First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Hungers of the Spirit

"The inherent worth and dignity of every person." "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." I’m hoping that these two phrases sound familiar to almost everyone in this room. They are the two most often quoted of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s seven principles; the affirmations that we have covenanted not so much to believe in, as to abide by in our life and work together as a public religious community. Beyond familiar, to many of us they may be so ingrained as to elicit a sort of automatic assent; not for us motherhood, apple pie, and the flag, but ‘inherent worth and dignity’ and ‘the interdependent web’ command our loyalty almost as phrases in themselves. It may have been some time since we paused to examine them, to ask ourselves about the variety of implications they might carry, and why they command our loyalty. This morning, Shelley and I want to lift them back into conscious examination, and I want to explore the possibility that they may not even be entirely compatible, these two great, taken for granted catch-phrases of Unitarian Universalism in our day.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the text which Shelley has asked me to consider in this auction sermon, is not a specifically Unitarian Universalist book, and yet it raises, in a most engaging and urgent way, one of the core issues around which Unitarianism here in America once coalesced, and which remains a dynamic tension in our tradition to this day. The omnivore’s dilemma, as author Michael Pollan presents it, is a simple question: given that we as human beings can eat successfully a vast variety of material from the natural world, what shall we eat? What is good to eat? What is good for us to eat? What is ethically legitimate to eat? What, if anything, is it forbidden to us to eat? How are we to understand the meaning of what we do, and do not, eat? How might we eat in such a way as to make this elemental, instrumental action a source of meaning, a nourishment and not a degradation to the human spirit? This question becomes in Pollan’s hands, as it does in any extended consideration, an examination of the connection between humanity and nature. What does it mean that we are dependent for our consciousness upon a material world that seems in some way profoundly less aware than we are; that we intuit to be largely unfeeling, unreasoning, unknowing, and therefore rather less important and valuable than our own delightfully perceptive selves? And what does it do to this naieve sense of spiritual superiority when we realize that without regularly incorporating into ourselves significant elements of that material universe, all our exalted consciousness will quickly perish? Our bodies tie us to the world of physical necessity in any number of ways, and the need to eat is one of the most persistent, and least negotiable.

I call our spiritual ancestors Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott into this discussion because the Transcendentalists of the 19^th century shaped the trajectory of our movement, and the question of the human being in the natural world was one which significantly occupied them. I love Thoreau’s honesty, when in the midst of his denunciation of eating as a distasteful necessity, that his aesthetic preference would reduce as much as possible, he notes that in his personal practice he has not even discontinued eating meat, though he thinks the human race would be improved if it would do what he has not been able to. I should note that my first disillusionment with the whole philosophy of Walden came when I learned that during his year at the cabin, Thoreau frequently ate dinner at the highly civilized table of Ralph and Lydian Emerson, and that the minister’s wife did the hermit philosopher’s laundry. But it was Louisa, the beloved author of my favorite children’s stories, who set the seal on my skepticism with her tongue in cheek behind the scenes account of the Fruitlands experiment in utopian living. A true feminist before her time, Louisa’s family was part of this abortive attempt to establish a community, or at least a household, upon the exalted premises of Transcendentalism in practice, and she is unsparing in her observations of the way these ideas played themselves out in the lives of the women and children who were subjected to them. At the same time, she held her father, the educator and philosopher Bronson Alcott, in affectionate esteem, and she is gentler toward his impractical idealism than I am in retrospect inclined to be.

The Transcendentalists, like many religious thinkers and philosophers before them, celebrated the human capacities for reason, compassion, imagination, intuition, and moral aspiration, seeing in these mental and spiritual functions something divine, that differentiated the human soul from the dead clay of the physical world. They saw human existence as a sort of zero sum equation; the more it was focused on and grounded in the material, the less it could realize of its higher, more divine qualities. The more it ascended into refined feelings and pure thought, the less it could have to do with the gross realities of its animal nature – of which eating, of course, was one example.

Now the Transcendentalists were radicals in their day, in part because they affirmed the natural world even as they deplored at some level humanity’s rootedness in it. Nature, to them, offered evidence of divine creativity and order; it summoned human consciousness to contemplate eternal laws of beauty, the reciprocity of physical forces, the intricate balances and harmonies of ecological systems, and ultimately, the moral nature of creation. They saw humanity not as hopelessly sinful, rebellious worms, condemned by a holy god’s wrath, as their Calvinist forbears had done, but rather as the only part of creation capable of recognizing its own true significance, and transcending – hence their name – the material world, in order to find the greater truth of a spiritual life and reality. To modern ears they often sound tiresomely pious, as when Louisa has her fictional father, Able Lamb, recite all the temptations from which he would wish to see human beings abstain, including religion, politics, property, and trade, as well as coffee, tea, wine, and meat. One might suspect her of satiric exaggeration, if we did not have Thoreau’s own earnest words of exhortation to demonstrate the justice of her portrayal.

This essential dualism, that the realm of intellect, imagination, and spirit, stands over against the tangible world of sensation, matter, and appetite, does not begin with the Transcendentalists, yet they are the ones who incorporate it enthusiastically into the development of liberal religion, and Unitarianism specifically, in the new world. And their vision at the time represented a genuinely forward movement. Whereas the Puritans had seen humanity confined to a material world of suffering and sin, until released by god’s arbitrary and saving grace, the Transcendentalists imagined that the human spirit could, by its own exertion and attraction to the good, escape from the debasing physical realities into the universal mind of the Oversoul. Not a personal god, but a transcendent perception, was their aspiration, yet they maintained the same division between spirit and matter, body and soul, that can be traced back through the doctors of the early church to the pre-Christian philosophers of Greece. Even 19^th century humanism, while it denied the existence of a personal god or a heavenly afterlife, continued to affirm what Felix Adler named the "ethical manifold," and took for granted a Victorian vision of the superiority of the life of the mind, with its moral principles, over the unreasoning appetites of the physical body.

It is precisely this bifurcation of the human condition that Michael Pollan calls into question through his exploration of the omnivore’s dilemma. There is nothing more physical and material than the act of eating, and nothing more inescapable to human survival. Even that archetype of physicality and appetite, sexuality, can be more successfully sublimated and spiritualized than eating can. Communities of believers – monks, nuns, Shakers, and other assorted sects – can and have organized themselves at least ostensibly to abstain from sex altogether, and most religious traditions have some understanding of sexual renunciation as an individual spiritual path. Indeed, it is telling how often the abstemious Transcendentalists speak of appropriate foods as "chaste". Yet even celibate monks and nuns and holy hermits must eat.

We can, Pollan begins by proposing, unselfconsciously eat what we are given to eat, first by our parents, and then by our culture. The domestication and industrial production of corn by modern agribusiness offers our society an endless assortment of variously manipulated forms of corn, of which feedlot beef is one, and corn based sweeteners are another. We are, the author suggests, almost entirely cut off from any awareness of the origins of these foods when we consume them; we do not know, and do not want to know, the conditions under which the animals which become our meat live or die, or the chemical sleight of hand by which corn sugars are stabilized and marketed into food products all but devoid of genuine nutrition. It should be recognized that this industrial food production process constitutes a triumph over one of humanity’s most ancient challenges; by it, both calories and protein are supplied so cheaply and abundantly that our health problems now have more to do with excess than insufficiency. This was not true throughout much of human history, and is not yet true everywhere around the globe. Yet it seems that we have discovered how this transformation may be accomplished, at a certain kind of price. Nevertheless, the question remains very much before us, is this what we want to eat? Is it what we ought to eat? Pollan claims that a meal provided by the agribusiness industry, with its relatively cheap immediate price, does not account for its true costs, leaving our society with a mounting debt "to nature, to the public health and purse, and to the future."

