Healing and Nurturing Ourselves to Nurture All Life

The First Principle Project

Healing and Nurturing Ourselves to Nurture All Life

Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner*

For your sake, for humanity, for earth, and for individual lives and life, vote yes to endorse the bylaw change that asks Unitarian Universalists to covenant and to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every being. Be part of your congregation and our Unitarian Universalist Association leading the way towards more beauty and more flourishing by nurturing humans to nurture all of nature.

I’ve been an avian veterinarian for 30 years and a Unitarian Universalist minister for almost 15 years. I am driven by incredible and hopeful possibilities for honoring and connecting to nature, including human nature, and thereby making a more beautiful world.

To heal our beleaguered earth and the wounds of human separation from the rest of life requires a praxis of compassion and ethics. We must more clearly see humans’ true relationship to life and others and more fully grasp that there is no disjunction between human and nonhuman nature. We must embody our interconnection through concrete relationships with discrete individuals, for otherwise the Unitarian Universalist principle of respect for the interconnected web of existence is merely abstract. I find affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all beings to be an expression of this hopeful and healing praxis.

We are called to connect to others. While we cognitively know that human health is intertwined with the earth and all earth’s beings, our diminishingly biodiverse and increasingly urban and technological world accentuates our impression of separation and distance from nature. This alienation from nature is an increasing cause of withdrawal and despair. Yet I am hopeful that a re-enchantment with the life that surrounds us -- an opening to the beauty, worth, and dignity in individuals – can motivate us to effect change, nourish our sense of belonging, and deepen our connection to life. As our own agency is enhanced, we will come to more fully apprehend the agency of individual life around us.

A denomination that covenants to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every being is a denomination that invites its members to creatively re-vision the web of interconnection. That web is not a network connecting some beings with worth and dignity (humans) with other beings that lack worth or dignity. Rather, it is a web in which all beings are interconnected by sharing worth and dignity; it is a web whose interconnections recognize and reinforce each being’s worth and dignity. This re-visioning is our path of healing. The web of beauty, worth, and health can lift us out of our spiritual and ecological crisis, but it cannot do so if some beings in that web are deemed without worth or dignity.

The path of healing through re-visioning will take unexpected curves and encounter unanticipated obstructions. As Unitarian Universalists embark together on this path of healing ourselves so that we can heal the world, we will discover surprising things about ourselves, our world, and place of our congregations. Our free and responsible search for truth and meaning is ever unfolding, a way forward together that invites us to fall in love with life over and over again.

Surprised by love, we go through our days with wonder readily available to nourish us, for re-enchantment and re-visioning brings an invigorating sense of wonder. It invites us into Henry David Thoreau's "discipline of looking always at what is to be seen." Through that discipline we encounter what Stephen Jay Gould called the "excruciating complexity and intractability of nonhuman bodies." Suddenly, we see the miracle of expression everywhere. What seemed unappealing, dull, or even fearful, is revealed as magnificently present before us. We live in a world of wondrous subjects, each being a life with an interior experience of life. This transformation of perception of beings represents a transformation of our selves.

Worth seen everywhere grows compassion everywhere. With vitality and beauty seen everywhere, wherever we go, we go not alone. Wonder replaces loneliness. Studies indicate that wonder nourishes our lives, improving our health, spirits, relationships, and compassion. When wallaby, walrus, whale, and worm provoke wonder, we are nourished and better able to nourish. But when any being’s worth is seen as merely instrumental, human lives, too, may be judged merely instrumental.  To distinguish just one species as having worth and dignity, to set ourselves apart as unique bearers of worth, only separates and isolates us and perpetuates the wound of disconnection.

Accompanying us on this visionary path we endeavor the development of a humble curiosity. Approaching all findings as provisional, declining to obscure the wonder of the moment with prior concepts, creative possibilities of relationship emerge.  We become playful fools, in love with life that constantly amazes and amuses. Life invites us to fun and frolic as we let go of our idols of knowledge and control.  Our lives are not bound to others in our mind's definition of life and worth. Rather, we are bound because all beings who have subjectivity, who desire to endure and flourish, are bound together. All life has the capacity to experience that which is harmful or beneficial. All life strives for further coherence of their embodied selves. Recognizing this, we begin to live wider, wilder, and deeper lives than human designs alone can realize.

Though the vision of interconnecting beauty, worth, dignity, and health between individuals does challenge us with the burden of knowing the harm humans cause to so many, we move forward nonetheless, perhaps ever more lightly, for we walk in beauty. As the Navajo Way Prayer suggests, beauty is all around us.  This ever present beauty, that is also within us, connects us to all others. We care for and protect them because we love them, and we love them because we are part of them, and they are part of us.  Healing comes from seeing how we are embedded in relationships of common experience and existence with other individuals.  We, the walking wounded, are healed and healers. 

We, a  people who covenant to affirm and promote the worth and dignity of every being are a people encouraged to cultivate patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman presence – a people emboldened to live a new story of wholeness in place of the old story of conquest and consumption. Appreciating the limits of our control and of our understanding, we can live freely in present and persistent beauty, wonder, and awe. Every denial of a being’s intrinsic worth and dignity cuts off life from ourselves, and cuts off life's creative striving expressed in that being.

If we hold that some beings have worth and dignity and some beings don’t, then we deny ourselves the journey along this spiritual path of healing and hope.

Every being has inherent worth and dignity.  Seeing it in unreservedly in all others, we see it in ourselves, and so embraced by life, we bring our Unitarian Universalist principles to life, nurturing human nature for all nature.

*Rev. LoraKim Joyner, DVM, combines her experience as wildlife veterinarian and Unitarian Universalist minister  to address the importance of both human and  nonhuman well being in considering conservation and care taking strategies.   She serves as Community Minister affiliated with the Community Unitarian Church at White Plains, NY, Right Relations Consultant for the UU Metro NY District, Facilitator of the First Principle Project, and Co-Director of One Earth Conservation. Bringing 29 years of experience working in Latin America, she currently has projects in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay. She promotes nurturing human nature through relationships with other species and nature in the Nurture Nature Program offered by One Earth Conservation.

Go to the Ant

Today's Guest Author:  Rev. Gary Kowalski

Gary Kowalski is the author of books on nature, history and spirituality, including The Souls of Animals and Goodbye Friend: Healing Wisdom For Anyone who Has Ever Lost A Pet" (both from New World Library); Blessings of the Animals: Celebrating Our Kinship With All Creation, Science and the Search for God and The Bible According to Noah  (all from Lantern Books);Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith of America’s Founding Fathers (BlueBridge Publishing); and Earth Day: An Alphabet Book (Skinner House).   His author's website iswww.kowalskibooks.com.

 

Reverend Kowalski is interim minister at the Community Church of Chapel Hill Unitarian Universalist. Visit his blog on faith, politics and current affairs.

          What does it mean to assert that every creature has inherent worth and dignity?  Drawing on the Biblical proverb to "observe the ant and be wise," this essay suggests that even seemingly mindless animals may hold unsuspected dimensions of complexity and creativity.  Moving beyond a mechanistic view of life opens our minds to wonder and our hearts to celebration of the infinite within the small.  

Go to the Ant

            When my children were young, they humored me one Father’s Day with a hike up Hunger Mountain, a peak in central Vermont. As we sat resting by a stream on the descent, we turned over a log to look for salamanders. But the chunk of birch I chose to lift fell to pieces in my hand. The inside had been chewed away and hollowed out by ants, thousands in that one length of windfall timber. I realized that the forest floor must be teeming with them, tunneling unseen and mostly unappreciated.

Ants are everywhere. The smallest ones swarm in the interstices between particles of soil, with over 14,000 identified species filling every available ecological niche. Collectively, the family of Formicidae outweighs the human population of the planet, and ants and termites together account for up to thirty percent of the world’s animal biomass. Specimens in amber have been discovered that are 92 million years old, from the Cretaceous period. While the dinosaurs of that era have long since disappeared, ants have survived and colonized every continent except Antarctica.

            It matters what we think of these tiny creatures. Perhaps most of us don’t think of them at all, except as nuisances on picnics. Yet ants are one of life’s oldest and most successful experiments, and how people view these pismires is a measure of how they regard animals in general. Ants represent the living world in its most typical and primordial form.

Historically, attitudes toward insects have passed through three stages: the mythical, the moralizing, and the mechanistic.

Indigenous, oral cultures made no firm distinction between the realm of waking and dream (or between heaven and earth, which the shaman could traverse in modes of ecstatic insight). Neither was there any clear boundary between human and animal. Insects played a role in the sacred legends of many native people. The Pueblo tribes of the American Southwest say that their ancestors lived in a subterranean world before the beginning and that it was the ant people who built a ladder, on which humans could climb into the land of sunlight. The Kabyl people of North Africa likewise say it was an ant who led the first man and woman from the subterranean regions to the earth’s surface and taught them the necessary arts, how to bathe and wash their garments, how to grind corn and knead it into dough, and how to make fire with flint and tinder for cooking. For the mythical thinker, the life force (which anthropologists who study animistic cultures often call mana) seemed widely dispersed within the cosmic order and might be shared by inanimate features like rocks and hills, as well as by other living beings. Spiritual qualities were not the exclusive preserve of any single species.

Things changed with the rise of written scriptures, particularly in the monotheistic West. Philosophy and didactic discourse gained ascendance over imagistic and associational habits of thought, as people tried to interpret the diverse phenomena of the natural world as manifestations of a single, overarching moral order.

In Hebrew tradition, this tendency is exemplified in the “wisdom literature” of the Bible—Job, Ecclesiastes, and the book of Proverbs—the latter attributed to Solomon, who supposedly gained his reputation for both wealth and discernment from a diminutive source:

Go to the ant, you lazybones;

Consider its ways, and be wise,

Without having any chief

Or officer or ruler

It prepares its food in summer,

And gathers its sustenance in harvest (Proverbs 6:6–8)

In Islamic lore, Solomon’s ant was one of the few animals granted entrance to paradise. While insects might not be deities in their own right, they could still be exemplars for human conduct. 

In Greece, Aesop (c. 620–560 BCE) drew lessons from the ant and grasshopper to illustrate the results of prudence and improvidence. As a slave, Aesop may have found it convenient to use animals as allegories for human foibles, without the risk of directly offending those in power. But the allegories would not have been effective unless people believed that ants really did symbolize industry and thrift. Such fables, along with bestiaries and riddles, continued to be written into medieval times, like this one from the early Middle Ages: 

I am foresighted about my life. Not a sluggard when it comes to hard work, I carry on my shoulders the reward of a carefree winter. I do not heave great loads all at once, but I heap up many loads one at a time. 

To the moralizing imagination, all creatures served a purpose—if not as good examples, then as dire warnings—where even the smallest details were the creations of a supremely ethical Designer. 

            The French philosopher René Descartes introduced a new paradigm for thinking about animals. He considered them automata, and this mechanistic outlook dominated biology in its early days. The pioneering entomologist Henri Fabre, for example, documented the apparently inflexible, unthinking behavior of ants and other insects. In his text on Mason bees, the Frenchman recorded observing columns of red ants searching the countryside for other anthills to raid, capturing nymphs to take back as slaves to their own subterranean fortress. The routes chosen for these raids were diverse: “Bare ground, thick grass, a heap of dead leaves or stones, brickwork, a clump of shrubs: all are crossed without any marked preference for one sort of road rather than another.” What never varied was the path home; even if the experimenter placed obstacles in the way, or washed away the track with water, the myrmidons rigidly retraced their original itinerary in reverse. 

