A sermon by Bill Neely
Summer Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church, Rockford, IL

August 14, 2005

Reading

An Islamic Hadith, attributed to Al Bukhar (adapted)

The Prophet [Muhammad] said, "While a man was walking on the road his thirst grew strong. He found a well and descended into it and drank and was leaving, when he saw a dog hanging out its tongue and licking the ground from thirst.

And the man said, "This dog's thirst is like the thirst I had," and he went into the well again, filled his shoe with water, held it between his teeth while he climbed out, and gave the shoe with the water to the dog to drink." The Prophet concluded, "God approved of this act and pardoned his sins."

The people said, "What, Prophet, shall we be rewarded for what we do for animals?" The Prophet replied, "Yes. There is a reward [from God] on every living creature."

Reading

Prayer of Compassion (adapted), by St. Basil the Great (330-379)

O God, enlarge within us the sense of
fellowship with all living things,
our [kin in life] the animals to whom thou
gavest the earth as their home in
common with us.

We remember with shame that in the past
we have exercised the high dominion
of [your children] with ruthless cruelty
so that the voice of the earth,
which should have gone up to thee
in song, has been a groan of travail.
May we realize that they live not for
us alone but for themselves and for
thee, and that they love
the sweetness of life.

Reading

Essay on Compassion, by Richard Lehnert

The cat curled against my wide foot's sole idles himself to sleep.
I tell myself he loves me, past food, warmth, shelter,
past my fingers' rough massage.

I think I know this to be true, but say
I tell myself to prove I'm no sentimental fool,
to leave me one ironic out.
When I cut my hand he lapped blood
where it pooled like cooling grease
but showed me more affection when I cried

for what I thought was loss of what I thought was love;
stared into my eyes, touched my cheek with one dry paw
until I looked away.

The paper tells the story: a giant sea turtle
carried a shipwrecked woman most of two days
before delivering her up to a fishing boat.

How would a biologist dismiss this
as coincidence of instincts, the woman saved
without the turtle caring?

How to explain the turtle's choice,
that it rose beneath the woman twice
before she let herself ride that hard back;

that it didn't dive once in two days;
that as much as we want to say so and do not,
it saved her life because it wanted to?

On every God-road known, compassion's the highest good.
I've never made or saved a life.
But, well-fed in calm salt water and good weather,

that turtle had no stronger thirst that day
than to try on a cast-off human goodness
to see how well it swam.

When this slack-ribbed cat, almost twenty, hearing gone,
gets up to walk his bones across the room, then stops,
seems to slowly reconsider, limps back to where he'd started,

I think it better to assume that when he seems to think
he thinks; that when he seems to love
he loves, that the turtle knew exactly what it did

and what would happen if it didn't.

"Reverence and Realness"

Bill Neely

Shannon, my wife, was staring intently at me from the beach as I swam in the ocean, parallel to the shore, about fifty yards out. She was walking along in the same direction that I was swimming, keeping an eye on me as the tides can sometimes unexpectedly pull a swimmer further out than she or he intends to go. We used to do this for each other a few times each summer when we lived in Virginia Beach and we would periodically complete, but not really compete in, triathlons. I say not really compete, because we were never among the elite local athletes who won these events. We were middle, or back-of-the-packers, the ones who race just to try and finish. The ones who, if we choose, literally stop to smell the roses in the middle of a race. The ones who find that a good conversation while running toward the finish is more than worth the two or three minutes that it might cost your clock time. The hearty ones of stubborn stock who compel bodies unfamiliar with athletic acclaim to become goddesses and gods in these imagined Olympic contests held in small towns and big cities every weekend, everywhere.

And to prepare for these triathlons, Shannon and I would swim for the most part in a pool with lanes, where you might get plowed over by an elite swimmer, but didn't have to worry about tides and currents. But a few times we would go out and swim in a straight line in the ocean for a half mile or so, mirroring what many of the swimming sections of the local races entailed. What you need to know is that while I can swim slowly forever, slowly, I never really took lessons or anything, so my form is sort of improvised. The result being that I can only look to my right when I'm swimming. If I try to turn to my left I inhale water, become disoriented, and sink, quickly, but as long as I keep looking right, I can breathe and everything will be fine. This means that if I start swimming in a straight line and the shore is on my right, that is all I see. If I'm going the other direction, I see the wide expanse of the ocean and whatever is out on the water.

The shore was on my right the morning that I noticed Shannon staring so intently at me from the beach. She would normally just sort of amble along like we beach-bums do, keeping an eye on me, but also looking ahead at the surf and birds and scanning the larger ocean. But from the way she was staring at me that morning, I thought I must be swimming really quickly. She could not take her eyes off of me, and I was thinking that maybe those early mornings in the rec center pool had really started paying off. I thought that I must have been flying through the water like a sail fish, no slicing through it like the fin of a shark, no soaring through the water like a penguin in Antarctica who pops out of the frigid sea to land on the shore.

