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If you are not already dead, forgive.
Rancor is heavy, it is worldly;
leave it on earth: die light.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
The Courage to Persevere
by Dr. A. Powell Davies , minister of All Souls Church in
Washington from 1944 until his death in September, 1957
One year ago this month...
. . .what we now call "the Events of September Eleventh,"
occurred. We offer these words written in 1953 by A. Powell Davies in
remembrance.
Standing where calamity has struck, we are stunned with bewilderment.
What is the use of hope and faith, of patient labor and long endurance?
And what is the use of this-this senseless, blind destruction? That
is how it seems, at first, but not at last, not if we stay with it long
enough and carry it with us into our lives as we live them, for then
we see something else-that, where a plan was crushed or a hope was broken,
something better than plans and stronger than hope began to grow.
How could we find courage, the deep moral courage that makes a human
life noble, without frustration and defeat? It takes a lot more courage
to face a broken scheme of things and mend it or reshape it than it
takes to plan it out in the first place. And it is not the scheme that
matters-let us get that clear-it is the quality of human life that counts.
That is what the business of living is all about. Our purposes may seem
to be ends in themselves, but they are not. They are at best a frame-work.
It is character, depth of experience, ripening of the spirit's powers
that we are really after. And what raises the level is by that level
justified. There would be no depth, no profundity no loftier wisdom,
no tenderness, no nobler courage-no greatness in human life-if plans
were never thwarted.
This does not mean there is no contradiction. The mind grows by struggling
with contradictions, with paradox. It does not mean there is no cause
for grief.
The heart is not a human heart until it feels the stab of pain. It does
not mean there is no room for doubt. Faith grows by the doubt it challenges:
Until it has met a challenge to mortal combat and fought and won it,
it is not faith. As for seeing "the thing you gave your life to,
broken, and stooping to build it up with worn-out tools"-it is
doubtful whether anything important was ever built with any other kind
of tools. Read the lives of the poets, the composers of symphonies,
the prophets, the saints-and look also at the world's more ordinary
people. Who are the shallow and the trivial? Who are the wise, the kind,
the responsible?
Not all souls find courage. But it happens often enough, often enough
to see a meaning disclosed by what at first was meaningless, a meaning
very deep, deep enough to thrust the roots of a life down into. And
the lives that have been most deeply rooted in that meaning have grown
tallest against the sky.
Adapted from "The Courage to Persevere," in Without
Apology, collected meditations by A. Powell Davies, ed., Forrester
Church.
Dr. A. Powell Davies was a leading Unitarian Universalist minister,
speaker, and author, and, as a renowned social and political activist,
he was responsible for a surge of growth in the denomination in the
1950's. He was minister of All Souls Church in Washington from 1944
until his death in September, 1957. In the Washington Post, Dr.
Davies was eulogized as "...militantly in the forefront of every
assault upon intolerance and racial discrimination and injustice."
Quest September 2002 Contents
 From
Your Minister
by Rev. Jane Ranney Rzepka, minister, CLF
I wonder what your summer was like. Were you the mom, racing around from swim
lessons to baseball, loading the car up with big, red plastic coolers,
rationing the popsicles, nursing the baby, worrying where your teenager
was an hour after the mall has closed, and finally, at the end of the
day, falling blissfully into the rocker on the porch?
Or maybe you are the person whose days stretched long, quiet, too long
and quiet on those hot, muggy days miles from nowhere, when the phone
call you made, or the hilarious rerun of Seinfeld, made all the difference.
Or are you the one whose summers and winters are pretty much the same
what with the latitude you live in: You get up and go to work and work
some more when you get home, and you just live for the week or two off
in July, when, glory be, you are On Vacation.
Maybe you're a teacher in San Jose, or you're a member of the ski patrol
in the Andes and paint houses in a mad rush in the approaching spring,
or you run a bed and breakfast for leaf-peepers in Colorado Springs-you
do one kind of thing in the summer, and now you turn the corner and the
other kind of thing begins in a whirl of activity.
Whoever we are and whatever we've done in the months just past for renewal,
it's worth making a little claim that what can be renewing about the summer,
what is spiritual about the summertime, need not be lost to us just because
the calendar flips to September.
Let's imagine a day, any day, at any time of the year. Here is the vignette
that Annie Dillard describes in one of her classics, Teaching
a Stone to Talk:
Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and
across the highway, is Hollins Pond, . . . where I like to go at sunset
and sit on a tree trun . . .This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute
walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here.
There's a 55 mph highway at one end of the pond. . .
So. I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences,
and traced the motorcycle path . . . .The sun had just set. I sat relaxed
on a tree trunk . . . .A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind
me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around-and the next instant, inexplicably,
I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
Weasel! I'd never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin
as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert.
. .
The weasel was stunned into stillness . . . . I was stunned into stillness
. . . . Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on
an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing
blow to the gut . . . It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved
the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into
that black hole of eyes …
So. I blinked, I think. He disappeared.
In this season, when Rosh Hashanah points us to a new religious year,
and when we turn toward the first anniversary of September 11th, it's
worth reflecting on what helps us greet our days. You tell me, you Unitarian
Universalists out there, you tell me that often when you get yourselves
away from the fray of day-to-day life and out into nature à la
Annie Dillard, you experience a feeling of peace, a sense of profound
connection.
We are modern worshippers, descended from ancient people who believed
in nature gods. We are twenty-first century suburbanites, many of us,
who have inherited the covenants of the Hebrew People, the arrangement
where their God, Jaweh, created the earth and sky and animals and-us-as
a part of a carefully balanced system, so the story goes. This system
is an interlocking one of mutual responsibility, where we are obliged
to do our part to stay related. We are direct spiritual descendants of
the Unitarian Transcendalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and all those friends
of his, who knew the miracle and the joy of the natural world. Many of
us are contemporary folks who feel more grounded, more centered, more
religious, when we are in touch with the earth and our huge extended family-weasels
and grasshoppers-with whom we live, under one sky.
As the year unfolds, may we stay in touch with that world. May we be called
to the brightening of the leaves, the solid granite of the shoreline,
or whatever gives us peace; may we feel the enlivening wind, may the beauty
of falling snow sometimes please us, and the rebirth of all green things;
may the eyes of an animal meet our own. In the words of a poem written
by a British Unitarian, Elizabeth Rogers:
I am a part of the earth.
I am a part of the solid,
unshakeable,
Immutable rock
Of the mountain;
Through the earth I am aware
of what I am:
All that is firmly fixed and endures forever . . .
All that is contained in Is, and Was, and Shall Be.
For such awareness, coming from the earth,
I give my thanks today.
For the earth, and my part in it.
Wherever you are in this UU world, may the coming season find you feeling
connected.
Jane Rzepka
Minister
Quest September 2002 Contents
Farewell to Betsy Williams
by Jane Rzepka, minister, CLF
To read this page of Quest, you may need to muster all of your powers
of imagination: You need to try to imagine the Church of the Larger
Fellowship's religious education program without our R.E. director,
Betsy Williams.
Betsy is an institution within an institution for those of you who have
engaged with our R.E. program during the last decade. She's developed
programs for the children, and resources for moms, dads, grandparents,
teachers, and who knows who else. I've known her to give advice to small
congregations in Europe, pre-teens in the South, and colleagues in California.
She's worked tirelessly to find funding for CLF programs, she supports
her fellow staff members, she sticks with it-whatever it is-and she
uses her deep knowledge of Unitarian Universalism to embody the faith
every single day. Above all, Betsy is known in the Unitarian Universalist
world for the CLF's children's magazine, uu&me. Betsy
is uu&me. She conceived of it in the first place,
wrote the grants, and put the production team together. Issue after
issue shows her fine hand at work-a true gift not only to CLF families
but to the denomination at large.
Betsy has resigned as CLF's R.E. director, and while we're happy that
she'll be able to spend more time in the area of her first love, children's
publishing, we get teary when we think about an empty desk over in her
corner of the office. The good news is that Betsy will continue to publish
uu&me, the mainstay of our religious education program.
Having left, she'll still be with us, and for that, and for her decade
of service to the Church of the Larger Fellowship, we are grateful.
REsources for Living
by Betsy Hill Williams, Director of Religious Education, CLF
Ten years ago this month I became the director of religious education
at CLF. I remember writing my first REsources page for Quest --it seemed
as hard as giving birth to my third child. Yes, it was that difficult-and
that rewarding, in the end. It was September; the summer had been filled
with political stump speeches, and I remember I wrote about citizenship-inspired
by a Bill Clinton speech that captured my imagination and led to me
read Robert Bellah's book Habits of the Heart. Even if I hadn't loved
the book (and I did), I loved the title, and I love it still. It's what
religion is for me-a habit of the heart. Developing a religious "habit"
is what my work here at CLF has been about these past ten years-both
as a teacher and a learner. And growing a heart that is filled with
habitual kindness, wonder, and reverence is what I hope to encourage
in the next generation of UUs as I leave my role as DRE this month and
devote my attention to uu&me! and other writing for
children.
