I knew when I was sixteen that I wanted to be a Unitarian Universalist minister. I went to college so that I could go to seminary so that I could serve a church. Seems simple enough. My plan was almost derailed, however, by my going to college in Vermont, and feeling the strong pull of a Currier and Ives romance with rural life. Marlboro and the surrounding towns looked exactly like the postcards, particularly in the fall or winter. In addition to going to school I worked for a contractor in the town. In the winter we logged and in the warmer months built roads, ponds—anything that required moving substantial amounts of dirt.

I loved my job and greatly admired the man for whom I worked. He was very capable, sturdy, intelligent, honest—a good model for what Emerson had in mind when he was thinking of a solid New Englander. So imagine my surprise the day I found out that he had been born and raised in New York City but had escaped as a teenager in the thirties to seek his fortune in the Green Mountain country. He eventually ended up at Marlboro, built his house from boards sawn from trees cut on his own property. By the time I knew him he had been married to Jay for quite a few years, owned about five hundred very hilly acres, about thirty sheep, a hundred or so chickens. He expanded his original modest cabin until it had three bedrooms, both a second floor and a basement. He heated his entire house with a wood fired furnace and an old kitchen stove.

It seemed idyllic to me and I began to wonder if I just might follow in his footsteps. One day I mentioned to Jim about how “natural” it seemed to heat one’s house with wood. I continued by suggesting that more people, in order to get in touch with nature, should consider following his lead in their choice of home heating fuel. He chuckled softly and asked me to think about how many trees would be left in New England if everyone “went back to nature” with wood heat. The only accurate answer to his question was and remains precisely, “none.”

That one question and my answer led me to realize that I would have to eventually leave the idyllic rural life, return to the city after college, and get back on track with my original plan. That one question and my answer led me to eventually realize that even while most individuals’ relationship with nature was very problematic, everyone’s “going back” to nature was not a practical or wise solution. “Nature” would be trampled out of existence in the process.

It turns out that I was hoping that a solution to the “relationship to nature” issue could solve the “human relationship to each other issue.” Yet over the ensuing years I have become convinced that the process is actually the reverse of what I originally believed. That is, I have come to believe that improved relationships among human beings is the only way by which we can repair our broken covenant with the natural world. To put this in another fashion, our most severe ecological problem is not global warming but the way that human beings treat each other.

This is actually good news. Many of the technical problems which we need to solve regarding our substantial environmental problems require years of incredible investment and ingenuity. Everything we do on that front is greatly constrained by the very obdurate laws of chemistry and physics. We cannot change the laws of nature. The ways that carbon atoms bond together have held fast since the beginning of time. So we have to work with what they will allow. The ways that human beings have bonded together, on the other hand, have been substantially altered several times in the past millennia. There is no actual physical law of the universe that prevents us from changing the ways of human beings. This is good news because we can have a substantial impact on our prospects for a successful future. But even though this is good news, we obviously must recognize that such a project will not be easy.

Thankfully, or not, the perilous nature of our environmental situation only serves to quicken our pulse and expand our capacity to reach for a deeper understanding of some of the enduring problems of human relationships. And I refer to this work as spiritual, as against a more limited psychological approach, to expand the context by which we understand our task within a religious community. Psychology focuses upon how we may achieve a greater degree of personal satisfaction in our relationships. Psychology examines how we can change our outlook so that we can, for instance, get along with family and neighbors. The spiritual work involved in relationships examines the profound consequences derived from what it means to be a human being. The spiritual work involves coming to grips with something called “human nature.” The spiritual work reforms, not what we think or feel about, but our thinking and feeling. This spiritual work is nothing other than the reformation of our consciousness.

In short, the only way I believe that truly altering our environmental future depends upon our capacity for altering our human future. We will eventually arrive at the technological breakthroughs which will help us navigate the years ahead. We are ingenious. But if we do not change how the people using those breakthroughs understand themselves, we are only forestalling, not fundamentally altering, our future.

So what might this reformation look like?

To get a handle on that change I have spent time with Ralph Waldo Emerson who is the touchstone for Unitarian Universalism. Emerson’s insights that will be of use to us in our current situation are primarily those that focus on personal integrity. As he wrote in his journals, we must take ourselves, for better or worse, as we are.

On the one hand his sentiment suggests that we need to learn to accept ourselves, stop being so hard on ourselves. And on a certain level that is exactly true. He reminds us, as do so many others, that accepting ourselves is actually not very easy. But the difficulty is not solely for him an emotional task of overcoming all those messages of self doubt which we have imbibed from so many sources. No, for Emerson, the real difficulty is that we have a too constricted sense of what the self is that we are accepting.

Emerson wrote in his essay Spiritual Laws, “The lesson (I wish to impart is) ... is, Be, and not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us lie low in the Lord’s power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great. I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here certainly shows me that the soul had need of an organ (a person) here. Shall I not assume the post? Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unseasonable apologies and vain modesty...? The good soul nourishes me, and unlocks new magazines of power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not meanly decline the immensity of good, because I have heard that it has come to others in another shape.”

It is not uncommon for people to take Emerson to task for what appears to be a stark individualism. We may hear in his call, “to thine own self be true,” forceful echoes of, “and to hell with everyone else.” That is actually a mistaken interpretation. Emerson did have substantial disquiet with “society” as it appeared to him but not because he disliked society in general. Rather, he sought to build a society out of people who were not so driven by what seemed to him such diminished desires. He felt that if you create a society out of people who are pursuing small and petty aims you shouldn’t be too surprised at the result—a small and petty society. What he hoped for was something more along the lines of what Whitman described in his Leaves of Grass,

I announce natural persons to arise,
I announce uncompromising liberty and equality,
I announce the justification of candor and the justification of pride.
I announce splendors and majesties to make all the previous politics of the earth insignificant
I announce the great individual, fluid as nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully arm’d.
I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,
I announce myriads of youth, beautiful, sweet-blooded
I announce a race of splendid men and women. (edited.)

