by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given March 11, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Something has happened in the last year or two that has brought the issue of global warming from somewhere on the periphery of the public’s consciousness to a much greater awareness. There are many reasons for this. The evidence has become almost impossible to ignore. And certainly Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which won an Academy Award a couple of weeks ago, has been seen by millions.

All of this is good and long overdue. But for me the issue, while clear, is still a little overwhelming and difficult to get my head around. The message from all of this is that how we live needs to change.

I should begin with a little confession this morning. It was just last week that I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth. Now I know that this might not be a wise thing to admit here this morning. I know that this might jeopardize my standing as a good Unitarian Universalist. If I really were as good as I would like to be I would have been out to see that film a long time ago—I would have been right there in line when it opened many, many months ago.

And yet I know why I didn’t see the film until just a few days ago. I figured it would be depressing and I have plenty to deal with in my life and frankly didn’t want to go and get all weighed down. But some friends happened to have it when I visited—it had already come to the top of their Netflix list—and they said I could take it and watch it. They, too, had put it off and hadn’t seen it yet. I think they may have actually been a little relieved when I took it off their hands—they could put it off for a little while longer.

I’m glad I saw the film. It is excellent. And, I know why I waited.

What has come into consciousness more and more these past months has been the reality that things are changing and they are changing rapidly. I know I had the idea that yes, in a hundred years, long after I am gone, this stuff would really come to pass. What has happened in the last few months is the realization that it isn’t necessarily in a hundred years—it is happening now and there is no time to lose. But the reality that change is needed is scary. After all, isn’t the known most always easier than the unknown? But there are so many things going on…

--with the ice melting so fast in Greenland and on the glaciers of our own Mt. Hood.

--with it not being clear if we will still have a climate to grow Pinot Noir grapes here in Oregon.

--with warmer ocean water leading to larger and more destructive storms.

--and, as the ice melts and the oceans rise—how high will the water level get?

There are so many things we just can’t predict. But what we know is that things are going to be different. The things that we are able to have, the ways of life that we take for granted, the very things that we just assume will be there may not be there. It is a realization that things might well be very, very different—our sense of home, our sense of place, what we eat, all of it.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben says that most environmentalists have been working at the periphery of our economic life for a long time. He says “we stuck filters on smokestacks and filters on effluent pipes and filters on car exhausts. The theory was that our basic scheme of life—getting more money and buying more stuff—worked pretty well. It just needed some filtering.”

McKibben argues that the filters have been good for what they have done. But what we really need, more fundamentally, is a different scheme. “We can change all our light bulbs for low-energy light bulbs (and we should) but if we don’t change the set of attitudes that produces tomatoes in January, or a flight across the globe whenever we’re chilly, and two people to the house—well, that nifty light bulb will be shining on a totally different planet.”[1]

These days you’ll find a lot of people asking and exploring how life could be different.

For Eric Brende, it is looking at our relationship with technology. He says that we in North America love all things mechanized and purchasable. He calls this devotion cultural indigestion in a new book. His cure was to spend a year with the people he calls the Minimites—people committed to minimizing the tyranny of technology. He does not reveal the identity or location of the community but says that it is a collection of Amish, Mennonite and previously mainstream Americans who joined together “somewhere deep in America’s heartland.”

Brende and his wife moved into a house in the Minimite community and lived without a refrigerator, a computer, a telephone and, eventually, a car. They asked the question: Was there some baseline of minimal machinery needed for human convenience, comfort and sociability?[2]

So that was one approach. Another is to cut back on the shopping.

This past week a writer named Judith Levine was in town. It was three years ago that she had an idea that came in the crush of Christmas shopping, a maxed-out credit card and calls from political leaders urging us spend as a weapon in the war against terror. She and her partner decided that they would have a year of buying nothing—or almost nothing.

The couple made a pact that they would buy necessities including groceries, insulin for their diabetic cat and toilet paper. They also maintained internet access. They reduced, reused or recycled. No movies or other entertainment unless it was free. No new clothes; books came from the library. Except for a few lapses they stuck to their pact.

“When people look at this project, they tend to look at the sacrifice of it.” Levine said. “I wouldn’t leap to that conclusion.” Her husband, Paul, kept saying that this, for him, was getting to the familiar side of an unfamiliar feeling. “You’re bored or depressed so you go shopping.” Instead, she said, they had experiences and adventures together.

“The implication,” she said, “is that both Paul and I were just straining at the bit and carrying on our backs this whole long burden of ungratified desires. Neither of us felt that at the end of the year.” She said, in fact, that the first thing she wanted to go and buy were some Q-tips… and then to rent some movies. The couple saved $8,000 in the year.

