Northwest UU Congregation

The Rev. Morris W. Hudgins

March 13, 2011

I first want to thank Mark Perloe and the Earth Ministry Team for their encouragement to do this service.  I saw Avatar when it first came out.  I loved it then.  I rented it again recently to prepare for this service and enjoyed it even more.  It is clearly a movie that speaks to our time.  This movie came out while I was interim minister in Charlottesville, VA.  It is no coincidence that the Social Action Committee began to focus on Mountain-Top Removal as an issue just after this movie came out.  They were clearly inspired by this film to do something about the killing of the planet.

This poem by Wanda Darlene Campbell titled “The Killin” speaks to this issue.  It goes like this:

They’re gray,

the house, the car,

the flowers in our year,

all gray.

Sometime after awhile

the sun’ll come up

over the mountains

and slice the dirty fog.

Our noses burn,

our eyes sting,

At night we cough and wheeze

and a body’s hair is never clean.

Yesterday,

Daddy said, “This here killin”

is how we make our livin’.

These dark holes

light the nation.”

We buried him this morning.

This poem says it all, why we are doing it to our planet and the result of what we are doing.

Let’s take a moment to remember the movie and its message.  We might see this movie as a science fiction and it is.  But it also seems like it could happen.  We are not far from such a world.

The film is set in the mid-22^nd century, when humans are mining a precious mineral called unobtanium on Pandora, a lush moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system.  The expansion of the mining colony threatens the continued existence of a local tribe of Na’vi—a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora.  The film’s title refers to the genetically engineered Na’vi-human hybrid bodies used by a team of researchers to interact with the natives of Pandora.  From the beginning of the idea to its fruition took about ten years to develop because of the challenges of the cinematic technology.  It was seen as a breakthrough, and the very costly movie was released to rave reviews, and then box-office success, surpassing Tiatanic, grossing over 2 billion dollars, also written and directed by James Cameron.   We all know there will be sequels.

We should acknowledge as Mark has that there were criticisms of the film.  Armond White of the New York Press wrote that Cameron used villainous American characters to misrepresent facets of militarism, capitalism, and imperialism.”  To that I respond, “Do you deny that the military are trained to destroy their enemies, that capitalists want to make money, often at the cost of overlooking what might be the right thing, and has not imperialism caused wars and destroyed the environment?  I woudn’t go so far as to say what one writer did to compare what is going on with the environment to what happened between the Americans and the British in the American Revolution.  I do tend to see the racial overtones as pointed out by one writer who said “‘some white guy’ becomes the ‘most awesome’ member of a non-white culture.”  Miranda Devine of The Sydney Morning Harold”  said “It is impossible to watch Avatar without being banged over the head with the director’s ideological hammer.”  To that I say, “Yes, maybe it is time, before it is too late.”   

There are some interesting stories about the casting.  The actor Sam Worthington who played Corporal Jake Sully, the disabled former marine and the film’s main protagonist, was homeless before this film.  He was living in his car.  I have a feeling he owns a home now.   Cameron selected Worthington because he had not done a major film.  He said “he has a quality of being a guy you’d want to have a beer with, and he ultimately becomes a leader who transforms the world.”  That is a great message for all of us who question if we can make a difference.

Critics see the influence of other films in Avatar.  I didn’t see it but it is very close to the message and story of Dances with Wolves.    Others are reminded of The Last Samurai.    NPR concluded Avatar was made by mixing a bunch of film scripts in a blender.  That is just plain mean.

We see in the military characters the qualities that make people good at their job.  They are so focused on what want to accomplish.  We see this in Colonel Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang. the head of the mining operation, who is fiercely loyal to his military code.  He has a profound disregard for the inhabitants of Pandora.

            We see in the character of Dr. Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver, a true scientist, who becomes a mentor to Sully and an advocate for peaceful relations with the Na’vi.

            The corporate administrator for the mining operation is Parker Selfridge (an inronic name) is willing to destroy the Na’vi civilization to preserve the company’s bottom line.  But he does have an ethic.  He is reluctant to authorize the attacks on the Na’vi, but does so after Colonel Quaritch persuades him it is necessary, and it will be done humanely.  It raises the question how can you destroy a civilization humanely?

