness and vitality, between denial and despair. With this kind of religious discipline we can accept what we need to accept - and accept it quickly - and then turn our hand to doing what needs to be done about it. We may be too late, and we may be too small. But if we live with reference to our toolkit neither of these would excuse us from acting to make things better.
Imagine a better world. Face the gap between that world and this one with hope and with courage. Do the thing you know you can do - they could make a difference. Hope that they will. And linger your whole life somewhere between denial and despair. That is where the work of the world is done.