Easter / Biomimicry

April 8, 2012
First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org
Rev. Paul Beckel


LIGHTING THE CHALICE         ”Exultet for Easter Morning” by Mark Belletini
GATHERING SONG             Lo, The Earth Awakes Again    #61
RE MINUTE / CHILDREN’S FOCUS    Albert, by Donna Jo Napoli
CHILDREN’S BLESSING            May Peace Surround You....
ANNOUNCEMENTS & GREETINGS
CHOIR                         Sing on this Festive Day    
OUR PRAYERS of GRATITUDE & RELEASE
In spring we acknowledge that time has turned, and the life, the beauty, the certainties
of times past --
these have left us.
In the spring we remember, we let go
and tentatively re-imagine
how the thread-like continuity of life
will re-emerge
as it passes through us
on its journey.

[these are some of the marks that life has left upon us]

READING            from Dwellings, by Linda Hogan
There are so many beginnings.  In Japan, I recall, there were wildflowers that grew in the far, cool region of mountains. The bricks of Hiroshima, down below, were formed of clay from these mountains, and so the walls of houses and shops held the dormant trumpet flower seeds.  But after one group of humans killed another with the explosive power of life’s smallest elements split wide apart, the mountain flowers began to grow. Out of the crumbled, burned buildings they sprouted. Out of destruction and bomb heat and the falling of walls, the seeds opened up and grew. What a horrible beauty, the world going its own way, growing without us.  But perhaps this, too, speaks of survival, of hope beyond our time.

GUIDED MEDITATION            
To Be of the earth is to know
The restlessness of being a seed
The darkness of being planted
The struggle toward the light
The pain of growth into the light
The joy of bursting and bearing fruit
The love of being food for someone
The scattering of your seeds
The decay of the seasons
The mystery of death
And the miracle of birth

==
To Be of the earth is to know
The restlessness of being a seed
Imagine someone you know who is restless.  It may be you or someone else you love.  They may be young or not so young.  Have you known this restlessness?

Do you remember what it is about?  Could it simply be about an urge to grow...an urge for that seed to become all that it has the potential to become?

To be of the earth is to know
The darkness of being planted

You are a restless seed.  You feel the urge to grow.  You’ve heard that it’s a frightening process.  And now you are being planted.  It is dark. You think about turning back.  But you’re a seed, you don’t have that option.

To be of the earth is to know
The struggle toward the light

You got used to the darkness more quickly than you expected.  Even got fairly comfortable with it.  But the urge to grow remains, and a part of you splits through your protective shell.  You leave it behind, now, and begin to scratch upward, through the dirt, with anticipation...

To be of the earth is to know
The pain of growth into the light

You were once a seed.  You were born in the light and were once accustomed to it.  But now you’ve grown used to the dark.  You’ve forgotten what it’s like out there in the sunshine.  It is a shock.

Sometimes a shock will stop you or send you backwards.  This time, without your understanding how, the light seems to propel you forward.  You grow.  You become what you had always known you could become.

To be of the earth is to know
The joy of bursting and bearing fruit

It all happens so quickly.  In the summer sun and rain you have reached maturity, and in one last rapturous explosion of self, you put forth fruit containing...to your amazement...tiny little near-copies of your infant self.

To be of the earth is to know
The love of being food for someone

You are through.  Spent.  Exhausted.  But it is not over.  You find that you have become more than yourself, you have become a part of a chain of life.  You are needed by something larger than yourself.

To be of the earth is to know
The scattering of your seeds

A breeze or a passing animal take your fruit, your nourishment, and your gift to the chain of life.  You are gone now.  You can only gaze from the place of spirits as your fruit is broken into thousands of pieces and scattered to unfamiliar lands.

To be of the earth is to know
The decay of the seasons

Those bits that are no longer you... lie waiting, now. It is hard to watch.  You gave them, as dreams, to the seasons, but you were unprepared to see your dreams stepped on in the rotting leaves.

To be of the earth is to know
The mystery of death

From your perch in the land of the spirits, your future is no longer visible.  Every bit of you has been absorbed by eternity.
[long pause]

To be of the earth is to know
the miracle of birth

The cycle continues, without us.  The earth is stirring, again.

==
I invite you now to remain in silence for a few minutes, and ask yourself where you are within the cycle of death and rebirth.  Do not attempt to force yourself into the station labeled: “happy ending” -- the miracle of birth.  Rather...find yourself and feel yourself wherever you are, and know that -- there you are...swaddled in the full expanse of being ... a unity that cannot be grasped, but only loved.

CHOIR        Dona Nobis Pacem    
MESSAGE    
Maybe you don’t find Jesus’ death and resurrection plausible in a literal sense. But still, maybe you recognize this as a powerful story, a great metaphor. Maybe there are parts with which you identify: having good intentions and getting crucified anyway...or the part about getting knocked down and then coming back stronger...maybe the nonviolent civil disobedience thing...or perhaps even the bit about making a personal sacrifice for the benefit of someone else.

Most of us have some experience, even if on a much smaller scale, to enable us to say “Yes” to the christian easter story. Even if we’re skittish about the violence. Even if we find the supernatural bits cheesy. Still, if we were watching this story play out in the news for the first time, we’d probably sympathize with the characters – both the good guys and the bad guys.

