BENEATH THE SILENT STARS
A Call to an Ecological Consciousness
8 November 2015
James Ishmael Ford
Pacific Unitarian Church
Rancho Palos Verdes, California
Some time ago I was sitting with Meredith Garman, an old friend and colleague currently serving as minister of our congregation in White Plains, New York. We found our conversation drifting to extraterrestrial life, flying saucer claims, and the SETI project. What can I say? Conversations just go like that, every once in a while. I particularly liked it because it gave me a chance to rehearse my oft repeated line that the very reason I’m past confident there are other intelligent life forms out there is also the reason we haven’t been surreptitiously visited by flying saucers kidnapping people for the purpose of probing them. It’s the very bigness of it all, how vast it all is, nearly incomprehensible.
Meredith, who was a philosophy professor before he went crazy and then to seminary, replied how actually the math suggests a different story. The physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael Hart worked that math and found something curious, a paradox, which they published in 1975. The article on it at Wikipedia presents the issue succinctly. “The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.” By Fermi and Hart’s math the galaxy, ours, the Milky Way, should have been pretty much completely colonized by some vastly earlier civilization by now. But, it hasn’t happened. The stars, which should be alive with chatter, are silent. And, so, hangs the question: Where is everybody?” It’s called the Fermi paradox.
There have been any numbers of responses to the paradox. Some are quite inventive. But one in particular haunts me, has even made it hard to go to sleep sometimes. Put simply it suggests that it is in the nature of intelligent life, at some point, to destroy itself.
Looking at our history it’s hard to miss how violent a species we homo sapiens are. We certainly could kill ourselves off with nuclear weapons. And might yet. But, I’m thinking, fearing, I’m searching for the appropriate word for that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, that, you know, well, we could just poison the planet bit by bit until we hit some tipping point; maybe kill the oceans, or set up a spiral that makes the air un-breathable by creatures that use lungs.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarized the consensus of the scientific community about this when they reported how “Human activities… are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents… that absorb or scatter radiant energy.” And this largely human activity is raising the earth’s average temperature, with consequences that are uncertain, but appear to be largely dire. This view has been endorsed by our American National Academy of Sciences as well as the national science academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom.
People who object to the reality of climate change and the harsh truth that the cause is largely in our human hands are with a few exceptions outside the scientific community, and rather are motivated by religion, politics, and, let’s face it, some enormous near term profits. As a small aside, confronting the situation isn’t helped by those concerned with ecological catastrophe who look for it in every out of the ordinary winter storm. There is a real issue and we in our collective are not facing it in a helpful manner.
Summing much of this up rather nicely is a posting from a Facebook friend, a ministerial colleague, who is also a friend, not, of course, always the same thing, who wrote: “So I believe in climate change and all, but I’m beginning to get annoyed with all of the articles telling me that soon the world is going to end–probably in 20 years–but first my kids and I will have to do some tribal live off the grid stuff and then probably eat each other to survive. Please, someone tell me that some of this is hyperbolic. Yes, I know climate change is irreversible. Yes, I know that one day the human species will meet its doom. Yes, I know that there is nothing I can do but really good pastoral care while we die. Human beings love an apocalypse. But seriously, this is depressing me. I don’t like camping. I could not survive for even a day during tribal warfare…”
This was of course a spontaneous eruption of emotion, not a thought through statement. But, it contains a lot we need to pay attention to, particularly those of us not caught in the snares of science denial.
Among the interesting things in the comments to this posting was the current running right through them that there was nothing to be done. There was pretty much a consensus. We are doomed. And fair enough, we do face some ecological tipping point. And the really hard part is you don’t know when you’ve crossed one, until you have. My colleague’s nightmare of people fighting to the death over long expired cans of dog food is not the worst scenario we’re facing. Doom in two decades, not very likely. But. I think of those silent stars. I think of those silent stars.
So, here, with all that, all of it, hanging in the air, including that terrible silence from the stars, let me share a word of hope, and an invitation.
We are born into the world with a sense of fairness, an inclination toward harmony. I have my suspicious about how that comes about in human consciousness, but let me simply state it as a fact on the ground. We as human beings come with a sense of fairness. However, we have many other things going on within our hearts at the same time, for instance a desire to foster our personal and often immediate advantage. So at the very same time that we want fair, we also are inclined to cheat, to seek personal advantage, for ourselves or ours.
I gather people who track traffic patterns use these two truths to calculate how traffic will flow. If we can reduce the number of moving parts, in this case, having a limited number of routes one can take, it turns out we’re pretty predictable. Taken together, our desire for it being fair, and our inclination to cheat has in some form of balance proven to be very good at advancing us as a species.
A bit too good, actually. When I was born there were about two and a half billion people on the planet, today there are some seven and a half billion of us. We all need food, shelter, and energy, and we all want more than that. In our relentless pursuit of these things by fair means and foul, we’ve actually run up against the finitude of our planet and have in fact disrupted the ecosystem. Looking with honest eyes we are in real danger. Not for tomorrow, probably not in two decades, but already things are happening, and they will get worse, eventually much worse. Unchecked we can kill the planet. Think of those silent stars.
And. Truthfully. Honestly. I don’t think it has to be that way. Here’s why. Here’s the secret that can save us. We, all of us, you and me, and everyone and every other creature on this planet, we are all related. That “me and ours?” Well, it turns out the “ours” is all of us. All the other things about us contending on behalf of ourselves and our own is true, but we forget the real extent of who is ours. In fact we are all of us family. We are one. We are all children of this planet; the earth is our shared mother. Her blood is our blood.
Now, this is real important. This is not just philosophy, words unconnected to our real lives. It is a truth we know in our bones and marrow. But it is a latent knowing. We often forget it in the headlong rush of our individual needs, the immediate situations we find ourselves in. That said, forgotten or not, we are all deeply connected, you and I and every living thing, we are family. We just need to remember this truth, because, if we do, we can change our behaviors.
Let me introduce a metaphor of drunkenness, and with it, of sobriety.
It really is like we’re drunk on the short term and our immediate needs, real and imagined. But we are capable of sobering up. And the sober truth is we are related. This truth haunts our dreams and informs our religions at their deepest places and is the great source of that sense of fairness we feel in our bones, even if we are capable of violating it. Our immediate task is to sober up, to remember, to re-member, to re-join, to look into our hearts as well as our minds and to find this truth of intimacy as the deep truth, as your deep truth, as mine.
The Sufi sage and poet Jalaluddin Rumi sang to our hearts. “Sit, be still, and listen, because you are drunk and we are at the edge of the roof.” Sit, be still, and listen. Within that listening, we can hear the heart of the world beating, and a sober noticing sees that beating heart is none other than yours, than mine. And then do something. Let’s back off the edge of the roof.
Here at Pacific Unitarian we have our Green Sanctuary committee. It’s a great place to educate ourselves, and to take on small projects, and larger that take us back from the roof.
Good news, indeed. We need not despair. There is a way. Pay attention. Right here. Right here. Look around. See the family. Look out these windows and see your mother.
And from that knowing of bone and heart, act.
It can save us all.
It really can.
So be it. Blessed be. And, amen.
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