Here are some words from a piece called "Reinhabiting the Earth" by Miriam MacGillis:

As my study of the universe and its evolutionary journey has deepened, so has my awareness of the particular geological and biological history of this place. As I reinhabit this particular place, I experience its connectedness to the inner and outer reaches of the whole Earth.

. . . In spite of our extraordinary medical discoveries, the recuperative powers within the natural world remain largely untapped or foreign to us. There is a legacy of healing in the roots and plants and soil . . . Equally important, we need to grasp the relationships that contribute to a healthy planet: soil, air, water, plants, insects -- all the living components. And we need to grasp how these are connected to the health of our bodies and our spirits.

Our bodies have incredible powers of rejuvenation. So does the Earth. But when the immune system, the recuperative power of the former, breaks down to the degree and magnitude it has, then we must suspect that the immune system of the Earth is in serious difficulty. The Earth is sick. Our air, forests, food, water, birds and whales are sick. We each need to help heal our bioregions. The first step is to heal our own perceptions that fail to see the connections between ourselves and the Earth. It is time for the healers among us to go beyond treating only the symptoms of our diseases, and to focus their insights, energies and compassion on the root causes of these symptoms.

And here's the first verse of a poem by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas -- I quoted from it last week, too:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

My talk today is about that sameness -- the connection between the growth of flowers and the growth of our spirits, the destruction of trees and the destruction of our lives, the simple truth that what we do to any part of existence we do to ourselves. The full title of our seventh Unitarian Universalist Principle, which is the theme of today's service, is "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part."

Some UUs would say that this is the Principle which includes all the others, and many would say that in an age of pollution, global climate changes and ecological disasters this is the one essential Principle, without which we cannot claim to be people of faith. But even if we all accept the concept, there's great leeway in how we interpret the "respect" which is called for. How we respect the interdependent web of all existence is the crucial question, much more important than giving lip-service to the words. Let me read you a challenging piece of prose to keep in your minds alongside that verse from Dylan Thomas and the words by Miriam MacGillis. It's from Bill McKibben's book The End of Nature:

We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves . . . We used to be. When we were only a few hundred million, or only a billion or two, and the atmosphere had the composition it would have had with or without us, then even Darwin's revelations could in the end only strengthen our sense of belonging to creation, and our wonder at the magnificence and abundance of that creation. And there was the possibility that something larger than us -- [St.] Francis's God, Thoreau's Benefactor and Intelligence, [a] Supreme Command[er] -- reigned over us. We were as bears -- we slept less, made better tools, took longer to rear our young, but we lived in a world that we found made for us, . . . just as bears live in a world they find waiting for them. But now we make that world, affect its every operation (except a few -- the alternation of day and night, the spin and wobble and path of the planet, the most elementary geologic and tectonic processes).

As a result, there is no one by our side. Bears are now a distinctly different order of being, creatures in our zoo, and they have to hope we can figure out a way for them to survive on our hot new planet. By domesticating the earth, even though we've done it badly, we've domesticated all that live on it. Bears hold more or less the same place now as golden retrievers. And there is nobody above us. God, who may or may not be acting in many other ways, is not controlling the earth. When he asks, as he does in Job, "Who shut in the sea with doors . . . and prescribed bounds for it?" and "Who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens?" we can now answer that it is us. Our actions will determine the level of the sea, and change the course and destination of every drop of precipitation. This is, I suppose, the victory we have been pointing to at least since the eviction from Eden -- the domination some have always dreamed of. But it is . . . a brutish, cloddish power, not a creative one.

Our seventh Principle, respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, is about nothing less than transforming that brutish, cloddish power into a healing, caring power which recognizes that we are, still, and will for ever be, part of something larger than ourselves, part of a Web of life in which human beings make up only a strand.

The image of a Web with its many strands is full of the idea of connectedness -- between body and spirit, between earth and humans, this life and previous lives, animals and people, words and actions, dreams and reality. In our daily lives and our everyday thinking, we tend to split reality into the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, self and others, human and non-human; we tend to be dualistic. But this reflects a fairly modern, and mostly western, convention. Our ancestors believed that one or more spirits pervaded everything in nature; their beliefs are now called pantheism and animism and various other isms.

In many parts of the world, and among the native peoples of our own continent, such beliefs are taken for granted as reflecting reality, and the experience and wisdom of many millions of people seem to confirm rather than contradict these ways of looking at things. Those of us who have made a distinction between body and spirit, material and spiritual, human and non-human, are in a decided minority, although our ideas have become dominant in the technological world of today. I believe it's time for us to reconsider our thinking, in company with many of today's most provocative scientists and philosophers.

