Nurture Your Nature with the First Principle Project

A new television show just began, Nurture Nature, hosted by Rev. LoraKim Joyner DVM.  In the first two episodes she speaks of the First Principle Project. Following each show are reflection questions and action steps that address the intent of the First Principle Project - living compassionately, healthy, deeply, and joyfully in a multispecies world so that we can nurture all of life, and care for the many individuals.  

These videos can be used in Lifespan Development activities and as a Worship Service.

As this is a new project, if you have any suggestions for producing the show or for future shows, please contact Dr. Joyner.

Click here to watch the first episode - Reverence for Life

Click here to watch the second episode - Living with Reverence for Life

Living and Dying with Reverence

Living and Dying with Reverence

Rev. LoraKim Joyner, DVM

January 25, 2015

Service at the First Religious Society – Unitarian Universalist

 of Newburyport, Massachusetts

In this service I lift up the teachings of Albert Schweitzer’s Reverence for Life Ethic and how it can be applied to the First Principle Project and the challenges of living in a multispecies world.

Sermon:

Let us imagine a family of humans walking along a road. A daughter walks slightly in front and her mother gently and fondly holds her hand. Across the street walks another family, a pair of chimpanzees. There too a mother holds with affection her daughter’s hand.

Now imagine that the human mother reaches behind her and takes the hand of her mother, so now they are 3 – grandmother, mother, and daughter.  On the other side of the road the chimpanzees do the same. Then each grandmother takes her free hand and grabs the hand of her mother, who takes the hand of her mother, for generation upon generation.  On each side of the road is a very long line of great apes, spanning hundreds of thousands of years.

Then something very special happens. The two lines begin to converge, they get closer and closer together, until there is only a line separating them, and then this line disappears and terminates into the hands of the shared ancestral grandmother of both humans and chimpanzees.

It is a blessing to see these two lines converging into one.  It shows that we all belong to the family of life on this earth, that we all have inherent worth and dignity, no matter our species.

To not reach out and join our hands with others is to say that those who come after us do not belong, or those before us.  It is to distance others from our compassion and care.

Ultimately, we become isolated, lonely.

But we primates only have two hands.  It is a challenge to reach out to the many to welcome them, and to be welcomed. So we often give up in exasperation or confusion, and we drop the hands of others. Instead we use our hands to draw lines of separation, on one side are those who live, and on the other, are those who shall die.

Where to draw that line between those within the realm of moral concern has captivated philosophers and ethicists for millennia, and divides many within the animal well being movement, in which I am deeply embedded.  One area in which I work for the benefit of all species is the First Principle Project, a consortium of UU groups and congregations that seek to improve the lives of all of us by engaging and changing the UU Principles.  We are asking how our UU principles might guide us in living in a multispecies world where science and the changing cultural paradigm tells us that there is no sharp distinction between human and non. To spark discussion we specifically are starting with the First Principle - changing it from the inherent worth and dignity of every person to "every being."  The goal is not to diminish the flourishing of humans, especially those marginalized and oppressed, but to reach out and grasp the hands (flippers, wings, paws, pseudopods) of others and lift them up higher into human awareness and compassion.  To symbolize this shared interdependence of well being, the logo of the First Principle Project is a human hand grasped by a chimpanzee hand

Where it gets tricky is what we do after the shared ancestral grandmother. How far back do we grant inherent worth? Does it extend to protoprimates that looked like rats, fish, invertebrates, or unicellular animals of ancient seas?

Unitarian Universalists vary as to where to draw the line of having and not having inherent worth and dignity.  Let's try a little experiment here and see if that variation also exists here. Please look around and see the other, and see the possible sharing and deepening that is possible between us.

How many agree that all humans have inherent worth and dignity?

How many would say that all great apes, including early humans and pre humans have inherent worth?

How about other highly intelligent social animals, such, dolphins and whales?

Now let's add other species of vertebrates who are often smart and social - crows, parrots, other species of birds, dogs, wolves?

Okay all vertebrates? Cats, fish, amphibians, reptiles?

How about invertebrates - such as tool using octopi, worms, insects?

