Everywhere science looks, it finds the same patient miracle: systems seeking balance in order to survive a hostile, chaotic universe. A forest is a negotiation billions of years old. A reef is a treaty written in coral. A body, your body, is trillions of cells holding a truce so faithful you get to forget it is being kept. Balance is the endless, living work of adjustment, every strand answering every other strand, so that the whole web holds.
This Sunday, our #BeingUU summer reaches our Seventh Principle: respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. And Dr. Daniel Sheridan and I will stand in the pulpit together to explore the hardest sentence hiding inside it. We are the strand that broke the balance.
As far as we know, humanity is the only component of the web that has pulled away from the ancient negotiation, taking more than the treaty allows, spending what the system cannot replace. And here is the strange grace pressed into the same fact: we are also the only strand that knows it. The reef cannot study its own fever. The forest cannot read its own losses. We can. We measure the damage we are doing to the world and to one another; we publish it; we grieve it. A creature that can recognize its own imbalance is a creature that can change. That is either the loneliest fact in the universe or the most hopeful one, and Sunday’s question is which we will make it.
Our tradition has long insisted on the hopeful reading, and it has receipts. Unitarian Universalists helped carry environmental justice from the margins to the center of American religious life. Our congregations were early voices naming that pollution is not distributed equally, that the incinerator and the highway and the poisoned water find the poorest zip codes first, so the web’s repair must begin where the tearing is worst. Our people organized through Ministry for Earth, pushed shareholder actions on fossil fuels through our denominational investments, voted climate justice into our national priorities, and joined Indigenous water protectors in prayer and protest. Here in Florida, where the limestone under our feet drinks the rising sea, congregations like ours treat the mangrove, the reef, and the bay as members of the parish. Ours was among the traditions that learned to name environmental racism in the years when naming it cost something. The Seventh Principle has never been decoration on our list. It is the loom the other six are strung on.
But this Sunday, Dan and I want to walk the principle somewhere it is rarely taken. Inward.
Because the outer imbalance and the inner one are the same imbalance. None of us is an independent actor. We are bound to one another by shared experience, and by things older than experience: patterns handed down through the generations, the way features are, griefs our grandparents could not process arriving in our bodies as weather we cannot name. We run in loops we did not write. And a person caught in an old loop treats the world the way the loop taught them, extracting, defending, numbing, taking more than the treaty allows, because somewhere back down the line, taking was how somebody survived.
So the repair of the web begins in the strangest place: inside the strand. It begins when we awaken our truest selves, and we do not do that alone, because no one becomes aware of themselves by themselves. We do it in community, in honest company, where the old patterns can finally be seen instead of obeyed. And once we see our place in the system, we can change how we engage every system we touch: the family, the congregation, the city, the sea. Break one loop, and you have not just healed a person. You have re-woven a strand, and the whole web feels it.
Come Sunday. I will bring the long view: what our theological ancestors and the scientists both learned about the web and our place in it. Dan will bring the depth view: how the change actually happens in a human life, and where each of us can begin. Two voices, one sermon, because a morning about interdependence should not be preached alone.
The universe spent over thirteen billion years making a strand that could see the whole web. You are that strand. Come find out what you are for.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero