Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s prophetic words from more than 40 years ago: “It all boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. . . . Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”
When I teach at Marist, I sometimes ask the students: How many plants and animals have you benefited from so far today? (And this could be at 8 o’clock in the morning.) How many continents? How many people, both dead and alive? Each of us can do a quick inventory. The home, the food, the clothes, the car, the coffee . . . The answer is: Too many to count! I also sometimes ask students to consider a theory we’ve named “plop.”: This theory acknowledges that -- unless I have a system of belief that gives me credit for choosing this life at this time in this form – which I personally do not – then somehow, I arrived here, randomly: born to these particular parents, into this particular Protestant family, on this continent, at this time, speaking English, having blue eyes and size 8 feet. Had I “plopped” elsewhere, I would look, speak, behave and believe differently -- a different name, language, nationality, religion, genetic inheritance and so on.
Instead, I’m here. Seven billion people on the planet, and my particular way of life is what? More expensive than someone else’s? More correct? More worthy? I don’t believe that to be so. How could I? When it’s so random that I’m here at all. The seventh principle of Unitarian Universalism is “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” Sociologist Robert Bellah challenges Unitarian Universalists to put this, the seventh and last principle, first: to put “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are part” first, to be aware of interdependence as an antidote to individualism. As a reminder that I’m not just connected to this web and could somehow pull out if I choose to; I’m actually woven into it. I was born the second of six children, raised on a small farm far from civilization, in western Pennsylvania, almost to the Ohio border, north of Pittsburgh and south of Erie.
We seemed to be a bubble of independence , raising our own food, planting our own garden. The apple tree, the raspberry bushes, even a grape arbor that produced grapes every few years. Self-sufficiency. Independence. In the Presbyterian Sunday School I attended, I learned of children begging on the streets of what was then Bombay. Later that day, I looked over the endless expanse of land from my back porch and thought, “We have 30 acres; they could come live here.” While the land seemed endless, the house was small, and 8 of us lived there. I learned cooperation, negotiation, give and take. I learned early that I had to save my bargaining power for what I really wanted, like watching American Bandstand after school, and not squander it in a meaningless argument over where I sat in the car. I learned to read a book without asking other people to be quiet; I learned to daydream in the middle of a crowd. My brother claims he learned to set up lego villages behind the sofa so no one would trip over his creations.
Give and take didn’t always work, but worked well enough, often enough, with rules like, “You can divide the ice cream into bowls and let the others choose first.” Equal parts become very equal when the one who divides chooses last. Or, regarding television watching: “Agree among you or turn it off.” We found our way to give and take.
I just read Stephen Covey’s book, The Habits of Highly Effective People. In the section on interdependence, he talks about ‘win/win or no deal.” He advises people to go into a discussion looking for a way for everyone to win and if that’s not possible, to be willing to amicably say “no deal,” and not force it. That way everyone gets more space, more breathing room, more freedom, including the freedom not to accept a bad bargain, and not to force one on someone else. My mother taught us “win/win or no deal” back in 1956.
Covey’s not talking about no deal as in I quit and I never liked you anyway, but, no deal as in: right now one of us will be compromising something too important, so let’s not do this. It’s a level of respect that’s quite tender. After high school, as a student nurse, living in a dormitory with only one roommate, and a desk and dresser to myself, I discovered autonomy and independence, awkwardly and through trial and error and many, many mistakes. I often tell my students that we have no choice; we work out our ideas of self and other, on each other; we have no choice but to practice loving and being a friend, out in the open, with one another.
Wise people from many different traditions tell us that interdependence is a choice only the independent can make. A professor of Buddhist studies in graduate school once said something like, “Before you can lose yourself, first you must have yourself.” First, be an individual; then forget about it because it’s not so important. But, first, be it. A teaching that helped me bridge independence and interdependence is from Buddhist literature:
The whole world we travel with our thoughts, Finding nowhere anyone as precious as one’s own self. Since each and every person is so precious to themselves Let the self-respecting harm no other being.
Beginning with my own preciousness, my own inherent worth and dignity, and seeing clearly that what is true for me is true for others as well -- compassion follows.
As Marge Piercy puts it : “No one is at the center, but each person is her own center.” Being at the center of our own lives, and aware that everyone else is also.
In James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, he explains that his point is counter-intuitive – his point is that the crowd, as long as it is diverse and independent, is wiser than a few expert decision-makers. In repeated, spontaneous experiments, Suroweicki found that diverse groups of people are smart. He speculates that while expertise is valuable, single experts have blind-spots and biases that can be corrected by groups. He raises the question, Can collective wisdom be valued more than it currently is? Could it be that collective wisdom has been devalued? Many of us might agree with Tommy Lee Jones’s character in Men in Black, when he says, “A person is smart, but people are dumb.” The proviso that the crowd be “diverse and independent” in order to rise to its collective wisdom is important here.
The internet provides examples of collective wisdom: for example, Wikipedia – I recently went to a workshop at Marist on “the new web” –instructors were asked why they don’t allow students to use Wikipedia as a source – the usual answers – expertise, etc. The presenters described panels of experts dedicated to different areas of Wikipedia and an overall result that’s often better than Britannica.