How about trees and plants? (Albert Schweitzer transplanted trees instead of killing them when clearing fields)

How about rivers and mountains, rocks?  (Yes, here too Albert Schweitzer saw reverence. He wrote of caring for ice crystals and said" Respect the order that is, and do not interfere any more than you have to").

This stuff makes for some pretty lively arguments, for we bring to it our very deep love and care for life - ours, and others. There is a lot on the line, and there is an urgent sense that we get it right. Billions of animals are suffering every day used in production and situations for human benefit, and we are losing our wildlife. We are staring not only at their deaths, but also our own. The task to focus and change who we are can be overwhelming. How do we have compassion for the many when our biology, evolution, and culture keep pulling us to turn away from the beauty and worth of the other?

Rev.  Rebecca Parker said,” The task given to us here and now is to do what we can to advance reverence for life and deepen the promise of love. this is what congregations are for:  to teach us to give reverent attention to life”.  I like that, for in my experience within Unitarian Universalism, by discussions and arguments alone we will not reach the Promised Land.  We need something more, our lives for life.

Albert Schweitzer promoted not arguments, but life through reverence when he said, "My life is my argument." How does reverence help make our lives an argument?  What if we used our two hands to not draw lines, but to bow down before the beauty and grandeur of life?  Might we use reverence as a means of leading a prayerful life as the starting line for an ethical and compassionate life?

Some have criticized Albert Schweitzer by saying that having reverence for everything results in a water downed ethic. We risk slipping into relativism and treat everything the same without using degrees of suffering or our absolute need as a yard stick for our actions.   We might also dilute reverence when we superficially acknowledge reverence or worth as permission for our actions.  One example I hear often enough is that reverence means saying a prayer before we kill or use animals, such as the often cited example in some Native American traditions.

Reverence is not a rote prayer and cannot be dismissed lightly.  Reverence takes study, attention, and risk.  It means taking the time to know the science, ecology, biology, and behavior of the animal before we act.  What is the animal thinking and feeling?  It means slowing down to take in deeply the knowledge that evolution brought them here, and the spirit of life is shining through them.   It means holding in one's heart that your direct actions and decisions are taking life or causing suffering.

The order for reverence isn't eat, love, pray.  It's pray, love, and then eat, but as Albert Schweitzer would say, only if it is absolutely necessary to our lives.

Reverence also means seeking support so that we can be vulnerable while taking risks, and failing.  This is a new territory we are asking each other to journey into.  Like our first great ape ancestors when they left the African jungles for the savannah, we need each other, and like those apes before us, this challenge can grow our intelligence and emotional capacity of empathy.

With reverence we do not judge one another for the tragic decisions we all make to benefit at the expense of another.  Reverence calls us to be present to the inherent worth, benefit, harm, and death in life.   And in this crucible if awareness, we are made more compassionate, more whole.  The dance of reverence is the two step, life, then death, then life, and the music is the compassionate decisions that we sing in response to beauty.

This song is not easy to hear, or to sing, but is life- giving regardless.  Each responds to this song of life differently, and I do as a wildlife veterinarian in Latin America.  My work is a spiritual endeavor. To be able to witness all the tragedy I see in the senseless suffering of parrots and people, I must truly open to beauty as much as I can.  At one time during the Guerilla warfare years in Guatemala in the 1990s it because too much. I closed off, and had to leave conservation work for over a decade.  I got better, reverence leading the way so now once again I work in several countries.  Reverence still calls me mightily to task, such as this past year in Honduras. 

I came right up, for the umpteenth time, to that seemingly impenetrable wall of harsh reality.  Once again I saw most of the wild parrots there poached illegally from their nests, torn from their families while still so very young.  Once in captivity they are treated without much knowledge or intention, suffering and languishing before dying.  The people too lead lives of desperation, seeking a better way while in the throes of income inequality, drug violence, corruption, and the highest homicide rate in the world.  But the Miskto indigenous people with whom I work are making a stand, reclaiming their lands and fighting against poaching. 

