Rev. Anthony David
March 18, 2007
For the past several weeks, we’ve been exploring a number of topics related to the connection between health and spirituality: the mind-body connection, coping with chronic illness, and this morning, the final topic in the sermon series: the enlightened diet.
Now, when I say “enlightened diet,” I’m not talking just another kind of eating plan, like Atkins or South Beach, the Zone or the F-Plan, the Scarsdale Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Astronaut's Diet, the Sleeping Beauty Diet, the Three-Week Trance Diet, or the More of Jesus, Less of Me diet. It’s not this kind of diet. It’s more about the kind of relationship we might have with food if we were to live out of our highest values and highest knowings. Our eating patterns are probably among the easiest things in life to take for granted and to be unthinking and unreflective about. So to infuse them with our highest values and knowings is a real accomplishment. A kind of enlightenment, for sure.
But what highest values? Which highest knowings? Let me say something about this first, and then we’ll get to work. These values and knowings I’m referring to are very definitely my own, discerned out of my own studies and experience, but perhaps you will resonate with them and find points of agreement with what you know to be true. Four basic ideas—and here is the first: Living into the truth sets people free. I’ll say that again: living into the truth sets people free. It’s just another way of saying that when we mindfully connect with the Sacred, our relationships are healed, our creativity is unleashed, and our possibilities are expanded.
That’s my first highest knowing, and here’s the second: It’s hard to live into the truth. It’s hard. There’s so many obstacles: our personal fears and expectations and ignorance. Social patterns like prejudice and poverty and greed. Especially the personal expectation which is reinforced by so many different social groups, both religious and secular: that truth comes or must come from a single person, a single book, a single all-embracing tradition, or a single way of knowing. All these: obstacles to living into the truth. What can make it so hard.
Yet there is hope. Even though living into the truth is hard, people have done it before anyway. People from all cultures and all times, who have somehow learned to overcome or transform the obstacles. Truth is spread out all over the earth, and some people have figured out how to look for it, how to distinguish it from falsehood, how to tell better from worse. Wise women and wise men, prophets, saints, saviors, heros. They exist, and they can help show us the way.
There is hope. That’s the underlying theme of my third highest knowing, and it also underlies the fourth: that a primary tool of living into the truth is the community of seekers gathered together by a promise—NOT that we will all come to think alike, but that we will all come to love alike and support eachother in our desire to live in the light of the truth, heart, mind, and soul. Freedom of the pulpit, freedom of the pew. Covenant, not creed, at the center.
And that’s it: the four basic ideas that together make up my highest knowing. My religious faith. Exactly why I am a Unitarian Universalist and not something else. Perhaps why you yourself are a Unitarian Universalist, or simply why you are here today, whether or not you formally identify as a Unitarian.
And with that said, let’s now get to work. Use these highest values and knowings to inform and enlighten our relationship with food. What does living into the truth of our eating mean? Why might that be so hard? Who has done it before anyhow? And how might a community like ours be instrumental in enhancing and improving our diets?
The enlightened diet. Let’s start with the issue of living into the truth of our eating. When we do this, we find ourselves living into the reality of our interdependence with the larger world, both natural and human. It’s illustrated very well by writer Amy Hassinger in her article called “Eating Ethically,” available in the Spring 2007 edition of our denominational magazine UU World. She writes, “When I eat a tomato, I am transforming it into my body. I take it into my mouth; my saliva and gastric juices break it down into nutrients that feed my muscles, my bones, my brain, my skin. Nor am I eating only a tomato: I’m eating the sun, soil, and rain that grew it. I’m also communing with the workers who planted the seed, cultivated the plant, and picked the fruit.” This is what Amy Hassinger says, and by virtue of it, we can see ourselves as in a true kinship relation with nature and with human industry. Eating is the basic fact that keeps us alive, and it is this fact which grounds our lives in interdependence and makes it inescapably who we are.
And once we consciously live into the reality of our interdependence—once we do this—we encounter a very sobering thing: that in order for me or for you to survive, other living beings must lay down their lives. Life feeds on life. The approximately 100 trillion cells of this body, and all these cells organized into greater degrees of complexity—tissues then organs then organ systems then ME—all of it survives and thrives by the grace and sacrifice of other organisms: other bacteria, other plants, other animals. They are there not because of anything I have done necessarily; their lives have their own significance and standing. And yet they die for me. My very living requires their dying. They die for me, and in my own turn, I will die for them, I will give my body back to the earth. The circle of life goes on. Life feeds on life.
It’s sobering, living into the truth of this. All beings alive—you and I and everyone and everything: we leave a footprint in existence. And once we know this, fully and truly, the question then becomes: how shall we respond? Ideally, I believe our best response which sets our spirits free is that of reverence towards other beings and ourselves; a sense of gratitude and compassion that commits us to living as lightly upon the earth as possible; and a full conviction that above all our job is to be good stewards of the gifts of the animals and plants that we will eat today for lunch, following this service, and that we eat every day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Of these gifts of grace, we must be good stewards.
