Moments of Grace and Vulnerability

[This is an edited version of a service reflection.]

I would like to share my path to ecological awareness through the lens of  two related concepts, vulnerability and grace.   I see vulnerability as the condition of being exposed to possible, sometimes unknown, negative consequences of our surroundings.  This can be ecological, social, economic or personal.  In my life, I have been relatively free of feelings of personal or economic stress.  But my understanding of the vulnerabilities of my physical environment have evolved with age and experience.

When I was young, I lived on the eastern edge of the Florida Everglades.  I only realized much later in life how seriously I took that name – “EVER Glades”.  If only it were so.  This wild and beautiful place was a short 2 mile bike ride that my friends and I would take almost everyday of our summers and many other days of the other “seasons” such as they are in south Florida.  We were fascinated by the wide array of reptiles, amphibians as well as bird of prey (owls, hawks) and water birds (Heron, egrets).  I can still recall the first time I saw these creatures, sometimes very close-up, outside of a book or TV show.  We made these trips up until our high school years when other priorities and interests took hold, for better or worse.  While I was away from this wonderful paradise, I had always assumed that it would be constant – that I could go back any time to visit these old friends.  But when I left home for college and graduate school many years passed where I did not visit.  When I finally did return I noticed some serious changes.  The species of lizards and amphibians that had been plentiful were now hard to find and they had been replaced by aggressive invasive species – many brought from southeast Asia during the Vietnam War years.   This wasn’t a natural progression – We (humans) Did It!

The constancy of the natural things around me as a child it turned out was illusory.

This was my first encounter with relatively sudden change in the environment and first experience with its vulnerability.  Still this experience faded into the background after I left graduate school and started my professional career.  Like many, I was mainly consumed by work, immediate family and professional achievement.  It was a mostly enjoyable, in some ways rewarding yet also oblivious ride.  Decades went by without giving a thought to the Everglades. 

I only began to pay attention to the natural world again after I had retired and even though I was still consulting and travelling, I had more time to reflect, explore and remember my childhood fascinations.   I began reading and investigating and finally latched onto climate change as an issue that captured my concern and curiosity.  I became aware again of what was happening in South Florida, especially sea level rise and the further damage by invasive species and rampant development well into my former childhood paradise.  The shock of those unexpected changes I saw as a young adult creeped back into my memory.  They were a small example of what we as a dominant species have been doing to an otherwise stable and welcoming environment.

Most people, busy with their lives, are almost completely focused on either survival (in much of the world) or at the other end of the spectrum, totally focused on accumulating as much material and financial wealth as they can.  

This inward focus makes the same assumption I did about the Everglades – they are oblivious to the preciousness and fragility of what appears to be a beautiful, dependable place of joy and curiosity.  Like my decade in the Everglades, the human race has been the beneficiary of what Thomas Berry calls a moment of grace.

It has been over 10,000 years since the end of the last glacial period.  The emergence of civilization has occurred, indeed has been made possible by the resulting stable climate over this time.  We have been able to develop local productive agricultural practices because year after year seasonal changes were predictable.  Once nomadic wandering groups were able to coalesce into communities, villages, towns, and cities.  These flourished and persisted over centuries and millennia.

Here I want to go back to the term “grace” I used earlier in quoting Thomas Berry.  I think it is critical that we understand what a gift we have been given in our existence, our Blue Boat Home, if you will.  Berry gives examples of the moments of grace that were necessary for us to be here where we are.  These moments in the past essentially saved us from vulnerabilities that would keep us from  achieving our current existence.   Some examples are:  a collapsed star spread the chemical elements that make up our Earth;  those elements were not evenly dispersed but gathered in clusters than ended up as veins of minerals in the ground that allowed us to build modern civilizations and technologies;  a most curious molecule, water (H20), appeared with the strange property that its solid form is less dense than its liquid form.  That is, ice floats!  (Imagine what it would be like if it were the other way around); the appearance of the first functioning cell and the subsequent evolution ever more complex beings; plants exhaled oxygen into the atmosphere to make animal life possible.

But like the beauty of my Everglades of my childhood, over the 10,000 years of stable and beautiful climate – this precious moment of grace – livability of our planet is only recently (last 150 years) being undone.  Human-kind is systematically creating a long list of vulnerabilities and for the most part telling themselves that it isn’t really happening mostly because they don’t want to threaten their seemingly comfortable and stable existence.  As a faith community, UUs are known to care a lot about this issue.

Our 7^th Principle tells us that all things are interconnected and interdependent and as such we are all vulnerable to each other and we all have the opportunity to be moments of grace for each other.  A new UN report issued today (3/20/2023) reiterates that we are approaching some serious points that if we dont address quickly (summed up as 50% reduction is emissions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050) we will bake in serious vulnerabilities for future generations.  As UUs we need to move from principles to action.  As has been best articulated by atmospheric scientist and climate communicator supreme, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe,  one of the first actions can be to talk about it to others.  Our individual and collective voices are the most powerful tools we have in the fight against climate change.

~Terry Welsher