Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Blessed Unrest

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
March 30, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

 

There is an unrest in the human heart and the human mind, the human heart/mind. A deep, disturbing, unmitigated unrest. A choral sounding, vibrant and unrelenting, an unrest that is one of the most powerful characteristics of the human we can name. This is true even for those few who dwell within that peace spoken of in the wisest passages of the world’s religious literature — the peace that passeth understanding — even for those few steeped in that vastly wide and pacific view, there ultimately exists a dissatisfaction, a yearning, not for their own liberation or for a cessation of inner conflict, for they have come to deeply know and largely live in that freedom — but for an end to suffering for all human kind. How can anyone be ultimately at peace when there are others who are suffering? How could anyone be satisfied when they know others are in need, are oppressed, or are living unfulfilled? The fact is, the more we grow in maturity, the more we deepen emotionally, the more wisdom we have access to, the more compassion flows in our veins, then the more fully and richly related we actually feel to others. As we mature, our freedom becomes more contingent in a deeper more profound and humane way.

That restlessness, both to personally transform, and to foment and assist in the healing and transformation of others who suffer, that restlessness leads us to the further reaches of identity, where the world is literally lover and self … and the self is literally lover and world. Remember the words of Alice Walker’s character “Shug” in The Color Purple; I used it in our Benediction two weeks ago. In the passage Shug is vividly recounting her journey away from an anthropomorphic white male God, into … well, into something more. The passage goes like this:

She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and cried and ran all around the house.

Joy that there is no separation. Joy at the experience of the final conscious conjunction of the unity of all life. But joy that had its origin in a deep sense of alienation, isolation, abandonment — which is, though powerful and undeniable, a trauma of conditioning not the condition of human normality. From that place of desolation, induced by, stimulated by oppression and by loss, a true shift can sometimes come, as it did for Shug. And, I submit that it rises, rather than from what seems to be a spontaneous emergence, actually from years of aching restlessness.

Restlessness not just to be free from pain, but, further, as an act of affirmation of a truth that would not let her go, would not let her go because her restlessness was leading her somewhere, somewhere bigger and wildly more fulfilling.

It is that same sense of restlessness that we all need to tap now, in our own lives and in our communities. For we live in dark times. Paul Hawkens, in his book, Blessed Unrest, in order to lay a true and stable groundwork for authentic hope, provides a sharp look into the heart of the disaster:

Global civilization is endangered by … isms. Climatic stability may be lost for centuries to come [or forever], poverty increases, fisheries collapse, megacities teem with influxes of rural refugees, water tables fall, and hunger and malnutrition grow, even in the richest country in the world. The twentieth century saw the greatest rate of destruction to the environment in all recorded history. It was also the cruelest, harshest, and bloodiest century in history. Eighty million were slaughtered from the beginning of the century through World War II; since then, more than 23 million people (mostly civilians) have been killed in more than 149 wars. For every dollar spent on U.N. peacekeeping, $2,000 is expended for warmaking by member nations. Four of the five members of the U.N. Security Council which has veto power over all U.N. resolutions, are the top weapons dealers in the world: The United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia.

In one day alone we pump 85 million barrels of petroleum out of the ground, and then burn it up. And on the same day we spew the waste of 27 billion pounds of [ toxic ] coal into the atmosphere. One hundred million displaced people now wander the earth without a home. One company, Wal-Mart, employs 1.8 million people. ExxonMobil made nearly $40 billion in profits, in 2006, enough money to permanently supply pure clean drinking water to the 1 billion people who need it. We have consumed 90 percent of all the big fish in the oceans.

And then Hawkens adds this little coup d’grace that exposes economic disparity and entitlement by writing:

Bill Gate’s house covers one and a half acres and cost nearly $100 million.

Then he adds: “Not surprisingly, people don’t know that they count in such a malordered, destabilized world, don’t know that they are of value. A healthy global civilization cannot be constructed without building blocks of meaning, which are hewn of rights and respect.”

And that is where Hawkens’ research into a global movement for justice and environmental integrity and healing took him, and it is where I sincerely want to go, as well: To the recreation, or rather creation, of a global civilization that is healthy, built on “blocks” of ethics and commitments, suffused with nurturing and wise meaning, whose core substance is rights that guarantee human freedom and respect that honors human integrity.

That is where I deeply want to travel, that is the world that I want to help build. But it is not an easy road. It has never been an easy road, we all know. Human history is shot through with violence and disorder, with greed and oppression. However, t is not enough for me to quickly lift up that human history has also been filled with peace-seeking and insightful institution building, with compassion and liberation … it is not enough because we need more than to hear once again the story of our paradoxical nature, our flawed though creative human character.

We need more.

Eco-feminist Joanna Macy, from whose work I spoke earlier this Church year, offers us a deep insight into the true transformation we really yearn for, the change we really need, that will not brook what Protestant theologians have called “cheap Grace,” and what I will here call “Cheap Hope.” Joanna, fully aware that our circumstances are dire, and that we might well fail, writes this about the possibility of world-wide transformation and healing:

Its risk of failure is its reality. Insisting on belief in a positive outcome puts blinders on us and burdens the heart. [Insisting on belief in a positive outcome puts blinders on us and burdens the heart.] We might manage to convince our selves that everything will surely turn out all right, but would such happy assurance elicit our greatest courage and creativity? [Would such happy assurance elicit our greatest courage and creativity?]