Laden with their plunder, the Red Ants return to the nest by the same road, often an exceedingly complicated one, which the exigencies of the chase compelled them to take originally. They repass each spot which they passed at first; and this is to them a matter of such imperative necessity that no additional fatigue nor even the gravest danger can make them alter the track.

Such regimented maneuvers prompted Fabre to ask of the insect brain, “Has it faculties akin to ours, has it the power of thought? Are they able to connect a ‘because’ with a ‘why’ and afterwards to regulate their behaviour accordingly? Are they able to change their line of conduct when faced with an emergency?” He answered, “I see nothing in it all but an invincible persistence in the act once begun. The cogs have gripped; and the rest of the wheels must follow.” With their clattering exoskeletons, insects even look like robots, an impression reinforced by their stereotyped actions.

Yet the whole is often more than the sum of its parts, and for this reason mechanical models have their limits. Termites in small groups, for example, may appear to move in random and chaotic fashion, but increase the numbers and patterns appear within the milling. A colony begins to form, self-organizing. Properties emerge that were not present or predictable before. One can claim that the insects are programmed by their DNA, but an equally strong argument can be made that termites’ genetic material has evolved to serve the complex requirements of the collective, selected and governed by the wisdom of the hive.

Deborah Gordon, who studies ants at Stanford, explains how individuals change jobs in her book Ants at Work. An insect working in housekeeping or the nursery one day may switch to patrolling or foraging the next. Have patrollers found a cache of tasty seeds? More laborers are needed immediately to bring home the harvest! But who gives the order to mobilize? The answer is, no one. If the bounty is nearby, the patrollers will return to the hive more quickly, at a higher rate, and that stimulates ants occupied in other duties to stop whatever they’re doing and join in gathering food. No head of personnel decides that it’s a good day to forage, yet through “swarm intelligence” the work gets done. Gordon muses, “A colony is analogous to a brain where there are lots of neurons, each of which can only do something very simple, but together the whole brain can think.” Giant colonies can comprise up to eight million insects, communicating with dozens of pheromones, as well as through touch and sight, forming the equivalent to a complex nervous system.

Though it sounds slightly mystical, swarm intelligence has practical applications, from powering search engines to streamlining traffic flow. Southwest Airlines has used ant-inspired algorithms to make more efficient use of aircraft as planes arrive early and late. In Europe, phone companies are increasing the efficiency of their networks by programming calls to leave virtual pheromones at switching stations, like ants leaving signals for their hive mates. The paradox is that one insect may be clueless, but millions together can be adaptive, flexible, and smart.

            A more holistic perspective may be replacing our earlier assessment of these creatures. The moralizing mentality of Solomon and Aesop is quaint but no longer tenable. Ants should not be praised for their industry or frugality, any more than they should be condemned for waging war. The mythical mode of thought is likewise becoming harder to sustain; the “ant people” diverged from the evolutionary line that led to humans half a billion years ago.  But mechanism, with its harsh worship of blind forces and brute matter, offers scant solace to hearts hungry for meaning and companionship. Thankfully, its reign, too, may finally be coming to an end.

It still remains possible to appreciate insects as threads within the intricate tapestry of life, actors who are small but have surprisingly creative roles to play. I went into the woods on Father’s Day for all the usual reasons, to find serenity and rejuvenate my spirit. But while the forest is a place I visit, it is where the insects live, pollinating the blossoms and turning the detritus of decay into the stuff of fresh beginnings. What I experience in nature is a feeling of both strangeness and kinship with a power larger and more lasting than myself—a power that is both vitalizing and weirdly Other—what some might call the presence of God. That sense of exaltation may come or may elude me. But I know the life that inspires it is always there, omnipresent and tireless even when unobserved—like the tiny ant.

Gary Kowalski

From Blessings of the Animals (Lantern Books, 2012)

The Spiritual Path of the First Principle

Today's Guest Author:  Rev. Meredith Garmon

Minister, Community Unitarian Church at White Plains

Main blog:  The Liberal Pulpit

To affirm and to promote the inherent worth and dignity of all beings is an exercise of the heart, a spiritual practice, and a path of deepening growth and broadening connection. In the most important ways, it’s not about what we owe them – other beings. It’s about how connecting with all beings in compassion is our own road to awakening.

My liberal arts education, enhanced by my faith tradition’s teachings (I grew up a Unitarian Universalist in the 60s and 70s) guided my thirst for self-understanding. I came to understand myself by investigating the glories and burdens of “the human condition.”  More recently, I’ve come to see that the way of self-knowledge also requires exploring “the mammalian condition,” “the warm-blooded condition,” “the vertebrate condition,” and “the animal condition” – for I am the inheritor these glories and burdens as well. Closer contact with, and awareness of, my animality, my being-ness, not just my humanity, engenders concern and respect for all beings, which, in turn, engenders my own self-awareness.

Here are two questions:

Question 1: What does it mean to be human?

Question 2: What does it mean to be animal?

Question 1 directs attention to what separates me from nonhuman animals. Question 2 directs attention to what connects me with nonhuman animals. To touch with reverence the ground of commonality with all beings, rather than to draw distinctions, expands my spirit, ennobles my heart, and grounds my soul.

This is not to deny that there are differences. There are some things we humans are really good at: like communicating learning and preserving it so we can build on it. We’re not the only species that does that, but we are really good at it. Other things, humans are not so good at. Other species have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs live in a world of smells that we can but dimly imagine, and bats and dolphins live in a world of echolocation that we imagine, if at all, even more dimly. There are various differences between any two species. Quite a large part of what I am, however, lies in the connections and similarities I have with all mammals, with all warm-blooded animals, with all vertebrates.

I’m not going to truly know myself by picking out one or a few unusual skills. I know myself by grasping the inheritance I share with the gorilla, gazelle, goose, and gopher tortoise. My world is taken in through eyes and ears that work pretty much like theirs do. Many of them live in, and are guided by, a world of smells that I am mostly oblivious to – but not entirely. The fast-track connection between the olfactory and memory is something my brain also has. I hunger as they do. I am susceptible to the same fight-or-flight adrenaline surges.

Humans do have an especially wrinkled thin neocortex layer on top of our brains, yet we remain largely driven by those brain systems that all mammals have – and even those that all vertebrates have. The cognitive processes of the neocortex govern me much less than the neocortex likes to believe. Indeed, perhaps the neocortex’s greatest glory, ironically, is that it has, over the many millennia since its emergence, developed the means to investigate itself and reveal its own relative insignificance.

Millennia of assumed differences between humans and other animals have been crumbling under recent research. Roughly speaking, the assumption has been that nonhuman animals are basically machines, their behavior merely conditioned responses, while humans are more than that: free, capable of exercising intention and forming responses that transcend conditioning. Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), for instance, influentially declared that nonhuman animals were complex organic machines without the immaterial mind or soul that only humans have. Research has been steadily closing the gap. Studies have noticed, or elicited, elaborate and intentional behavior in various species.

Other studies come at the gap from the other direction: revealing that humans are not nearly as intentional as we think we are. Of these studies, there are two – findings by Benjamin Libet and by Michael Gazzaniga – that warrant a detailed look.

The Libet Experiments. In 1983, Benjamin Libet and others at the University of California, San Francisco, published the striking results of their experiments. In the study, participants were asked to voluntarily flex their wrist at a time of their choosing. Libet found that the neural signals for motion preceded the conscious awareness of intention to move by 300 to 500 milliseconds. “Put simply, the brain prepared a movement before a subject consciously decided to move!” Conscious intentions to move aren’t what cause our movements. This begs the question: why do our brains bother to create for us this illusion of conscious intentional control? Janet Kwasniak suggests that “the conscious feeling of intent is simply a marker indicating that we own the action.” She suggests that “this marker is very important so that our episodic memory shows whether actions” were “ours” or just happened. The memory of an event that came from me influences my neurons for the future -- we do learn from our actions and their results. If I get a pain from something I did, my neural wiring makes me less likely to do that again. But if the pain “just happened,” the effects on my wiring are different. What we call “volition” is a perception of our own behavior rather than a generator of it. The illusion of intention (or, more precisely, the illusion that intentions precede and determine action), then, is a by-product of the systems that all animal brains have for learning from experience.

