Farewell to NYC?

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 24^th of February, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
on a late winter's morning,
to worship, to allow ourselves to be called
to lives of higher purpose and deeper questions.
With word and music, silence and rhythm,
we risk awareness and even love.
And as we become more and more who we are

(together) And may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become..

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

On this very place, under the saffron sunlight
that has fallen for billions of years,
the generations of life have risen and fallen
risen and fallen, risen and fallen.

Now, I see this very place
with the vision of timeless imagination.
Underneath our feet, carpet.
Under the carpet, flooring.
Under the flooring, a vast dark foundation.
Under the foundation, the earth.

On this very earth, first, I see a warm ocean
teeming with soft, eyeless life.

On this very earth, second, I see a cold sea,
its indigo deeps jagged with many-legged creatures
serpentine, armored and segmented.

On this very earth, third, I see a silver swamp,
with reeds waving as amphibious tails whip them.

On this very earth, fourth,
I see a nest of allosaur babies,
hatching from soft shells in the morning sun.

On this very earth, fifth, I see a deep night at noon,
with steaming clouds and dust-darkened rain.

On this very earth, sixth, I see the trails of
small deer running from the scent
of large forest cats, hungry.

On this very earth, seventh,
I see the footprints left by the women
crossing the forest here on their way
to the river, which they call
"There is red face paint here"
or, in their tongue, O Lenta N'gy.

On this very earth, eighth,
I see trees being felled
and lumber hauled away.

On this very earth, ninth,
I see a dull-colored wooden farm house
and small barn, with two men,
Will Gillie and Ed Slowter measuring
its size with their eyes.

On this very earth, tenth,
I see a stucco white building being combined
with this great square of wood and glass
and color and green leaf, and angle and
apse and corner and floor.

And here we are, we who live at this moment,
seeing all of this in silence…together.

silence

We bind ourselves to all who live and have
died in our days, everyone of which is a rose
born of a billion years no less than ourselves.

We name those whom we remember with
love, or reach out to in love, aloud, or in the
silent breathing inside us.

naming

a thousand million years to us….
from wind in the forest fronds
to African chants,
from murmurs of the primitive seas
to women dancing the folk tunes of Bulgaria,
from calls of the sauropods
to the thunder of Bach at the organ,
from the scented wind in the grasses
to Ellington dreaming a jazzy future of love
for every one of us….

First Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from an excellent small book, The No Nonsense Guide to Climate Change by Dinyar Godrej, a citizen of Central India, who now lives and works in Rotterdam.

The Role of Ozone

The inhabitants of Punta Arenas in Chile became prisoners in their own homes in October 2000. They weren't hemmed in by insurrection or the threat of infectious disease, but by the sun blazing above them. A month earlier, NASA scientists had announced the largest-ever hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, over an area more than three times the size of the U.S. By October it had extended over the tips of Chile and Argentina, opening up over Punta Arenas. As harmful Ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radiation spread over their city, those venturing out during daylight hours risked irreversible damage to their skin and eyes, which could result in cancer and cataracts. In neighboring Argentina, citizens of Ushuaia were warned that unprotected skin could burn after just seven minutes' exposure. The filter of ozone high up in the stratosphere had been whisked off and the ultraviolet radiation was pouring in through the hole, a bit like a beam of light falling through a magnifying lens.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from the first Nobel Laureate in Literature for Chile, Gabriella Mistral. She lived for a while in the States, but certainly, she was one of those rare persons who was as much a citizen of the world as of her own beloved native land.

Riches

I have an abiding bliss
and a lost fortune,
one like a rose,
the other like a thorn.
I was not cut off from that
which was stolen from me.
I have an abiding bliss
and a lost fortune,
and I am rich with purple
and with melancholy.
Oh, how beloved is the rose,
and what a lover, the thorn!
Like the double contour
of twin fruits, I have an abiding bliss
and a lost fortune.

Sermon: Farewell to NYC? [Next][back to top]

During my ministry, I have been fortunate enough to take two sabbaticals from my ministerial work, according to our Unitarian Universalist professional practice. My first sabbatical took me to Russia, back in Soviet days, where I studied Russian art and architecture first hand. My second sabbatical took me to Chile, where I lived for a while on the farm owned by my good friend Bonni Carryer.

