Here is some of the latest: Average global temperature has increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past hundred years, but this rate of increase has increased and may continue to, the ice caps are melting, atmospheric CO2 content has risen and continues to rise to levels never seen before in human history, rain forests are being cleared at a rate of one and a half acres per second. We are losing an estimated 50,000 species per year to extinction. The world population, which was about 6 billion in 2000, is expected to reach 9 billion in 2040 and we cannot even adequately support the 6 billion. And the list goes on. The good news is that it is on the news. The challenge is that it is happening.

Couple this with the current economic downturn and as an individual and planetary citizen I engage in a feeling that oscillates between powerlessness, grim acceptance, and the desire to engage in decisive personal action.

Environmentalist Paul Hawkin wrote: “If you look at the science that describes what is happening on the earth today and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data. However, if you meet all the many people and organizations in the environmental movement who are pushing forward a grass roots, modern day environmental agenda and you aren’t optimistic, then you haven’t got a heart.” If I weren’t in some way optimistic, I would not stand before you today. Indeed, Amory Lovins, energy guru, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, wrote about energy efficiency and of the relatively small effort it would take for us to stabilize our carbon footprint “There is so much low hanging fruit with regard to cutting energy losses that its falling off the trees and mushing up around our ankles” he wrote. So, what is it that has kept our country and the world from at least stabilizing our carbon output thus far? Inertia – the tendency to do what we are doing until something forces us to do something different.

As an individual who is striving to be more conscious, how do I cope day-to-day with these realities ? They have been coming over the pike for so long and now are they are so real and so close at hand. Popular culture once spurned such environmental topics as radical and outside of the main stream. Now such discussion is commonplace and green products are touted as the solution to many of our environmental problems, at least once people start shopping again. How do I fit this in, make sense of it, and, hopefully, take steps which though they will not solve the problem, will at least help me feel that I am minimizing my contribution to it? And where does this fit into my life as a spiritual being? Paul Hawkin wrote “ We cannot save our planet unless humankind undergoes a widespread spiritual and religious reawakening. Would we recognize such an awakening if we saw one? Is there already such a spiritual reawakening taking place and we simply cannot recognize it? “And, can that awakening begin within each of us, by looking within ourselves?

Carl Jung once wrote that the less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought , the less we understand ourselves. With that thought in mind, I want to share with you and reflect upon a bit of my own personal history. I was literally born a Uniterian Universalist to a set of parents who both married outside their faiths. My mother, who grew up Jewish and subsequently left the faith, married a Spanish immigrant who was supposed to have been brought up Catholic. Following my entrance to this world, they sought a religious community where they would fit in, and Uniterian Universalist came to the top of the list. Both sides of my parents grew up poor. Given the lack of resources available to them, they learned to rely upon little and to make the best of what they had. A popular story is of my maternal great grandfather, who was a strict Jewish immigrant from Poland by the name of Lazaar Cohen. He was known to his great grandchildren as “Zeydah.” He would obstinately conserve, of all things……teabags. Something we now generally take for granted was a luxury and an important commodity in the days of my great grandfather and he took to conserving his teabags seriously- even after coming to the US where he was known to make at least 7 cups of tea from the same bag, giving each cup just a few seconds to steep prior to moving the precious cargo to the next steaming cup of water. His reputation carries on long after the 37 years since he died. At family gatherings during those times when someone prematurely threw a teabag into the trash (or at my house, into the compost) a tone of reprimand would be uttered, such as “What would Zeydah have said!” Indeed, every time I send a teabag “back to the earth” I feel a twinge of remorse. My wife always teases me when I insist on eating 10 day old leftovers; she calls me zeydah). Zeydah also happened to live to the ripe-old age of 99.

Such awareness of the resources we consume was always apparent on my maternal side. Zaydeh’s daughter, my maternal grandmother, Rachel Farin, was adept at reusing and passing on clothes. This ran in the family, possibly to a fault, judging from the wardrobe I had when attending middle school. My grandmother also never learned to drive and would take extremely short showers, just long enough to get wet, soap and rinse off quickly. Possibly less than a minute.

As a child playing in my backyard with my friends I recall being teased because my underpants (among other garments) were hanging on a clothesline. “My Mom dries my clothes in a dryer” my friend exclaimed proudly. Indeed, many of my early childhood memories of the 1970’s involved my mother hanging out the wash in our backyard. When I asked her later why we didn’t use our dryer, she told me she appreciated the fresh smell of clothes hung out. Plus, she said, “the dryer uses energy that I do not have to use when I hang out the clothes.” Little did I know that these ideas were being passed to me unconsciously, just as the actions we take today are passed on to those who follow us. In my present day family , we regularly hang out the wash. Particularly exciting was the five years of washing our children’s cotton diapers and hanging them on the line…For this awareness, that my forefathers and foremothers brought to me, I offer my thanks….

It is partly through these memories and impressions that I am motivated today as someone who strives to be as conscious as I am able given the expectations of employment and of being a parent in our society. For instance, I hang out my clothes, I don’t eat meat, I drive a car that runs on waste oil, I bike whenever I can, I turn out the lights when I leave the room, I compost, I recycle and I bring a solar oven to as many events as I am able to. However, I, like many of us, have to drive many miles per week (even with alternative fuel, I still create carbon). I use electricity, I heat my home, I live in a large home, I own a refrigerator, a washer, and, yes, a dryer, and am tied to a lifestyle that is consumptive by design, though not by intent. Haircut/shampoo example?

