HOW WIDE THE WEB? – GA
Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

READINGS From The Souls of Animals, by the Rev. Gary Kowalski:

My dog has deep knowledge to impart. He makes friends easily and doesn’t hold a grudge. He enjoys simple pleasures and takes each day as it comes. Like a true Zen master, he eats when he’s hungry and sleeps when he’s tired. He’s not hung up about sex. Best of all, he befriends me with an unconditional love that human beings would be well to emulate.

Chinook does have his feelings, of course. He’s afraid of firecrackers and hides in the clothes closet whenever we run the vacuum cleaner, but unlike me he’s not afraid of what other people think of him or anxious about his public image. He barks at the mail carrier, but in contrast with some people I know he never growls at the children or barks at his wife.
So, my dog is a sort of guru. When I become too serious and preoccupied, he reminds me of the importance of frolicking and play. When I get too wrapped up in abstractions and ideas, he reminds me of the importance of exercising and caring for my body. On his own canine level, he shows me that it might be possible to live without inner conflicts or neuroses: uncomplicated, genuine and glad to be alive.

Adapted from the writings of Dr. Albert Schweitzer:

I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live. As in my own will to live, there is a longing for a wider life and pleasure, with dread of annihilation and pain; so is it also in the will to live all around me, whether it can express itself before me or remains dumb. The will to live is everywhere present, even as in me. . . .Ethics consist in my experiencing the compulsion to show to all wills to live the same reverence as I do my own. A person is truly ethical when obeying the compulsion to help all life which one is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives. . . . (But it is true that in practice, not all life can be saved) We are forced to choose . . . which forms of life, and even which individuals, we shall save, and which we shall destroy.

But the principle of reverence for life is nonetheless universal. . . . (It) compels one to decide for oneself in each case how far one can remain ethical and how far one must submit to the necessity for destruction and injury to life. No one can decide (for anyone else) at what point, on each occasion, lies the extreme limit of possibility for persistence in the preservation and furtherance of life. (Each person) has to judge this issue, by letting oneself be guided by a feeling of the highest possible responsibility toward other life. We must never let ourselves become blunted. We are living in truth when we experience these conflicts more profoundly.

SERMON: How Wide the Web?

Experience with animals, or at least one animal in particular, is part of my earliest memories. The animal in question was a beagle pup named Dina that my parents brought home when I was three or four years old. I can’t recall any particular adventures with Dina, though my parents have photos of me playing with the dog, but to this day I still have an image of her in my head. What I most remember about Dina is a feeling, a kind of happy warmth that was unlike anything I felt for anyone or anything else.Now people could give you all kinds of reasons for that feeling. We could discuss psychological theories about emotional transference or how my own experience resonates with evolutionary patterns of human-dog interaction dating back some 15 to 40 thousand years. What I knew was: I liked Dina and she seemed to like me, and whatever its origins, at some level we met and appreciated each other.

Now, fast forward 40 years or so to this past summer when our family moved from Wisconsin to Asheville, North Carolina. Our home is on the northern edge of Asheville, a neighborhood that is mostly suburban, though encroaching on the wilds of a nearby mountain. On my first day in the house I enjoyed exploring our yard, the various plantings and such. But I was most curious about something that seemed to be moving around near a little overgrown pond just off a terrace in the back. That evening our secretive resident revealed himself: a frog. From the rare glimpses we get and his song like the twanging of a rubber band, I’m guessing it’s a green frog.What I can’t explain is the sheer joy it gives us to hear him. Maybe it’s some peculiar sense of ownership – as if he’s “our” frog. It’s not as if he (I don’t know why, but we always seem to use the male pronoun with our frog) or his single note “glug” of a song is so beautiful. As much as anything, I think, it is some aching for a connection to wildness, a wildness we see vanishing from so many places. Perhaps underlying it is a fear of the deep impoverishment we would experience should “froggie” and his ilk disappear.