Bonni is from Port Huron, Michigan, but she has spent all of her adult life overseas. She's lived in France, Spain, Algeria, Mozambique and finally in Chile, where she resides today with her husband Ignacio and my Star Wars - loving "god-daughter," Andrea Maria Salome.

My sabbatical to Chile took place in the winter of 1994, speaking from the North American bias. Of course, it was full-blown summer down there. Bonni and Ignacio live an hour north of Puerto Montt, on a farm that spreads across the rolling Oregon-like landscape. I milked cows, cooked on a wood burning stove, and otherwise did things as far away from parish work as I could get.

While I was down there, I decided to take a side trip to Tierra Del Fuego, the very tip of South America, and the most remote place on earth by many lights.

Even from Puerto Montt, it was a long journey, a two and a half hour flight.The Andes Mountains towered underneath the belly of the plane, and volcanoes thrust their snowy heads almost as high up as we were.

I was flying to the town of Punta Arenas, which might translate into English as Sandy Point. It's a small city, less than 100,000 people, but it's the main city in the Tierra Del Fuego area. Only two very small towns, Puerto Williams and Ushiaia, are any further south. Punta Arenas itself is, in fact, much closer to the South Pole than either Capetown in South Africa or Hobart in Tasmania.

It's a strange town, certainly worth a visit. The climate is very odd, because of its location at the juncture of two oceans. The wind blows so much down there, and with such force, that no trees can grow, unless they are protected. Thus, the only trees in Punta Arenas proper are in the downtown park, which is entirely protected by tall buildings. As a result of this lack of trees, all the homes in this distant place are built of tin, not wood. But they are painted, quite deftly I must add, to look as if they were created by the hand of a very talented Victorian-era carpenter.

The clouds above the city are blown by the relentless wind into unusual smooth shapes. Imagine, if you will, football-field size pie plates tossed in the glowing air.

Punta Arenas sits on the Straits of Magellan, or Magallanes, as they say down there. The water in the straits is such a cold, indigo blue that it seems almost black to the eye.

The flora and fauna are unique too. Giant stalks of purple flowers they call chochos fill the gardens. And in the park I saw no trees I recognized from North America. And then there are the cute penguins which waddle on the shoreline in large groups. Guanacos (pronounced wa nah kos---a kind of American camel) and giant rheas (pronounced ray'uz--a kind of swift American ostrich) run wild in the strange and rocky green-gray landscape outside the city environs. In short, it's a very different place than Columbus.

But by far the strangest thing about my trip to Tierra Del Fuego had nothing to do with odd clouds, or styles of architecture or unusual flowers or animals. It had to do with what I was told when the plane landed at the airport. Before we left the craft, we were told in no uncertain terms, both in Spanish and in English, that none of us on the plane were to walk around Punta Arenas without wearing a hat, longsleeves, the best possible sun-block, and polarized sunglasses. We were told that children, by law, were to stay indoors from ten to three each and every day. No one was allowed to walk down the beach even in clothes, let alone swim in a suit, even on the hottest of January summer days.

Why? Because of the hole in the ozone that had opened up over Tierra del Fuego.

The sober description that our first reading, from Dinyar Godrej, sets in the year 2000 I experienced personally in 1994. All the scientific information he gives is correct, about the ultra-violet radiation, and cataracts blinding the animals in the south. The eyes of all the guanacos and rheas I mentioned, as well as family pets, like dogs and cats, are clouding over in the raw sunlight pouring from the sky.

But when I was Punta Arenas, I didn't hear scientific descriptions about ultraviolet radiation. I only saw a vision of everyday life severely changed for the worse, a vision of such cautious and careful living that the awareness of it cut a jagged rip in my soul.

The rip in my soul clearly paralleled the huge tear in the atmosphere of the earth over my head. But instead of being blinded, I suddenly felt like I could see, as if for the first time. Why, I wondered, is this rip in the sky not a big piece of news up here in the States? We are told routinely here in the States that winters like the one we are having, warm winters with day after day of temperatures twenty degrees above freezing, are because of El Nino or El Nina, unusual warm water areas in the Pacific.

