Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner, Co-director of One Earth Conservation, wrote this essay in response to the First Principle Project of the Unitarian Universalist Association which asks members to vote to change their First Principle from the "inherent worth and dignity of every person" to the "inherent worth and dignity of every being." Though aimed at Unitarian Universalists, the essay's foundational ideas carry across organizational and tribal ties.
Healing and Nurturing
Ourselves to Nurture All Life
Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner
For
your sake, for humanity, for earth, and for individual lives and life, vote yes
to endorse the bylaw change that asks Unitarian Universalists to covenant and
to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every being. Be part of your
congregation and our Unitarian Universalist Association leading the way towards
more beauty and more flourishing by nurturing humans to nurture all of nature.
I’ve
been an avian veterinarian for 30 years and a Unitarian Universalist minister
for almost 15 years. I am driven by incredible and hopeful possibilities for
honoring and connecting to nature, including human nature, and thereby making a
more beautiful world.
To
heal our beleaguered earth and the wounds of human separation from the rest of
life requires a praxis of compassion and ethics. We must more clearly see
humans’ true relationship to life and others and more fully grasp that there is
no disjunction between human and nonhuman nature. We must embody our
interconnection through concrete relationships with discrete individuals, for
otherwise the Unitarian Universalist principle of respect for the interconnected
web of existence is merely abstract. I find affirming the inherent worth and
dignity of all beings to be an expression of this hopeful and healing praxis.
We
are called to connect to others. While we cognitively know that human health is
intertwined with the earth and all earth’s beings, our diminishingly biodiverse
and increasingly urban and technological world accentuates our impression of
separation and distance from nature. This alienation from nature is an
increasing cause of withdrawal and despair. Yet I am hopeful that a re-enchantment
with the life that surrounds us -- an opening to the beauty, worth, and dignity
in individuals – can motivate us to effect change, nourish our sense of
belonging, and deepen our connection to life. As our own agency is enhanced, we
will come to more fully apprehend the agency of individual life around us.
A
denomination that covenants to affirm and promote the inherent worth and
dignity of every being is a denomination that invites its members to creatively
re-vision the web of interconnection. That web is not a network connecting some
beings with worth and dignity (humans) with other beings that lack worth or
dignity. Rather, it is a web in which all beings are interconnected by
sharing worth and dignity; it is a web whose interconnections recognize
and reinforce each being’s worth and dignity. This re-visioning is our path
of healing. The web of beauty, worth, and health can lift us out of our
spiritual and ecological crisis, but it cannot do so if some beings in that web
are deemed without worth or dignity.
The
path of healing through re-visioning will take unexpected curves and encounter
unanticipated obstructions. As Unitarian Universalists embark together on this
path of healing ourselves so that we can heal the world, we will discover
surprising things about ourselves, our world, and place of our congregations.
Our free and responsible search for truth and meaning is ever unfolding, a way
forward together that invites us to fall in love with life over and over again.
Surprised
by love, we go through our days with wonder readily available to nourish us,
for re-enchantment and re-visioning brings an invigorating sense of wonder. It
invites us into Henry David Thoreau's "discipline of looking always at
what is to be seen." Through that discipline we encounter what Stephen Jay
Gould called the "excruciating complexity and intractability of nonhuman
bodies." Suddenly, we see the miracle of expression everywhere. What seemed
unappealing, dull, or even fearful, is revealed as magnificently present before
us. We live in a world of wondrous subjects, each being a life with an interior
experience of life. This transformation of perception of beings represents a transformation
of our selves.
Worth
seen everywhere grows compassion everywhere. With vitality and beauty seen
everywhere, wherever we go, we go not alone. Wonder replaces loneliness. Studies
indicate that wonder nourishes our lives, improving our health, spirits,
relationships, and compassion. When wallaby, walrus, whale, and worm provoke
wonder, we are nourished and better able to nourish. But when any being’s worth
is seen as merely instrumental, human lives, too, may be judged merely
instrumental. To distinguish just one
species as having worth and dignity, to set ourselves apart as unique bearers
of worth, only separates and isolates us and perpetuates the wound of
disconnection.
Accompanying
us on this visionary path we endeavor the development of a humble curiosity. Approaching
all findings as provisional, declining to obscure the wonder of the moment with
prior concepts, creative possibilities of relationship emerge. We become playful fools, in love with life
that constantly amazes and amuses. Life invites us to fun and frolic as we let
go of our idols of knowledge and control.
Our lives are not bound to others in our mind's definition of life and
worth. Rather, we are bound because all beings who have subjectivity, who
desire to endure and flourish, are bound together. All life has the capacity to
experience that which is harmful or beneficial. All life strives for further
coherence of their embodied selves. Recognizing this, we begin to live wider,
wilder, and deeper lives than human designs alone can realize.
Though
the vision of interconnecting beauty, worth, dignity, and health between
individuals does challenge us with the burden of knowing the harm humans cause
to so many, we move forward nonetheless, perhaps ever more lightly, for we walk
in beauty. As the Navajo Way Prayer suggests, beauty is all around us. This ever present beauty, that is also within
us, connects us to all others. We care for and protect them because we love
them, and we love them because we are part of them, and they are part of us. Healing comes from seeing how we are embedded
in relationships of common experience and existence with other individuals. We, the walking wounded, are healed and
healers.
We,
a people who covenant to affirm and
promote the worth and dignity of every being are a people encouraged to
cultivate patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman presence – a people emboldened
to live a new story of wholeness in place of the old story of conquest and
consumption. Appreciating the limits of our control and of our understanding,
we can live freely in present and persistent beauty, wonder, and awe. Every denial
of a being’s intrinsic worth and dignity cuts off life from ourselves, and cuts
off life's creative striving expressed in that being. If
we hold that some beings have worth and dignity and some beings don’t, then we
deny ourselves the journey along this spiritual path of healing and hope.