We humans are caught up in a remarkable disconnect when it comes to animals these days. On one hand, for our carefully loved pets we provide unprecedented levels of care and attention. We coif and cater to them and spend millions on doctors, dentists, masseuses and psychologists to ease the cares and serve the wishes of our animal companions.And yet at the same time, through pollution, consumption and the eradication of habitats, we humans are the agents of a massive extinction of life underway right now that within a couple of generations could see the elimination of most primates, most large mammals, most amphibians and hundreds, even thousands of other species large and small. We Unitarian Universalists, who covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, are left to ask how we are to respond to this state of affairs, how we might understand our obligation to life on Earth.

Our western culture locates the primary teaching on humanity’s relation with animals in the first chapter of Genesis: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’”The image is clear: we humans are in charge, and animals are a resource we are at liberty to exploit however we may choose. And so we have. We have domesticated and mass-produced a select few, some for our amusement and companionship, others for labor or food. The rest we covet or despise, fear or delight in. We may hunt them, or squash them under foot; we may celebrate them, admire them, or simply ignore them. But as a rule our relation with animals is defined by utility: what they are good for in the light of our own purposes.It is only within the last 200 years or so that serious arguments have been advanced that animals could make a moral claim on us. Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher, said the fundamental moral question to be answered was not whether animals could reason, or talk, but whether they could suffer. If so, he concluded, they could make a claim on us not to cause them suffering.

Unitarian Universalist minister Gary Kowalski, in his book “The Souls of Animals,” advances that argument a step further. The question, he says, is not just whether animals can suffer, but whether they have capacities to feel, enjoy and express themselves.Studies in recent years have found curiosity, ingenuity, even the mourning of loss and death in a broad range of animals. This, Kowalski says, is the kind of “soulfulness” that humans have long claimed as their own, yet which research now shows is “rooted firmly in the biological order and in the ecology shared by all life.”We need not equate these abilities with human qualities to grant them at least some moral status, he says. Surely an elephant’s mourning, a chimpanzee’s inventiveness, or a dog’s playfulness are all different in important ways from our own. All we need do, he says, is recognize that “we are part of a larger world: not an inert or unfeeling world, but a world full of pain, healing, passion and hope.”And the longer we live with animals, the more we see that the sympathy that we express across species is not just one-way. In our house, our Boston terrier, Sadie, has such an uncanny ability to detect when one or another of us is feeling down – she comes over with her ears down with her most adorable “pet me” look – that Debbie and I have taken to calling her our “empath,” after the character on “Star Trek” who could expertly read people’s feelings.

How is it we are willing to accord such complex feelings and motivations to our pets and not to other creatures? And what are the consequences if we do?

This takes us onto slippery ground. If we grant that animals actually have moral interests beyond our own amusement or utility, we are left to puzzle out the quandary of what those interests are?Peter Dickenson in his novel “Eva” imagines a 13-year-old girl’s memory placed into that of a chimpanzee. Over the course of the novel the girl takes on more and more of the chimp’s ways, learning after a while, for example, that she no longer feels the human drive for independence and self-determination, but instead finds solace in rituals of the chimp colony. Dickenson’s thought experiment raises questions about how we go about deciding among or even identifying animal interests and sorting them out from our own. And, what’s more, who’s to say that human-like feelings or physical qualities that we admire ought to be the criterion for some moral claim on us?It is easier to wage a campaign to save impressive creatures like snow leopards, mountain gorillas, or bald eagles from extinction than skinks or toads, yet in the larger scheme of things it is hard to argue that one or the other is more deserving of our attention.These mounting dilemmas suggest that the time has come for us to shift our frame of reference. To begin with, we need to abandon the myth offered up in Genesis that imagines that the world was created for our benefit. One of the consequences of our seventh principle, the recognition that we are interwoven into the web of all existence, is to dethrone humankind from the pedestal on which the Bible placed us.