In actual fact, winters are getting warmer all over the world, for a lot more reasons than El Nino. So are the summers. And this has been a fact for decades. Twenty years ago, when my friend Bonni was living in Mozambique, there was a drought there that surpassed the famous dust bowl in the central US in the twentieth century. This drought was part of the same pattern of climactic change that is bringing us more and more warm winters. But in those days, we did not hear much about the tremendous number of deaths by starvation there…after all, Mozambique was a Socialist regime back then, and why should we care about such people and their calamities?

But when I got back from South America I found out part of the reason why this change of life in South America is of so little concern up here.

Upon my return, I told a friend of mine what I had experienced down in South America. I told him what I had heard about the connection between this tear in the ozone and the whole issue of global warming.

He said, "Aw, there's no global warming. That's a fairy tale. And the hole in the ozone down there only came about because of volcanic eruptions in the Antarctic area."

"That doesn't make any sense," I said to him. Volcanoes actually usually create ozone, not deplete it." But then it hit me…"Jim," I said, "wait a minute, what company do you work for?"

"You know very well what company I work for, PG&E," he said, "Pacific Gas and Electric." That's right, the power company of central California.

And it was then I began to read more and more about the difference between the practice of scientific method among employees of the oil and power companies and the science utilized by the rest of the world. Let me say a bit about this.

Since 1979 at the first World Climate conference in Switzerland, when scientific speculation slowly gave way to world scientific consensus, there have been many, many other venues calling world governments to, in the words of the Swiss conference, "prevent and prepare for the negative impacts of human induced climate change."

In 1988, a United State scientist, James Hansen from NASA, gave a speech on the hottest day of the year in Washing- ton DC which so galvanized the world science community that the United Nations instituted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The reality that this speech in the US, which only spoke of a few degrees of raised temperatures here in North America, caused so much of stir, when speeches around the world about the great African drought that killed millions were not even noted, caused no little bitterness in the world scientific community. The political nature of the world climate discussion became painfully evident to one and all.

But ultimately, the expressed bitterness that North America counts, whereas Africa does not, is less stirring to me than the questionable activities of the great fossil fuel companies. They have spent millions of dollars in an attempt to use scare-tactics and innuendo to cast doubt on the whole issue of climate change. Those volcanoes in Antarctica are a case in point. Despite thousands of studies to the contrary, the companies that most stand to lose economically from changes made to carbon dioxide emission standards are really determined to lose nothing at all. Even, apparently, if it costs the next generation of human beings the potential loss of their own lives, and worse, the planet.

The International Petroleum Industries' Environmental Conservation Association is a sad case in point. Using a totally deceptive title, the so-called scientists of this organization, all on the payroll of the industry, take every assertion of the UN Inter-govermental Panel on Climate Change (ICPP) and call it into question by saying there are "uncertainties." Of, course, of course, "uncertainties" while the citizens of Tierra Del Fuego walk around swathed in very certain hats and shirts while their pets go, most certainly, blind. Furthermore, the climate skeptics have tried to make a circus of the whole thing…the infamous conference at Rio De Janeiro in 1992 had over ten thousand whipped-up reporters helping to support a sense that all the scientists, except those in the employ of the petroleum companies, were so many Chicken Littles, claiming that the sky is falling, when in fact it's not.

I need to point out that this really has to do with the needs of the corporations, too, not necessarily conservative politics per se. I think you will agree that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of England was hardly known for her liberal agenda, yet she vociferously brought up the dangers of global warming throughout her tenure, calling her people to respond to it in any number of ways. But Mrs. Thatcher could say so, because she was never in the employ of an oil company.

At the even more famous Kyoto conference on this subject, where island nations expressed worry about water levels rising because of global warming, thus drowning their nations, and when Italy expressed concern over losing the Po River valley due to flooding, many of the United States folks expressed no fear at all that New York City could be underwater in less than fifty years, a very real possibility if emission standards continue as they are, unchecked. And this summer, when our national government completed the outrage by dismissing the Kyoto Accords out of hand, I sat down and actually went pale with despair.

Now some folks may wonder why we told the Noah story this morning. It's a biblical story, but it's also a story found in most middle eastern nations in antiquity, and there is even a Greek version.

Well, in its present form, the story is a moralistic fairy tale, to be sure. But recently, many archeologists in the world are beginning to wonder if the story of a flood destroying a whole civilization might not have a basis in a real event. Many, many thousands of years ago, there was a climate change associated with the end of the ice age. This was a natural climate change, not created by humanity, but nonetheless a serious one. Water levels rose. The Black Sea was once just a small lake. We know this because Turkish maritime archeologists have found the remains of whole towns underwater, with buildings that used to huddle on the shore of a much smaller body of water. But when water levels rose, the much higher Mediterranean flooded into the huge inhabited basin, which eventually became the Black Sea. Tens of thousands perished in a very short time.

The ancients wondered if such calamities happened only to terrible people, and thus the Hebrew moralistic stories of Noah, the Babylonian Utnapishtim, and even the Greek Deukaleon, were born.

But today the ark in the story is not a ship, but the whole planet. And the theological question of why terrible things happen to humanity is replaced by the question, "What can we modern Noahs, who both have the power to make the flood and build the ark, do about it?"

Gabriela Mistral gives us the first suggestion. She insists we have to love the riches of the earth passionately. The earth is as precious as a rose, she says, but we can lose it. We can lose the whole fortune if we continue to live in denial that this is even possible. We have to acknowledge that the thorn of this beautiful rose is real…climate changes have happened in the past and they will happen again in the future. But this one is different. We ourselves, by the way of life we have come to accept, have contributed to the wilting of the flower.

And thus, it's up to us to contribute to the solution.

There are many things we can do that are simple, but will make a difference. We can turn our thermostats down a few degrees, install energy-efficient light bulbs, wash our clothes in cold water.

We can also reduce our daily consumption of almost everything. We can walk more, drive less. We can support every sensible effort to bring good public transit…clean public transit, to our growing city. We can eat two or three vegetarian meals a week, since meat production is often very damaging to the environment. We can drive energy efficient cars, and buy only energy efficient appliances. We can support the development of electric cars.

But most importantly, we can be part of the groundswell of opinion that, even now, is protesting against the United States rejection of the Kyoto Protocols. In this modern world you see, arks are built, not of gopher wood, but of sound policies and sound practices. Every single voice is important in this regard.

Look, I know this is complicated and frightening stuff. I know a sermon can only scratch the surface of such concerns. If you want to read more, I will make sure I put some suggested reading on the sermon site on our web page.

The earth is our "abiding bliss," in Mistral's words, but we can lose it. We can lose the rose that is our home, the planet earth; we can be washed away in a flood of sunlight no less than the mythical citizens of Noah's town were washed away in a flood of water, unless we remain aware of how government policies shape our future. I began this sermon by telling you how much I learned by taking a sabbatical. But maybe now it's time for us all to take a sabbatical, a spiritual sabbatical…a sabbatical from ways of thinking that we have moved to unconsciously. Maybe this sermon is calling us to greater awareness about how we live our everyday life. Maybe we have to take a sabbatical from ways of living that imply that we can go on consuming as we have, and that the abundance of the earth is infinite. It is not, any more than a rose is infinite.

"I was not cut off," says Mistral, "from that which was stolen from me." We are not cut off, either, from the consequences of our decisions.

And please, don't tell me that all I have done is to help you feel guilty every time you drive your car or eat some meat. That's just plum foolish. Guilt, after all, is no different than bodily pain. Pain in our bodies reminds us something needs to be done to protect ourselves from further injury. Pain is obviously no good in, and of itself. And guilt, too, reminds us that something needs to change for the better before things change for the worst, as in the case of Punta Arenas.

And all I am saying in this sermon, therefore, is, something needs to be done. Let's you and I get on with it..

Prayer   [back to top]

Benedictus Terrae

Blessed is the earth, our only home,
our holy home.
Blessed is the earth, our only home,
our common home.
Blessed is the earth, our only home,
our ailing home.
Blessed is the earth, our only home,
our fragile home.
Blessed is the earth, our only home,
our common responsibility.
Blessed is the earth, our only home,
our holy responsibility.
Blessed is the earth, our only home,
our only home, our only home.
Blessed is the earth. May we love it
even more than we love ourselves,
day upon day, year upon year.

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