Cameron’s choice of the Na’vi as blue people has a religious and personal connection.  Cameron says, “It’s an incarnaton of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form.”  As our science advances and as we explore outer space, I can imagine us doing this kind of thing.  Actually, the look of the Na’vi was inspired by Cameron’s mother who had a dream in which she saw a blue-skinned woman 12 feet tall.  She told her son about the dream and he thought it was cool.  He included similar creatures in his first screenplay written in 1976 or 1977 which featured a planet with a native population of “gorgeous” tall blue aliens.  The Na’vi are based on them.

Cameron has also acknowledged the similarity of the love-story between Jake and Neytiri, the Na’vi, to the story of Jack and Rose in the film Titanic.  Cameron did not mean for the characters in the film to fall in love right away, but the actors, Worthington and Saldana felt they did. 

One of the beautiful things about the film was the scenery.  Cameron says he drew the inspiration for the “Hallelujah Mountains” from the limestone formations in China. 

We must also acknowledge the connection between the interiors of the mining colony on Pandora as relates to the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.  The production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreax oil platform in the Gulf in 2007, photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the platform then replicated on-screen.  Who was to know that one of the oil platforms would cause the worst ecological disaster in the history of our country if not the world, the next year.  It makes you want to believe in fate.

To turn to the story, there are some important aspects that do relate to our present world.  Let us not forget Grace’s argument that destroying Hometree could affect the bio-botanical neural network to which Pandoran organisms are connected.  Hometree is destroyed.  But the sacred Tree of Souls still exists and the Na’vi go there.  In the story the Na’vi have a connection with the animals and receive their aid.  So it is a war between the humans and the Na’vi, the environment, including the sacred trees and the animals who are all connected.  Eywa, the mother goddess, wants the Na’vi to work with the humans, and in the end helps them in this battle. 

I must confess that I am not going to begin worshipping the mother goddess as a result of this film, but I am going to try to heed the message of the film.  We should see the need to defend the environment against the attacks of war, capitalism and emperialism.  We should take seriously the symbols in the film.  I am personally appreciative of the symbol of the sacred trees.  It does raise the issue of the destroying of trees for our own use.  This is often a difficult matter.

When I was minister in Raleigh, and we expanded the facilities, I made sure an environmentalist was on the building committee.  He helped us to save the more important trees, some in the middle of the parking lot.  He also held firm to the idea of keeping trees close to the building, which was done, to the consternation of the builder who was forced to use a crane to bring in his materials. 

           The meaning of the tree is most important.  In the most general sense, according to the Dictionary of Symbols,  it “denotes the life of the cosmos:  its consistence, growth, proliferation, generative and regenerative processes." ”(p. 347)  The Dictionary also points outs its relation to other symbols:  like an axis it is the center of the world, its roots and branches symbolize an upward trend, as do the ladder and the mountain.

            The tree is also the connection between different worlds—heaven, earth and hell.  For me the most meaningful symbol of the tree is two-fold:  the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.

            In the Bible we find in Paradise the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.  In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, both are crucial:  A commitment to life and a commitment to knowledge and understanding.  The tree can symbolize both.

            Martin Buber, in his writings described the many aspects of the tree.  He wrote:

            I contemplate a tree.

            I can accept it as a picture:  a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.

            I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life.

            I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law—those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate.

            I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it.

            Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.  (p. 13, Tree and Jubilee, Greta Crosby).

Ultimacy of the Symbol

            Yes, the tree has all of these aspects, but the question is there an ultimate significance to the symbol of the tree?  Paul Tillich said a symbol must have ultimacy, it must point beyond itself, for it to be meaningful.  Buber would say:  Does the tree become more than an It? Can it be a “Thou?”  His answer is “Yes.”  He writes:

            But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It.  The power of exclusiveness has seized me . . . .  The  tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it—only differently.

            I agree with Buber.  I have always had trees outside my windows.   There is a reason we love to look at trees, and it is not just because the tree is beautiful, which it is.  The tree outside my window, that tree, envelopes me, surrounds me, reaches out to me, can fall on me.  The child in me wants to climb the tree and get as close to the top as I can.  The adult in me, just wants to stand under the tree.  I love the tree.  I love the memory of marrying couples under a tree.

            The tree is an ultimate symbol because it calls us to relationship.  As Buber says, “it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it . . .”  Yes, the tree is the symbol of life.  Life calls me into relation with all of life.  The Tree of Life includes birth, growth, decline and death.  The tree is all of life.

            My colleague, Greta Crosby, like Buber, talks about having relationship with trees. She writes: