Growing up I believed that you could get either love OR respect in life, but not both. This was my mother’s understanding of the way the world worked — one she taught me from day one — and maybe it was true for her or even for women of her generation. But over the years, I’ve discovered that without respect, love is a hollow sweetness, and that without love, respect can result in a distance that undoes its best intentions.

These insights came back to me Sunday at First Unitarian Society in Madison as I listened to our associate minister Karen Gustavson offer one of her best sermons ever. It was well-crafted, contained great stories and great intelligence, but I disagreed completely with what she had to say. The sermon was also about a topic that I care about with every cell in my body — about our need to love and care for the Earth. And so I feel compelled to present a different viewpoint.

We in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) are considering changes in the language of our “Principles and Purposes,” the statements that guide our work together as an association of free, but interdependent congregations. Karen was responding on Sunday to the rewording of the seventh principle, a change that would substitute the word reverence for the word respect in the phrase “we covenant to honor and uphold … respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” She made an effective appeal for retaining the original language –respect — because she believes that to revere something implies a certain passivity — true for our fundamentalist brethren, but not for me and other people on the left hand of God — while respect indicates an active response. Obviously, this is not my experience.

What all Unitarian Universalists want in this rewrite of the seventh principle is language that reflects care for the Earth as a religious imperative, not an optional activity. And for me it’s even more important, because as a Wiccan UU, the seventh principle encapsulates some of the most significant aspects of my combined religion. Karen is a psychologically savvy, smart woman, who knows how to enjoy life, and she’s a good friend of mine. I love her dearly. But in this case, I think she’s had a very different experience of life than mine. As a teenager, Karen’s father primed her to understand the word respect as an active response to powerful energies, emotions, and natural forces when he left her a message about the pitfalls of sexual attraction. But to my mind respect implies a hands-off approach to whatever we’re dealing with. To respect someone or something is to show consideration for them, have regard for them, appreciate them, but not necessarily to embrace them or even shake their hand. Some of the synonyms for the noun form of this word reinforce this disengaged perspective: deference, admiration, esteem, and reverence.

This last synonym is different for me, because what is sacred — that for which we have reverence — absolutely calls out to me to protect it. But I know that within the UUA, the language of reverence has been controversial. For many of our secular humanists, atheists, and “come-outers” (those who have been wounded by other religious traditions and then found Unitarian Universalism instead), the sacred is taboo, a language they can’t embrace. So I’ve been thinking a lot in the last few days about what words will energize all of us to action for the Earth. Our biosphere is our larger body without which we cannot survive. But I know that fear doesn’t motivate most people, and love certainly does. I agree with Diane Ackerman when she talks about her strategy for environmentalism. She says,

My strategy is to celebrate. I believe that if you can cause someone to fall in love with an animal or a landscape, they won’t want to lose it. They’ll fight to protect it.

I also agree with the new president of the UUA, Peter Morales. Peter’s most recent editorial in the UU World (our monthly magazine) talks about our religion in terms of what we love, of

…what we truly care about, what we want to preserve, embrace, and create….When you and I focus on what we love and what we long to create, something almost miraculous happens. We are energized. We form lasting bonds. We become eager to commit ourselves and to work together. We become more generous. We come to care more about “us” and less about “me.”

So what language reflects these strategies of love? The words I’ve been playing with are: LOVE, CARE, and RESPONSIBILITY. I just read an article in New Scientist that stated — without equivocation — that we have moved into a new geologic era. Until recently we were in the Holocene Epoch (“entirely new”), but now we’ve begun the Anthropocene, an era when human effects can be seen on the Earth through its climate and ecosystems. As a result, we humans need to take responsibility for what we’re doing to the Earth, to care for the Earth in both senses of the word — to love it and to take care of it. I also think that simple words activate us better than words with four or five syllables. So maybe the down-to-earth words I’m looking for would combine all of these connotations (with the word need implying responsibility). Then our seventh principle would read: “we covenant to honor and uphold … our need to love and care for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

I’ve realized in the past that Tikkun Daily readers are sensitive to language, so I ask you: What do you think? What words would you use to activate us all to greater environmental responsbility?


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