“The Great Turning, Part 1: Ordinary Time”
The Reverend Cecilia Kingman Miller, Interim Minister
Rachael Maxwell, Lay Leader
Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Church
January 6, 2008
Readings
Adapted from WH Auden's “Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being” (1944)
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes--
Some have got broken--and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school.
There are enough
Leftovers to do, warmed up, for the rest of the week--
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted--quite unsuccessfully--
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers.
Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent [It] away,
[…]
But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much more narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this.
To those who have seen
The [Vision], however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering.
So, once we have seen the Vision,
We are tempted ever after to pray;
"Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake."
They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine.
In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance.
“Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky.
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Sermon
Today is Epiphany, often called King’s Day. It is in many cultures a feast day recognizing the arrival of the Three Magi in Bethlehem. It’s a Catholic holiday, predominantly, but though I was raised in a strictly Protestant home, I’ve always found this an interesting day. The conjunction of the arrival of magi—mages, wise men, to the birth of innocence. The very name itself—Epiphany. An enlightening moment. A moment when the scales fall from our eyes and we see clearly.
Of course, this holiday is celebrated by the rituals we all know so well: taking down the tree, throwing things away, cleaning out the fridge, and getting ready for ordinary life to resume. Ordinary time, Auden calls it. Back to normalcy.
But the story of the Magi is a story in which no one goes back to normal again. The legend says the Magi made their way home, yes, but by different routes and as profoundly changed people. New vision and new wisdom had descended upon them, and they could not continue on as before.
Many of you have heard about the Great Turning. This is a term coined by Joanna Macy and refers to the enormous social shift that humankind must make if we are to survive as a species.
The Great Turning concept was popularized by David Korten, in his book by the same name. He spoke at General Assembly in Portland, and the idea caught fire in a number of our folks. A group of us have been reading and studying these ideas, and we want to invite the rest of you to join us in learning more about this deeply provocative and exciting idea.
The premise is that for 5000 years humans have lived in a worldview that orders relationships according to power and domination. This worldview embraces the myths of redemptive violence and human dominion over nature and the myth of natural hierarchies. This worldview sees all things for their exploitative possibilities.
It is a worldview built on lies: Lies which say that power is authority; that the weak are to be blamed for their weakness; that the world is divinely ordered into structures of power and oppression. The Gods that are created in that worldview are vengeful Gods, tribal gods, who mete out punishment and authorize injustice.
For 5000 years, humans have believed those lies. And the Great Empires who came to power over the millennia have used those lies to justify their destruction and exploitation of nature and people. Korten calls this worldview “Empire,” and others call it the Domination System.
We live in this narrative, as much as it pains us to recognize this. As citizens of the American empire, we have been told these lies, and we have believed them. We have been taught to worship power and wealth. We have been told that violence is justified when it serves our national interest. We have been told that people of other nations are not as important as we are.
And one of the most pernicious lies we have been told is that everything can be commodified, and is ours to consume. We have been told that our desires must be satisfied and that our most important desires are comfort, pleasure, and status. Like the citizens of empires of old, our desires are a great engine which fuels an imperial economy, which makes commodities of trees and rivers and the very earth, which even makes objects out of people.
We have so separated ourselves from nature that we can no longer recognize what is worthy in each season. We have strawberries in January, and in fact we believe it is our right to have them. We have so separated ourselves from the poor that we don’t consider their needs. We have clothing made cheaply, by people of far away, poor nations, and we believe it is our right to have such inexpensive goods.
We have forgotten our place in the family of things. We are fighting a war to maintain our car-based lifestyle and escalating an ecological crisis, and while it causes us sorrow, we still live in the old ways.
Our desires are stripping the planet; our pleasure is bought with the enslavement of many and the abandonment of many more. We have been seduced, as the citizens of empires always are, seduced into believing that we are entitled, more entitled than others.
Yet, entitled as we are, we are also deeply insecure. We put our trust in material things and neglect our families and our communities. We believe we are self-made and yet dimly know that that is untrue. We have forgotten who we are.
We have forgotten the old teachings to revere and worship only that which transcends ourselves. We have forgotten the values of humility and restraint. We have told ourselves lies or colluded with those who lie to us: Lies about what is worthy of our devotion, our care, our work. And…we have lied to ourselves about what is possible, or meaningful. We have declared any other vision to be utopic and thereby foolish, naïve. and unattainable.
But there is a choice before us. We can awaken from Ordinary Time. We can, like the Magi, allow ourselves to be transformed and take a different path.
The Great Turning is a process of awakening from the lies of Empire. Macy and others believe that we are living in a time of both great possibility and great peril. This is a moment in human history where we can and must turn away from Empire and embrace a new narrative, a new way of human living. We live in a time of Epiphany.
What shall our era of human history be remembered for in another thousand years? If human society survives, Korten asks us, will our descendants say of us: “This was the time of the Great Turning”—or will it be known as the Great Unraveling?
The work of the Great Turning is a massive reawakening of humankind, in which the scales of deception fall from our eyes, and we cast off the old, destructive myths of Empire. We turn towards a creative, cooperative, generative relationship with one another, with other nations, and with the earth.
This vision is called by many names; The Kingdom of God, the Age of Wisdom…Korten calls it “Earth Community.” I like the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King’s term: the Beloved Community.