As I recently reflected in my annual report to the CLF Board, I've seen
a lot of changes at CLF since I started here. We were writing in the
old computer operating system, DOS, then, our most coveted machine was
Nancy Engel's waxer for paste-up work, and the 800 toll-free telephone
line revolutionized our personal communication with individual members.
It turns out the real revolution was yet to come: E-mail and the Internet
has changed the face of CLF more than any of the human-face changes
the office has seen. In the past year we have begun the work of transforming
our religious education program from a staff-driven information delivery
system to a committee-supported, interactive learning opportunity. The
challenges are many; none of us has done this before and we stumble
as often as we fly with new ideas. But there's great promise for CLF
and my hope is that one legacy of my tenure here, a new website called
Between Sundays,
will lead the way.
Between Sundays
is designed to answer the questions kids ask about religion and life.
Whether you're a new parent, an experienced parent, or beyond parenting
altogether, I'm sure you can relate to a time when a child asked a question
and you didn't know what to say. Maybe it was because you didn't know
the answer-becoming a parent doesn't make you a walking encyclopedia.
Maybe you had an answer for yourself but you didn't want to close the
door to self-discovery by giving a definitive answer to your child.
Or, maybe you'd never answered it adequately for yourself and you felt
incompetent even discussing the question. We've all experienced - these
scenarios. Between Sundays is designed to work in whatever way you want
it to-you can use it to respond when questions are raised, or you can
use it to institute a regular program of religious education at home.
As good as this may sound, it's only good if it gets used! So, please
go the site at: www.clfuu.org/betweensundays
and try it out. Let us know what you think, either by adding a comment
in the "user comments" section at the end of the lesson, or
by getting in touch with our interim religious educator, Dan Harper.
It is my hope that Between
Sundays will be a living document-growing and changing frequently
to accommodate your needs and interests.
Thank you all for your support and confidence over the years, for sharing
yourselves and the joys and challenges you face. My religious habit
has been strengthened by this work-I hope yours has as well. It's truly
been an honor and a pleasure to serve CLF as your director of religious
education and I look forward to many years of continued relationship
as editor of uu&me!
Quest September 2002 Contents
Passing Gym
by Christine Robinson, minister, First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque,
New Mexico
I've been told that what teens have to do to pass their gym classes
is to show up, dressed to participate. I bristled at this at first,
but now I think it's a great idea. Presumably, if you show up, dressed
to participate, you will at least get a little exercise, develop some
skills, and perhaps notice an activity to come back to later in your
life. Gym class is not a team sport, where the point is to win. For
lots of teens, it's just something to endure.
I'm thinking of this is a wonderful metaphor for lots of parts of our
lives, especially the things we enter into reluctantly or blindly, like
the class called "crisis" or the class called "showing
compassion" or the task called "spiritual life." Perhaps
what we are called to do in these situations is not to be wise or courageous
or skilled, but to just show up, willing to participate, and see how
the forces that work within us will help us manage and grow.
So you slog through all the appointments and elements of a crisis, make
yourself take time to listen to a distressed friend, set yourself to
meditate or pray. Just that slogging and sitting signifies to our inner
selves and to those around us that we are here and willing to participate,
and that we trust that if we do that, something good will happen for
us. Maybe, just by showing up, willing to participate, we'll get some
life exercise, learn something useful, notice something to come back
to later. It may be that the fruit of that willingness, learning, or
noticing won't show itself for years. It may be that what we actually
do or don't find words or wisdom or courage to feel or say or do is
secondary to just showing up, dressed to
participate.
Quest September 2002 Contents
Forgiveness: The Hardest Act of Love
by Patrick T. O'Neill, senior minister, the First Unitarian
Church of Wilmington, Delaware
In the crowded urban neighborhood where I spent my earliest growing-up
years, there was an amazing array of people for a young boy to encounter
and observe. One of the nicest and most exotic personalities of that
long-ago place, I remember, was an elderly immigrant Frenchwoman who
lived in our building.