After exploring several variations of so-called "organic" and "sustainable" agriculture, Pollan concludes by describing what he calls "the omnivore’s Thanksgiving", a meal consisting of pork from a wild sow that he hunted, killed and butchered himself -- with a great deal of assistance from knowledgeable others -- mushrooms that he personally gathered, beans that he grew in his garden, cherries that he picked, bread that he baked, and home made pasta. It was as close as he could come to what he describes in the reading as "the perfect meal"; one that is fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding, including the karmic debt that human beings tend to feel they owe to other creatures whose lives are sacrificed so that we may eat. He stipulates that this meal is not sustainable; no one can eat with such deliberation and intention all the time. Indeed, Pollan himself reflects ruefully upon the tray of take-out sushi that he consumes for lunch in the midst of preparation on the day of his perfect dinner party. Yet the exercise has value in terms of his, and by extension our, self understanding – which is perhaps what Louisa would have said about the months that she and her mother spent at Fruitlands, attempting to run a household by the light of Transcendentalist idealism. It is always edifying to attempt to eat our values; we will learn in the process something about ourselves, something about the world, and something about the meaning of those values.

What I have learned, growing up as a Unitarian Universalist in a feminist era, is to take my idealism with, as the saying goes, a grain of salt. The real, material world -- the world of, among other things, bodies, and sex and food -- is not a muddy swamp out of which the ethical and intellectual spirit of humanity would do well to arise and to leave behind. It is, rather, the discipline of our fancies and fantasies; it is the testing ground for the usefulness of the meaning we think we have made in our philosophical meditations. It is the place where we are forced to come to terms with that interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, and which we are so fond of invoking. What 21^st century Unitarian Universalism is called to represent, it seems to me, in its feminist, post-modern, anti-oppressive aspirations, is the philosophical embrace of appetite as a legitimate function of the human condition. The omnivore’s dilemma is not how best to extract ourselves from the demands of our physical hunger, and attempt to satisfy ourselves with high-minded thoughts of beauty and purity. "Sensual savors" as Thoreau called them, are not contemptible food for the worms that possess us; they are strands in the web of interdependence that includes ourselves and the worms, the fruits and vegetables and grasses and fungus, the predators and the prey, the insects and the amoebas, the minerals and oils and gasses and waters, the nerves and cells and sinews that together with ideals and aspirations, make us who we are here in this world.

Our spiritual ancestors, the Transcendentalists, believed that the inherent worth and dignity of every person was located precisely in our capacity to overcome the demands of the material world, to disregard appetite, and to dwell as constantly as possible in the realms of pure thought. They hoped in this way to escape what Michael Pollan calls the "karmic debt" of creatures whose lives are nourished by the consumption of other life. I would suggest, and Pollan I think would agree, that we are called upon not to avoid that debt, nor evade it, but to satisfy it in the terms of this world, first by recognizing and acknowledging it; second, by resolving the ethical dimension of the omnivore’s dilemma for our own time in terms sustainable for nature, for human community, and for the future; and third, by living lives that are intentionally worthy of the sacrifices we know are necessary to sustain them. It is when we celebrate the sensual savors of our food in fullest awareness of their origins and their cost that we are most honest, and I would suppose, most fully human.

For in the end, we are inextricably bound into the web of the world; whenever we think we have somehow transcended it, we are fooling ourselves, as the pangs of hunger will quickly and convincingly remind us. And that connection is not a punishment, or a debasement, or a trap of filth upon our souls. It is the essence of our humanity, to be creatures of flesh and blood and appetite, in a world of such manifold material variety that we can scarcely decide what to do with all of it. Some part of that variety I must consume, if I would live; my only options are whether that consumption will be entirely mindless, or tainted with disgust and regret, or attentive and appreciative. I believe that my whole being – mind, conscience, and spirit, as well as body – is nourished best when I choose awareness, and thankfulness. Once upon a time, people used to know when harvest had occurred for their community’s particular crops; they noticed, and rejoiced, and sang about it. This is a good season for us, city dwellers though we may be, to remember, and share that gratitude, and that song.