This is not a new idea, though perhaps the immediate peril of global warming makes us newly ready to hear it. For thousands of years the world’s great religions have stood against these lies of empire. Buddhism makes a distinction between reality and ego-driven self-delusion, and its Four Noble Truths teach restraint in one’s desires and the practice of right-relationships with others. The earth-centered religions of indigenous peoples all over the world have proclaimed reverence for the earth’s creatures. Islam teaches a fierce commitment to care for the poor and vulnerable. The Sufi mystics warn us not to set value by anything but the presence of Divine Love.
And the Judeo-Christian tradition, out of which we come, has told this story for thousands of years. The Hebrew prophets proclaimed the vision of the Great Turning centuries ago. Isaiah and Micah spoke of the wickedness of the powerful and called the Hebrew people into a covenantal community. Jesus taught his followers to use non-violence to resist the agents of empire. Jesus berated those who hoard wealth for themselves and ignore the needs of the poor. To those who wish to be “‘spiritual’ and still amass wealth within an unjust system, Jesus pronounced an unconditional no: ‘You cannot served God and wealth.’”
Jesus insisted on a great equality, a true community in which no one was left out—not even lepers or the mentally ill. Like all visionary prophets, his teachings were perverted throughout the centuries, but they remain a great and worthy challenge to us.
The Great Turning proclaims a vision of Earth Community that is very much like the vision of the prophets of old. The Beloved Community will be characterized by our reverence for the earth and respect for the natural limitations of its resources, by a loyalty to the human family rather than to nation-states, and by the practice of non-violent resolution to solve conflict. It is a vision of human potential realized and of merciful, just, egalitarian relations between people.
And the amazing thing is that more and more people are having this vision and heralding its beginning. We can see it all over the world as people rise up and claim their power and stand against the governments, corporations and oligarchies and say: We want a new way!
This is a life-affirming, world-shaking vision, and we can quickly get caught up in our excitement for its possibilities. But this awakening is about more than just changing our lifestyles. It is not enough to change our light bulbs. It is not enough to be better recyclers. It is not enough to buy local, organic produce. It is not enough to buy a Prius or even to give up our cars. It is not enough to elect different people. None of this is sufficient, without the reorientation of our own spirits.
As Derrick Jensen writes,
“Yes, it’s vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrial civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility. With all the world at stake, it is self-indulgent, self-righteous, and self-important. It is also nearly ubiquitous. And it serves the interests of those in power by keeping our focus off them.”
This shift will not come by us acting as individuals. In order to bring in the Beloved Community, we have to see ourselves as intricately connected to one another. This work is not so much about overthrowing as it is about reorienting. This is not an us-versus-them work.
If we go forward with the ideas of us being right and some other people being wrong, or if we attempt to change things through our usual methods of busy, scurrying effort, we will fail. We cannot go about this work of transformation with our Blackberries and day planners, rushing from meeting to meeting, frantic to get it all done. If we try to bring in the Beloved Community using our old methods, it will never come.
Creating the Beloved Community asks us to act and think in radically new ways. Resisting the messages of empire and consumerism is a difficult practice, one that requires a certain spiritual vigilance. And crafting a new narrative for human living will require a creativity as yet unimagined. To be that creative and generative we will have to nurture our own souls as never before.
We must begin to live as though the spirit mattered. We must be like the Magi, utterly transformed and unable to go back to the old ways. We must release the bindings of ego and desire. We must make fearless moral inventories of our own addictions and our own fears. We must give up the myths that say that we somehow can do it all and still have it all. The myths that say we belong only to ourselves. And, smart as we are, we must realize that this is not an intellectual shift but a spiritual revolution.
We must be willing to give up our own lives as we know them. We must be willing to die to the old myths before we can be born in the new reality. And the only way to do that is to go deep into our own spirits and find that quiet place within where wisdom dwells. This requires a regular spiritual practice of some kind. Yoga, meditation, prayer—even simply keeping silent for ten minutes. We cannot hear wisdom unless we make room for her to enter.
And then we must set all of our attachments on the altar of sacrifice. We must give up our plans, our concepts of how it should be done. We must stop fighting, fighting all the time—in ourselves, with each other, with those who may still be caught in the web of Empire. We must have humility about our own progress—not compare ourselves to others and say, yes, I am further along than you. I am more enlightened than you. There is no room for blaming or shaming in this new vision.
We must embrace a deep and lasting humility that says, ‘I am not separate from you. We are all struggling together.’ We must open ourselves to a love that recognizes no difference between us. A love that holds all creatures as part of the same whole.
We must open our hearts to a deep and transformative peace that is free of attachment. We must cast off everything—everything—we know and move into uncharted territory. We must be willing to be utterly, totally transformed. And when we do that, we will not be able to return to the old ways.
This is good and worthy work. It is the most important work we humans can do. I invite all of you to join us in studying the Great Turning and working together to imagine how the church might be an agent of this transformation. I’ll talk about the church’s role in the Great Turning later this month.
But first and foremost, I invite all of us to begin the work of transforming ourselves. Perhaps we could start here, in church, to keep silence together. Perhaps in that silence we could hear the first stirrings of wisdom. Perhaps we could make commitments to each other to nurture a spiritual practice. Perhaps instead of social talk after the service, we could support each other in this spiritual deepening.
Perhaps, in these small steps, we can begin to live in the new way.
May it be so, my friends, this first Sunday of the New Year, and all the days to come.
AMEN.
