The God of Serendip

Reading: The Three Princes of Serendip

The story has become known in the English speaking world as the source of the word serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole because of his recollection of the part of the "silly fairy tale" where the three princes by "accidents and sagacity" discern the nature of a lost camel. The fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip is based upon the life of Persian King Bahram V, who ruled the Sassanid Empire (420–440). Stories of his rule are told in epic poetry of the region (Firdausi's Shahnameh of 1010, Nizami's Haft Paykar of 1197, Khusrau's Hasht Bihisht of 1302), parts of which are based upon historical facts with embellishments derived from folklore going back hundreds of years to oral traditions in India and The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. With the exception of the well-known camel story, English translations are very hard to come by.

Talmudic version

The fable of a camel blind in one eye is included in the Talmud, attributed to Rabbi Yochanan:
Rava relates the following in the name of Rabbi Yochanan:—“Two Jewish slaves were one day walking along, when their master, who was following, overheard the one saying to the other, ‘There is a camel ahead of us, as I judge—for I have not seen—that is blind of one eye and laden with two skin-bottles, one of which contains wine and the other oil, while two drivers attend it, one of them an Israelite, and the other a Gentile.’ ‘You perverse men,’ said their master, ‘how can you fabricate such a story as that?’ The slave answered, and gave this as his reason, ‘The grass is cropped only on one side of the track, the wine, that must have dripped, has soaked into the earth on the right, and the oil has trickled down, and may be seen on the left; while one of the drivers turned aside from the track to ease himself, but the other has not even left the road for the purpose.’ Upon this the master stepped on before them in order to verify the correctness of their inferences, and found the conclusion true in every particular. He then turned back, and…after complimenting the two slaves for their shrewdness, he at once gave them their liberty.”
Sanhedrin, fol. 104, col. 2.[6]

SERMONETTE

There is an old joke that “Unitarian believe in One God – at most.” Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way helped me to give my own personal God a name.
As I mentioned, Serendipity is part of the process that Julia Cameron sees happening with greater and greater opening of one’s self to one’s innate creativity – the way in which we become co-creators of our universe. As I thought about the elements necessary to turn my “sermonette” into a full-fledged service, the first words that popped into my head were from the musical dialogue between Noah and his sons from “Two By Two” –“ if God had wanted a rudder, God would have said, make a rudder.” These words were indelibly inscribed in my memory by virtue of the fact that, some thirty years ago, my father sang the role of Noah in an amateur theater production in Wayland, Massachusetts. The God of Serendipity clearly dictated that this should be my choice of music for a church service on Father’s Day, so I could honor my father across the miles.
In “Two By Two,”the author’s conceit was that Noah was a fundamentalist in his faith. When the storm hits, however, the almighty seemingly lacked the foresight that Noah’s sons, with their worldly experience, could provide. Noah’s faith is shaken. By the end of the play, however, Noah has had to accept the reality of human suffering and death, but nevertheless challenges the almighty to respect his offsprings’ foibles and the limitations of the human condition. God, therefore, moderates his wrath, and covenants to limit his destructive powers.
Since I was diagnosed with MS (in January 1994), I have become more and more conscious of how “I get by with a little help from my friends.” While I rejoice in the increased awareness of “the interconnected web of existence of which we are a part,” my ever-increasing level of dependence on others does not necessarily do much to feed my self-esteem. Members of UUYO have been ever obliging, and with the ironic sense of humor which has become more acute with study of Russian culture and my own existence over the passing years, I try to come up with various new takes on what I can offer in return. Our last interim minister, Martha Munson, dubbed me a “Wordsmith,” and indeed language tends to be the vehicle through which I try to make my contribution. But sometimes, the God of Serendipity is operating to connect our needs with the needs of family, friends, and even strangers. And when this happens, a deep sense of gratitude for the mysterious forces in the universe wells up in me.
This past spring, I participated in Matt Alspaugh in his workshop on “Crafting the Sermon Within You,” and challenged us to take a small incident, describe it in at much detail as possible, and then examine it anew for its potential to teach a more universal truth. I discovered, through successive attempts to find an appropriate incident, that the more seemingly insignificant the detail, the more poignant the process of dis-covery. It was not a narrow escape from a catastrophic auto accident that yielded the most successful results, but an un-covering of the wonders of everyday survival.
Indeed, just getting out of my house in time to teach a class at YSU has become a miracle in my world. The summer course I teach, “Foreign Film” meets for over three hours twice a week and involves a large amount of “show and tell” materials (DVDs, VHS tapes, books, handouts, and notes on multifarious internet links), preparation is nearly equivalent to packing for a short trip abroad. The first day of the summer term, I had made arrangements for a student who worked at the LLRC, Molly, to come by my house at 9:30 to help me get into my car to make sure I got to YSU in time for my 11 a.m. class. Molly had had an 11 a.m. class last fall that corresponded to my schedule, so when I had run into her in the LLRC two days before and said she had to be at YSU on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 a.m., I asked her to stop by my house on her way to YSU at 9:30 during the summer term. Since I live less than two miles from campus, I felt comfortable making such a request, and was planning to propose that I compensate her for an hour of her time at $10 per hour.
At 9:30, when Molly had yet to appear, I managed to take care of a few of the tasks I would have handled at the office on my home computer. By 9:45, however, I sensed something was amiss and decided to face the tasks of putting on footwear, setting the house alarm, locking the door behind me, loading stuff in the car, and making sure I had my leg lifter to assist in hoisting my recalcitrant right leg into the driver’s seat on my own. Just as I had assumed my “bag lady” persona, laden with 2-3 canvas bags and two purses (one with cell phone from which I would call the YSU escort service to unload my mobility scooter once I got to campus) and was about to open the back door leading to the garage, the phone rang. It was NOT Molly, however, but UUYO member-neighbor-friend Eugenia Pierce, inquiring whether my offer of space in my basement for some of her collectibles inventory was still extant. I said of course and, ascertaining her immediate availability, I suggested that we continue our negotiations while she “spot” me during my home-evacuation exercise. Gina came over, and helped me load my stuff (and self) into the car. When Molly called from the office at 10:15 with abject apologies for having forgotten me, I could truthfully report that I was in capable hands.
So, I get by with A LOT of help from my friends. But many times, I find this a BLESSING rather than an imposition.
The time I have spent in Russia, where virtually NOTHING can be accomplished without a personal network of support, has moderated my native American individualism so that I can trade a modicum of my independence for the humbling experience of having to ask for help at nearly every (physical) turn. Indeed, I think that the plethora of resources we Americans have at our disposal leads to a loneliness that we can only assuage by gluing our cell-phones to our ears and “friending” people on Facebook. This virtual community, supported by our access to advanced technology, is no doubt a virtue of our American economic superiority in the world. But sometimes the warmth of a flesh-and-blood “helping hand” is what REALLY the highest expression of what makes us human.

RESPONSIVE READING: THE ARTIST’S WAY – BASIC PRINCIPLES BY (JULIA CAMERON)

1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy.
2. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life—including ourselves.
3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives.
4. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.
5. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.
6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature.
7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: Good, Orderly Direction.
8. As we open our creativity channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.
9. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity.
10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.

Julia Cameron

Being in Nature

I’m glad we’re off to Mill Creek Park for our picnic today! That park is one of the things that I really love about Youngstown. It has become part of my spiritual practice, to go over there two or three times a week, if possible, and walk the paths.

Being outdoors, in nature, has been shown to be helpful for one’s mental health. A study in the UK showed that taking walks in woodlands reduced depression in nearly three quarters of participants. In the control group, which walked in indoor shopping malls, fewer participants had reduced depression, and some found their level of depression increased.[1] As a man who hates shopping malls, this is not one bit surprising.

Even a window on nature is helpful. Studies in hospitals have found that patients who are in rooms with windows looking out on natural scenes need less pain medication, are more cooperative with staff, and are discharged more quickly than those who see something unnatural like a brick wall.[2] In the hospital where I worked as a chaplain, we even considered putting photographs of nature scenes in patient rooms, which we learned has a similar effect. We were warned that paintings or watercolors (as opposed to photos) apparently don’t work.

Our Unitarian ancestors did not have access to this kind of science but they did have religion! Unitarian Universalism is made up of numerous intertwined theological strands, including Unitarian Christianity, Humanism, Paganism, Process Theology, among others. Of these, one I find most attractive is the Transcendentalist movement, that radical offshoot of Unitarian Christianity. The Transcendentalist movement got its start with Emerson’s publication of his essay Nature, from which we quoted earlier. Much of what we hold dear in our UU movement we owe to Transcendentalists: our attention to social justice, our belief in the primacy of each individual’s own search for meaning, and particularly the respect for nature as a source of spiritual inspiration. As religious movement, we have inherited the Transcendentalists’ high reverence for the natural world. We tend to respect the world more than many other faiths, which see the world is merely the stage on which humans and god or the gods play out their various roles. God, for UUs who seek god, is found in nature, among the rocks and trees, and in the ecological interrelationships among the organic beings within an ecosystem. For the Transcendentalists, that god is one, that god is everywhere, and that god is within everyone.


It’s been hard to watch the unfolding of the oil spill that continues in the Gulf, after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform, as pictures roll in of birds covered thick in oil, beaches ruined with slick, and satellite images of the blackened gyre that continues to form and spin, difficult to stop after repeated attempts. Carol Howard Merritt, a friend who once served a church in Louisiana, says that when she saw those pictures, she “felt that the soul of our nation was drowning in the muck, along with our precious wildlife. … Looking at those white graceful egrets covered in slick, black oil reminds me of what we have done. There is something majestic hidden in that marshland, something that we have destroyed. In many ways, our soul lives there, and it is irreparably damaged.”

I feel a strong sense of personal remorse about this incident, since many in my family work in the ‘oil bidness’ as they say in Texas. I did too, briefly, in college, where on a co-op job, I helped design oil refineries for one of the big Houston firms. I don’t think any of my family truly believes in the ‘drill baby drill’ craziness of Palin and the Tea Party crowd, but there is a confidence among many in that business that oil extraction can be done safely, responsibly, and in an environmentally sound manner -- until this.

But even now, at a distance from the oil business, it would be easy to be contrite; as I drive my second-hand Prius and buy locally grown produce through the CSA. But I know better. We are all deeply intertwined in this, we all contribute to these problems by virtue of being alive in this country, with its addiction to oil. Even though most of us work for a better world, we are complicit.

Thich Nhat Hahn tells us:

"I am the forest that is being cut down.
I am the rivers and the air that are being polluted,
and I am also the person who cuts down the forest
and pollutes the rivers and the air.
I see myself in all species,
and I see all species in me. [4]

Last Sunday we had a little musical revue here, “Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long”, based on some of Ogden Nash’s writing from the early nineteen sixties. Some of his poetry almost makes me nostalgic. Bacteriological warfare. Conquering space. Intercontinental ballistic missiles blasting the air with roars and whistles. Nuclear fallout. Bacteria issuing forth to prowl.

A half century ago, and our problems seemed so easy then!

Our world is more complicated now. It seems that as we solve one of those old problems, two new more intractable problems take its place. Bacteriological warfare may be banned by treaty, but genetic modification of living organisms can be done in a well equipped high-school.[5] The threat of full scale nuclear war between superpowers may be decreased, but the new danger is a small-scale nuclear exchange launched between small nations with deep grudges. Even a relatively small war involving primitive nukes has the potential to create a nuclear winter that would starve much of the human race and perhaps end civilization as we know it.[6] And I haven’t even started to consider the problem of global climate change.

Underneath all of these problems is the problem of greed. We want too much, more than the earth can deliver. According to a research organization called the Global Footprint Network, we’ve been running a deficit with the earth since 1986. As they put it, “Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.4 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and five months to regenerate what we use in a year.”[7]

Population is a big part of this problem, certainly. We’ve grown from about 3 billion people in the good old days of Ogden Nash’s poem, to nearly 7 billion now. Projections suggest we’ll reach over 9 billion by 2050.

Bad enough, but things used to look more dour. The amazing thing that has happened is that birthrates have dropped from almost five children per woman in the middle of the last century to about two and a half children per woman, with trends continuing down. Often this is the result of women simply having more control of their lives, and being allowed to make their own choices. Programs such as microloans so they can start small businesses and achieve some financial independence help. Better access to contraceptives helps, too. Slowing population growth is great news, but it has national economists in many countries apoplectic because how can you have GDP growth without population growth? Some are even pushing policies to increase birthrates.

The other half of the problem is increasing desire for material wealth worldwide. One interesting comparison is made by Oregon State University statistician Paul Murtaugh, who studied the carbon footprint of having babies in different parts of the world. He concludes that today, one American baby with its descendants will have the same carbon footprint as fifty-five babies with their progeny in India.[8] Fifty five! That’s a huge difference!

But the more pernicious problem is that these consumption patterns are changing. As the head of one non-governmental organization put it, in a Mother Jones article: "The irony is that just as some Americans are starting to learn to live more like traditional Indians—becoming vegetarian, buying locally, eating organic—aspiring middle-class Indians are trying to live more like over-consuming Americans. The question really is, which kind of people do we want less of?"[9]

And the related question is, can we decrease our overconsumption faster than our population growth, so that we are able to reach a sustainable state? Because if we don’t do it, the earth will do it for us, and it will not be pretty. As Tony Barnosky, a paleontologist at UC Berkeley put it, "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people."

Environmental sustainability is a difficult problem that will require great creativity and courage of thought as well as concerted action if we are to resolve it. When we face difficult problems we are wise to turn to the wisdom of those who preceded us and the lessons of past experience for guidance. In particular, we might look to our own Unitarian history.

The Transcendentalists were able to take on some difficult problems in their time. They opposed slavery in a time when slavery was almost universally accepted. They opposed American wars of expansion, in particular the war which acquired Texas from Mexico. They worked for women’s rights, at a time when women had no vote or property rights.

I have no doubt that the Transcendentalists would be at the forefront of modern eco-justice work. They understood innately the interconnection of all life, and would see that our actions here could cause harm to others elsewhere.

We are part of life and it is part of us. This is, I think, the essence of the spiritual intuition of many of the Transcendentalists. This sense of loss of ego or of false separateness, of being connected with the all, is a strong strand that runs through Unitarianism and reaches down to us today and has become a core theology for many of us.


So today is the last worship service of our regular church year.

I ask you to do two things this summer, that are really two forms of the same thing. The first is to come to Sunday worship here at UUYO this summer. We are changing what we do in our summer services, and holding worship, rather than talks. Worship is attending to things of worth, and we hope to have Sunday morning experiences that are worthy of your presence. This is experimental, and I know we will have successes and make mistakes. Help us as we explore this new way of doing things, help us to make it better, to make it more worthy.

The second thing is to take yourself out into nature, when you can. Even on some Sunday mornings, if you must (I can’t believe I’m suggesting this) take yourself out, and attend to things of worth, by being in nature.

The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore speaks from joyful experience, “The stream of life that runs through my veins … is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks in tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.”[10]

It is not just that we are interconnected, as our seventh principle suggests, we are embedded in life. Being in nature reminds us of this deep connection, this unity of life, that the Eastern mystics knew and the Transcendentalists came to understand.

Seek your own interior spiritual understanding, follow your own intuition about the nature of things. Follow Thoreau’s lead, and “Make time for intelligence with the earth”. Perhaps from the earth you will learn what you are called to do, to preserve all of us, to save our unified soul, and to create a sustainable world. May it be so.

Notes:

1 “Ecotherapy – the green agenda for mental health” http://www.mind.org.uk/assets/0000/2138/ecotherapy_report.pdf
2 Research on the importance of nature to well-being and functioning
http://www.centreforconfidence.co.uk/flourishing-lives.php?p=cGlkPTE3MiZpZD02Njk=
3 http://tribalchurch.org/?p=1618
4 Thich Nhat Hahn, Plum Village Chanting and Recitation Book, 2000, p. 33
5 “Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering” NY Times, Feb. 10, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14Biology-t.html
6 “South Asian Threat? Local Nuclear War = Global Suffering?” Scientific American Jan. 2010,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=local-nuclear-war
7 Global Footprint Network http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/
8 “Population: The Last Taboo” Mother Jones, http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/05/population-growth-india-vatican?page=3
9 http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/05/population-growth-india-vatican?page=3
10 Rabindranith Tagore, "Stream of Life", Gitangali, verse 69.