Role Models

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By Rev. Terry Davis

Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist

Congregation on February 3, 2013

Many years ago when I was 30, my life seemed to be on the verge of falling apart. On New Year’s Day, my husband of less than three years taped an envelope to the door of the apartment where I was living during our separation. Inside the envelope was a letter, asking me for a divorce.

In the three months leading up to my court date, I encountered a bout of depression that hit me harder than any I had ever experienced . . . and I knew I had to take action or I was going to come completely unraveled. So, I made many phone calls and two reservations. Then, less than two weeks after my divorce was final, I packed my bags, boarded a plane, and checked into a treatment center in Tucson, Arizona . . . a peaceful and beautiful place surrounded by towering Saguaro cactus in the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

It was at that treatment center in the middle of the desert, where cactus flowers were blooming and brown snakes were sunning on flat rocks, that I discovered my spiritual center. Therapy, Native American readings and rituals, hiking excursions in the Santa Catalina Mountains, and midnight treks through the moonlit valley began to heal my heart and spirit.

I returned to Atlanta 45 days later carrying that warm experience inside of me . . . ready to continue the journey I started back to myself and to the god of my understanding.

And so, in the year that followed I did a few things. I quit my soul-sucking job and started my own business. I purchased a condo in a lovely old building that was surrounded by oak trees. I returned to my abandoned practice of running outdoors. I started attending the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. And, one afternoon, I read a magazine article about a monastic community high in the hills of Santa Barbara, California and decided that I needed to go for a spiritual retreat.

The monks belonged to an Anglican Benedictine order. Their Santa Barbara community at the time was comprised of about 20 brothers who lived in the mountains and ran a retreat house. They were about to become my teachers, maybe even my role models. They would continue my education about and my experience of what it means to live a life where everything is holy and every action is a prayer. And, no one was more surprised at this than I was.

In our reading this morning, Kathleen Norris referred to monks – along with poets like herself – as among the best degenerates in America.^[1] Degenerates. Now, I don’t recall that being a very nice word. I typically have heard it used to describe punk rockers, alcoholics, incarcerated persons or others that society has deemed as – well – as not having their acts together.

Just to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood the term, I looked it up. “Having lost the physical, mental, and moral qualities considered normal and desirable,” read one definition. “Showing evidence of decline; to deteriorate” read another. Nowhere did I read anything that resembled Kathleen Norris’s elegant definition of degenerate monks, where she said they “have a finely developed sense of the sacred potential in all things; they recognize the transformative power hiding in the simplest things, and it leads them to commit absurd acts.”^[2]

Absurd. Another word I didn’t remember as being very nice and, thus, required another visit to the dictionary. “Wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate,” said Merriam-Webster. “Foolish and preposterous” it continued.

So, what exactly are these absurd acts of monks? For the monks at Mt. Calvary Monastery in Santa Barbara, they included the wildly unreasonable practice of daily communal and private prayer . . . the illogical activities of gardening and selling organic coffee . . . the inappropriate ritual of silence during breakfast and after sundown . . . and the foolish and preposterous commitment of working several days each week at the homeless shelter in town.

Of course these activities aren’t so absurd after all, which is Kathleen Norris’s point. Rather, this liturgical rhythm of prayer and work . . . which is the essence of the Rule of St. Benedict, the ancient book of precepts that guides Benedictine monastic life . . . it’s this balance of prayer and work that enables monastics to live both in the world and apart from it.

Monastics “[remain] out of reach of commercial manipulation and ideological justification,”^[3] writes Norris. And, yet, their focus on prayer in all its forms is not an end in itself, but a means by which they can then engage thoughtfully, compassionately, and decisively in human affairs.

It’s these characteristics of the contemplative life that have led Dr. John Carroll, professor of natural resources at the University of New Hampshire, to conclude that monastic communities – particularly those whose members are female – are where we will find persons deeply committed to healing the human spirit through healing the planet.

Carroll, author of the book Sustainability and Spirituality, argues that some of the most persistent examples or models of sustainability in the United States are to be found in the series of Benedictine, Dominican, and Franciscan women’s communities located here.

These women-led and women-inspired ecumenical communities are not only fully active in the real world with social ministries, they also, writes Carroll, “have deliberately set out on a path to ecological sustainability, interpreting such as God’s command to them, indeed to all of us.”^[4] 

Impressive, dedicated, and even absurd acts of sustainability can be found at a number of these communities . . . which is why I believe they serve as an important example for our community . . . a Unitarian Universalist community that’s dedicated to living more fully into our Seventh Principle.

And so, this morning I’d like to suggest to you that these religious women may be the role models we are seeking . . . role models that can show us what a commitment to sustainability – sustainability rooted in a deep and abiding faith and intentional spiritual practices – looks like.

By examining what these communities do and their shared characteristics and principles, we may find some clues as to how each of us and Northwest as a whole can move forward with what is a passion among us and quite possibly our ministry to the wider world.

To begin, we might first look at what these exemplary women contemplatives are doing.

According to John Carroll, who has conducted extensive research in this area, women monastics are living sustainably and advocating sustainability in many ways. They include a commitment to sustainable, organic food production for themselves and others; to developing and practicing sustainable agricultural practices; to ecological habitat design; to major energy conservation techniques; and to complete or near-complete reliance on renewable rather than nonrenewable sources of energy.

Next we might ask, “What is the nature of these women who see their spiritual life as one of living sustainably in as many ways as possible?”

Carroll writes that while they are fully Christian and vary in age, they are exceptionally non-hierarchical in theory and practice. They conduct themselves in a consensus mode of self-governance, under the ultimate supervision of a larger order elsewhere. But this “ultimate supervision,” says Carroll, “tends to be loose, informal, and distant . . . meaning that these women operate with a high degree of autonomy.”^[5]

Hmm. This strikes me as not at all unlike Unitarian Universalist congregations, who are in covenant with one another through our larger association . . . and who each make their own decisions regarding policies and practices.

Another question about these religious women might be, “What sustains their efforts?” Carroll says that while monastic women are naturally devoted to more conventional prayer and chant, these women also regard prayer as action.

Prayer as action. Again, this strikes me not at all unlike Unitarian Universalism, which promotes the importance of living our faith through acts of compassion and social justice, rather than by sharing common theological beliefs.

Prayer as action makes possible the labor necessary for these monastic communities to live ecologically – which Carroll notes is in contrast to other monastic communities who spend so many hours in chapel in conventional prayer that they don’t have enough time remaining to do the work needed to maintain land, crops, and so forth as ecology would require.^[6]

Carroll provides a window into the specific activities of a number of these monastic communities, but here are just a few examples^[7]:

• They are constructing strawbale residences and buildings, which uses straw and stucco and is considered one of the least expensive, energy efficient, and most socially-just forms of architecture available.
• They seek to obtain organic agricultural certification for the food they grow, eat, and sell and are active in organic certification organizations and movements.
• They are active participants in Community Supported Agriculture, a food production and distribution system that directly connects farmers and consumers.
• They view energy and resource wastage as sinful and are particularly committed to using solar and wind energy and practicing composting wherever possible.
• They are committed to connecting to supporting populations, such as immigrants and inner-city residents, by establishing community organic gardens for them on their properties.
• They provide education to others about sustainability, including newsletters, literature, lectures, retreats, conferences, internships, and teaching sustainable farming techniques.

And Carroll cites many more examples in his book.

It’s really a quite lengthy and impressive list. In many ways these women are as extravagant in their efforts to embrace sustainability practices as was the woman in the Gospel story referenced in the Kathleen Norris reading.

As the story goes, a woman appeared at the home of a Pharisee where Jesus was invited as a dinner guest. Upon seeing him, she fell at Jesus’s feet, she bathed them with her tears, wiped them dry with her hair, kissed them, and then extravagantly anointed them with an entire jar of heavy and expensive oil.

When the Pharisee criticized the woman for such an extravagant gesture, Jesus, in turn, reprimanded the Pharisee. “I entered your house and you gave me no water for my feet,” Jesus said, “but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. She has shown great love.”^[8] The woman had taken action, whereas his host had offered none. Therefore, what appeared to be a wasteful act to others was, in Jesus’s eyes, an act of abundant love.

The monastic women described in Carroll’s book seem to clearly be taking extravagant action to live sustainably – extravagant action with love at its center. Yet, we might wonder how much of an impact can these small communities really expect to have on the global and colossal problem of climate change? How much good can a little group of people really do?

My friends, the answer to that question is essential to understanding not only these monastic communities, but also the raison d’etre of our entire Unitarian Universalist faith – which as you and I know is also a relatively small religion of 250,000 members worldwide.

The answer, as Kathleen Norris puts it, is this: symbolic acts matter. “Those who know the exact price of things, often don’t know the true cost of anything,” she writes.^[9]  We have no idea what impact our actions may have, what seemingly small and simple actions may have on the grand scheme of things.

Role models . . . like the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet . . . like the Benedictine brothers in California who faithfully keep an ancient rhythm of prayer and work . . . like the women who are living and breathing sustainability in tiny monastic communities . . . these role models don’t exist to solve our problems. They won’t take down what my ministerial colleague James Forbes refers to as the giants of racism, materialism, and militarism. They won’t single-handedly bring peace on earth. They alone won’t end the greenhouse effect or our dependence on fossil fuels.

No, we can’t count on role models to do any of these things by themselves, just as we can’t count on this congregation or even the entire Unitarian Universalist Association to change the world.

But here is what I believe a few amazing role models can do: they can inspire us to change . . . hundreds of us, thousands of us, even millions of us. Just think of those role models throughout history who have inspired countless men and women to do the impossible and end injustices.

Role models and their actions, therefore, aren’t the solution or even a small dent in the solution. Instead, I believe that their actions are a prayer . . . they’re a prayer for the rest of us. I believe their actions are offering the rest of us a prayer of hope and courage.

I believe that they are showing us that . . . if we put our faith at the center of everything . . . then we and all living things can achieve deliverance from harm, ruin and destruction, which is, by the way, the definition of salvation.

So, what about it? Is our faith in these role models delusional? Is it the dream of a degenerate . . . you know, someone who is in a serious state of mental decline? Would any actions Northwest might take to live more deeply our commitment to respect the interdependent web of all existence . . . would these actions be wildly unreasonable, foolish, illogical, inappropriate and preposterous?

I don’t think so. My faith in the promise of Unitarian Universalism and the passion of this community is why I’m here.

And, I see signs of hope all around us. They exist in monastic communities of women who model what it is like to radically live in connection to the earth and one’s faith.

They exist at the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, with whom this congregation has partnered to help protect, preserve, and restore an important natural resource.

And, they exist in the passion of Northwest’s Earth Team ministry, whose members have put solar panels on this building, have instituted a carbon footprint reduction program to raise money to complete that solar array, and have enabled this congregation to achieve the UUA’s Green Sanctuary designation – the only UU congregation in Georgia so far to have this recognition.

But, we know we still have a lot to do. So, let’s keep going. And, as we go forward, may we humbly follow in the footsteps of those role models who are showing us the way. May it be so. Amen.