Hawkens has made a wonderful effort to offer something more that looks beyond false hope for a positive outcome through the lens of real experience. Through fifteen years, and after almost 1,000 talks about the environment around the world he has amassed data that is hopeful and stirring about the millions of people and institutions working to ensure justice and safeguard the environment. He describes it all as a movement without a name, a movement that no one saw was coming. He says it has three basic roots: environmental activism, social justice initiatives, and indigenous cultures’ resistance to globalization — all of which have become intertwined. I would argue that the braid of transformation he has revealed has yet another root and dynamic, one that if not fulfilled will ultimately undermine the other three. That root is an authentic transformation of human consciousness and the human heart.

But let me say more about the strands he has pinpointed. In one of the book’s early passages he names eight people who are unknown to each other, but whose justice and environmental work are all actions that, when viewed with the right lens, demonstrate a far larger effort. From work by Clayton Thomas-Müller in the Cree nation in northern Alberta, Canada, on toxic waste “lakes so big you can see them from outer space;” to Shi Lihong, founder of Wild China, and her film documentary work on “migrants displaced by the construction of large dams;” to Rosalina Tuyuc Velázquez and the Maya-Kaqchukel people fighting for “full accountability for tens of thousands of victims of death squads in Guatemala;” to Rodrigo Baggio, teaching poor children computer skills in the favelas of Brazil on discarded computers he procured from New York, London and Toronto; to biologist Janine Benyus who speaks to 1,200 business executives at a forum in Queensland about biologically inspired industrial development; to Paul Sykes part of the fifty thousand people who tally 70 million birds in one day of the Christmas Bird Count in north America; to Sumita Dasgupta on a ten-day trek through Gujarat, India with students, engineers, journalists, farmers and tribal people exploring the rebirth of ancient rainwater harnessing and catchment systems to relieve drought-prone areas; to Silas Kpanan’Ayoung Siakor who “exposes links between the genocidal policies of President Charles Taylor and illegal logging in Liberia resulting in international sanctions and the introduction of certified, sustainable timber policies;” from all these Hawkens traces the outlines of a massive, effective movement for justice and environmental healing that has almost entirely escaped notice by the world’s mainstream media.

Of this movement he says: “It claims no special powers and arises in small discrete ways, like blades of grass after a rain. The movement grows and spreads in every city and country, and involves virtually every tribe, culture, language, and religion from Mongolians to Uzbeks to Tamils. It is composed of families in India, students in Australia, farmers in France, the landless in Brazil, the Bananeras of Honduras, the ‘poors’ of Durban, villagers in Irian Jaya, indigenous tribes of Bolivia, and housewives in Japan. Its leaders are farmers, zoologists, shoemakers, and poets. It provides support and meaning to billions of people in the world.”

Later he says, “The industrial Revolution went unnamed for more than a century, in part because its developments did not fit conventional categories, but also because no one could define what was taking place, even though it was evident everywhere.”

The world is in the grip of a transformation so profound that it can’t even see it. We are awash in change so vast we have not found the right focus to grasp its breadth and outline. We are riding an outrider reality, running along side the caravan headed ever deeper in to the territories of global disorder and degradation — along side and ahead, challenging the drivers to alter their course — but, the fact is, we haven’t yet grasped neither the import nor the depth of responsibility of our outrider function.

When I lifted up the fourth root of the movement, the root of the transformation of self, of consciousness, however, I did so with a special purpose; to put that requirement, to put that necessary struggle directly and clearly before us so that we could be inspired to touch it more deeply. Beyond therapy, beyond self-help and self-improvement, there is a journey that we must engage. It is the work that is the deepest response to our inner restlessness, the blessed unrest that will not let us forget what the human endeavor is about at its most fundamental core. The excavation of our deepest values, values that coalesce around a single creative drive: the drive to love, to express love, to wrap ourselves in love, to push away all hate love, the love that draws us into relationship, over and over with what we most fear, what we most disagree with, what will challenge our rigidity and confusion, our distaste and our disorder. The love that reveals just how frightened we are of our future and the world’s future, and just how determined we are to do our part, no matter how small, no matter how slow, no matter what the cost.

The Industrial Revolution was, in a sense, an expression, fundamentally, of the adolescence of the human enterprise of global civilization, an adolescence of vibrancy, to be sure, but also of a developmentally and tragically limited grasp of the consequences of our actions and creations. This emerging revolution, the one we sit squarely in right now, is calling out our maturity, our spiritual and our ethical maturity, for in it we have to be fully conscious, fully conscious of the widest possible range of consequences, we have to be willing to assume responsibility for what we do in ways never before asked of us.

If we do not meet the challenge, if we shrink away, if we hide in our supposed insignificance, if we allow our frequent numbness to the world’s difficulties to rock us into moral oblivion … there is no telling how bad it will get, but it will undoubtedly be inescapably grim, grim beyond reckoning.

If we do accept the call to change, to open ourselves to the fullness of the difficulties, and thereby to the hidden and creative strengths that lie within, lie within the soft and generous satchel of the heart, wherein lives the love that will not, will never let us rest — then the creative possibilities are endless, the solidarity with human kind and the earth greater than human beings have ever before known or can imagine.

May we be courageous enough, responsible enough, eager enough, hungry enough, wise enough and above all, restless enough, to claim the love that is needed and that awaits us so openly.

May we, as a community, also find an authentic enthusiasm and our birthright bravery to step out — where we are so desperately needed.

It is in our hands.

 

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.