But not all of them. One man defied the laws of his country and his village's collective decision, and continued poaching.  One day he climbed a tall pine tree to take the two wild scarlet macaw chicks from the nest. He made a mistake while climbing, and fell.  He died at the base of the tree, as did one of the two chicks he fell upon.  A cross and grave stones mark the place where he died, and I visited it with the villagers one day.  They began to cry, kneel, chant, and pray.  Though this man had gone against their wishes and was threatening their biodiversity, he was still loved.  I was moved, and remembering a Zuni Pueblo prayer I sing every day at home, I too began to sing:

I add my breath

To your breath

That our days may be long on this earth

That the days of all beings

May be-long

Looking down at one end of the tree was death, but as I craned my neck upward I saw a beautiful giant of a tree and imagined the family of macaws roosting there in the years to come. Then I looked back down at the base of the tree and saw this man’s grandchildren, healthy, playing, and in healthy relationship with the rainbow birds that fly above them.

 He and his kind are responsible for much pain in my life and the lives of many, but do not let our fear of pain deter us from love.  Out of an awareness of death and loss, comes life and love, and family arises. We cannot choose who is in our family, or in the family of life, but we can choose how we interact with those whom we share our lives and planet. By calling all into the family, we choose the way of reverence.

This path is not easy, for to face harm and suffering in this world, especially when we personally or our species are responsible can paralyze us.  Life is too precious to spend it in guilt, shame, or blame.  We need joyful and compassionate action, saying yes to truth, life, and love.

How to do so and also solve life’s wicked problems is not clear.   None of us know the exact path that will stop the poaching, save a species and a people, reverse climate change, or mend a broken relationship.    Albert Schweitzer nonetheless invites us to go forward by becoming a sibling to all who live, suffer, and die.  In that relationship of reverence, I am clear that we can be healed, and can bring our principles to life.   

Take courage friends.

The way is often hard, the path is

never clear,

and the stakes are very high.

Take courage.

For deep down, there is another

truth: you are not alone. – Wayne Arnason

And are held in beauty and belonging.

Opening Words

Albert Schweitzer says,  "The human spirit is not dead It lives on in secret. It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to humankind."

And so we gather today to bring out of secret our human compassion, and proclaim that spirit is not dead, but lives in the breadth and depth of this gathered community.

Responsive Reading #470

Readings - From Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker

We must learn again to live with reverence. 

It is response to life that falls on its knees before the rising sun and bows down before the mountains.

 It puts its palms together in the presence of the night sky and the myriad galaxies and recognizes as Langston Hughes told us, “beautiful are the stars, beautiful too are the faces of my people.”  

Reverence greets all humanity as sacred. 

It genuflects before the splendor of the grass and the magnificence of the trees. 

It respects the complexity, the beauty and the magnitude of creation and does not presume to undo its intricate miracles. 

Instead, it gives life reverent attention – seeking to know, understand and cooperate with life’s ways.

Reverence for life has to be learned. 

It is not just a feeling – it is a way of life that is manifested in more than an isolated moment of appreciation for nature or awe before its destructive as well as creative power. 

Reverence involves full-fledged devotion enacted in deeds of care and responsibility.  It involves knowledge, study and attention.

Reverence is a form of love that needs to be learned and affirmed.   And this is what congregations are for:  to teach us to give reverent attention to life.

The task given to us here and now is to do what we can to advance reverence for life and deepen the promise of love.

Hymns:  #203 – All Creatures of the Earth and Sky

     #83 - Winds be Still

      #6 - Just as Long as I have Breath

Benediction:

We leave here now friends of all, inwardly united with everything, the secret of life's beautiful interconnection brightly illuminated with the light of our shared time together.  And so our service has now ended, but our service to the world has just begun. Go in peace and love. (adapted from Albert Schweitzer)

Norman Phelps Speaks on the First Principle Project

Guest Author:  Norm Phelps

Animal Rights Activist and Author (The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights According to the Bible (2002), The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights (2004), and The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA (2007).

Excerpt from a longer blog post: An Open Letter to My Fellow UUs on Animal Liberation

The First Principle Project

Disclaimer: I have had and continue to have no involvement with the First Principle Project. I am writing strictly as an individual and the views expressed here, as throughout this article, are my own.

For the benefit of readers who are not UUs, Unitarian-Universalism is a non-creedal denomination. There is no specific set of doctrines to which one must swear allegiance. In place of a creed, we have a set of Seven Principles, which outline the commonalities that bind us together. The First Principle, a commitment to “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” is the subject of a pro-animal initiative known as the First Principle Project (FPP). Initially created by Unitarian-Universalist Animal Ministry (UUAM), and facilitated by UU minister and wildlife veterinarian LoraKim Joyner, FPP campaigns to amend the First Principle in order to bring animals as individuals clearly and plainly under its protection.

Let me start by saying that as far as I am concerned, the First Principle—exactly as it is written—should provide the same degree of protection and nurture to animals that it provides to human beings. As I explained earlier, nonhuman animals—especially the mammals, birds, and fish that we enjoy eating—are people in every meaningful sense of the word.

But because the preponderance of UUs view it through the frame of humanism, the First Principle as written protects only human beings. Most UUs interpret “person” as a synonym for “human” and consider our relationship to animals to be governed by the Seventh Principle, “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” Thus, most UUs adopt a conventional environmental or ecological attitude toward animals and advocate protecting species and ecosystems, but not individual animals. This is a morally deficient response to the fact of animal sentience and personhood.

The First Principle Project proposes to change the First Principle to read, “the inherent worth and dignity of every being,” so that it expresses a worldview similar to what Albert Schweitzer termed “reverence for life.” Schweitzer viewed all living beings as individuals, not as species or populations, and so does The First Principle Project.

I wholeheartedly support The First Principle Project for reasons that should be clear from what I have said thus far. Because the locus of sentience is the individual, all sentient beings need compassion and respect as individuals. No one would think that so long as homo sapiens was not endangered, the enslavement and slaughter of individual human beings was morally acceptable. The same principle should hold for nonhuman animals, as well. Personally, I would prefer that an amended First Principle refer to “every sentient being,” because I fear that some will insist on interpreting “every being” to include plants and will argue that since even vegans eat plants, the consistency principle permits us to eat animals as well. This would be a misuse of the consistency principle, but I suspect we will nonetheless hear the argument made. But one of the things that makes being a UU so stimulating is that no two of us ever (or hardly ever) agree entirely about anything. And if each of us insists on their own favorite wording, we will never get anywhere. And so, I support amending the First Principle exactly as FPP proposes.

One thing that I find especially interesting about The First Principle Project website, including the Resource Guide, is that it never once states that eating the flesh of enslaved and murdered animals is inconsistent with respecting “the inherent worth and dignity of every being.” In fact, it mentions vegetarianism and veganism only in a worksheet and even there it takes extraordinary care to assure that the language is sterile and value-neutral. “Inherent worth” is quite a different matter from “instrumental worth.” When we eat the flesh of slaughtered animals, we are allotting them only instrumental worth and denying them inherent worth. To respect the inherent worth of any being, you must respect their life, and take it only under the pressure of dire necessity, as in defending yourself or someone else from attack. Enslaving and slaughtering an innocent being for one’s own pleasure—gustatory or otherwise—is a gross insult to that being’s inherent dignity.

Why this tiptoeing around the fundamental moral issue? Why this reticence where the bedrock question of right and wrong, good and evil is concerned? I do not know for certain, but it seems to me likely that the leaders of the FPP fear that a more direct approach would trigger a reflexively negative reaction from so many UUs, clergy and laity alike, that the FPP would be doomed before it ever got started. And based on my experience trying to get ethically unambiguous language inserted into the Statement of Conscience on Ethical Eating, this is a legitimate concern. And this sad reality brings us back to the larger question: Why is the UUA—and why are UU congregations and members around the country—defending the enslavement and slaughter of 65 billion innocent sentient beings every year? What has happened to us? Why did we stand still while others were moving the moral agenda forward? And, more importantly, How can we get back on track? How can we reclaim the UU heritage of moving the moral frontier forward? On the answer to that question hangs not only the fate of nonhuman people, but the fate of Unitarian-Universalism as well. If we do not get on the right side of the definitive social justice issue of our time, future generations of UUs will look back at us and see little to be proud of.

Reverence for Life - Bringing Our Principles to Life

Today's Guest Author:  Rev. LoraKim Joyner, DVM

Community Minister in Multispecies Ministry and Compassionate Communication

UU Metro NY District Right Relations Consultant

Director One Earth Conservation and Ministry

Director Lafeber Conservation

We are here on this earth to prey.  I don’t mean the calling of sacredness into our lives kind of praying, but preying as in the predator prey relationship. 

.  

We are all in the club called the predator prey cycle.  It is well and alive.  It is a beautiful thing we evolved to do to take care of ourselves, which means harm to others.  I've always thought we needed another principle in our Unitarian Universalist tradition: We must harm to survive.  We were born to compete.  Albert Schweitzer called this truth, "the necessity of life," and he says it lays a burden on all of us to benefit at others expense, for every species and every being has a “will to live.” 

Yes we evolved to take advantage of others and for violence. Every culture has sexual violence, rape, which indicates that it is hardwired or at least very easily accessible in our human behavior repertoire.   Murder, killing, and tribal conflict runs deep in our social DNA.  But just because we "can" doesn't mean we "do."  Slowly over the centuries, violence as a whole recedes because cultural evolution and expectations can override biological mechanisms.  As a species we have become increasingly aware of the inherent worth and dignity of each other, and even more importantly, how to act more compassionately towards others given this growing awareness.

Part of the growing awareness includes how we understand human behavior.  We are a plastic species.  Human plasticity means we can choose how to act so we can reduce harm for we also evolved to nurture one another.  This sense of care and empathy extends not just to our own species, but others.  We evolved to collaborate in part because we need each other to survive.  Our human communities need healthy ecological communities.  We are learning that animals can't make it without humans, and vice versa.  We depend on each other.

Affirming this interdependence of all things as in our 7^th principle requires wisdom and reverence.  To touch on reverence together this morning and experience the miracle of commitment that our species can rise too let me share this story.

I work in Honduras with the indigenous communities.  My goal is to help support their efforts to preserve the last 150 Scarlet Macaws left in this country that fly over their ancestral lands. There used to be thousands of them throughout the country, but no more. People want to steal the birds to make money, and so take the young chicks from their families to sell them to people with power and privilege.  There is terrible pressure from without on not just their ecological community, but also their human community. People with money and power are coming in stealing their land, and willing to kill the indigenous people to take what they want.

Tomas, and elder of the village, tried to stop the illegal poaching, logging, and cattle ranching.

For his efforts, he made enemies who ambushed him one day, and he was shot 4 times.  He nearly died. His whole village had to flee because they were likewise threatened with their lives. Yet, 4 months later he returned to the ghost like village to work with me and others on parrot conservation.  We had to hire a squad of soldiers from the Honduran military to accompany us and keep us safe.  I asked him why he was willing to risk his life. He replied, "Everything is at risk so I am willing to risk everything. If we lose the parrots, we lose our way of life."

He is not alone. This year more people have returned to his village, and the death threats have not stopped, nor has the illegal poaching.  When we shared our year's research results with them I told the leaders that if any more parrot chicks were lost, even one more year of it, I didn't know if their parrot population would  make it. So the leaders held a community meeting and decided, on their own, to mount up daily parrot patrols to protect the remaining nests. They have very little resources, and their lives are in danger, but they elected to spend their resources to protect parrots.

And they did. Though many chicks were taken from their nests, the patrols were able to confiscate the chicks and raise them in the middle of nowhere with no electricity and no training in avian husbandry, and barely enough food for themselves. Eventually sixteen of the giant, red, long tailed parrots were released and they now fly free in the wilds where the parents, grandparents, and cousins too fly free.

Every day the juvenile birds return to eat rice and beans in the village. A few years ago an armed group of 10 men came to the village and robbed it of all valuables. Well, not all.  The people are still there not giving up, and the birds are still flying free. They know if the birds can remain free, they can too. Liberating the birds is liberating themselves. Saving the birds is saving themselves.

These villagers are like us. There is no need to romanticize them. They fuss with each other, strain their relationships, and give into desires that cause harm. But what they have learned is that there is no special place of privilege on this planet. We are all in it together, and if one doesn't make it, none of us do. They aren't saints, they are just looking after themselves.

But looking after ourselves and others is not easy.  I was just in this village in September and the people and parrots are struggling. The birds aren't getting enough to eat because  the people aren't doing well.  They get sad when they hear the hungry birds calling in the tall pine trees - and anguish having to choose whether to feed themselves, or their children. How do we decide whom to feed?  Whom to nourish?  What if there is a way to nourish others, as many as possible, and nourish ourselves, as much as possible?

Writes Albert Schweitzer, author of the Reverence for Life ethic,  By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world. By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.”

Life is good for us when we have reverence for others.

But living with reverence, even though we evolved to do so, does not mean that such a life comes automatically or easily, for there is a huge amount of cultural influence that impacts us to not see the worth and dignity of life.  Writes Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, President of Starr King School of Ministry,  We must learn again to live with reverence.  [Reverence} respects the complexity, the beauty and the magnitude of creation and does not presume to undo its intricate miracles.  Instead, it gives life reverent attention – seeking to know, understand and cooperate with life’s ways. Reverence for life has to be learned.  It is not just a feeling – it is a way of life that is manifested in more than an isolated moment of appreciation for nature or awe before its destructive as well as creative power.  Reverence involves full-fledged devotion enacted in deeds of care and responsibility.  It involves knowledge, study and attention.  Reverence is a form of love that needs to be learned and affirmed.   And this is what congregations are for:  to teach us to give reverent attention to life. The task given to us here and now is to do what we can to advance reverence for life and deepen the promise of love.”

To help us learn and advance reverence together we need a call to promises and to commitment, which can in part be accomplished by affirming that our covenant is with all life, such as in the 7^th principle, but we need more.  We are called to have reverence not just for the abstract notions of communities, ecological and human, but for the individuals within.  We do this in part through our Principles as they stand now, but we can be more powerful in how we dedicate our shared lives to the beauty of this earth and all her beings. By changing the First Principle to “We covenant to promote and affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every being” we clearly state that all bodies matter and have, as Albert Schweitzer wrote, a “will to live.”  Paying attention to the well being of individuals cannot be cleaved from living with reverence. To life in such a way we do for the sake of others, and we do it for ourselves.

Albert Schweitzer tells us how. “With Reverence for Life in everything you recognize yourself again.  Reverence before the infinity of life means the removal of the strangeness, the restoration of shared experiences and of compassion and sympathy.

We are healed with a sense of belonging when we have reverence for life, and our compassion grows. One way we can grow in wisdom, reverence, and compassion is to slow down enough so that we can recognize the gifts of life.

In my work in Honduras as a wildlife veterinarian, I also encourage us all to slow down so we have time for reverence.   We take time to connect with each other and this beautiful, tragic world.

One day we were in the middle of the village, sweating, standing under tall trees where once hundreds of parrots flew, and now only a few.  I offered my favorite poem, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, except they don't know what wild geese are, so please forgive me Mary, I substituted macaws instead.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the savanna, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the savannas, and the deep pines, the jungles and the rivers

Meanwhile the macaws, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Just then we heard the calls of macaws, five of them, a rare family in a time when most chicks don't make it to fly free because of poachers who take them for pets.  They flew directly over head with their deep cries as I finished.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild macaws, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

We wept - those of us of so many nations and ethnicities. For the birds had told us we belong, and in that knowing, we committed ourselves once again to the life around us, in us. 

Such commitment is fueled by reverence, which is a form of love that allows humans to work under extraordinary conditions with extraordinary results. 

This is the dream of congregational life.

Dr. Schweitzer knew we could not escape harm and the necessity of life, but with reverence we can face who we are and reduce our harm while increasing benefit. 

Fueled by reverence we receive life, the greatest gift of all.

Healed by reverence, we give back the gift of life to as many as we can.

Each of us finds reverence in our own way - through birds, walks in the woods, a child at play. But whatever it is, stalk reverence relentlessly.

We are fierce predators, so let us prey/pray for reverence in our lives for the flourishing of all.