We’d say Amen. Not because the good guys win in the end but because for god sakes the truth is being told. Told it like it really is. You get blamed for things that aren’t your fault. You try to do the right thing and you die anyway. But, until the very end, somehow you keep coming back. We keep coming back.

Now some remarkable souls bounce back more readily than others. They wake up every morning with a smile on their face, grateful for another day. Most of us come back alive through somewhat longer cycles -- maybe weeks, maybe even years of gestation separating our periodic renewals of hope. But we all recognize the cycle: grief and renewal, exile and return, death and rebirth. It’s in our religions; it’s in our human families cascading from generation to generation; it’s in the turning of our great green planet within its big blue protective sphere, circling in turn around an even bigger ball of yellow sun.

These cyclical patterns, even with their highs and lows, are somehow comforting. To know, in the face of everything sad, and everything wonderful, that this too will pass, is a mentally and spiritually healthy awareness.

These cycles are the very essence of pagan religions, but I don’t think there could be christianities either, without the same patterns.

Sometimes people argue about whether one religion or another is True. Well today we’re going to stay around the perimeter of the question of what is True by noticing instead what is brilliant, and stunning, and ingenious. And useful.

Which brings us to biomimicry. Biomimicry is the recognition of patterns within nature that can be used to solve human problems. I’m going to talk a little bit about the emerging science and technology of biomimicry now, but just long enough so that I can get us back to Easter before we go.

We’ve all encountered examples of biomimicry; in fact humans have probably been copying for eons those things we see plants and animals doing to stay alive. Maybe it’s just in the last century or so that we’ve imagined ourselves somehow above and beyond nature, independent, and domineering. Happily we are turning now again toward the wisdom of the natural world, its systems and processes developed by trial and error and adaptation.

Velcro came out when I was a kid. I remember thinking then, probably a lot of you thought the same thing: Ooooh that’s so obvious, why didn’t I think of that?! Well, it’s perhaps the simplest example of humans copying and adapting something that we observed in nature. And happily there are many more examples, and their rate of discovery is increasing – not of new ways to consume the life around us, but to take lessons from the methods by which nature has solved various problems of design, production, harnessing energy, eliminating waste, communication, and going with the flow.

You probably remember the Olympic swim records falling a few years ago when new fabrics, copying patterns found in sharkskin, were introduced. A potentially much bigger discovery about this surface pattern, however, its ability to reject bacteria...which could be civilization-saving since we are finding diminished efficacy in our antibiotics.

Just a few more simple examples of biomimicry [slides]
·    The natural cooling effect of vertical ventilation inspired by termites is being used in new building construction.
·    The kingfisher design of the bullet train -- which is not to make the train go faster but to prevent sonic booms when exiting tunnels. It was observed that kingfishers could pass from one medium to another (air to water) without making a splash – that’s how this design arose.
·    The capture of dew on leaves brings us these bucket planters made for use in areas where the desert is expanding into productive land. You can see how water will collect overnight, drain into the protective container...and there’s a seam that enables the container to be split in half and re-used once a young plant has established itself.
·    Coral building its structure from CO2 has inspired a new process for manufacturing concrete that is carbon negative.
·    Mathematicians looking at communication patterns among social insects [ants and wasps] for algorithms that might enable our household appliances to talk to each other and balance the energy loads among them.
·    And finally, wind turbines utilizing a scalloped edge design copied from the humpback whale, meaning they turn with about 30% less drag and produce power more efficiently.

Oh and this of course [slide], is our goal: mutual rebirth. Co-existence. Not just finding new ways to appreciate nature by devouring it, but allowing some old habits -- destructive patterns -- to die, so that human civilization can become a responsible partner with the rest of the natural world. Because developing some more virtuous cycles for ourselves is truly essential. [slide] The picture on the left shows how much liquid fresh water we have to share among all plants and creatures of the earth. The picture on the right shows how much breathable air there is in our atmosphere. Clearly there’s nothing to waste. It all has to be recycled, again, and again.

But my Easter message is not that science and technology will be our salvation. Not a chance. Science, by itself, gives us humane and inhumane technologies -- some productive, some counterproductive, and sometimes we don’t even know which is which.

Religion has a mixed record too, of course. Good intentions gone awry. Inspiring peace and conformity, communion, and demagoguery. And yet religion too has delivered great genius in its biomimicry -- copying not just a single design element from nature, but retelling the very story of life and death, life and death, that sacred cycle: human, natural, and hopeful.

==
What will save us, I believe, is getting out of the tomb. Let’s get outside our old death traps of habit and ask ourselves: are there solutions out here (outside) to some of the problems we’re facing? Are there ancient elders to get in touch with outside the box? Shapes and patterns and cycles that might help us unclench our stiff winter limbs?

A few days ago poet Adrienne Rich died. And yet she lives on in the lives she touched. She wrote:

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”

I love the courage of that poem. There’s no naïve hopefulness. No salvation by faith. “My heart is moved by all I cannot save.” The only way forward seems to be...to be reborn. Even though I have limited power...on my own...even though the conditions of time will crush me and all those I love...what can I do?.. but to do what the corals and the begonias, the termites and the great oaks, the clouds and the dust have always done…still showing us the way, to live and die, and thereby reconstitute the world.

SENDING SONG             Earth was Given as a Garden      #207
SHARING OUR GIFTS
BENEDICTION
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. [Howard Thurman]