Here follows, with full permission of the author, the 2019 Anniversary Sermon given at the Annual Meetings of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches by Rev Dr Maria Curtis (full version as delivered, an abridged version is found in The Inquirer no. 7962). Maria can be seen and heard delivering the sermon on the video of the service at the 41m20s point.

Please note: aside from the material attributions to the work of other authors the text that follows is Copyright M Curtis 2019

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I’d like to invite you to join me on a walk.  We’ll cover 13.8 kilometres in two days, as we walk the story of the cosmos, from the Big Bang, when our universe began, to the present.  Every two steps represent a million years.  The longest part of our journey is lifeless chaos, until mid-morning on the second day, a mere 5 billion years ago, when our solar system began to form.  We humans appear in the last few centimetres of the journey.

We have achieved great things in our little blink of cosmological time, but this perspective should also engender due humility in us.  We have placed ourselves at the pinnacle of creation, as if we got here by merit.  Now we need to dethrone ourselves and see ourselves as part of nature, part of an inter-connected and inter-dependent world.  We need to change the story of our place in the universe.

There is a lot at stake – nothing less than the future of our species.  With imperialistic zeal, we have trampled roughshod over the earth, greedy for her resources.  From a tiny band who narrowly escaped extinction, we flourished then multiplied at an alarming rate.  We have colonised nearly every corner of the world.  Now we are on the verge of catastrophe.  At first, unknowingly, our species began to damage the planet.  However, much damage has been done in the full knowledge that we were causing harm.  More than half of the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in the last 30 years; ie, since Al Gore published his first book on climate change.  More in 30 years than in all the centuries, the millennia before.  Somehow the bare facts fail to motivate us to act differently; we need a change of heart.

I probably don’t need to catalogue these facts – the many and varied ways in which we’ve disrupted the balance of the eco-system:  not just with greenhouse gas emission causing serious global warming; but also by pollution of water, land and air; use of pesticides in intensive farming; destruction of habitats; loss of water; soil erosion, etc, all contributing to the 6^th mass extinction event on earth – and the only one caused by humans.  And yet we carry on driving our cars, flying, eating meat, addicted to our wasteful consumerist lifestyles.

Authors of a recent report on insects worldwide concluded:  “If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind.”  Insects are in serious decline and could die out by the end of the century, and if they die out, we die out too.  We are dependent on them to pollinate our food plants; they also recycle nutrients in the soil and are a major food source for other creatures.  The analysis points to intensive agriculture as the main driver of the decline, particularly the use of pesticides.  Urbanisation and climate change are also significant.  Just one illustration of our interdependence with other species.

And yet when this deeply shocking report came out, it was the last item on the news – I’ll leave you to guess what was first!  It seems that, in the words of TS Eliot from Four Quartets, Human kind cannot bear very much reality.  We stick to our parochial concerns, but Rome is burning while we fiddle.   Our culture seems to be in denial about the disruption we are causing to the inter-connected web of life.  We are shamed by children who feel the urgency and are desperately trying to make us act responsibly.  If only we could reclaim some of their innocence.

Marcia Bjornerud thinks we need to develop our time-literacy.  In her book, Timefulness – How thinking like a geologist can help save the world, she claims that “We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time as primitive as a world map from the fourteenth century.”  Thinking like a geologist gives us an awareness of deep time and very slow earth processes, like the movement of tectonic plates and mountain building and the carbon cycle, a perspective that sees rocks not as nouns but as verbs!  We become aware of the relationship between the biosphere and the atmosphere over millions of years, a delicate balance, which can be easily disrupted to devastating effect, causing at one time overheating, or, at another, snowball earth.  We are chastened by the magnitude of our effects on the planet in the very short time we’ve been around.  She says:  Timefulness is vital in the Anthropocene, this human epoch of accelerating planetary change; we need a more time-literate society.”

As Thomas Berry claims in The Great Work, “Both our religious and our humanist traditions in the West are primarily committed to an anthropocentric exaltation of the human.  We have difficulty in accepting the human as an integral part of the Earth community.  We see ourselves as a transcendent mode of being.”  Our view of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, or the centre of the universe, has been severely challenged over the centuries.  And some people still have difficulty accepting that the human race evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees.  (An endangered species with whom we share 99% of our DNA. )  We feel that we deserve a privileged position among living things, as if the earth and all its creatures were merely a resource for us, but this species imperialism is dangerous and unfounded:

Frederick Muir in The Whole World Kin: Darwin and the Spirit of Liberal Religion says:  “There is no higher or lower, best or worst – the language of hierarchy, inherent value, or anthropocentric categorising does not apply to species or to the evolutionary process.  The proximity of a species to human beings does not determine its worth.  Take away these false divisions of life, and all that remains is simply difference.  Humans are not higher than dogs, just different; chimps are not more valuable than fish, merely different; finches are not better than worms, but different.” 

With species extinction occurring at an alarming pace, we need to remember that there is no reason why Homo sapiens couldn’t be added to the extinction list.

“Darwin gave us a liberating gift:  He freed us from our demi-god bondage at the centre of the universe, divorced from the web of life.  His theory of evolution can help us appreciate the preciousness, fragility and connectedness of all living things.  Because of this, we have the knowledge and motivation to save our species and our planet.”

In the Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 years ago, the domestication of plants and animals led to a radical shift in the way people lived and the way they thought.  In the Industrial Revolution that began just a few hundred years ago, a similar dramatic transition took place.  The whole basis of society was transformed, including the relationships of people with one another and with the Earth.  The world is a much bigger place now; the number of humans tripled in the last century and we are now better informed about each other.  Urban humans have become capable of doing serious harm all over the world.  This is new in human history.   Now we need another Revolution if we are to make the transition necessary to save our world.  We need a shift in consciousness, an awareness of a deeper unity connecting us, and we need to climb down off our pedestal.

Our duties to distant humans, to animals, and to the environment need to come together – as whole system – in a way that hasn’t been done before.  Our trade, investment and even expressions of opinion affect all sorts of distant events.  We need to adapt our morality that was formed for a different world.  We cannot go on acting as if we were still in that world.  It’s hard now for us to take in the facts of environmental destruction and react effectively.  And the hope that science and technology will get us out of the problem is a misplaced fantasy.

What sort of story can motivate us in the face of the collapse of ecological and social systems, the disturbance of climate, the depletion of resources and the mass extinction of species?  In her book, Active Hope, Joanna Macy, Buddhist eco-warrior outlines three choices.  She says, “We can adopt a Business as Usual mentality, defined by the assumption that there is little need to change the way we live.  Economic growth is regarded as essential for prosperity, with its ever-increasing consumption and energy use.  The central plot of this story is about competition and getting ahead.  It is a story told by most mainstream policy makers and corporate leaders.”

Another story she calls The Great Unravelling.  This draws attention to the disasters Business as Usual is taking us towards, as well as those it has already brought about.  It perceives the world as in serious decline.  It is the poor of our world who bear the brunt of the Great Unravelling; in 2010 more than 900 million people suffered chronic hunger; meanwhile the richest 20% of the world’s population received three-quarters of the total income.  The UN Millennium Project estimated that extreme poverty and world hunger could be eliminated by 2025 for a cost of approx. $160 billion a year.  The world’s military spending in 2010 alone was 10 times that amount.

The stories of Business as Usual and the Great Unravelling offer starkly contrasting accounts of the state of our world and our roles and responsibilities within it.  We may find ourselves inhabiting either of them at different times.  It’s possible to spend part of a day in business-as-usual mode, making plans for a future we assume will be much like today.  Then something will trigger an awareness of the mess we’re in and we plunge into despair.

The Great Unravelling can seem like an overwhelming horror story that leaves us feeling paralysed and hopeless.

But beyond denial or despair, Macy proposes another story, The Great Turning, a story that restores our sense of agency and taps into our better selves, through a process of Active Hope.

The Great Turning involves the transition from a doomed economy of industrial growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the recovery of our world.  The story of the Great Turning encourages us to act for the sake of life on earth.  The book, Active Hope, addresses the issue of how we change ourselves so that we are strong enough to fully contribute to this great shift.  We are guided on a journey of gratitude, grief, interconnection and, ultimately, transformation.

Joanna Macy offers us Guidelines to bring about the change in consciousness that is necessary if we are to avoid ecological disaster:

1 Come from a place of gratitude.  We have received an inestimable gift: to be alive in this wondrous, self-organising universe with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it.  And how amazing it is to be accorded a human life, with self-reflexive consciousness which allows us to make choices, letting us opt to take part in the healing of our world.

2 Don’t be afraid of the dark.  Zen master,Thich Nhat Hanh, was once asked what we need to do to save our world.   He replied: “We need to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.”  This is a dark time filled with suffering; grief and lamentation, anger and fear are appropriate responses arising from the depths of our mutual belonging, testimony to our inter-connectedness.

3 Dare to vision.  We need the courage to imagine a better world.  We have been infantilised into thinking that there is no alternative to the way things are.  Never has the (what Macy calls) “ juicy, enlivening power of the imagination”  been more desperately needed than now.

 4 Link arms with others.  The hyper-individualism of competitive industrialised culture has isolated people from each other, but the joy of the Great Turning is that it is a team undertaking.  It evolves out of synergistic interactions among like-minded people, perhaps from diverse backgrounds,  sharing their common goals and their different gifts, in small- and large-scale projects.

And finally:

5 Act your age.  “Now is the time to clothe ourselves in our true authority.  Every particle in every atom of every cell in your body goes back to the primal flaring forth of space and time.  In that sense, you are as old as the universe, with an age of about 14 billion years.  You have an absolute right to step forward and act on Earth’s behalf.”

We are apparently three quarters of the way through the window of habitability on the earth.  In about 1.5 billion years from now, the sun will have grown so luminous that the oceans will begin to vaporise; water molecules will be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen and lost to space.  Life on earth will no longer be possible.    BUT in the meantime, we still have more living to do.  Why end it all prematurely?

Marcia Bjornerud’s book Timefulness  ends with these words:

“Tomorrow’s the Anthropocene.  We’ve all enjoyed the fantasy that we can keep playing our self-absorbed and careless games – that when we choose to come inside, our supper will be waiting for us, and nothing will have changed.  But no one is home to take care of us.  Now we need to grow up and navigate on our own, doing our best with the Atlas of the Past to make up for so much lost time.”

Let us continue to occupy our place in space and time, not as plunderers and exploiters but with gratitude and humility, aware of our interconnectedness and interdependency with the Earth, her land, her rivers and oceans, her air, and all of the natural community.  Let us preserve the natural world as the primary revelation of the divine.

It is our duty as conscious beings to use our gifts wisely and responsibly.

Let us be worthy of the 13.8 billion years that brought us into being.

Amen.