When my swim was over, I walked toward Shannon, readying myself for the accolades that were surely coming. And she smiled at me and said, "Did you see those dolphins on the other side of you? They were swimming right next to you." And of course, no, I had not seen those dolphins, because they were on my left side, and I can only breathe to the right when I swim. I had missed those dolphins because I could not look the other way.

And dolphins are my favorite wild animals. Part of the reason the beach feels like the beach to me is because for more than twenty years of my life, I've lived somewhere where one could watch dolphins swimming in the wild most of the year. It's one of the reasons I've never been able to stomach seeing them confined in tanks, as I've seen them swim in huge packs along the shore for as far as the eye can see. I've run on the boardwalk at sunrise to the steady pulse of their fins breaking the sun-streaked water. I've broken runs to lean against the rail of the boardwalk and watch them swim along, feeling comfort in the constancy of their motions, which seemed linked to something even deeper and more eternal than even their ocean home. I've noticed the reverence that can fall even upon bickering children in the daytime when the dolphins swim past and the kids get caught up in a beauty that they don't quite understand. I've noticed the elderly lovers sitting on boardwalk benches whose passion deepens when the dolphins come into view. I've seen the younger glorious specimens of male and female sensuality, so prominent on so many beaches, seem to become less self-aware and image-absorbed for a few moments when the dolphins pass by. I've played in the surf with my wife and my father as the dolphins played in the waves further out from us. Together, the three of us have held our breath under the water to hear their whistles and squeaks, and popped back up out of the water as delighted as five-year old's with ice cream cones for having heard a little piece of a conversation we could not even understand. Dolphins are my favorite wild animals, so its easy to afford them the utmost compassion. They're actually not very common here in the mid-west, but it's still easy to avoid the tanks where they're confined. It's easy to avoid the meals where they're served. It's difficult, or impossible, to do something similar for every animal, everywhere.

Not that some folks do not try and act with utmost compassion for animals near and far. There are people who do their best to treat all animals, known to them and unknown to them, with the sensitivity and care that most of us treat the beloved cat or dog companions of our lives. There are people who do their best not to eat any part of any animal, not to wear any part of any animal, not to patronize any business that profits off of animal exploitation, not to in any way support any action that harms animals immediately or anywhere down the causal link of consequences sprouting from the choices they make in the moment.

There are people for whom the lens through which they contemplate most of their daily choices is a one that not only filters out options that add to animal suffering, but one that also enhances the viewer's vision of choices that can make life better for animals. One who simply wants to avoid contributing to how animals are treated on factory farms and in circus training yards moves from one apt to avoid the product, to become one who works to change the system. Activists are created, called by an expansive ethic of life that extends all the way to sentient non-humans. Activists who are often ridiculed for concerning themselves primarily with non-human suffering, for revering a universal spirit of life that is associated with all life, even lives very unlike ours. Activists who are often mocked for caring as much about a chicken in a factory as the one who mocks cares about their cat.

I know these people pretty well. For about three years I worked at an international animal rights organization doing media work, public affairs, and operations. While I never quite reached the level of devotion that many folks in the organization did, I was inundated, as we all were, on a daily basis by images and accounts of the lives of animals used in various industries that to this day make me nauseous and angry, even at the memory. I've witnessed mind-boggling evil inflicted upon animals in the names of tradition and entertainment and nutrition and spirituality. I've held starved dogs during their last breaths and plucked freezing, starving, discarded house cats out of icy mud to warm against my chest. I was one of many doing this in many different ways for the three years that I worked at the organization. And what we always knew was that we could be doing more; that no matter how many animals we helped, there were more who needed help; that no matter how much we tried to avoid contributing to animal suffering, we could never completely avoid doing so; that the valley between the cliffs of reverence for life and the reality of life was deep and wide, with no method in sight of linking the two sides.

Which is, in and of itself, a rather common objection to actively expanding one's sense of reverence for life to animals beyond those living in our homes. Since one can never completely avoid contributing to animal suffering, why should one do anything at all? And because some animal welfare and animal rights proponents can be, and remember, these are my people here and I still have close friends in the movement, but some can be amazingly self-righteous, the reality of never being able to fully imbue a reverence for all life into the fabric of society, gets linked to the pressing reality that all of us, in some way contribute to painful lives for other beings, human and non-human. The objection that starts with, "we can't do everything, so why do anything," which is actually a healthy question, a pertinent query, and an invitation to further discussion, moves toward an insecure and silly antagonism stated by examples like, "you're not doing everything, so why should I do anything?" As if someone's personal ethics should be based solely on another's actions rather than a deeper understanding of morality, interconnectedness, and one's personal relationship with God. At an extreme, this silly antagonism is manifested by folks who indicate no interest in eating less or no meat, or in how animals killed on factory farms are treated, because that means they'll have to eat more plants and plants are alive. I remember using this objection in high school knowing full well that I understood plant life to be fundamentally different than animal life, thus warranting different approaches to the two. I actually view plant life, animal life, and human life as all fundamentally different and thus, warranting of different approaches to the three. But there are common values that we can apply to all life, values like reverence and compassion, values that may find different manifestations as we interact with different forms of life, but values that should still be central in our relations.