They made permanent changes after their year was up. Neither buys impulsively anymore. Levine said she thinks about the “life story” of what she wants to buy. Was it made in a sweatshop? What was the cost in natural resources?[3]

And Eric Brende and his wife found that their lives were a lot happier with less technology. The point, he says, is to be clear about the things they need and the things they don’t need.

What is important is first of all to be able to ask questions like these: Are we just following the latest trend? Why do we really need it? What is the cost in terms of what it takes to make it?

It is important to note that we all have desires and that that is okay. We also have to be aware that doing without can also become desirable. A whole movement has grown up around simple living. And we have to be careful. Is it another lifestyle choice that is really, in the end, about marketing?

Living with less can be a trap, too. Writer McKibben has called the voluntary simplicity movement “slightly submerged consumerism.” He says its adherents—himself included—“consume inconvenience, turning it into a pleasurable commodity”: it becomes, he says, “the fuel for my own sense of superiority.”

Levine, who gave up shopping for a year, avoids being sanctimonious by emphasizing the question of desire rather than dismissing it. “There is no way to approach the problem of over consumption without investigating the feelings that surround fantasizing, getting, and owning our stuff,” she writes.

It is important to be in touch with those desires and to acknowledge that they are okay. If we aren’t, we might find ourselves in denial. We might find that we really haven’t changed that basic story—that we are what we consume.

Almost 80 percent of respondents to a study conducted by economic sociologist Juliet Schor said most Americans are “very materialistic.” But only 8 percent considered themselves to be so.[4]

McKibben says that there is a more fundamental question. “Instead of asking, ‘What did you buy?’ You can ask someone: ‘Is your life good?’ and once you’ve asked that, you’re in position to ask the most subversive question there could be: ‘Is more better?’”

Is more better?

One environmentalist found that compared to 1950, the average American family now owns twice as many cars, uses 21 times as much plastic, and travels 25 times farther by air. Gross domestic product per capita has tripled since 1950. And yet we are not satisfied. More Americans say their marriages are unhappy, and the number who say they are “very happy” with their lives has slid steadily over that period.[5]

One of the great lessons I have been given is having the privilege to travel to places where people have so much less in terms of material things and yet seem to be so much happier than so many in our culture. It has to do with having time together, the generations being together. It boils down to the reality that as we have had more we have become less connected to others—there is that old community factor again. It comes back to the story of how we are with the stuff of our lives and how we see that stuff in relation to others and to the earth.

Whether we are rich or poor, whether we shop a lot or not, we all invest objects with meaning. Our house represents safety, the blanket represents comfort, the car or bike strands for freedom. Home comes to represent our place in the world, where we have come from, where we are grounded. The things in that home are symbols of who we are. Those are not bad things to desire. The question is how do we fill those needs and are we in touch when we want to find them in places where they are not going to be?

So what makes life good?

I was recently at a memorial service for a woman who had lived a long, good life. As her children and grandchildren and other family and friends and caregivers spoke a theme emerged around washing dishes. She loved to wash dishes. She had a certain way of doing it—with good hot soapy water in one basin and good, clear hot water to rinse them. It was an image that I have carried with me since that service. It is am image in my mind of how she was in the world—how she took good care of those around her and how she did this act with love and intention.

No matter what we are doing, no matter what it is we have, how we live is what brings meaning in our lives. The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, “I enjoy taking my time with each dish, being fully aware of the dish, the water, and each movement of my hands… the dishes themselves and the fact that I am here washing them are miracles! I must confess it takes me a bit longer to do the dishes, but I love fully in every moment and I am happy. Washing the dishes is at the same time a means and an end—that is, not only do we do the dishes in order to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes just to do the dishes, to live fully in each moment while washing them.”[6]

It is important these days to ask how we will live with less. It is important to ask that question. But maybe the first question—and the most important question—is “How will we live?” Might we find that in doing less we actually come to know more?

The times they are the indeed changing. We are asked to change our ways. We need to watch our carbon footprint. We need to pay attention to where our food comes from. But we also need to keep learning a new story—one that isn’t about how much we have or how much more we need.

The questions are about what we really need, what really makes life good, how our lives can be sustainable for us and for everything around us.

How are we to live? What is it that I really need to make a home?

I don’t want to pretend that I have a lot of answers for how we are to live into the future. I don’t think any of us really know. We need to have courage to be with what is real—even when the feeling that may come with it is despair. It is from that place of being real that we can see what we have in front of us and what it is we are to do.

We live without all the answers and that is okay. We live in faith that we will figure it out, step by step, together.

Prayer

Great spirit of life, be with us in all our days, guide us in all we do. Call us always to mindfulness, of how we are in relationship with all of life. Help us to live in gratitude for this good, green earth. Help us, in all that we do, to live mindfully and in hope. Amen.

Benediction

How will we live? Live full of passion, good people. Walk gently on this good earth. Live and love and hope. Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.