Reflections on Unitarian Universalism's Seventh Principle

We affirm and promote: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

For those of you with spider and snake phobias, beyond the usual eeewwh factor, I apologize.  I’ve been there.  I used to be terrified of snakes, but I had a true spider phobia. At the sight of a T-tiny jumping spider I would hyperventilate. I still jump when surprised.

Once, in my parents’ home, in Fort Myers, there was a dead wolf spider on the floor, barring me from the kitchen…sprawled between me and the coffee pot. I crawled over the kitchen “bar” to get to the coffee, and crawled back over, cup in hand. I waited for my Dad to get up, find, and dispose of the wolfie before I came out of my room again.

My folks relied on pest control, almost as soon as we moved to Florida. Tightening our belts meant my Dad going room to room with noxious pesticides. So, for the most part, the only spiders I ever saw were dead spiders.

Then, a number of years later, I found myself living in Cross Creek—the North Central Florida town made famous by Majorie Kinnan Rawlins. It was a sane two-bedroom, cement block home—butted up against the marshes of Cross Creek.

What was I thinking?

Nature, as I’d never known her, was all around. In the evening I’d gaze out over the creek to cypress trees festooned with Spanish moss, and I woke up to the sounds of a family of barred owls nestled into an oak beside our window. Late at night, the frog song was so loud the walls vibrated.

But Nature was inside as well…a loaf of bread would mold if left out a day, and spiders marshaled each corner of the garage. I tried not to look. One morning I went to slip on my gym shoes, for a hike, and swear I heard a shriek…”No! Don’t!” I was tired and didn’t listen until my toe was smack dab against the screaming spider.

To my credit, I wore those shoes again, many times.

We weren’t terribly welcome in the neighborhood—we didn’t attend the local Baptist Church, my black cat arched her back in the window when we weren’t home, and we let the yard go—lawn orchids popped up uninvited and a quarter acre of purple spider wort was our pride and joy. The neighbors hired our adolescent friend to mow it all down.

The same young man came over shouting one day. “Jeff.” “Renée.” He barreled into the house with a small corn snake in his hands to tell us about the five or six-footer he’d just stepped over to get to us.

Before my eyes they hatched a scheme, the adolescent and my then husband, to photograph the huge snake. The young corn snake was foisted into my hands and only returned when it was my turn to grab the two and a half foot branch they’d annoyed the huge snake onto so I could lay it up against a tree…so Jeff could get some shots. It struck at me twice before careening at lightning speed up into the crown of the wee tree out front…no photos were taken…and I’ve loved snakes ever since.

We affirm and promote: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

After six months we moved away from Cross Creek, from the air boats that would blast into the marsh that was our yard, from the bellowing gators that literally lifted the deck beneath my feet, from the barred owl that shared its hunting evenings with us. We moved to the sandhill—remnant of a phosphate-mining-development boondoggle—a dry, misused, but no less lively habitat.

We were quiet. And the creatures came back. Squirrels and raccoons busted the bird feeders. Spiders set up housekeeping in the upper corners, safe from the cats. They took over pest control. I squealed and found an eyepiece to look under the deck to watch a wood rat build her home. I called her Pumpkin. Then the snakes moved into the yard—black racers, yellow rat snakes, even an indigo.

Native roaches chewed into bitter acorns, and rarely found their way inside.

A friend turned the 8 x 10 pool into a pond, and during a drought I had to pause on the drive to let the toads and frogs find their way. Dragonflies laid their eggs, and we watched pupa and tadpoles transform. Real life resurrection!

I heard a great horned owl take a raccoon, and watched swallow-tailed kites rounding the skies above the pond. Grey fox turned old gopher tortoise burrows to their liking. Red-shouldered hawks prowled. You could almost hear things falling into place, back into place.

We affirm and promote: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, but only a part… .

Thoughts to prompt discussion of Unitarian Universalism’s Sixth Principle—

We affirm and promote:

The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty and Justice for All

This principle, sixth of seven, is perhaps the easiest to read right through without savoring —thegoalofworldcommunitywithpeacelibertyandjusticeforall—

a seedless grape rather than a pomegranate.

Toward the end of the day Friday, I got into a discussion with a woman I work with about pomegranates.  She and her husband grow food for the farmer’s market, and she was listing off all the fruit trees they’d just planted. I wanted to know if you could grow pomegranates here. She thought yes, but she had no idea what you do with a pomegranate.

“I’ve seen the containers at the store, but I don’t know what you do with it.”

I’ve seen those containers too, little plastic cups filled with pomegranate seeds—all neat and tidy.

That’s no way to eat a pomegranate!

First you find your pomegranate. You can’t tell what’s inside, so you need to go by feel. You hold it in the palm of your hand and feel for the heaviness, for the juice full to bursting in each seed.

Then you’ve got some work to do. You need to get inside and pull it all apart, separate the seeds from the bitter membranes. Your fingers get stained red, as does everything else if you let the seeds escape the bowl.

Makes the little containers of seeds sound promising, doesn’t it?

The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty and Justice for All

It’s just a goal after all. We’re not saying we’re going to bring about world community, we’re not promising to grant peace, liberty and justice. Just pull off the lid and sprinkle the seeds on a salad and enjoy—let’s move on to number seven.

For Unitarian Universalists, this principle can even feel a little disingenuous—in the beauty pageants of religion, it our pat answer to the personal question at the end of the pageant.

I want to help bring about world peace.

Do you remember those questions? I haven’t watched a pageant in years, but when I did, when I was a little girl, in between bouts of walking with a book on my head to improve my posture, I remember waiting for it. Yep, now she’s going to talk about loving children and wanting world peace.

Then there was a pageant that changed everything. It was a Miss Universe pageant, and instead of a lovely evening gown—how I loved the evening gown competition—Miss Israel walked out in a tight-fitting black jumpsuit, with a machine gun slung over her shoulder.

I was stunned.

Sitting on the floor in front of the black-and-white television, alone, I cried—as devastated by the sight of a woman with a gun as I was by the notion that fire power was the answer to the question—how do you plan to contribute to the world community?

But then, hasn’t that always been the answer? The country with the most weapons, the biggest, baddest weapons, dictates what the world community looks like, feels like, tastes like. Toss that pomegranate in the air, and shoot it. Yes. Just like skeet shooting.

Everything ends up stained red.

We affirm and promote:

The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty and Justice for All

As we enter this new week, with the loudest shout out for women’s rights being that American women are cleared for combat, with Walmart fending off a run on ammunition, and with so many parents burying their lost, blood-stained children—that’s no seedless grape of a principle, no neat little package of seeds either—isn’t this principle asking us to put the pomegranate back together?

Where do we start—overseas, in Washington or Chicago, or just a few blocks away from here? How in a world of so many different faiths, beliefs, and philosophies? How in a world with child soldiers and gang warfare? When do we start? When everyone is armed alike, or when we see who is left standing? What can we do?

I don’t have the answer, perhaps no one does. But I do know this…if I take your hand…and your hand…and you take the hand next to you…we’ll have all the arms we need.

To prompt discussion on January 20, 2013...

...on Unitarian Universalism fifth principle:
We covenant to affirm and promote: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large. 

I’d like to take a moment to settle into this weekend. It’s quite the weekend for celebrations—the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the second inauguration of President Barack Obama.

For the inauguration luncheon this year, 15 chefs will be scurrying around to produce three courses representing the agricultural bounty of the entire country. Okay, I admit it. When I tour the White House, the room I most want to see is the kitchen… . I’m willing to chop vegetables for the tour—shoot—I’ll wash dishes.

Things have really changed in that kitchen. Martha Washington, who brought the first slaves into the president’s kitchen, likely trained the slave Hercules herself—and he excelled. He ended up with eight assistants, and worked the system so he could dress like a dandy, and enjoy some of the better things in life. However, when Washington was planning to leave Philadelphia for Mount Vernon, Hercules escaped. Although I’m sure he packed his favorite chef’s knife, his story ends there.

Not so the president’s kitchen.

The story of Hercules, and the stories of other slaves who served in the government in particular, remind me how much we tend to simplify slavery—to see one side, one vignette—but it’s so much more complex. Christianity Itself was stretched and molded to accommodate slavery. Our Founding Fathers accepted that entire races of people were incomplete.

Right of conscience and the democratic process brought us from Hercules to Obama and will, I pray, take us beyond.

But, what takes us from discomfort over something being not quite right to I’m willing to run away, to be beaten, jailed, and even die to stop this?

We simplify as well the moment of that enlightenment. Surely to develop that level of commitment takes time…nurturing… .