Mrs. Boutellon was always very elegantly dressed, and she always carried
herself with an upright posture and stately demeanor. She spoke with
a very thick French accent, and she was my sister's piano teacher. She
and her husband were both shy and very quiet, and how tolerant they
must have been, living next door to the boisterous racket of seven O'Neill
children wrestling past them night and day.
I was to have one very important encounter with Mrs. Boutellon. I was
very young, first-grade maybe, and several older boys-second grade thugs,
I suppose-had run by me and pushed me face-first into a snow bank. It
was a great indignity, and I sat there on the stoop crying tears of
outrage and frustration.
Mrs. Boutellon had witnessed the incident from her upstairs window,
and she came down and collected me from the stoop and brushed the snow
and tears from my face, and brought me into her kitchen for a cup of
hot cocoa, and fussed over me in French-accented maternal phrases that
seemed to right the universe again.
"You are angry at those boys for what they did to you, Patrick,
and it is natural for you to feel that way. But now you must let it
go," she said. "This day has other things to give you."
It wasn't until years later, after Mrs. Boutellon and her husband had
both died, that my mother mentioned her name in conversation, and I
told her of the day Mrs. Boutellon rescued me from that hard experience
on the front stoop. "That sounds just like her," said my mother.
"You know, don't you, that the Boutellons were both survivors of
the Nazi death camps in the War?"
I had never known that. But it gave even more power to the words Mrs.
Boutellon had offered me on that cold day when I was still a young boy.
"This day has other things to give you." Imagine hearing that
from a death camp survivor.
Besides the hurts and indignities of an unfair universe, this day has
other things to give you. Besides the anger that you want to carry in
your heart for all the wrongs done to you-this day has other things
to give you. If you are ready to let go of your anger, to forgive what
has happened in the past, this day has other things to give you. I heard
that from someone who knew a thing or two about pain and hurt and injustice
and indignities. I heard that from a survivor.
Forgiveness is hard. It's hard to do. It's hard to give, it's hard to
receive, it's even hard to talk about. Forgiveness is hard business.
It is soul work on the deepest level.
Forgiveness is hard for a lot of reasons, some of which are healthy
and understandable, some of which are very unhealthy and damaging. Despite
all the practice we've had over a lifetime of telling each other we're
sorry for all the intentional and unintentional hurts and harms we do
to each other in this limited living space together-forgiving each other
is hard.
Let's be clear that we are talking about an adult activity here. When
children practice forgiveness they are practicing adulthood and maturity.
And when adults refuse to forgive, they are quite often acting out of
a very childish stance. Forgiving is the act of a thoughtful and mature
civility between people, the opposite of aggression and vengeance. As
one psychologist puts it, forgiveness is about "preventing the
pains of the past from distorting the joys of the present and undermining
the promise of the future."
If there is one fundamental misunderstanding about what forgiveness
is and what it does, it is this: a lot of us still think forgiveness
is something we give to other people, to people who have wronged us
and who may or may not be sorry for what they did to us. But that is
only part of what forgiveness is, and it completely misses the true
nature and power of forgiveness in our lives.
Forgiveness is first and foremost a gift to ourselves. It is an act
of self-love, self-care, self-respect, self-healing. It is the permission
we give ourselves to let go of the pain of the past so that it does
not define us for the future.
Mrs. Boutellon always wore high-necked frilly blouses with long sleeves.
But one day at the piano my sister saw the number that was tattooed
on Mrs. Boutellon's forearm. It was her identification number from the
prison camp. And when my sister innocently asked what it was, Mrs. Boutellon
patiently explained that the number on her arm represented her past
identity as a prisoner, but now she covered it over not because she
was ashamed of it, but because that was not her identity anymore. It
was not her present, and it was not going to be her future. She had
moved beyond the victimhood of her past, and her future was different.
What people like Mrs. Boutellon understand is that forgiving is the
intentional act of moving away from a place of woundedness, letting
go of that woundedness, letting go of the hurt feelings we harbor from
that woundedness, and leaving it in our past in order to receive unencumbered
the gifts of future growth.
Let me say that again, because a lot of people never think of it quite
this way. Forgiving is the intentional act of moving away from a place
of woundedness, letting go of that woundedness, letting go of the hurt
feelings we harbor from that woundedness, and leaving it in our past
in order to receive unencumbered the gifts of future growth.
Some of us want to move on to new wholeness in our lives, but we are
not ready to put down the burden of the hurt that has been done to us,
we aren't ready to forgive. The wounded child in us wants to carry the
psychological cargo of that hurt around for a little longer. We're moving
in the right direction, we'reaware of what we're doing and what ultimately
we ought to do for ourselves, but we're not yet ready to forgive.
"Can't I skip this forgiveness part for a while and still move
toward wholeness for myself?" we ask. Which is exactly what we
all do whenever we choose to harbor a hurt rather than forgive it. "Can't
I carry this pain with me for just a little longer? Can't I keep this
grudge growing inside of me for a little longer? I don't know if I'm
ready to part with all this anger yet-I'm used to it now, and I'm used
to having this as part of my story. It's part of how I explain and justify
my life now. Can't I carry it for a while longer?"
When we do that, of course, we may indeed move forward in life even
carrying our cargo of unforgiven hurts with us, but we do so only with
diminished capacity. Of course, you would be amazed at just how much
emotional junk some people manage to carry around with them every day.
There are people who carry within their hearts the freight of every
pain and hurt that life has ever dealt them. That such people can even
get out of bed in the morning is a stunning act of strength.
Some people do it. And they do it for years and years. Hold on to that
pain, hold on to that anger, carry that old hurt, never forgive, never
put it down, never clear it out.
The problem is, you see, there's only so much room in the human heart,
literally and figuratively. And if all your heartspace is taken up with
a collection of unforgiven hurts and the junk and clutter of unprocessed
anger and the pain of bitter resentments that you have never managed
to clear out through forgiveness, then your heartspace is all occupied,
unavailable when the good stuff comes along. This day has other things
to give you-if you've made room in your heart to receive other things.
The tragedy of some people's lives is that they've never given themselves
the gift of forgiveness. It isn't an all-or-nothing kind of deal-we
know that. And it isn't a quick fix-all, we know that, too. The heart
gives up its bitterest cargo only piece by piece and the process can
take years. But how tragic to watch people allow a terrible event of
the past to take up so much of their heartspace that there isn't any
room left for new love to touch them, for new hope to lift them, for
new faith to call them out of their pain.
Can you move through life "skipping this forgiveness part,"
carrying the cargo of unforgiven hurts? Of course you can. But it will
cost you. It will cost you heartspace. It will cost you energy and joy
and freedom and love to keep carrying all that junk. In some senses,
it may even cost you your life.
The book How To Forgive When You Don't Know How illustrates this
principle by telling the story of how national park rangers in Africa
catch monkeys in the wild. Maybe you know this already.
"The ranger brings a Plexiglas box, which has a small, round hole
on one side. Into it he slips a banana. He places the box underneath
a tree in which there are some monkeys, then retreats into the distance.
Inevitably one of the monkeys gets curious and comes down out of the
tree to explore the situation. He finally puts his hand through the
hole and picks up the banana. But when he tries to withdraw his hand,
his fist, holding the banana, will not fit through the hole. The monkey
jumps up and down squeaking and squealing, trying to get free. In the
meantime, the ranger appears and captures the monkey. So the question
is, what did the monkey need to do in order to get free? Open his fist
and drop the banana."
Learning how to open fists that have been clutched in rage or anger
for a long time is not simple. We have a lot of wrong ideas about what
forgiveness is and how it works. Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness
is not tolerance. Forgiveness does not mean denying a past hurt. It
does not mean that the feelings of anger are not real or justified.
Forgiveness means simply that I will not allow myself to be defined
only by those things. Forgiveness means I will not allow myself to be
nailed to a spot in the past from which I can never move again.
When the great prophets and teachers of history speak of the human heart,
their teachings begin and end with the lessons of love and its great
and powerful tool of forgiveness. "Forgive us our trespasses,"
one of them taught us to pray, "as we forgive those who trespass
against us." In my opinion, the world would be vastly improved
if churches spent less time teaching people how to repent and more time
teaching people how to forgive.
"This day has other things to give you:" a lesson about heartspace
and survival and liberation from an old Frenchwoman. I hope you pass
it on.
Quest September 2002 Contents
Behold the Grasshopper
by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, professor of entomology, University
of Wyoming and member, the UU Fellowship of Laramie, Wyoming. Excerpted
from his book Grasshopper Dreaming, available at the UUA bookstore
and in the CLF library
Introducing myself at social gatherings as
an entomologist is almost sure to generate interesting conversations.
Everybody has stories to share and questions to ask about their encounters
with insects. I haven't kept count, but the most common question I hear
at parties goes something like, "I know we shouldn't kill them
all, but really, what are they good for?" "Them" refers
to the particular insect that is the topic of discussion. After a moment,
most people suggest their own answer: "I suppose birds eat them."
But somehow this doesn't seem satisfactory, and they want me to explain
the purpose of mosquitoes, miller moths, or grasshoppers.
I admire our increasing awareness that all beings are part of an interconnected
whole and that when a strand of the web is broken, there are often system-wide
effects. All of that is true, but it suggests, however implicitly, that
the purpose of this web somehow involves us humans. The problem is that
nature doesn't exist for us, ecosystems don't care about us, animals
don't generally love us, and the universe doesn't really need us.
I know grasshoppers. I've dedicated my professional life to their study.
Over the past fifteen years, I have employed many methods for learning
about grasshoppers. Only recently have I begun to consider what I might
learn from them. Science provides inumerable tools for learning about
life, but ultimately one must turn to other ways of knowing to discover
how we might learn from it. Fortunately, one can interpret a single
experience from multiple perspectives; "good science" need
not preclude intuitive insight or transcendent understanding. An observation
can provide information, foster knowledge, or evoke wisdom, depending
on what the observer brings to the encounter. So it is that the grasshoppers
have taught me, among other things, the nature and value of nothing.
I began my university research by spending my first summer studying
grasshoppers on the short-grass prairie just north of Fort Collins,
Colorado. I spent hundreds of hours from June to September sitting on
the prairie with a video camera recording grasshopper behavior. Previous
field studies on insect behavior had taught me that the greatest virtue
of my summer's work would be patience. I took breaks periodically, but
real relaxation came only when I became fully engaged in my filming,
when I lost all sense of time and discomfort by total absorption in
the life of grasshoppers. I didn't analyze the ten-foot shelf of videotapes
until later that fall, but even in the summer I knew full well what
grasshoppers did most of the time: nothing. Absolutely nothing.
From the perspectives of ecology and evolution, spending hours engaged
in doing nothing is difficult to explain. After all, these grasshoppers
suffer a daily mortality rate of about 2 percent, meaning that only
about one-third of those that hatch in the spring will survive to reproduce
as adults. Under these circumstances, an organism should be desperately
engaged in securing resources and assuring its biological success-eating
and mating-especially when the essential ingredients are presumably
in short
supply.
However, grasshoppers defy the economics that use either energy or genes
as the currency of life. Grasshoppers are incredibly blasé about
reproducing or feeding. If we consider that grasshoppers often reach
population densities of thirty, forty, and up to one hundred per square
yard, surely they ought to be competing fiercely for their share of
the food. But in my summer of behavioral recording, the grasshoppers
spent only about three minutes out of every hour eating, despite the
impending famine. There was no tragedy of the commons, no gluttonous
devouring of a dwindling larder, no headlong race for each to extract
the most food from the pantry
What are the grasshoppers up to? If we humans were short of resources,
we would surely battle for our share. We'd scurry about attempting to
vanquish competitors, hoard supplies, mate feverishly, and, well, do
much of what we seem to do in the modern world. But grasshoppers aren't
humans. It is not even clear that they are operating under an economy
of shortages, and if they are, there is scant evidence that they are
behaving to ensure a competitive advantage. Why should they? If science
aspires to objectivity, why is it appropriate to ascribe to other beings
the values we use to explain or rationalize our actions? In a great
subjective leap, we presume that competition for limited resources is
the leitmotif of all living beings because this theme defines our own
interactions in and with the world.
The fact is that grasshoppers spend most of their time doing nothing
(unless you count digesting, breathing, and being incidentally warmed
or cooled). Our struggle to understand their languor arises from our
approaching these creatures with the same question with which we approach
one another: "What do you do?" It is as if we can define all
worth in terms of what someone or something does. This assumes that
value is instrumentally derived-things have worth in terms of what they
do for us. Relationships are critically important to defining life,
but they are not the sole measure of our lives.
If we were to reconstruct our scientific understanding in the context
of intrinsic value (the notion that something can have worth in and
of itself), a different interpretation of animal behavior, ecology,
and evolution would emerge. If we seek to reveal the inherent worth
and dignity of life-the intrinsic reality fundamental to Alfred North
Whitehead's metaphysics, the inner being essential to Teilhard de Chardin's
understanding of existence, the self that was the core of Ralph Waldo
Emerson's meaning of life-then it is not surprising that a grasshopper
might spend a couple of hours just sitting.
I am reminded that Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist priest, suggested that
when people are hurrying about and shouting, "Don't just sit there,
do something!" the crisis might be more effectively addressed if
a quiet voice admonished us, "Don't do something, just sit there."
Maybe grasshoppers would make good Buddhists. They certainly defy the
Protestant work ethic (a failing immortalized in the children's tale
"The Ant and the Grasshopper") and the cultural values that
underlie scientific inquiry. Sometimes I wonder why we call ourselves
"human beings," when we spend very little time "being."
Perhaps we ought to call ourselves "human doings" and reserve
the notion of "beings" for the other creatures.
A resting grasshopper is akin to randomness; it manifests a behavior
that fails to fit any identifiable purpose or pattern that we expect
to see. It is, as far as we can tell, doing nothing and persists in
this state of meaningless existence for prolonged periods of time. To
code the behavior of these insects, I designated "resting"
as 0. When analyzing data, we differentiate between "missing data"
and "true zero." Missing data are just that: empty, information-free
spaces because we didn't look (or lost the data). A true zero means
that we looked but didn't see anything. This system, however, presumes
that when we don't see anything, there really is nothing there. Categorizing
resting behavior as a true zero created the illusion that I knew there
was nothing other than an immobile, impassive, nonfeeding, nonmating,
noncompetitive, uncommunicative organism devoid of biological meaning.
What it really meant was that I didn't know what the grasshopper was
doing, or whatever it was doing, it didn't fit any of my expectations
of what a grasshopper ought to be doing.
And so, in answering the polite and honest question "What is a
grasshopper good for?" the ecologist in me wants to discuss the
role of this creature in nutrient cycling, and the evolutionist in me
wants to explain that it is good at replicating itself. But I have come
to understand that these are ends that we impose and values that emerge
only by induction; the grasshopper is unaware of our goals and statistical
extrapolations. We might as well as ask ourselves what our children
are good for: Do we love them because they are efficient omnivores,
effective competitors, successful phenotypes, genetic successors? These
qualities give the right answers to the wrong question. The reason we
value our children is not because of what they do, but because of who
they are. That's why as a spiritual scientist, my answer is that a grasshopper
isn't good for anything. Its presence is of no significance-an ultimate
zero. Its value is in being a grasshopper, nothing more. The grasshopper
just is. And that is enough.
Quest September 2002 Contents
From the Board Chair:
As you read in the July/August issue of Quest, the Church of the Larger
Fellowship board of directors has decided to experiment with the way
we run our annual fund-raising campaign. In October, we will try to
contact as many CLFers as possible by telephone, asking every member
for a pledge for the 2003 calendar year.
The CLF office will be filled with Harvard Divinity School students
to assist us in making personal contact with you. Now, before you decide
irrevocably that you don't like the idea of getting a telephone call
at home in the evening, consider this: When is the last time you got
a call from your church? We hope you will decide to enjoy the phone
call from Boston and be gentle with our student callers. We think they're
great to help us.
One problem with this wonderful plan is that we don't have telephone
numbers for all our church members, so we hope you will e-mail us your
phone number at clf@uua.org or call the office and give it to us at
617-948-6166.
As David Pohl said in his recent letter to CLF donors, "Our worldwide
ministry continues today because of the support of friends like you."
Please welcome our telephone call in mid-October as an opportunity to
support your church community and its mission to provide ministry and
a spiritual home within Unitarian Universalism to isolated religious
liberals.
In the quest,
Brad Greeley
Welcome Times Two
Welcome to our two new CLF staff members, Eliza Blanchard and
Dan Harper. Eliza will be our ministerial intern for the 2002-2003
program year. She is from the Boston area and attends Harvard Divinity
School. Eliza is a former Director of Religious Education and will work
half time at CLF and half time at the Arlington Street Church in Boston.
Dan Harper will be CLF's interim director of religious education. Dan
will work part-time at CLF writing for Quest (you will be reading him
in the October issue), managing the RE e-mail list, providing RE support
to CLF families, and helping the CLF board and RE committee to design
the religious education program here at CLF.
Did You Know
that we welcome letters to the editor?
Just send them along in your CLF reply envelope or e-mail us at: clf@uua.org.
Quest September 2002 Contents
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