This isn't the first period of questioning the dualistic, split view of the world. Genesis, the first book of the Bible, tells us that when God created the world, everything that was made, including human beings, the whole of creation, was very good. It was the work of God, it was imbued with the divine spirit and purpose, and it was all inter-related. It's this faith in the goodness and connectedness of nature which Matthew Fox, a dismissed Dominican priest, now an Episcopalian, is trying to recover in what's called Creation Spirituality -- which happens to be the title of one of Fox's books. There's a strong movement within Christianity, as well as outside of organized religion, which wants to return to the ancient belief that there's a fundamental unity and connectedness within the whole of nature -- that all existence is, in fact, an interdependent web.

Those whose faith is based on a belief in the web of life take their teachings from nature and find inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons. They insist that experience of the world around us is a more reliable teacher than books or institutions or doctrines or leaders which are concerned only with the human part of the web. Believers in the interdependent web of all existence tend to echo the thoughts of such poets as William Wordsworth, who wrote 200 years ago,
. . . I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Wordsworth believed that we're all intimately connected, with each other and with everything in nature, from our very origins. Plato and other Greek philosophers, much earlier, were among those who believed this, but faith in our spiritual connections transcending space and time had been largely forgotten by the time Wordsworth and his fellow poets came on the scene. Coleridge, another of the Nature poets of Wordsworth's time, was for a while a devoted Unitarian, but he later rejected the Unitarian movement as not spiritual enough. He compared Unitarianism to "moonlight"; that is, it provided light but no warmth. And he wasn't the only one. Perhaps the most famous Unitarian of all time, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a hero of mine as some of you know, left the Unitarian ministry because the Unitarian outlook, he said, ". . . is cold and cheerless, the mere creature of the understanding, until controversy makes it warm with fire got from below." Emerson would have been right at home with the concept of the interdependent web, I think. Listen to this passage, from his essay,"The American Scholar":

Every day, the sun; and, after, sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows . . . There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.

Respect for the interdependent web requires us to connect with larger forces and participate, at least imaginatively, in the cosmic process. We're respecting the interdependent web, I think, when we gaze with wonder at a comet in the night sky, when we take our children to hear the frogs in a marsh, when we plant an orchard of fruit trees. This UU Principle touches the environmental theology and deep ecology movements, as it teaches us that we're deeply involved with nature, one with it, not apart from it. This is also where it encourages us to leave the bounds of western technological thinking and consider eastern philosophy and religion. As Matthew Fox's associate Starhawk reminds us,

. . . Eastern religions offer a radically different approach to spirituality than Judeo- Christian traditions . . . The image of God is not the anthropomorphic, bearded God-Father in the sky -- but the abstract, unknowable ground of consciousness itself, the void, the Tao, the flow. Their goal is not to know God, but to be God.

Religious thinkers tend to get into trouble with the mainstream authorities if they dare to suggest that not only are we one with nature but one with God. The Jesuit scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing in the 1950s, considerably before Matthew Fox and his friends, was not too popular with his superiors when he described the evolution of the universe from a geosphere of rocks and inanimate matter to a biosphere of living organisms to a "noosphere" of conscious and self-conscious beings to the final "Omega point" of the whole world's oneness with God. This, I think, is the ultimate respect for the interdependent web of existence: commitment not only to love one another as ourselves but all creatures, and the earth and the universe itself, and whatever we may call God, as ourselves, because we are part and parcel of one another, evolving together towards a mysterious culmination. As Coleridge wrote in "The Ancient Mariner",

He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;

Respect for the interdependent web of existence is expressed in many ways; one of them is using the word "Gaia", from an old name for the earth, to describe the faith that we're part of an organic unity. Gaia is used as a name for that unity, like the name of a god or goddess, suggesting a respectful attitude, in which Gaia, the Earth, the interdependent web, is good; anything which damages, destroys or perverts natural processes is suspect at best, evil at worst. This old but newly-discovered reverence for Nature may lead us to question the extent to which we interfere with natural processes, even for the very best of reasons.

We know, for example, that there's a price to pay for careless deforestation, even when we're making good use of the trees that we cut to build homes and print information. Some of us believe that logging in certain places should be halted altogether; others think that we simply need to be more careful to replenish the resources of the forests. We know that Nature, while wonderfully able to heal herself, is not infinitely renewable and can't withstand all the damage that we humans are capable of inflicting on her for our short-term or long-term benefit.

Our return to an earth-centred spirituality, which this seventh of our Principles encourages, along with our consciousness of the practical effects of pollution and all the other ways in which we impose ourselves on the world, means that we must search for new ways of relating to Nature and natural processes. We can no longer be secure in our old role of having unlimited dominion over the earth, subduing it to our own ends without thought of the chains of events we set in motion. That's no longer working. We somehow have to find a more co-operative relationship with Nature, working with her rather than against her, for our own sake as much as for the long-term survival of the planet.

Human beings tend to see alternatives as extremes. If we should no longer subdue Nature, we think, perhaps we must submit to her entirely. Perhaps Nature's way is always best and we should stop interfering with it altogether. Maybe a famine in Somalia or an earthquake in India or AIDS and cancer all over the world is a natural form of population control and by sending in food relief we're perverting Nature's way. Perhaps it would be best to let Nature take its course, espousing the ancient oriental philosophy of "wu wei", "no action".

My own answer to this dilemma, which I offer as a starting point for discussion, is based on my belief that our nature as human beings is to transcend the limitations of the non-human world. I disagree with those who not only reject, quite rightly, the ways in which human beings have abused Nature, but who also reject the human role as steward of Nature. My position is a religious one, which owes a debt to the Judaism which gave rise to our western religious traditions, and which sees Nature as good but not perfect, not a God to be unquestioningly adored. I accept the wonderful paradox that we humans are both a part of Nature, animal creatures within Nature, subject to physical laws, and at the same time mysteriously able to project ourselves imaginatively beyond Nature's present limits and to make that imagination real and actual in the world, to actualize our potential as we used to say.

I think it's significant that one of the earliest imaginings about the beginning of things pictures human beings in a garden, being given the job of tending and keeping the garden -- living in it, as part of it, but able to care for it and be responsible for it, rather than just being subject to it. I like the image of us as gardeners, and I find it describes my understanding of our relation to Nature pretty well. As a gardener, I think quite deeply as I'm tending my flowers, pulling weeds, turning over the earth, moving things around, about what I'm doing and why. I often remember the old joke about the minister who passed by a home where a woman was working on the flower-beds. He said to her, "Isn't it wonderful what God can do with a garden?" "Yes", replied the woman, "but you should have seen it when He had it to Himself!" Gardening, whether for the sake of beauty or for food, is evidence of a conviction that we can (and should) do better than just respect Nature from a detached distance: we can co-operate with Nature, accentuate the positive, eliminate (or at least diminish) the negative, and ultimately improve on the raw material.

But there are limits. We've discovered, in the last few decades, that some pesticides are destructive to more than the pests we aimed at. We've discovered that accepting some wildness also allows some beauty which is entirely absent from an artificial landscape. We've found that there's a delicate balance between loving the land and exploiting or assaulting it. We know that our response to famines and floods and earthquakes and diseases, as well as to all the ethical questions posed by new technologies, must take account of the interdependent web of all existence, not just our own little lives in our particular time and place.

I was very struck, as perhaps some of you were, by our own Herb Lefcourt's article in the K-W Record last Thursday, in which he explored the various dimensions of the contentious Free Trade Area of the Americas. Herb said, echoing many of our thoughts, I suppose, that

"It's not that trade is bad in and of itself, and in fact free trade will have some positive fallout for many nations. But the issue is . . . that we have evolved into [a nation] in which the unbrideled pursuity of wealth overrides any demands for responsible handling of the environment, urban infrastructure and the like. Is it any wonder that people are disturbed enough to mount protests at trade summits?"

No, it is no wonder - or rather, it is a wonder, a wonderful thing, that so many people still, despite all the money and power arrayed against them, care enough to speak up and put themselves on the line for those very things, for the interdependent web of all existence.

I want to end with a poem, written by another Welsh writer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, more than a hundred years ago. Hopkins was writing about the destruction of trees long before that became a widespread cause: his poem is called "Binsey Poplars", and the trees he's writing about were cut down in 1879.

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled / Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew --
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball / But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean / To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

"If we but knew what we do"! Let's educate ourselves as best we possibly can to know what we do. Our heightened awareness will help us respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part; it will make us more tender nurturers of our earth, gardeners rather than despoilers. May it be so.