As we strive for bigger and better changes, it is worth keeping in mind these words from writer David James Duncan “When small things are done with love, its not a flawed you or me who does them; its love. In keeping with this faith, the only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist, or activist in these strange times is by giving little or no thought to ‘great things’ such as saving the planet, achieving world peace or stopping neocon greed. Great things tend to be undoable things. Whereas, small things, lovingly done, are always within our reach. “

Particularly in Western Society, driven by an inner angst, we tend to look outward to material possessions, wealth and other externalities to satisfy our deepest longings, as Carl Jung wrote “We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will bring the light of proper sunlight.” This, incidentally, was published in 1961. I wonder what he would say now!

I liken this at a national level to one very large endeavor that the nation and the entire world was drawn into – the Race to the Moon. This was identified as our country’s priority in the sixties and, finally, in 1969, we did it and the US became the first country to successfully land a person on the moon. This big step became yet another source of pride for us, yet it was based upon the notion of competition and external achievement and, incidentally, space travel is no small source of greenhouse gases! My grandmother herself once told me when I was a boy in the mid-70’s in her NYC Yiddish accent that I can still hear to this day… “I don’t know, Danny, these men going into space and all. I tell you, the sky is different since they started doing that.” As a ten year old, I did what I may have seen grandfather do when he heard something he thought absurd coming from my grandmother . It wasn’t for many years that I realized she may have been right (maybe not in the cause, but in the outcome). Perhaps she DID notice something that evaded not only me, but most of the world at that point (and still evades some of us now). She noticed some environmental results of our actions, not necessarily of us going into space, but of the buildup of civilization that was a necessary prerequisite. We are now just beginning to reconcile these changes and to accept their enormous scope. Ironically, one of the results of space exploration, the stunning photo of Mother Earth from outer space, became one of the icons of the modern environmental movement.

Also to be noted at about this same time was the relative lack of attention that was being paid to studies of the deep ocean. Our attention as a nation was focused on the heavens, on reaching for something akin to God, of, in a sense, conquering the space between the earth and the moon by reaching through it, as if it were a mountain that needed to be climbed because “it was there.” This very masculine, outward tendency far outweighed our quests to reach the ocean depths, which were dark, perhaps seemingly forbidden, marked through lore and history as the underworld. The technological challenges of reaching the ocean depths are in some cases greater than those of reaching out into space, but I expect it was more than the challenge of exploring the ocean that kept us from doing it for so long. The ocean to me represents the feminine, the watery world, the inner depths through which we tend to hesitate to tread.

In his great work, “The Divine Comedy” 13th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri loses his way in life and must find his way back only by going through the levels of hell (or the underworld) guided by the ghost of Ancient poet Virgil in order to come out and continue on to meet his love, Beatrice, in heaven. This concept can be taken metaphorically as our need to go deeply within ourselves. It is here where we can find both our heavenly and our shadow sides. Through careful self exploration we can gain greater and deeper understanding of ourselves and of the world.

Noted environmentalist and Oberlin professor David Orr wrote of gratitude and of its place in the environmental movement: “Gratitude restores the cycle of giver and receiver and back again. It extends our awareness back in time to acknowledge ancient obligations and forward in time to the far horizon of the future and to lives that we are obliged to honor and protect. Gratitude requires mindfulness, not just smartness. It requires a perspective beyond self. “ Gratitude toward each other and to Mother Earth can restore broken bonds and heal. Along the same lines, the great Jewish Rabbi Abraham Heschel described the source of dissonance as lack of appreciation when he stated “As civilization advances, the sense of wonder almost necessarily declines…. Mankind will nor perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe, but a will to wonder.”

Along with gratitude comes happiness.

Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russel wrote “If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.”    By “happiness” I do not mean reveling in the success of one’s outward accomplishments that we may associate with greed, the need for attention, or the temporary satisfaction of the ego. By “happiness” I refer to a deep contentment associated with service to others and to the earth. I experience it when I am able to be present with myself, do something kind for another person, experience a kindness from another person or reduce my impact on our planet. When I am present with myself rather than reacting to agitation, frustration, or the unrelenting “wants” of the mind and body, in Jung’s words that “mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness,” I instead take the time to notice them, to feel them, to wonder about them; and to perhaps find their deeper sources…

In this way, I am not constantly rushing, as Jung said, “impetuously into novelty” always looking for the next big thing. My happiness is also enhanced and that, in turn, enhances the happiness of those around me and it is this spirit by which we can all move in the direction we need to (which is sometimes forward and sometimes backward) but it is in unison. When we are happy we have less need for the external items that tend to drive the environmental concerns of today. We are also much more capable of working together to resolve differences, which is what we are going to have to do to make the changes that we need to make.

Part of my own spiritual practice for the past 5 years has been Vipassana meditation. Following each meditation session, the practice involves thinking loving kindness thoughts to those around us in circles that extend outward until they reach all beings. This practice (called Metta) allows me to wish happiness to all others, including my family and close circle, to my friends, to people whom I know, to those people to whom I may have felt wronged me, to those people to whom I may have wronged, to all people, to all creatures. Surprisingly, at times when I have felt a charge toward a certain individual, I would make sure to include that individual in my Metta practice and I would find that the tensions tend to dissolve and the relationship with that person can then move forward. This is without having a physical, left brain interaction with the individual. The power of Metta is strong. It is this type of healing work that can lead us to a new level of human/social sustainability, which is critical as we work toward environmental sustainability.

I would like to complete this sermon with a Metta exercise after which I will engage in a short chant in the ancient Pali language where I will repeat the words “May all beings be happy” three times.

Please rise and stand with me as you are willing and able and please hold the hand of your neighbor, if you can still read the benediction while doing so: