The Sacred Hoop
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My dog and I go running together a few times a week and we’re always trying to find new places to go. (Or at least I am – I don’t think she really cares.) I’m always fantasizing that if we run far enough into some unknown part of the city, we’ll wind up off the grid. We’ll find some huge beautiful park that no one knows about with big leafy trees and fresh air and a lake and I can let the dog off the leash and we can swim and play. So a few months back, my search for this mythical land led us over the Pulaski Bridge into Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We headed east toward the most industrial-looking part of the neighborhood because, in fairy tales at least, miracles always show up where you least expect them.
We headed toward the factories and utility buildings, the smokestacks, deserted wide streets with trucks rumbling by, the towers of the iconic Greenpoint sewage treatment plant rising up like huge metallic onions in the distance. We approached a dead end and found a guard sitting in a little booth in front of a barbed wire fence and a large “No Trespassing” sign. Next to the booth a concrete walkway disappeared between two looming windowless buildings. I stopped running and asked the guard whether the “no trespassing” sign referred to the walkway. She said, “No, no – the sign’s for the parking lot. This here’s a nature walk. Go on in!”
A nature walk. Really. I felt a little like Alice in Wonderland falling into the rabbit hole. We entered the chute between the buildings. I started to wonder about the mushrooms I had eaten in my stroganoff the night before. The path turned and the walls rose on either side of us. The path turned again and there it was: the water; the trees; the grass; the breeze. I let the dog off the leash.
Only, we didn’t go swimming. The water was Newtown Creek that divides Queens from Brooklyn and it was inky black and still with oil floating on the surface. The few trees were scraggly and skinny and each was labeled with a little sign that listed its Latin name as if to certify it as an actual living organism. Across the water, highways crisscrossed in the air, factories billowed smoke. A giant claw crane scooped up scrap metal by the tons and dropped it into a waiting barge with a booming sound, over and over. The air smelled faintly of iron filings and exhaust. It was an operatic industrial landscape. And in the middle of all this was a circle of flat stones engraved with place names used by the early Lenape (len-AH-pay) people, indigenous to this area – their names for the natural features that used to be here.
It was so rich with irony; the postmodern Gen-Xer in me loved it. I couldn’t wait to run home and tell my husband Jeff and get him to come see it with me. But of course part of me didn’t love it at all. Part of me felt very, very sad. And standing there, suddenly I felt cheesy thinking of the “Crying Indian” commercial –this was an ad run in 1971 that portrayed a Native American crying over the pollution of the natural world. He was staring out at a landscape a lot like this.
The guard had told me with a straight face that this was a “nature walk.” This simulation is what now passes for “nature” in our world. And this token rock engraving is what passes for an honoring of the tragic history of the people of this land. People who are only not here right now because early Europeans, like Christopher Columbus, who we are supposed to be celebrating this weekend, violently “removed” them. How did things get so distorted that this somehow seems normal? How did it get to seem normal that the only trace of the Lenape people and the natural world they once lived in is a few words carved on a rock in a blighted corner of Greenpoint (an ironic name itself)?
The answer is that what’s considered normal, reasonable, and moderate moves. It changes. It’s relative. All you need is for someone really extreme to come along on one far end of any continuum, and the middle shifts. If you kill and displace enough Native Americans, eventually no one will know whose land it’s supposed to be. And, continue down that path long enough, and it will come to seem reasonable that the “middle” – the reasonable compromise point – is that the indigenous peoples get to live in tiny reservations on unwanted land and the European immigrants get the entire rest of the continent.
A version of this is exactly what is going on in our government right now. By making extreme demands and being unwilling to budge on them, the Tea Party has managed to move the middle way to the right. Even the business community is starting to feel like it’s out of wack. Joe Echevarria, the chief executive of Deloitte and a staunch Republican, complained that while both parties have extreme elements, only in the G.O.P. did the extreme element exercise real power. “The extreme right has 90 seats in the House,” he said. “Occupy Wall Street has no seats.”
And so the middle moves. What sounds reasonable moves. History gets distorted, people forget who made what concessions when, and you wind up with a government that gets shut down because one side refuses to fund a law that has already passed. And they get away with it. According to a Pew poll, half of Americans think the current government shutdown is the Republicans’ fault. The other half thinks it’s the Democrats’ fault. The middle has moved. It’s a house of mirrors. You can lose your bearings in it.
When you’re inside a culture, which we all are, like Alice in the rabbit hole, it’s really hard to follow what’s going on as everything shifts around you. What you need is some kind of vantage point – you need an “outside” to the culture – a place of perspective from which you can see the whole and get your bearings. What in the world can possibly give you that outside vantage point? Religion. Religion is the one modality in our world that at least intends to transmit truths that are absolute. It intends to supply us with an “outside.” In fact, the etymological root for the word “religion” is “rel” meaning “outside” and “gion” meaning “world.” Okay, that’s not true at all. I completely made that up. But it should be! It should mean “outside the world” because I believe that’s the single greatest gift religion can give us – an outside perspective.
Granted, it doesn’t always work — as I talked about last week in the Ten Commandments sermon, religious teachings too are informed by the place and time of their authors. Religion sometimes perpetuates the worst of our cultural prejudices and oppressions. But liberal religion in particular has evolved so that it has remained accountable to ideals that have lifetime appointments – like Supreme Court Justices – that allow them to stand just a little bit above the fray. Religion can give us a God’s eye view of the world – the biggest possible view of ethics and morality, our place in the history of the universe, the sacredness of the natural world, of our relationships, and of our ordinary lives. At its best, religion succeeds in this project, and when it does, it’s really powerful.
The reading from Black Elk that we shared earlier gets to this sense of outside perspective: “Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round beneath me was the whole hoop of the world…. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight, And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree, to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”
Tim DeChristopher is someone who, in my view, exemplifies the power of this religious outside perspective. He is a Unitarian Universalist and a number of years ago, he metaphorically climbed a mountain, looked at the “sacred hoop of the world” and from that vantage point, looked down below at the Utah canyon lands and saw something terrible unfolding: The rights for oil and gas drilling on 150,000 acres of public land were about to be put up for auction. Environmental groups had initiated a lawsuit, maintaining that the auction shouldn’t go forward until an environmental review of this fragile ecosystem had been completed. But in 2008, the auction went forward anyway while the lawsuit was still pending.
So Tim DeChristopher showed up. Instead of protesting outside the auction house like the other activists, he went inside, picked up a paddle, and started bidding on the land. He bid up the prices on the many parcels, sometimes driving them up from $2 an acre to $240 an acre. Then he began bidding until he won. By the time they figured out that this guy had no intention or means of paying, the entire auction had been skewed by the artificially high prices. The auction had to be cancelled and rescheduled. But by the time the new auction date rolled around, the court had ruled on the case: the auction was ruled illegal. The rights to drilling on that land could not be sold.
Tim DeChristopher’s ideals stemmed from his religious perspective, his connection to the interconnected web of all existence. But his actions existed in this relativistic world where immediate profits often outweigh considerations of long-term costs. So Tim was sentenced to two years in federal prison for his crime. The Prosecution openly admitted that he wasn’t a threat to society; the stated purpose of the sentence was to deter other activists from taking similar action to further the climate movement. Tim served his two years and recently got out and started at Harvard Divinity School, preparing to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. Lucky for us, he’s actually coming to speak here at First U in just a few weeks: Saturday, November 2nd at 10am. Please come if you can — the info is in your order of service.
We live in a house of mirrors. The “middle” moves continually. The culture can see some kind of equivalency between the needs of the oil companies and the needs of the earth as a whole and locate “the middle” somewhere between the two. A vantage point of faith, teaches that those needs are not equivalent at all. Through our faith, in the words of Black Elk, we can “see more than we can tell and understand more than we see.” We don’t have to wait for the culture to figure it out; we can act. And if Tim DeChristopher and people like us didn’t do this, a nature walk in the Utah canyon lands would soon look a lot like a nature walk in Greenpoint.
I’ll close with Tim’s closing words to the courtroom at his hearing:
“You can steer my commitment to a healthy and just world if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow.”
Final hymn: 207 Earth Was Given as a Garden