I think of a passage in a book I read years ago—Letters from an American Farmer by Crèvecoeur. I offer a caveat here. I read this book with about 15 other people, and of them, grad students and favorite and lauded PhD professor, I was the only one who thought it was a satire—if not satire, then allegory.

They all uniformly hated the author of the letters and took him to task for every puny, boneheaded thing he said that he did. Still, whether it was a scathing indictment of Early America written by a cad or a scathing satirical indictment of Early America written by a crafty wordsmith—it was scathing enough that he was asked to leave the country, and not return.

In the passage, Farmer Crèvecoeur is off to dine with a planter, and being no fool, chooses to walk a shaded path. Coming to a clearing he finds a caged human beset by birds. On reflex, he shoots…and the birds fly off…a short distance. I won’t read you the passage. It is gruesome, and you’d probably end up hating him too.

In the cage is a slave, near death. Crèvecoeur laments that he doesn’t have another ball for his musket, else he would put the poor man out of his misery.

Of course, what is he doing walking a shaded path in 18^th America with only one ball for his musket? I guess they weren’t a well-regulated militia even then.

The man is begging for water, and unable to end his misery, Crèvecoeur actively debates giving him water and prolonging the misery—he does it because it’s the only way he can make himself feel better. Then he heads along to dine, with the planter whose slave it was—and where he is assured that the execution was on the up and up with the law.

I know. How could he not do something? How could he break bread with the man who had caused it? I could intellectualize the argument; he’d be risking his own life—but I wanted a hero, I wanted to believe I would have acted differently.

One of the things I miss the most, and the least, about living in the country is country roads. On days when you’re not in a hurry, the weather is fine, and there are many more horses and cows than cars…nice.  Then on a morning just like that, I noticed something in the road up ahead. It was a beautiful rattlesnake—5 or 6 feet—but someone had driven over it, one tire, and although it was plastered to the pavement the width of a tire track, the first 4 feet continued trying to move forward. I hoped it was dead, and this was reflex, but I didn’t know. There was only one right thing to do.

I drove up a ways, turned around, and drove a lot farther in the opposite direction than I needed to before I turned back around and aimed for the snake. I couldn’t do it. I tried twice before I saw a car coming up behind me and I continued on my way.

Forgive me, but damned cages.

They’re everywhere. Within 15 minutes of turning on my computer, I was invited to watch a TED talk on human trafficking, compelled to action by a Syrian facebook page, and notified that a woman inadvertently left a couple of guns and some ammunition in her first grader’s backpack.

But who needs to look that far? 

I live in Porter’s Community. For those of you who do not know, Porter’s is a very old, Black Gainesville neighborhood with a checkered history that is on the brink of gentrification. When I first moved in I used to go outside in the evening, let down the tailgate of my pickup truck parked in the drive, and sit and chat to my neighbor Angie…and whoever happened to walk by. I was determined to meet people and really experience the neighborhood. And…I did. I don’t sit out on my tailgate anymore.

But even with just a window to the outside open, I can hear the cages clanging.

Young men, who have no jobs and no prospects, congregate in groups of six or eight through the day, wherever someone has been able to score some beer, and turn shiny black SUVs, with 2 dollars in the tank, into four-door, faux leather upholstered radios. Listen and you can hear the frustration building—whether the talk is about a woman, football, boxing, or the dogs they are trying to raise for profit—harsh words rise into the afternoon quiet, a challenge cracks like a whip, and then a laugh breaks, a crude joke, a bruising tease—but things calm back to women, or football, or boxing, or dogs.

The other evening, the trick didn’t work. I had to weave through 20 police vehicles just to get on my block. Everyone was outside. A young woman had been stabbed, on my block, right in front of the community center, and the perpetrator walked right on out of the neighborhood. No one stopped him or let one of the many officers know that—hey, that’s him. Everyone, including the police, just stood around and watched.

Damned cages. They’re everywhere.

It’s overwhelming, but let’s enjoy a moment together. It’s late tomorrow night, maybe even early Tuesday morning, and President Barack Obama nips down to the kitchen for a healthy snack (of course)—and you just have to imagine old Hercules, smiling, and dishing up a big piece of Martha Washington’s own Great Cake.

For a long moment, imagine you’ve knocked one of those cages down and bent back all of the bars—what would the moment look like, and who would be smiling?