So this is a little about what it means to live into the truth of our eating, what that means. But now it’s time to talk about how it’s hard. Hard to do, because there are so many obstacles, one of which is simple lack of awareness. The interdependent web embracing us and loving us, and we don’t know that our best response is loving it back, revering it with gratitude and compassion. Not knowing that, and not knowing that one of our primary human responsibilities is to be a good and mindful steward of the gifts of creation. Just growing up and through a consumption pattern that has been set up for us by culture and by family. Taking it for granted. It’s just who we are. We go to the one-stop grocery store, look into the freezer, and grab what’s lying there, shrink-wrapped or in a box, and there is no thought regarding where it comes from and what that process might look like. Shopping for price tag and taste only.
Simple lack of awareness is an obstacle to living into the truth of our eating. But so is hyperawareness and hypersensitivity. Here’s what I mean. Just start exploring the ins and outs of the industrial agriculture system—defined in part by mechanical methods of planting and harvesting; animal agriculture on a mass scale; and human manipulation of natural processes through a variety of means like chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; or growth hormones for livestock; or genetic engineering. This is industrial agriculture, and it has led to a radical transformation in food production, resulting in levels of plenty around the world that have simply been unknown in all previous generations of human existence. Starvation has always been a major threat for the human race—except recently. Thanks to industrial agriculture.
And yet you start looking more deeply into it—this source of human plenty, this ultimate reason for why we can one-stop shop—and what comes at you is also a vast ugliness. It’s both yin and yang here. I’m talking all the unintended consequences of the system, including pollution, economic injustice, and a decrease in biodiversity. All the hidden costs, all the environmental side-effects. Amy Hassinger pulls no punches when she talks about those shrink wrapped chicken breasts we buy at the grocery store, how the living beings they came from were “confined in windowless sheds filthy with their own excrement; [how] their beaks were seared off to prevent them from pecking their neighbors due to the stress of overcrowding; [how] breeding and hormones had sped up their growth so that the weight of their bodies deformed their legs and arrested their hearts; [how] they were fed a constant stream of antibiotics to stave off disease (meanwhile creating antibiotic-resistant strains of disease with the potential to plague the rest of creation); and [how] their feed might legally include ground-up cattle parts, as well as the corn from those vast fields treated with enormous quantities of pesticides and herbicides.” This is just one instance of the vast ugliness that comes at you when you look deeper into the industrial agriculture system.
As for what this has to do with hyperawareness and hypersensitivity: One form this takes is to hear about what happens to chickens and to hear about all the flaws and downsides of industrial agriculture and simply to shut off. To deny. The shock of it all so overwhelming that we turn a blind eye. This, or the other extreme: to hate with pure hate the agricultural system that has blessed humanity; in fact to see humanity as one big blight upon the earth and for oneself to feel ashamed for even existing—to feel cursed by an original sin—to believe that one has no right to take a place in an interdependent web and a circle of life that, in truth, love us and make room for us and only want us to leave a lighter footprint….. What I’m saying is that both forms of hyperawareness and hypersensitivity are obstacles to living in the truth. We cannot any longer turn a blind eye to the ugliness of industrial agriculture; and yet reactive hate towards the system and towards ourselves is no answer either.
All are obstacles to living into the truth of our eating. And there are still others: the denial of aging and death that is rampant in the contemporary Western world, which is a significant factor in spawning and supporting one diet fad after another promising a way into perpetual health and perpetual youth. So many obstacles. But having said all this—there is still yet hope. Lots of hope. People and traditions aware of the interdependent web of all existence and of the spiritual significance in every bite and swallow of food—people who have aligned their lives and their relationship with food to this, and can help us find our own way.
In this regard, one spirital practice that has long fascinated me is that of fasting. The opposite of eating. Have you ever fasted before? Muslims do it as part of a month-long observance called Ramadan, a time when one withdraws from regular consumption habits so that one may reflect on them and wonder whether they are in line with one’s highest values. Through them, am I coming into closer relationship with Allah? Am I bringing into the world the kinds of things Allah would want? Am I being the best steward I can be of the gifts of life?
You find fasting as a spiritual discipline all over the world, in many traditions and religions, and it is but one example of a technology of consciousness that we can draw on to enlighten our diets.
We can look to the old, and we can also look to the new. Personally, I think that anything Andrew Weil MD writes is solid stuff, based in good science, and sets people on a course of eating that respects mind as much as body, is truly holistic.
