May All Be Blessed

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

October 2, 2011

 

Sermon:  May All Be Blessed        -Rev. Paul Sprecher

 

Here are some word of gratitude as expressed by Gary Kowalski:

We give thanks for the earth and its creatures,

And are grateful from A to Z:

For alligators, apricots, acorns and apple trees,

For bumblebees, blueberries, bananas and beagles,

Coconuts, crawdads, cornfields and coffee,

Daisies, elephants, and flying fish,

For groundhogs, glaciers, and grasslands,

Hippos and hazelnuts, icicles and iguanas,

 juniper, jackrabbits and junebugs,

Kohlrabi and kangaroos, lightning bugs and licorice,

For mountains, milkweed and mistletoe,

Narwhals and nasturtiums, otters and ocelots,

For peonies, persimmons and polar bears,

Quahogs and Queen Anne's Lace,

For raspberries and roses,

Salmon and sassafras, tornadoes and tulipwood,

Urchins and valleys and waterfalls,

For X (the unknown, the mystery of it all!)

In every yak and yam:

We are grateful, good Earth, not least of all

For zinnias, zucchini and zebras,

And for the alphabet of wonderful things

That are simple as ABC.[i]

We love the animals we take as our pets; we care for them as members of our family, because they are.  At the same time, we sometimes miss the beauty of creatures who are wild but who can inspire us with their haunting voices and lavish colors or diverse habitats or their very presence.  We raise animals for food, and we need to recognize that we are stewards of the other living things on our planet.

Mary Oliver captures the casual and astonishing beauty of birds in her meditation on an encounter with a meadowlark:

Meadowlark, when you sing it's as if

you lay your yellow breast upon mine and say

hello, hello, and are we not

of one family, in our delight of life?

You sing, I listen.

Both are necessary

if the world is to continue going around

night-heavy then light-laden,

though not everyone knows this or at least

not yet,

 

or, perhaps, has forgotten it

in the torn fields,

in the terrible debris of progress.[ii]

Who among us has not sometimes seen one or several deer standing or walking gracefully through the woods or across our yards and been touched by their sheer elegance?  Then again, there are other times when we feel overwhelmed by their expansion into new territories – not to mention their role in spreading deer ticks and Lyme disease.  But there is available a kind of peace and joy in the contemplation of the birds and other beings with which we share this fragile earth.

This morning we have raised up many of the pets we love now and have loved in the course of our lives.  The companionship and caring we share for our pets opens a dimension of pleasure that vastly expands the circle of love and kinship available to us.  For children, there is a natural identification with the young of other species and, for many, a first opportunity to care for another being in the ways that they are also cared for – feeding, walking, cuddling, cleaning up after – for example.  The death of a pet is also one of the early lessons our children have of mortality.  I remember how our son David mourned the loss of Ebony, one of the first cats in our household, how carefully he tended the grave daily for weeks, and how glad he was when a new cat came into our lives to help relieve the loss he had experienced.

Our pets teach us about love.  Here’s Mary Oliver with more about her dog Percy:

Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night (Three)

He puts his cheek against mine

and makes small, expressive sounds.

And when I'm awake, or awake enough

 

he turns upside down, his four paws

in the air

and his eyes dark and fervent.

 

Tell me you love me, he says.

Tell me again.

Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over

he gets to ask it.

I get to tell.[iii]

We also raise animals for food.  I grew up on a farm with chickens and pigs and cows and stray cats and a string of outdoor dogs.  I was familiar with how chickens running around the yard were sometimes converted to food for the table by my grandmother.  I saw how our animal husbandry required gelding and de-horning young livestock, and with my brother I raised and fell in love with a young calf whom we called Henry and, when the time came, we took him off to Oscar Meyer’s to become part of someone’s sustenance.  I was close to the realities of raising and using meat, and parts of it were harsh.  Now the processes that go into the raising of meat bringing it to my table are very remote from me.  I am not aware in any real way of the practices of factory farming that have almost completely replaced the idyllic family farms of the sort I knew as a boy.  This very remoteness keeps me from experiencing the reality of the practice of factory farming, or the reality of the suffering of the animals who are merely part of the food chain that brings meat to my table, or the environmental consequences that follow from the intensity and volume of meat consumed.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, living at a much earlier stage in the development of animal husbandry, was already sensitive to the reality of that disconnection.  He said: “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”[iv] The usage of meat all around the world has soared as prosperity has spread.  Mark Bittman, in an article entitled “Re-thinking the Meat Guzzler” in the New York Times, offers this projection:

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons [a four-fold increase]. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050.[v]

There are consequences for people without enough to eat.  Bittman notes that two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories as the direct consumption of grain.  “It is as much as ten times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.” The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization documents how the increasing consumption of meat around the world is impacting the environment:

The sheer quantity of animals being raised for human consumption also poses a threat of the Earth's biodiversity. Livestock account for about 20 percent of the total terrestrial animal biomass, and the land area they now occupy was once habitat for wildlife. In 306 of the 825 terrestrial eco-regions identified by the Worldwide Fund for Nature, livestock are identified as "a current threat", while 23 of Conservation International's 35 "global hotspots for biodiversity" - characterized by serious levels of habitat loss - are affected by livestock production.[vi]

We have not even mentioned the effect that the suffering of animals who are brought to our table has on us humans.  Albert Schweitzer, an early member of our Unitarian Universalist Church of the Larger Fellowship, was famously a proponent of Respect for all Life.  He speaks of the need for compassion this way:

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.  If man is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness toward animals, for he who is cruel to animals, becomes hard also in his dealings with men.  We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.[vii]

I believe that humans, as the dominant species, have a responsibility to be good stewards of the earth, of all the living things that inhabit the earth, and of the web of life of which we are a part, as our seventh Unitarian Universalist principle avows.  The story of creation in the first chapter of Genesis ends with a charge from God to the humans:

[Genesis 1:28 (NIV)] “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”  We have been fruitful, we have multiplied, and we have filled the earth.  In our modern world, we have perfected ruling over the animal kingdom.  Indeed, we have succeeded so well that all of life is held now in human hands, and “ruling over” must now be understood to mean caring for, being good stewards of this good earth and all of the beings with whom we share it.  Our dominance calls on humans to protect other beings from extinction and also from cruelty.  Let us strive to extend the love we experience or have experienced for the pets we have known to all of God’s creatures. 

There is a good deal we have to learn about love from our pets.  Mary Oliver takes a lesson about balancing between the life of the mind and the life of pure joy that her beloved dog Percy (mostly) inhabits:

Percy and Books (Eight)

Percy does not like it when I read a book.

He puts his face over the top of it and moans.

He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.

The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.

The tide is out and the neighbor's dogs are playing.

But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!

The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories

that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

 

Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.

Let's go.[viii]

Finally, Percy shares with the poet the sum of his wisdom:

I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life (Ten)

Love, love, love, says Percy.

And hurry as fast as you can

along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.

 

Then, go to sleep.

Give up your body heat, your beating heart.

Then, trust.[ix]

Like St. Francis, we can learn to love better, we can have more joy, we can find balance in our lives, and the beings all around us can help to teach us how.

May it be so, and amen.

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