For All You Who Let Yourselves Feel ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
April 28 2024
We’ve been talking a lot the past couple of weeks about the interconnectedness of everything here on Earth, from unseen life underground to all the plants and animals and humans that share this life-giving and life-sustaining and wondrous planet. The more we study the natural systems of Earth, the more we see those connections. We understand how the connections we form as humans between one other are just another manifestation of the ways of all life; that our thoughts and emotions are designed to help us connect; much as other species find ways to communicate that we are just learning to understand.
And so, as I started to think about what to share with you this week, I found myself thinking a lot about the other side of all this visible and invisible interdependence. What forces keep us from connecting? What isolates us? After all, with all the challenges we confront these days, it’s the separation, the disconnection that can appear to be at the forefront of our existence. With two major wars dragging on, other smaller conflicts, famine, the unfolding climate crisis, and university protests spreading across the country, one might think that I, with all my talk about how connected we are, have not been paying attention.
As I thought deeply about this sermon, as I paced around the house, and walked around the neighborhood, I thought more and more about disconnection. And yes, pacing is a big part of sermon preparation – as is the threat of wearing out carpets and walking shoes. Some weeks sermon writing is great exercise.
One question kept coming to me: why, after all we learn about ourselves and our world, do we still so easily revert to violence? Why is our human response so often to attack, to wage war, to attempt to conquer? For what is a more profound disconnection than war, than killing, making large areas of the earth uninhabitable, poisoning the soil and water, tearing apart the fabric of communities and families? It’s the ultimate disconnection – a severing of almost everything that creates and sustains life. And that’s what humans do, over and over and over again. As Anna Fusco wrote in a blog post: “On earth, war is still the dominant creative solution to getting our way.” (https://lordcowboy.substack.com/p/you-and-i-are-earth)
Despite my pacing, I do not have a complete answer for that question: of why we so readily attack one another. But I thought more and more about another disconnection that can often arise as a result: our detachment from all the pain, the grief, the fear associated with the crises confronting us here in 2024. We can begin to feel flooded, and even numb, as we watch footage of conditions in Gaza. Do you find yourself wondering where your grief has gone, or your outrage, or your fear? Do we feel connected to the suffering of others, or do we feel that we are watching from a great distance, looking through a darkened window? Do we often look away?
It’s easy to think: well, there’s simply too much happening all at once. I can’t absorb all the bad news, and I can’t even figure out which issue to focus on. And in order to preserve our own sense of well-being, we look away. Perhaps it’s a form of privilege. Most of us simply don’t know the feeling of having no safe place to rest, as do the people of Gaza. Perhaps it’s fatigue.
Author and environmentalist Joanna Macy has another theory. She attributes our lack of connection, our lack of reaction, to despair. And as we heard in our reading a few minutes ago, we have been long conditioned to hide that despair from ourselves and from one another, and the result of that denial, that attempt to hide from our feelings, creates even more isolation from one another. I know that several years ago I decided that I simply didn’t have to engage with climate deniers – the folks who continue to claim that the climate crisis is a hoax. I assumed that there would be no common ground on which to meet. And of course, that leads to more isolation, and less connection.
According to Ms. Macy, we humans have different ways of responding to the conditions around us in the world. She suggests that there are four basic archetypes, or worldviews, that can shape us and our responses. The first one is, in her words, the World as Battlefield. This caught my attention, for it offered me a partial answer to my question of why we so often resort to war and destruction.
In this Battlefield worldview, life is a struggle between good and evil. And of course, guess which side each one of us thinks we’re on? This worldview is pervasive: in international relations, with the United States opposing the Axis of Evil, for example. We see it in our response to student protests, with an immediate reaction to send in law enforcement, send in the National Guard. On a personal level, the Battlefield worldview can be seen as a test, as perpetual competition: are you good enough? Can you compete? Are you successful? And of course, in today’s world, we see this approach playing out daily in the media, with the never-ending arguments over who is right, and therefore, righteous, and who is wrong, and therefore at best sinful. “My religion is the right one.” “My political party must win at all costs.” Everything is reduced to a dualistic view: black and white, right and wrong, winner and loser.
Ms. Macy’s second archetype also caught my attention because of my thinking about disconnection. The second worldview is the World as a Trap. The goal here is, as she put it, “to disentangle ourselves and escape from this messy world.” (World as Lover, World as Self, p. 6.). Many of us can recognize this view through a religious or spiritual lens. We feel that we must rise above the crises, the noise and confusion and violence, to separate ourselves from it all. We seek tranquility, sanctuary, equanimity. The trouble, Joanna Macy points out, is that as a result of the desire to escape, we can end up disliking the world, and rejecting connection and relationship. We long to protect ourselves, at the cost of turning away and hiding. I see such a paradox here: we use our spiritual practices, or our religious beliefs, to guide us, to help us to feel stronger, but in the end we use them to detach, to isolate ourselves. And the primary message of all major religions in the world is that we are all one. This World as Trap archetype presents us with quite a conundrum.
What if we were to see the world as a lover: the third archetype? Using this perspective, the world is our partner; life-giving and life-sustaining. We draw closer to the world, we cherish it, yearn for it as we would a lover. Perhaps the Hindus were the best at expressing this sense of desire: Joanna Macy mentions worship of Lord Krishna as a prime example, writing, “As you sing your longing for the dewdrop sparkle of his eyes, the nectar of his lips, the blue shade of his skin, like the thunderclouds that bring the refreshment and fertility of the monsoon, the whole world takes on his beauty and the sweetness of his flesh. You feel yourself embraced in the primal play of life.” (Ibid., p. 10)
And finally, the last of the four archetypes is the World as Self. Ms. Macy proposes that when we allow ourselves to fall deeply in love with the world, we will finally be able to feel ourselves at one with the world. Mystics throughout time have expressed their sense of oneness, either with the Holy, or with the world itself. Perhaps we Unitarian Universalists might think of those as one and the same. Let’s listen to the words of Saint Hildegard of Bingen: “I am the breeze that nurtures all things green…I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life. I call forth tears, the aroma of holy work. I am the yearning for good.” (Wayne Muller, How, Then, Shall We Live?, p. 267.)
The world, the Divine, is in all of us, and we are all in it. As Joanna Macy put it, “We are the world knowing itself.” (op.cit. p. 16)
How do you see the world? As Battlefield, as Trap, as Lover, as Self?
I suspect that many of us are despairing, experiencing the world as a trap these days, and trying hard to protect ourselves, to find ways to detach, to look away, to rise above the pain through prayer and meditation practices. And those practices are helpful, up to a point. What is lost in our efforts to remove ourselves from that sense of being trapped, though, can be connection.
In focusing on developing our own spiritual practices with a goal of detaching ourselves from the despair and suffering and fear around us, we emphasis only our own well-being. We see the world as a trap, and ironically, it is us who become trapped, stuck, unable to do more than to isolate ourselves. Joanna Macy writes, “Despair work is not a solo venture. It is a process undertaken within the context of community. When we face the darkness and terror or our time, openly and together, we tap deep reserves of strength. The gateway of despair opens to belonging.” (Ibid., p. 46.)
We try so hard to protect ourselves because we care so deeply. We care for the innocent lives in Gaza and in Ukraine, for the animals losing habitat, for the forests and the oceans. And by trying to pretend that we are not affected, that we’re not grieving, we in fact trap ourselves.
How can we move forward, beyond the competition and the fighting, beyond the mindset of being trapped, into a place of partnership with the world, a place of joy and wonder? One answer is simple, and available to all of us, at any moment. That response is simply to practice awareness and gratitude. Before we can be grateful, we have to be aware, to notice all that we have. At the same time, there will be pain in this practice, because if we open ourselves to all that is around us, we will see the damage as well as the beauty. But maybe we’ll find that our gratitude, our appreciation of all that is magical and wonderful, will help strengthen us to face all that has to be confronted. I felt that this past Monday morning when six of you came together at sunrise at Good Harbor to celebrate Earth Day and this spectacular home of ours. We celebrated. We offered our gratitude. And then we went out for coffee.
Here is one last bit of wisdom from Joanna Macy: “…(there is) a dysfunctional notion of the self. It is the notion of the self as an isolated and fragile entity. So long as we see ourselves as essentially separate, competitive…beings, it is difficult to respect the validity of our social despair. Both our capacity to grieve for others and our power to cope with this grief spring from the…relationships from which we arise.” (Ibid., p. 40)
My friends, my wish for us all is that we can find our way out of seeing the world as a place of constantly opposing and warring forces, and that our best response is to remove ourselves and protect ourselves so carefully that we cut ourselves off from the world. We have been given an incredible place to live. The need to care for it feels overwhelming, but if we can start by simply enjoying it, together, and seeing ourselves as part of it instead of separate from it, we can find our way forward. Together.
“You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside you.” (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus IV, trans. Macy and Barrows)
May it be so.
Amen.