It remains an open question how many other species might also generate such an illusion as a by-product of learning. Whatever the answer to that question might be, we can no longer plausibly claim, “We humans are in control of ourselves while nonhumans are machinelike bundles of conditioned responses.” Either they are not machines, or we are too – and our vaunted human exceptionalism amounts, at most, to a unique capacity to be deluded.

The Gazzaniga Experiments. Psychologist Michael Gazzaniga flashed two different images at the same time into the subject’s visual field. One image was in the part of the field that could only be seen by the left visual cortex, and the other only by the right visual cortex. The right brain saw a picture of snow covering a house and car. The left brain, at the same instant, saw a picture of a chicken claw. Gazzaniga then asked the subjects what they saw. The left brain has the language centers, so the left brain can articulate what it saw. “I saw a chicken claw,” reported the subjects. So instead of asking for words, Gazzaniga then presented an array of pictures and asked subjects to point to what they saw. Subjects’ right hands (controlled by their left brains) pointed to the picture of the chicken claw that the left brain saw. At the same time, subjects’ left hands (controlled by their right brains) pointed to the picture of the snow-covered scene that the right brain saw.

Gazzaniga then asked each hand to point to a picture of something that goes with the picture seen. The left brain saw a chicken claw, so subjects' right hands pointed to a picture of a chicken. Chicken claw goes with chicken. The right brain saw a snow-covered house and car, so subjects' left hands pointed to a shovel. Finally, Gazzaniga asked his subjects, "why is your left hand pointing to a shovel?" Now we’re in the language realm where only the left brain can express itself. If left-brain knew the truth, it could say, "I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel. It must be something you showed my right brain." Instead, the left brain instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, "Oh, that’s easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."

Our brains create a running commentary on whatever we are doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of our behavior. When Gazzaniga flashed the word "walk" to just the right hemisphere, many subjects stood and walked away. When asked why they were getting up, subjects had no problem giving a reason. "I’m going to get a drink," they might say. Our inner interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing it has done so.

Our language centers and neocortex notice our behavior, and they make up a story about ourselves – typically as heroes with certain endearing foibles. This is an after-the-fact story. The behavior came first, we now know, and the story about about ourselves as intentional, purposeful, and rational is made up after we notice our own behavior. Yet my brain makes it seem to me that everything I did was just what I “meant” to do. That’s the delusion I live in.

I wouldn’t want to lose the things my human neocortex can do, the level of detail of envisioning the future that my human forebrain creates, the wonders of language produced and comprehended by my human versions of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Yet these functions are only a small part of who I am. Moreover, as attached to them as I am, they do cause problems. The forebrain that envisions the future can so easily start obsessively worrying about that future -- in contrast to the "peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief." (Wendell Berry). The language centers, creating their own little world of story loops, can leave me oblivious to the nonlinguistic awareness of each moment.

Where will deepened awareness of our animality take us? There is an emerging theology of nature that honors wildness as sacred. An earlier time described the material world as fallen, sinful, or, at best, crass. Then the scientific view has encouraged seeing the world as mechanical and inert. The emerging eco-spirituality connects in wonder to the aliveness of the world. Connecting to our own animality means attending to, honoring, and loving what in us is wild and unpredictable. Connecting to our own animality means connecting to our world. To consciously cultivate self-awareness of animality is to become more present, to become more open to the nuances of the unexpected in experience. This is the path of affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of all beings.