Liberating Wings

Dare To Rise To Compassionately Care for All Beings

Here is a music video I produced that speaks to the wondrous interconnection of all life.  By truly seeing and feeling, we humans can dare to rise to compassionately care for all!

 

Compassionate Communication with All Beings

Dr. Ursula Aragunde Kohl, me and participants at the CC Workshop in Puerto Rico

 

 

Last weekend I was in Puerto Rico offering two separate workshops on Compassionate Communication. One was to the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project and the other to a conglomeration of animal welfare, social services, and faith organizations in San Juan. This was the first time I had chosen to concentrate on organizations that deal with nonhuman animals. My goal in so doing was to support and nourish the humans so that they in turn could help all beings flourish.

In my home faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism I am also gearing up to offer workshops in Compassionate Communication to those interested in the interweaving justice issues that include nonhuman animals. I will do this as part of the Reverence for Life Program that the Unitarian Universalist Animal Ministry is offering our congregations. Now is the time to struggle with how we covenant with earth and her beings as our association of congregations deals with the Study Action Item: Ethical Eating and Environmental Justice. In the last few weeks congregations and list serves have been abuzz with commenting on the Draft Statement of Conscience that deals with this compelling and complex topic. Comments on the draft are due February 1st and we as an association will vote on the final draft at General Assembly in June, 2011.

How shall we come up with a statement that includes the wide diversity of who we are and yet challenges us to hold the needs of all species ever more tenderly?

My response to this question, at both the workshops and to my fellow Unitarian Universalists is this:

It’s important to think of how animals feel and suffer, how their evolution has brought them to where they are , and what they are thinking as we research how their brains work. Yet, we can never know what is “best” in the morass of ethical vagueness that cloaks humanity. Let this complexity be not a death shroud for any. Instead, let us lift up the few things we can know:

    All beings have needs that connect us in an interdependent web of inherent worth and dignity.

    We can bring kindness to every moment.

    Everything is a practice ground for the skills of compassion.

 

May this be our prayer in intention, word, and action in the months to come.

The Lama of Birds

Tashi Sange. Photo: Geng Dong

 

Tibetan Buddhism produces much for us to admire, including now a lama of birds.  Tashi Sange, also known as the Bird Whisperer, dedicates his life to protecting the environment and birds of his homeland of Tibet.

Sange always loved birds, even before he moved to a Temple at 13 years of age.  Sange spent much of his free time at the temple observing birds, whom he imagined were his father and mother.  When he reached 15,  he began recording his observations, later to draw and paint his subjects, and thus his hobby turned into a lifetime passion.

One interviewer, Geng Dong, said "He regards birds as his friends. I remembered he once whispered to a Tibetan Bunting just like he was speaking to close friends."  Geng adds,  "I think he got a lot from Tibetan Buddhism, such as the equal rights of human beings with other life and the harmonious coexistence between nature and humans."

I wonder if his love of birds came before his path of Buddhism, a path he uses to sustain research and conservation for over 25 years.

This is the order at which I came to religion, birds, and conservation.  As a child I spent my days with birds, talking and singing to them as I wandered the fields and woods of my childhood.  Their songs led me to conservation and my religious calling as a Unitarian Universalist minister.   I came to Unitarian Universalism and my spiritual practices sprinkled with Sufism, Buddhism, and nature spirituality only 13 years ago. What if, instead, I had entered on this path at age 13 as did Sange.  Perhaps I could have given so much more in return for the company of birds.

No matter the past, the question now is how to sustain ourselves into the future.  

What do you do to sustain your efforts?  

 

Liberating Locked-up Compassion

 

This week I am visiting Minneapolis Minnesota as part of the Unitarian Universalist Annual General Assembly.  It is a week packed with indoor meetings and worship, rushed conversations, and strategizing on how to save and savor the world.  I admit to going stir crazy with so much human interaction and emphasis, much perhaps like a caged bird might feel.  Finally I managed to get out for a long walk this morning from our hotel down to the Mississippi river. Amongst the skyscrapers and parking lots were the expected urban birds: scattered pigeons, sparrows, and grackles .What was surprising was a lone bird feeder hanging from a parking sign, around which flew the city dwellers.  I wonder who considers the well being of these birds, often thought of as pests or blights upon our urban landscapes.  I wonder too who doesn’t consider the well being of these birds, as there was a lock on the feeder so it would not be stolen.  So there we have our paradox – how we demonstrate the liberating compassion of our kind and how we cage our compassion, keeping it locked up from others and from ourselves.  The miracle is that we have a choice.

Which do you choose – liberating or locking up your compassion?