When queried about why people do collaborative work on the internet even when they don’t get paid, the presenters laughed and said, maybe they just like refining their skills, making a good resume.
My daughter works with a group doing special effects in film and video. She laughs at the idea of the individual creating anything alone, and yet, she has no doubt that her contribution matters, and that the team wouldn’t be the team without her. She also spends long hours on video work for causes she loves – like the wellbeing of animals – and she’ll do it for nothing if she has to, just passing on her skills.
Ethan Nichtern, in One City, a declaration of interdependence, sees the city as an organic internet that constantly reshapes itself. Have you ever seen a You-tube clip of an aerial view of an intersection in HongKong? Amazing randomness and patterning, made up of individuals all relying on one another to manage!
Once, my husband Randy saw a goose “trip” in the air; it wiped out one whole line of a vee, and then they all recovered, became straight as an arrow, and continued their migration.
I can’t take full credit for my accomplishments, or, I guess for all of the times I “trip,” though I’m utterly responsible for my part in forward movement and in recovery from the trip. Though I might hope someone will lend me a hand. We don’t stand alone. And yet, we can’t stop contributing. We can’t claim we did it alone, but no one else can do our part. Each relationship has its own song. And I wonder, Why can I sing better with him than her? Why are my jokes funnier here than there? Every interaction is co-mingled. I don’t have a stand-alone personality, an independent individual planet to live on. What I have is my awareness, co-mingled with yours.
The publicness of it all: I can’t become a minister without you and the only way you can participate in the process is to be exactly as you are while I do the same.
When I came here, I was told by many of you, that this is a happy congregation. I have mostly found that to be so. That it is a happy congregation brings with it a responsibility, to participate in its happiness.
There’s a broken window theory: when a window is broken in a neighborhood and it’s unrepaired, more windows tend to get broken, more litter tends to pile up. When a congregation is happy more people come and if someone breaks a window it gets repaired! I worked with the Deptartment of Youth Services in Massachusetts for several years, with court-involved youth who couldn’t attend public high school. I set up a school for 14 to 17 year olds, and worked with case managers and parole officers and families to look for ways to transition the students back into public school.
When a student had earned a home visit, I often volunteered to take the student home, to Roxbury, Dorchester, the parts of Boston that are less visible to tourists who might go to Fanieul Hall, the North Side, the Boston Commons. Once, after parking the car, I was walking with a student to his home, and he threw a wrapper onto the ground. I said, “No, you can’t litter; we love the earth; we couldn’t live without the earth.” (I had just finished reading SallyMcFague’s Models of God and was most at home with the model of God that pointed to reverence for the earth.) To the student’s credit, he simply gestured to the surrounding area: I followed the wave of his hand: litter was the least of the problems. He said, “You don’t want me to litter?” I looked around. This particular interdependent web had broken windows, broken cars, and quite a bit of litter.
The student shook his head and did pick up the wrapper. Most of the time the students were incredibly respectful. I was non-threatening; I was a teacher; I took them on home visits when I could; I was the least of their problems. In fact, my interactions with them helped me to develop the “plop” theory I mentioned above. Why me, here? Why them, there? And, to give the hierarchy its due, though I never threatened, they knew, and I knew, that behind me was a whole world of power that I had the good grace not to invoke and they had the generosity not to compel me to invoke. The students also taught me how easy it is not to notice the water we swim in --
The day before he was assassinated, Dr. King said, “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.” Nichtern uses this quote to discuss our own private internal military industrial complex. Our ongoing job of defusing ourselves as we participate in the organic web that we are an integral part of. And, I could add, not lighting the fuses of others. Nichtern also says that we no longer have the option of a counter-cultural movement; we cannot stop the world and get off; the only option is to participate in a transformative culture.
From Ethan Nichtern’s Interdependence Project, here are three practices of transformation to consider:
1. Question one consumption choice a day. If you can refrain from purchasing whatever it is, consider giving the money you would have spent to a person or project that can benefit, opting for generosity instead of acquisition.
2. Pick up three pieces of garbage you didn’t create every time you go outside.
3. Say thank you anytime anyone provides a service for you to cut through any sense of entitlement. Say thank you even though you’ve paid; say thank you even though a friend or family member provided the service, and it was only “right” that they should have.
These practices help me to fall in love with reality, to give up cynicism, to feel, if not powerful, certainly, not helpless. William Blake asks us to reclaim innocence after experience. We can’t stay innocent, we have to go through experience. To have knowledge and to give it its due without giving up on what delights us is to fall deeply and hopelessly in love with reality.
Louise Nayer, in the most recent UU World Reflections wrote
We are all attached like tiny red and white carnations whose stems touch at the bottom of the glass
More than forty years ago, Dr. King’s prophetic voice said, “inescapable” – our relatedness is inescapable. My autonomous self is utterly dependent on others, in order to recognize itself, in order to be itself.
Benediction: From Norman V. Naylor:
Reminded that we are part and participants of the Universe, let us go forth from the quiet of this hour encouraged to strive toward faithfulness to the best in ourselves, in others, and in the whole creation.