Earth is our home: January 2006 Archives

I sit overlooking a lake near Orlando, Florida. The UUMA's Committee on Ministry for Anti-racism, Anti-oppression and Multiculturalism is on retreat. We talk of situations, of problems and solutions. We share our own stories. The UUA has organized a transformation committee to do this work. They have wisely chosen to look at one institutional change at a time. We look at cases. Situations involving ministers in real concrete situations facing the processes and procedures that our community of faith has instituted to regulate and regularize our interconnections.
Our conversations are deep and sometimes when we look at a case we jointly experience the pain of doing this work. The Lake is good, and reminds us that we are sustained and renewed always.

Hills. Mountains. It is good for the human soul to behold the earth rising up toward the sky and falling down in to ravines and valleys.

Florida is beautiful, but it is so flat. I miss the rises. Marjorie and I arrived in Albuquerque yesterday afternoon. We met two colleagues, rented a van and drove up to Sante Fe by way of the scenic route stopping for a little browsing in an old mining village which apparently has been converted into a dozens of art galleries. The rents for setting up a gallery in Sante Fe must be really high, or the tourists must drive this scenic road a lot, to make it worthwhile. We didn't see may customers, but there were lots of vendors and quite a few artists.

I am here in Sante Fe for the January meeting of the UUMA exec. Our agenda is full. There is work relative to the UUA policies and ministers that we spend lots of time working on. But in our polity the association of ministers and the association of congregations are partners rather than antagonists. Some ministerial colleagues would love it if the UUMA were a union, and fought for ministers rights with congregations and the association. I have more experience as a trade unionist than 99% of my colleagues (three unions, steward, secretary treasurer of a local, and a field organizer) and I can't imagine how such a minister's union would work. Already we help by creating model contracts for parish ministers with congregations, and creating best practice guidelines. But the UUA is as association of congregations is not an antagonist to ministers, and ministers are not antagonists to their congregations. The UUA can't implement its policies without ministers, and ministers interests are bound up in the health and welfare of strong congregations. We are not employees, we are clergy, and the UUMA is an association of clergy. I am sure the conversation will go on.

So this morning I am a mile higher than yesterday. Loving it.

Some times new Unitarian Universalists are curious about why so many of our congregations consider saving the whales a social justice issue.  Whaling!  Didn't that go out with Melville's generation.  Now days it is just those Japanese who take a few whales as  a cultural delicacy, right?

Wrong!    Many thousands of whales are being killed every year, and several species are on the verge of extinction.

The Independent reports that "We cannot be excused our culpability. Almost anyone born before 1960 ate whale - in margarine or ice cream - wore it as a cosmetic or fed it to their pets. The peak of whaling was not the brutal days of Melville's Moby-Dick, but the 1960s when, in one season alone, floating factories "processed" 6,158 blue whales, 17,989 finback whales, 2,108 humpback whales and 2,566 sperm whales - not including the thousands killed by the Russians, unreported to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The whale, too, was a victim of the Cold War. "
Read the Independent report

James Luther Adams related the story of the oral examinations at the Harvard Divinity School when he was a student.  It seems that the professors always asked "what is a prophet" and the students had learned that way to respond to that question was to begin  with "one who cries doom."  When I was young, doom meant thermonuclear war,  a scenario that is still possible, but which requires more imagination to conjure up what would cause the final conflict.  Crying doom today is to talk about the melting of the ice in Greenland.

The polar ice is melting, water in the Atlantic is becoming warmer and less salty, raising the possibility that the Gulf Stream will be degraded, bringing catastrophe to Western Europe whose people have come to depend on the heat from the Gulf Stream.

The year 2005 brought  record heat waves in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.  North Africa and Europe experienced heat and drought.  Canada and Australia had record hot summers.  And then there was that warm, warm ocean.

The 2005 Hurricane season officially ended five weeks ago, but there were several tropical storms in December.  It was a record year, we ran out of names on the official list, and we had to resort to the Greek alphabet.  Which raises the question, what about next year?  Do we have Zeta II to distinguish it from Zeta I. 

Being an optimist, I have a hard time crying Doom.  But the evidence is mounting, we need to commit to a sustainable future.  We need to rid our capitals of politicians that worship the false gods of corporate power and expediency and realize once again that the earth does not belong to us, we belong to her.

Micheal McCarthy writes a nice roundup of 2005 as a year when we came to realize that climate change was happening in a neighborhood near by.