And as for what to do about eating patterns that emerge out of the industrial agriculture system…. I want to go back to Amy Hessinger. She suggests a number of helpful things to do that represent a good golden mean between denial that there’s anything wrong and sheer reactive hatred. Her strategy is to say: do what you can do. Do something. Buy USDA-certified organic products or pasture-raised meats as a first step. As a next step, you might learn about what’s available in your community. Find a local farmer’s market and shop there. Beyond this, you might even consider supporting a local farm by committing to buy a share of its products for a season. This is what Amy Hessinger suggests, and do you note an underlying theme here? That of voting a different way with your food dollars. Backing away from supporting industrial agriculture, and stepping forward towards investing into local food systems. Let’s do what we can do.
But then she also says this. And as I quote her, I want you to imagine me as I was when I first read the article, sitting at home on the couch wearing a t-shirt that read, “I love bacon.” Here’s the quote: “Inevitably, thinking about ethical eating means thinking about the animals we eat. The Rev. Gary Kowalski, minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, Vermont … believes that ‘the greatest and most effective thing we can do to befriend our own bodies and befriend the environment and other living creatures is to eliminate meat from our dinner table.’ In my conversation with him, Kowalski ran down a list of highly persuasive reasons to take this step. He told me that eating a 16-ounce steak is equivalent to driving about 25 miles in your car. Each new vegetarian annually saves three acres of tropical trees. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat and 25,000 gallons to produce a pound of beef. Clearly, the choice to become a vegetarian—or, even better, a vegan—is an excellent way to diminish your ecological impact.” That’s what I read when I was sitting there on the couch, wearing my “I love bacon” t-shirt. And so, for me personally, where to go from here? I’m not sure. But I can’t stay the same person and do the same old things after learning about all this…..
It’s just hard to look into the issue of our relationship with food and not come away changed and transformed. This is true personally, and it’s true collectively—which takes us to the fourth and final enlightenment idea: that the community of faith is a key support for individuals as they desire and dare to live into the truth. Community builds us even as we build it. Community gives us a power that we cannot have on our own. And so, as a community, where might Pathways go from here? Or Unitarian Universalist churches in general?
There’s many possibilities here. Certainly practical things related to how, corporately, the church might back away from supporting industrial agriculture and step forward towards investing into local food systems. But here, in my remaining time with you, I want to do a little dreaming. Every week, Unitarian Universalists across the land enter into their churches, and there is hunger to be inspired, to be challenged, to experience the Spirit of Life. At the same time, we are becoming more and more a people of faith who identify with the interdependent web of all existence—this is a signature phrase among us, reflecting the awe and reverence we feel towards the earth that is our home.
So what I’m dreaming about this morning is a signature ritual to go with that signature phrase. A signature ritual we might do that embodies our awe and reverence before life, brings us face to face with the circle of life in all its power and poignancy, and sends us back into the world more grateful and more mindful of our role as stewards.
The need for this came alive for me several years ago, when I was in seminary in Chicago. It happened when I was studying with an Episcopalian priest. He was a gay man, a beautiful spirit. Every week, he would lead a traditional Christian communion service, and I would break the bread and drink the wine even though it was something I had not done for years, since leaving the church of my youth, and since moving away from Christianity. But there was something in that ritual I still hungered for. Bread and wine—among the most ancient and basic staples of human agriculture, lifted up into transcendent meaning through the art of the ritual. And then one day, as I was caught up in the eating and the drinking, I found myself weeping. It had nothing to do with the Jesus story. I found myself weeping, because finally I had made the connection between the bread being broken and the wine being drunk—between this and the circle of life. How for me to live, countless life forms must lay down their lives. That’s what I realized that day. The sacrifice of the living creatures of the earth, for me—and how I will give back, in my turn, when I die.
It’s this moment of insight and illumination that I bear with me today, and bring before you. Yes, this congregation can start buying and serving organic, fair trade coffee. It can talk up environmental awareness all day long. These are all good things. But then there is the urgent fact that we need to know down to our bones: that the gifts of life we are given are free and undeserved—and that we must find ways to know that and witness to that, to give thanks for that, and then to live as the best stewards we can be, to live as gently as we can upon this earth.
How, as a church, can we do that? What will our signature ritual look like? How can we consciously relate our bodies and lives to the Bread and Wine of life, fully aware of how much Creation gives us every moment, every day—so in turn, we can give more of our compassion and our gratitude to it? Our reverence. Our love. Let’s do that. Let’s do that. Amen.
Eating Ethically,” in UU World, Spring 2007 (Vol XXI, No. 1).
Deborah Kesten, “The Enlightened Diet,” Beliefnet, available http://www.beliefnet.com/story/117/story_11796.html
Buck Wolf, “Belly Laughs at Early Fad Diets: Tasty Morsels From Weight-Loss History,” ABC News, available http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/print?id=1537630