Thomas Berry in his book “The Dream of the Earth” argues that what we have learned about our interrelated world is that “the human is less a being on the earth or in the universe than a dimension of the earth and indeed of the universe itself.” That is, we humans were not placed on Earth; we are of the Earth. We emerged from the web of life and ultimately, are responsible to it.The story of human evolution that Berry argues for is very different from the one we are used to telling. Like every other species, he says, humans were a product of their surroundings and emerged in tune with them. In time, though, we learned to exploit our surroundings. At first, we depended heavily on the complex web of living things around us, but eventually we learned how to tweak and manipulate the networks of living things to our advantage. This manipulation also disrupted other living things and their ecological relationships, but in time, most were able to recover. As the intensity of human activity has increased, it has steadily degraded the natural world and offered fewer and fewer opportunities for life to recover.Animals and plants bound closely to narrow ecosystems have been the first to go. Those that are more flexible have moved on as they could, but they have created new problems. Moving outside of natural systems that controlled them, they have become invasive, proliferating at a fast rate at their new locations and wiping out other living communities.

It is impossible to measure precisely what has been lost, but the effects can be seen today in the destruction of forests and wetlands, the emptying of fish from the seas that are the world’s commercial fisheries, and the killing of coral reefs. We are able to track populations of large animals, but many less noticeable creatures and the systems that depend on them are winking out of existence without our knowing.In losing these creatures and the web of plants, microbes and other living things that are linked to them we lose some of the genetic diversity that has emerged in some three and a half billion years of life on Earth. Each loss weakens the chain of life and its ability to respond to changing circumstances.We humans have been a factor in the evolution of life for only the past one million years or so, yet the changes we have made to the chain of life have been profound. In the case of animals, we have been an agent largely of declining diversity and extinction. It is worth considering how these losses we are bringing about may be endangering not only our own existence, but also the very possibility of life’s resiliency.Berry suggests that the shift required of us is from a perspective that is human-centered to one that is centered on the entire community of life. “The solution,” he says, “is simply for us as humans to join the earth community as participating members.” We can no longer define the circle of our concern as the human race, with, perhaps, a few favored animal species tagging along. “If there is to be any true progress,” he says, “then the entire life community must progress.”This shift in concern also shifts our viewpoint. We come to see, Berry says, that “the splendor of the earth is in the variety of its land and its seas, its life forms and its atmosphere phenomena; these constitute in color and sound and movement that great symphonic context which has inspired our sense of the divine. “It has given us our emotional and imaginative power and evoked from us those entrancing insights that have governed our more sublime moments.” This shift, this decision to identify our loyalty to the web of life of which we are a part has an important religious dimension. It means that we must come to regard the sacred, the holy, that which is of ultimate worth as in and around us, not over and above us. It means that we look about us and see not a depraved, sin-ridden existence that we hope to leave some day for a better place, but an interconnected world of astonishing variety and complexity, a world out of which we arose and to which we owe a duty. We look upon it and see that it is good.

With Albert Schweitzer, we see that each of us, each living thing, embodies a life that wills to live, in the midst of other life that wills to live. We see that each of these lives, our own included, deserves reverence and respect; each of them has deep knowledge to impart.
And yet, as Schweitzer warns, our circumstances present us with difficult choices. The world is complicated. Not all can be saved. Indeed as life evolves, it is inevitable that some will be lost. But we hardly qualify as judges in that process As Denise Levertov reminds us, “We have only begun to envision how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors.” We have so much more to learn of life’s vast and intricate interrelationships. Our best impulse, as Aldo Leopold once suggested, is like that of any good tinkerer: save the parts.

We have, in truth, only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes as humans in partnership with all life in the communion of struggle. In that struggle, if we would be true to our origins, true to the throb of life that passes through our own bodies and every living thing, that warmth that communion with other life gives us, we would, in Schweitzer’s words, “never let ourselves become blunted.” We would never pretend that other life on this planet is not owed our reverence, or our honor, or that the choices before us as we negotiate our own and the web of nature’s continued existence are any less difficult or freighted with significance than they are.It will not always be clear when are we serving life and when simply our own peculiar whims and interests. But surely Albert Schweitzer had it right when he said, “we are living in truth when we experience these conflicts more profoundly.” It is a struggle that is worthy of our humanity.

So be it.