A GLOBAL REQUIEM

Thoughts on a speech by Jack Miles, senior advisor to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust and author of God: A Biography, delivered as the keynote address at the 50th anniversary Cross Currents Consultation in New York City, 2000

A Sermon Preached by Gayla Marty

University Baptist Church
Minneapolis, Minnesota
March 11, 2001

Ecclesiastes 1:1-9

Revelation 6:12-15, 8:7-12, 10:8-11

Early in the summer of 1987, my grandfather rode home from a blood transfusion at the Rush City Hospital with my mother. He had had many.

"That was the last one," he told her.

The doctor said it wasn't leukemia, but Grampa's body had stopped making red blood cells, just stopped. He was 84. He had lived a very hard life that included machinery, forest conservation, hunting, dancing, love of hard work, and a lot of hard drinking and smoking, violence, burned bridges and relationships. When he'd been about 70, a coronary shook him up enough to change his life. The man who once chased church-goers off his farm with a shotgun made peace with God and had a few years to mend fences with my worn-out grandmother before she died. Ten years later he still drank a little, and smoked a pipe enough to accidentally set his car on fire one night driving home from the tavern, but he was thoughtful.

My mother was the only person he could talk to about dying. They agreed that when the time came, he would stay in her house, and hospice care would be arranged.

When July came, he was weak enough to agree to move from the trailer house across the yard to the house where I grew up. "Let's not prolong this," she remembers him saying that day. Lying in a bed she made for him on the south-facing front porch, his kidneys failed, by mid-month he stopped eating, and sleep gradually overtook him. His other children, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren came to see him.

There were two houses plus the trailer on the farm. My mom and aunt, two of his daughters, worked off the farm, but my dad and uncle, his sons-in-law, were always nearby. They took turns checking on him, bringing him water, turning him gently. One morning Dad and Uncle got their wires crossed and both came to the house to check on him at nine o'clock. After turning him, they sat a few minutes in the kitchen and planned their day. Before they went back out my uncle went to ask him once more if he needed anything. In those moments while they sat in the kitchen, he had died.

Two weeks after we buried him, my boy William was born, and if you look at William you will have a good idea what my Grampa looked like. In years later, William grew up and we told him stories of the great-grandparents he never knew. When he was in kindergarten or first grade, the class had a story about wishes--you know those stories, about the man with three wishes, or a hero who gets one wish--well, the children had to answer the question, "If you had one wish, what would it be?"

"To die in peace, like Grampa Clarence," that was William's answer.

Many of us have similar stories in our lives. I have been thinking of this story of Grampa Anderson a lot over the past few weeks, because I have been thinking of the author Jack Miles' question: What if the human race is really terminally ill?

Jack Miles is the author of God: A Biography, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for biography and was a bestseller for months. Last year Miles gave the keynote speech at the 50th anniversary Cross Currents Consultation in New York City. The speech was called, "Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science, and Art."

If the first generations that absorbed Charles Darwin's thought were concerned with the origin of species, Miles said, ours is obsessed with the extinction of species, including our own. In 1850, the rate of extinction is believed to have been one every five years. Today it is estimated at one every nine minutes.

If the human race on Earth is doomed by environmental devastation, he asked, what does that mean for the role and purpose of science? of art? religion?

In other words, why do we keep going to college? making art? Why do we sing and play bells, paint, dance? Why do I write? Why do we come here to University Baptist Church, or to any church? Does it make a difference? Or is the point not to change the outcome, but to make us more comfortable as we wait for death--for extinction as a species? This may be a morbid question, but if we cannot talk about it in church, and during Lent, when can we ever? My grandfather could talk to my mother about his own death, and it made all the difference.

The texts come from two often opposing traditions in the biblical tradition. The opening passage from Ecclesiastes is from the wisdom literature. Miles opened his speech with it: "Biblical wisdom differs from biblical prophecy in that God, who sometimes promises through his prophets that he will indeed do something new under the sun, is expected in wisdom literature to do no such thing" (Miles, 2000). Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926 in the wake of World War I, borrows its title from this very passage. Within the wisdom literature, the typical function of the imagination--of art, in particular--"has been to find ever more telling ways to contrast the brevity and vulnerability of human life and the folly of human desire with the immemorial indifference of nature." Things may be terrible, but life in the broad sense goes on, and tomorrow is another day.

Although we typically think of prophecies as full of ghastly warnings, the voice of prophecy also promises that our action can make a difference, that we can change outcomes. The Book of Revelation was written at the time of Rome's cult of the divine emperor, which was used to test loyalty for citizenship--forcing Christians to profess their faith even if it meant death; yet the vision of Revelation promised the victory of God in the end. The creators of the Christian canon themselves had grave doubts about including this book--I think they put it in because they needed a colorful ending, after all those edited letters. I chose these particular passages of Revelation because their language and images have continued to haunt us, today because of their portrayal of environmental disaster.

Have we passed an environmental threshold, has a switch been thrown simply by incremental increase in what we've been doing for a long time, that provokes a nonlinear effect? William seems to think it has--he is more hopeful that Mars can be made habitable than that the Earth can be saved, and he's not the only one. This is Miles speaking:

"Long before the human species is extinct, we may know that we are irreversibly en route to extinction." Such a prognosis, if it comes, is less likely to come as an apocalypse like the one in the Book of Revelation or a disaster movie, than as "an accumulation of ignored warnings from scientists and science journalists and an ensuing consensus that the opportunity to take the action that would have saved the species has come and gone.

"As this paradigm shift takes place in the realm of politics and activist science, another change looms in the realm of the imagination, and perhaps also, in the practice of religion. If the Earth is failing as a viable habitat for our species, then we can no longer imagine our individual deaths against a backdrop of continuing life, as we have so long been accustomed to do. Can--and should--a religious wisdom emerge that will accept species death as if it were personal death?

"At the scientifically apocalyptic moment, should it be reached--and we can certainly imagine it being reached--actual extinction may still be far enough in the future that there will be time for a new kind of religion and a new kind of art to develop. These will be, no doubt, a religion and an art born of despair, but religion and art--far more than politics or commerce or science--are precisely those products of the human spirit to which we turn in times of despair. The last days of the human race could be, not to speak flippantly, our finest hour.

"Or should we, instead, repudiate this ancient wisdom as unwisdom, and turn instead to the prophetic option, the path of protest and refusal rather than the path of acquiescence and acceptance? Do we prepare to die with dignity, or do we shed all dignity and prepare to fight to the death? The religions of the world have resources for either option; but whether we consider religion or art, the choice we face is an historic one, for step by step, the Earth, which once seemed to abide forever, now seems to be dying around us."

The agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago produced the seeds of our Genesis myths.

In the Axial Age of 800 to 200 B.C.E, the dramatic rise of cities and kings produced Taoism and Confucianism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; philosophical rationalism in Greece; and Judaism in the Middle East. "Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh Sabaoth," Isaiah proclaimed, "His glory fills all the Earth!" As the writer Karen Armstrong described it, Isaiah's Yahweh was still the god of the armies, but not only that; not just a tribal deity (Israel's) but the whole Earth's. Yahweh became an idea that could help people cultivate compassion and respect for their fellow human beings--a hallmark of all the religions of the Axial Age. Religion began to recognize intrinsic value in human life (Armstrong, 1993).

Not much later, based on the short, inclusive ministry of Jesus, who wept over the destruction he foresaw of Jerusalem, the Christianity that had formed in Europe by the year 235 was multiracial, catholic, international, ecumenical, and administered by efficient bureaucrats--a force for stability in a dramatically changed world (Page, 1995; Armstrong, 1993).

Muhammed's brilliant leadership in the 7th century C.E. in response to a ruthless capitalism that had developed in Arabia over just two short generations due to a surge in trade--a change literally killing off Arab people through blood feuds and poverty--achieved peace by his death. A century later, the energy released by this unity had resulted in an empire that reached from India to Spain. Innovations such as the ritual of prayer that required lying prostrate five times a day struck at the heart of individual pride and self-importance and encouraged deep egalitarianism.

"In what may be the last years of the human race," Miles said, "the role of the imagination lies not in supplanting religion but in imagining how existing organized religious traditions might adapt their old resources to meet this new challenge."

All religions prepare the individual to accept physical death as the human lot, and the time when religious traditions of all kinds most make an appearance is the time of death--whether the dying or deceased was a "believer" or not. We have all been to funerals that blend the secular and religious.

"If the death of the human species truly cannot be avoided," Miles argued, "we can at least hope to dignify this passing with decent grief and try by our resignation to prevent the last years of the human species from being a battle of all against all."

On the other hand, all the major religious traditions of the world also teach disciplines variously described as the slaying of desire, inner jihad, or self-mortification, and all celebrate sacrifice to the point of martyrdom. If the death of the species can be averted at all, it surely cannot be done without enormous sacrifice to a degree rarely seen beyond the family.

Jared Diamond, author of the recent Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies--who will incidentally be on campus April 11 to speak at a University of Minnesota sesquicentennial event at Northrop--says nothing so tied to the existing social order as organized religion can be expected to work if and when the famine, epidemic, and anarchy that are already seething in parts of Africa spread around the world.

Jack Miles concedes that it is easier to imagine how religion might aggravate rather than alleviate ecological crisis--to say nothing about our long tradition of using our religions as a rationale for war. Barbara Ehrenreich, however, in her book posing a theory of the origins and history of war, pointed out that in the last century, humankind at last began to wage war upon war, what she calls "a tremendous human achievement" that we must continue. We will need armies of committed activists, she wrote, leaders who will educate, inspire, rally others, and strategies and cunning. "We must prepare ourselves to lose battle after battle and fight on, to lose security, comfort, position, even life." Her words can be applied also to a war on environmental destruction (Ehrenreich, 1997).

But Miles argued that it is our lack of time that wins religion at least a preliminary hearing.

"A problem that religion may well make worse may yet be one that cannot solved without religion," Miles said. "The challenge, though posed by science, is artistic as much as it is theological—a breakthrough of the imagination in the service of religion, in the service of the human species, in the service of life itself. We would be fools to predict such a breakthrough, but worse fools not to hope for it."

Miles used John Cage as an example of an artist who ultimately gave up music and began writing in a crisis of conscience about environmental devastation and illustrated the limitations of art alone. But it is in the fusion of religion and art that I believe we have hope. In my view, the prophecies that have been heard and survived are carried in powerful language. Many early Islamic writers described "the wonder and shock felt by Arabs when they heard the Koran for the first time. Many were converted on the spot, believing that God alone could account for the beauty of the language" (Armstrong, 1993, pp. 137, 144-45).

1. First, I think we need to confront our theology and philosophy as it relates to the possible end of our species. If it is not too late to heed the prophetic voice, including the voices of our children, we must address these questions in our worship, music, and sacraments. Our children are thinking them. I would argue that many of our children have made a judgment and are already responding to the world as if humankind, even all of life on the planet, is terminally ill. And some of them would prefer a swift death to a slow one. We must listen to our children and let them point the way.

As an example, as John Shelby Spong wrote in Why Christianity Must Change or Die, the concept of "Jesus as rescuer" has fallen apart theologically, while the concept of "Jesus as spirit person," as the person of enlightening and powerful spirit described not only by the Gospels but by the apostle Paul, is reinvigorated. It is not enough to use gender- and ethnic-inclusive language in our hymns and texts if the theology is bad or even mediocre.

2. Second, our experience of community here must energize and empower us for our work out there. We must foster artists and art at UBC, including the artists in all of us. All we do together must be oriented toward God-within-us, not God-out-there, to building each other up and making room for our spirit force. We must create structures that allow us to grow and change and nurture our spiritual lives. We must use all our imaginative and creative powers to adapt our church resources to meet this new challenge.

3. Third, we must create models here for how to live sustainably on the Earth. As Jesus broke the bond of dependence on one city, Jerusalem, as a holy place holding up the framework of belief, he moved us toward that day in the 1960s when a human in space saw the Earth and recognized the whole as our sacred home. The care of this building and plot of ground may become our sacrament, our sacred grove in the world, where we learn to care for each place in our lives as sacred. It must give us experience and language to engage ourselves in fighting war, injustice, poverty, as well as environmental degradation. We cannot excuse ourselves from recycling or conserving energy just because the work we are engaged in is a moral imperative, because saving the Earth is, too.

4. Fourth, we need to be strategic about how we spend our time and energy at church. The 1993 World Scientists Warning to Humanity exhorted us (1) to bring environmentally damaging activities under control and restore the integrity of the Earth's systems, (2) to manage resources crucial to human welfare more effectively, (3) to stabilize population, (4) to reduce and eliminate poverty, and (5) to ensure sexual equality, guaranteeing women control over their own reproductive decisions. Anyone familiar with UBC knows that we are already engaged in most if not all of these efforts. Even as we work on these urgent tasks together and individually, we must guard ourselves from eroding time together in worship, prayer, communion, and study that build our inner lives.

5. Finally, we must pay special attention to creating theologically meaningful and beautiful services to celebrate life's passages. We often mention weddings and commitments, but we need to work on birth, coming of age, arrivals and departures, graduations, commissions, separations, and yes, death. At the same time, I believe we must foster our Earth consciousness by making more explicit our celebration of the seasons, which undergird the Christian calendar, but also solar and lunar cycles that link our daily lives to all creation.

For myself, I need to keep writing. In order to stay at UBC, I need to receive support in that calling. It is through stories that we make meaning, and making meaning is an intrinsically religious endeavor. It was through telling the story of my grandfather's death to my son that I made meaning, and that he made a different meaning. In telling the story to you and making a metaphor of that one death, I wonder whether the story of our species' death will remain a prophecy of doom unfulfilled, or a story told by whales and other species who survive us, or the end of all stories.

It is in this wondering that I feel the breath of God.

Miles, Jack. (2000) "Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science, and Art," keynote speech. New York: Cross Currents Consultation. This speech was published on the Web at <a href="http://www.crosscurrents.org/milesrequiem.htm">http://www.crosscurrents.org/milesrequiem.htm</a>. It includes some key points from the 1993 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists and signed by 1670 scientists, 104 of them Nobel laureates. It also examines in some detail the life of John Cage, probably best known for his anti-composition, 4'33", in which a pianist came to the piano in a concert hall with a stopwatch and sat for four-and-a-half minutes but played not a note. Gradually the sounds of the outside world became audible to the assembly. Gradually they heard not just coughing and rustling of clothes but sirens, air conditioning, children's voices outside, airplanes. In 1952, this work started out as Cage's affirmation of life and the necessity to wake up to the one we are living--a perspective strongly influenced by Buddhism. But, Miles said, "what John Cage eventually heard in the silence he had created was the sound of the world dying, and he could not bear to hear it." The composer turned ecological poet and counseled others "direct, urgent action--a general mobilization as in wartime, with guarantees for nobody."

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Armstrong, Karen. (1993) A History of God: The 4,000-year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. New York: Ballatine Books.

Diamond, Jared. (1997) Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Norton. Diamond himself concedes that shared ideology or religion does provide a bond not based on kinship that helps people live together without killing each other, and also gives them a motive other than genetic self-interest to make sacrifices for each other.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. (1997) Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. Ehrenreich’s theory poses that war developed directly from the human species' experience of being the prey of big cats and other large predators, succeeding to the point that those once-predators are now almost extinct. Through the millennia, this fight for survival became ritualized and morphed into war among our own species, until war has itself become our predator, and "has left us ill-prepared to face many of the larger perils of the situation in which we find ourselves: the possibility of drastic climate changes, the depletion of natural resources, the relentless predations of the microbial world. The wealth that flows ceaselessly to the project of war is lost, for the most part, to the battle against these threats." Based on humankind’s "war on war" that emerged in the 20th century, however, she has hope that war, too, can be extinguished. "What have all the millennia of warfare prepared us for, if not this Armageddon fought, once more, against a predator beast?"

Mack, Burton L. (1995) Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth. New York: HarperCollins. Mack says the Book of Revelation helped to make martyrdom "the dominant model for Christian practice," and in so doing "shaped a literary legacy for western Christian imagination that continues to haunt us." Revelation is the basis for the current bestselling fiction series Left Behind and a major motion picture about to be released.

Page, Charles R., II. (1995) Jesus and the Land. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Page identified three conversions of Jesus: from exclusive Judaism to the inclusive pluralism of the Pharisees, then to acceptance of Gentiles, and then to a break with the Pharisees based on their failure to adequately represent the kingdom of God to God's people.

Spong, John Shelby. (1998) Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Spong describes massive changes already taking place in Christian churches, from theology that is influencing architecture and interior layout (altars have come away from the walls and turned to face the people) to a relaxation of professional distance with clergy. He advocates a radical revisioning of the church's liturgy and practices.

Svitil, Kathy A. (2000) "How to Revive an Old, Cold Planet," Discover, February, p. 14.

An aerospace grad student at MIT, Margarita Marinova, has worked out a plan for thawing Mars with 20 perfluorocarbon factories, each powered by a nuclear reactor, which could produce the necessary benign greenhouse gases to reactivate the raw materials in just a century. "Such a scheme might cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but she thinks future solar-system colonizers will consider that a good deal for creating a whole new world. 'The numbers are big, but not big enough that you’d say forget it,' she says."

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