Meaning that no, no person can live in such a way as to never cause pain or discomfort to another living being, just as none of us can expect to live lives free from having those qualities inflicted upon us by others. But the relationships between reverence, animals, and humans are not ones of extremes, aimed at either surrendering completely to the reality that humans are sometimes indifferent to, or neglectful of, or intentionally cruel to other living beings, nor aimed at a naive expectation that everyone, everywhere, will come to view animal rights through the moderate frame that I do, much less the more extreme frame of the folks I used to work with. It's not a matter of simply accepting that Calvinistic understanding of a depraved human nature creating conditions that will never be imbued with significantly more compassion, more respect, nor is it a matter of single-mindedly insisting that animals and ethics should trump every other social concern in the world until the issues are resolved.

It is a matter of realizing that our days are full of opportunities to turn toward reverence for life even when faced with the realities of living. Our days are full of interactions with life in many forms that call us to travel on those "God-road['s] of compassion" that the poet mentioned earlier. Every day that passes is one in which the sacred and the profane step up to our front door and ring the bell, asking for entrance. And every day that passes is one in which we let both in, learning from the sacred, being transformed, and transforming the profane into that which we would more fully embrace, and into that which more fully embraces life. Every day that passes is one in which to pray with humility for the awareness and compassion that draw from within us a deeper sense of appreciation for the lives that we share, for the mystery of our common beating hearts, for the inspiration of our dreams of a more peace-filled world. The question is not one of extremes, it is one of daily mundane decisions that call on us to consider our evolving and varying understandings of reverence and life, and then whenever we can, make the choice to turn toward compassion.

When I first moved to Hyde Park in Chicago, I quickly located the nearest coffee shop which was, thankfully, was a couple hundred feet from where we lived. They have really good coffee, and since I'm a touch of an addict I got in the habit of going there quite often to get a cup and take back to school. And outside of the coffee shop there are almost always venders selling Streetwise, a newspaper that people without homes sell for income, or there are people just standing there asking for money. They stand on the side of the sidewalk away from businesses, so as I pass them on my to get coffee, they are on my left, and the shops are on my right.

And I noticed early in our stay in Hyde Park that I certainly seemed very interested in the shop windows on the right as I passed the guys without homes asking for money on left. For someone who doesn't like to shop at all and doesn't really enjoy window shopping, I sure became interested in what was going on in the windows of the convenience store and restaurant kitchen that one passes right at about the same place where the guys ask for money. It was a shame that I couldn't turn toward those men and at least acknowledge them because the transaction of cash for candy and a newspaper was so interesting.

And in truth, or course, those transactions weren't so interesting. I was turning away from the men not because I didn't have much to give them, not because I didn't want to share some change with them. I was turning away from them because I knew that regardless of what I gave them or didn't give them, they would still be there tomorrow, still asking for money, still clutching to the margins of survival. I turned away from them because the realities of our very different lives made reverence for life difficult, made shame easy, and made avoidance desirable. What I accidently did with the dolphins in the ocean years earlier, I did quite intentionally with those fellows in Hyde Park.

That kind of avoidance, that kind of hardening, empties compassion of it's potential in our lives. It sucks the water away from the seed of the sacred within and blocks the sun from nourishing the leaves of our soul. For if we limit our compassion to those with whom we identify, the reverence for life we claim and know is just a patch against the quilt that it could be. Compassion is it's own reward in that it deepens our experiences of life, makes more significant our relationships with those we love, expands our relationships with those we don't know well, and brings us in closer company with that which sources our beliefs and values. Compassion turns shame and avoidance into respect and engagement. Service finds a way through compassion. Hope thrives on compassion. Engagement realizes its fruits through compassion. And the world our hearts call us to co-create is one which compassion will be the very air we breath.

In the days ahead and all the days that follow, may we turn toward compassion at every opportunity, in manifestations that represent our heart's intent and our mind's contemplation. May the circle of life that we see with reverence open wider so that we might more fully glimpse the depth and mystery of that we are a part of. May our cups of compassion overflow, balming a sometimes harsh reality with a hopeful, soothing vision of an ever-expanding beloved community.

Amen, and blessed be.