Bird of Life, Bird of Death, Bird of Amazement

 

 (Scarlet Macaws - photo by University of Texas)

I am in the north of this continent, not so very far, but far enough that the sun rises much earlier and sets much later than usual.  I awoke with a vision of amazement, the Scarlet Macaw of Mesoamerica.  I cannot think of that bird without thinking of death, and of loss.  Reading yesterday in the book, “Seven Names for the Bellbird,” which is a book about how people value birds in Honduras, I came across a section on the Scarlet Macaw, the Guara Roja.  The author found that the Hondurans speak of the Guara in terms of how much loss of the natural world they have seen.  So the Guara came to me today, a bird of life and a bird of death and a bird of amazement.  I so strongly feel that to be on a journey of amazement I must also set one foot in the door of death.  For this being present to what is, which stuns me with the finality and infinity of my shared being.  So here I am at the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalist ministers in Minneapolis, hearing the call to shared ministry, which today I see as shared being.

Where do you journey for amazement, and is death a part of this path?

The Downside of Spirituality - Guest Minister Rev. Meredith Garmon

My cominister Rev. Meredith Garmon delivered this sermon on September 27, 2009 at the Unitarian Univeralist Fellowship of Gainesville (audio below for listening or for downloading.  Written manuscript available upon request or for UUFG members on the website:  UUFG).  I followed his sermon with some spontaneous comments; the written excerpt follows below.

    For me the "downside of spirituality" is that our various practices often do not tell us how to deal with the pain, hurt, and suffering that exists in the  world.  If spirituality means we are to open our hearts and minds to all that is, this means that we must make meaning not just of beauty, but of tragedy, and the tragic choices each of us makes, or that our communties and species makes.  How do we do this?

    I got a glimpse how one person answers this this past weekend.  I had the honor to officiate a godparenting ceremony outdoors at Payne's Prairie State Park. Before the ceremony began a park ranger walked up with a whip on his belt, "to control gators" he replied when asked about it's function.  He watched the ceremony and at the end he said:

   "I don't know if your bible is my bible. But my bible says 'to walk circumspectly.' Out here at night walking around under the stars you never know what is around the corner - lizards, snakes, gators, bison, horses, feral pigs.  There is much that can harm you and you've got to be careful.  I mean, I don't think we can stop what's coming, the bad stuff, but we can walk carefully to ward off some of it.  And as we go, we walk under those beautiful stars."

   So maybe spirituality helps us walk open to beauty and to tragedy, and my guess is that there is so much beauty that it might just be harder to make meaning of the incredible beauty than the immense tragedy." 

    How do you hold the pain? 

    Is it worth trying to grow your awareness of interconnection, to both beauty and tragedy when you can't stop the tragedy?

    How can you grow your sense of interconnection and meaning with others?

 

Download Downside of Spirituality

(Payne's Prairie)

Begin Again in Love

This is an excerpt of a sermon delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville, September 20, 2009. 

For the full sermon, listen to it or download it at the end of this short piece.

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(Brown Booby - photo by Aviceda)

 

What does that mean to begin again in love?  For me, love means never having to say you’re sorry.  I don’t think I’m the first to say that, or think it.  What love means to me is that we are in love with this awesome world – with God, with earth, with oceans and thunder, with family and friends.  It is being in love that leads us to make amends with others, to find ways to change our behavior and to care.

 

We don’t say we’re sorry or ask forgiveness because we or others are “bad.” That’s not the dream of our 1^st principle in Unitarian Universalism which is the inherent worth and dignity of all people.  We yearn for forgiveness because we want to be part of something special, something glorious; we want to be part of this awesome world.  If we can just awake to the beauty within that touches the beauty without we can find healing, atonement, be at one. 

 

Have you ever been held in that sweet embrace of wonder?  For me it’s swimming in fresh water spring or ocean, held in waves and flow as if in a womb or being born in beauty.  In that moment of purple eel below and brown booby flying above, everything is perfect, even my fumbling and bumbling.  In touching the source of awe and wonder, we forgive ourselves and each other.

 

Born out of awe and wonder, shorn of our ego’s pride, reborn in humble adoration, may we make our days glad together.

 

 

Download Rosh Hashanah 2009 sermon

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Piracy and Morality

 

 

In celebration of International Talk Like a Pirate Day I facilitated a service on Piracy and Morality at the Unitarian Univeralist Fellowship of Gainesville.  The audio recording of the sermon follows below.

 

Let me lift up the issues of piracy regarding the nonhuman aspects of our communities.  If piracy means taking what belongs to others, often from the sense that “the world owes me a living,” where in your life do you feel that we are stealing from the earth and her beings?  What if we became Universal Pirates, and not just pirates following a code of ethics that serves individual needs or smaller community needs?  What if our every action was based on an orientation to the common good, to biodiversity, to sustainability, and to animal welfare (including humans)?  In this way I’d say let’s become pirates, matey, revolutionaries who take back what belongs to us all by giving back to what belongs to no one. 

 

(Photograph from "Pirates and Parties")

Download Piracy and Morality Sermon

 

Healing Arts and Hearts of Science

Sermon Delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville

August 23, 2009

Rev. LoraKim Joyner, D.V.M.

 

 

 

Download Healing Hearts and Arts of Science August 2009

 

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