The home base of my multispecies ministry has now changed to White Plains, NY. Here we have a local TV show hosted by Rev. Jack Lohr called, "Views from the Pews." I had the wonderful opportunity to explain what a ministry for all beings looks like.
Click on the photo below to see the show, and enjoy!
There must be something in the air. Yes, as always, there are birds, but sometimes they fall to the ground, and that's when people step up to the plate.
Such was the case of Anaheim Angel relief pitcher Dane de la Rosa last week during a game with the Oakland Athletics. He spotted a pigeon in trouble in the bull pen area and did something about it - he picked it up until he could turn it over to someone who could protect the bird. After he did he went on to retire the next 3 batters with only 10 pitches, and the bird was released back into the wild. Nicely done!
In my own world, we had a nest of wrens on our front porch, which I thought was empty. The wind blew down the nest and I taped it back up. In the process I saw that the nest held 4 chicks, which successfully fledged a week later, thank goodness in time before we were to leave the house for good as my spouse had gotten a church position in White Plains, NY.
Taped up nest back where the wrens made the nest on our porch
A nest for of wren chicks about ready to fledge from our home in Florida, as were we
So we left Florida and on our first full day in New York were told of loose birds in the sanctuary of the Community Unitarian Church at White Plains. I was called upon for advice and discovered that wrens had made a nest in the sanctuary and could come and go from the outside through a hole in the rafters. I asked the church staff to be on the look out for fledglings as they would not be able to fly out of the hole and would be trapped inside. Sure enough, a week later we got a call for the church administrator and my spouse, the Rev. Meredith Garmon, the newly settled minister at the church, and I went up to help the administrator, Liliana Keith, catch the chicks, chase the adults out of the sanctuary, and release the chicks where the parents could see them and care for them. It was quite comical to see a little bitty weeks old bird scamper away again and again from our hands while a parent was chasing us both with a bug in her mouth. While on wren duty, we also noticed a robin's nest with 3 chicks. I was so pleased that our new church home was indeed a sanctuary for all beings. Nicely done CUC!
Successful Robin's nest in outside rafters at Community Unitarian Church (CUC)
We can't save them every time however. That same week my spouse gave me a call from New York City, only a short train ride from our new home. He was attending a conference and during the lunch break was outside at Union Square. Noticing a sparrow unable to right himself and thrashing around, he wanted advice on what to do. After discussing possible disease or injury, I told him to catch the bird and place her in the shade out of the hot sun and under protection from predators. There was a chance that the bird had run into a building and would recover shortly as long as she could be safe. So my spouse spent his lunch time standing guard by the struggling bird, who was joined by another sparrow. Before returning to the conference he went to see how the bird was doing, and there, along with the other sparrow and a couple of other humans, they discovered that the bird had died. The three humans bowed, hands together to honor and mourn the life that had passed.
Another three humans honored a long dead wren chick we found in the sanctuary when we were chasing live chicks. Apparently this bird was from a previous clutch of wrens that had not been as fortunate as the ones that the CUC staff saved. After a moment of silence we placed the still form up in the church's memorial garden.
Sometimes all we can do is witness, and that's important. To be present to life, to death, to beauty, to suffering, and to compassion is a gift we all can give the world. It's a gift that can be catching, even for pitchers, and can free us all, birds included.
Stone sculpture at CUC with plaque that reads, "Roots hold me close, wings set me free."
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.
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?
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?
(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?
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)
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..
(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 1st 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
(To download, click here. You might need to "right click" and "save target as")
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.
Download Piracy and Morality Sermon
Unitarian Universalist minister, avian veterinarian, vegetarian.
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