It would not be unusual to first think, upon hearing Emerson’s comments about living that expresses the “immensity of the good” something along the lines of, “Oh great! So now I have to take French lessons and learn how to play the tuba!” Yet that thought is not accurate. In a further section of Spiritual Laws he wrote about someone cleaning rooms for a living, who, if he or she could realize how much they were an expression of divinity, and easily revealed that self understanding, would inspire everyone to grab a mop.

More to his point, the decisive difference between a diminished and a full life lay in the deepest recognition that what created you was the very same force that propelled all of existence. Whether it was a whale or a minnow, a volcano or a meadow; all of creation, Emerson would remind us, has the capacity to strike us mute with awe and wonder. And as we are a part of that creation we too should strike ourselves in a similar fashion. But of course we don’t. It is not unusual for people to chastise themselves for taking all they have been given for granted. What few realize is that we all take ourselves for granted. The ordinary miracle of a million chemical reactions firing off in synchronicity within our bodies bores us to tears, except of course when the synchronicity wears down a bit. We admire unusual feats of prowess and courage. We neglect the fact that each of us performs a million biological feats of extraordinary prowess and courage every day.

Emerson believed that all good things came from people recognizing the true nature of the soul as the personal expression of our animating divinity. For him the recognition did not ever lead to arrogance but to gratitude and astonishment. According to Emerson people who could recognize this animating divinity made good friends, reliable work mates, and loving and supportive family members. And you may have experienced something of what he means if you are familiar with that Zen Buddhists call “satori,” that experience when a conversation seems particularly real, when one’s powers of observation seem particularly acute. You have encountered moments when the breathtaking reality of people or things broke through your customary distractions. Emerson thought, build a society out of people who readily encounter this state, which is a recognition of a divine origin—now there you’d have something.

Of course what frustrated Emerson was the degree to which people did not recognize their elemental divine origin. He hoped that by diverting people’s attention from the supposed artifice of human culture and back onto the non-human natural world people would more readily encounter the reality of the universe. He was, in a sense, right about this prescription about steeping our experience in something elemental. But his distinction between the artificial and real was incorrect. The world of nature not only makes butterflies. Nature also makes rocket ships and ball point pens—in that it is clearly humannature to make such things. So the distinction between the human constructed and the non-human constructed world is a false distinction.

What is instead the real artifice in human consciousness is not that human culture is un-natural, but that we think it is un-natural. We have created a false dualism between the world of nature and human culture. That dualism leads us to make routine and fundamental errors about who and where we are. We act as if our culture is a victory over the red tooth and claw of nature. We imagine we wall ourselves off from fate and rise above the laws of nature which other poor creatures are too dumb to avoid. But our culture is a very real fact of nature. We don’t realize that even our impulse to rise above the world of natural forces is itself a natural force. Thus, we do not realize that we are routinely out of touch with who we are as creatures, as created.

How do we overcome this dualism? I want you to try something. Place your finger just in front of your ear lobe. Now open your mouth. Can you feel the movement of the jaw hinge? The important thing to notice here is the proximity of your jaw hinge to your ear. The reason why I have asked you to do this is to get a sense of something amazing about a simple human reality. You all know that human, in fact all mammalian, hearing, is dependent upon three little bones, the hammer, stirrup, and anvil, in the middle ear. You are not the least bit aware of the action of those little tiny bones. They just do what they do. But what might astonish you is knowing where those three little bones came from. I asked you to place your finger on your jaw hinge because those three little bones, without which you would not hear a thing, are the remnants of reptile jaws. When mammals evolved from reptiles, they created a slightly different jaw structure which left these three little vestigial bones with nothing to do. They, over the course of several million years, migrated north until they came together in the middle ear and made it possible for mammals to have much more accurate hearing than reptiles have ever possessed.

That is just part of the story about your ability to hear. And I’m not going to go into the story about how long it took for human beings to develop the ability to speak but it is an equally amazing story. And when you next see a snake or a toad you ought to do more than go, “yuck.” You should say, “Thank you.” No reptile, no you. And you could not hear a thing if it weren’t for toads and snakes.

Emerson knew that our spiritual malaise was derived from our existential ennui. He advised brisk walks in the wilderness to enliven our spirits by which enlivening we would more truly encounter the glorious vistas of the natural world. But if we, the walkers, travel out there without understanding our own divinity, without knowing that we are every bit the miracle as the stunning landscape, without knowing that we are just as much it as it is us, we will miss this lesson:

All that we are is shot through with holiness, blessed fire, stardust from supernovas, rolling oceans surging through our veins, and yes, even loose reptile bones. There is not part of this that is not amazing.

What few realize is how much we all take ourselves for granted, take our holiness for granted. The ordinary miracle of a million chemical reactions firing off in synchronicity within our bodies bores us to tears, except of course when the synchronicity wears down a bit. We admire unusual feats of prowess and courage. We should not neglect the fact that each of us performs a million biological feats of extraordinary prowess and courage every day.

One final note—should it surprise us, considering how much neglect our own miraculous nature, just how much we neglect that miraculous reality in each other? Could we instead look at each other in a different light, look at each other in astonishment and awe that is appropriate for any miracle? Let’s say you had a daughter named Madeline who had spent several weeks in her room working quietly on her science project. One evening she comes into the living room and announces that she is prepared to reveal her creation. Madeline says “Tadah!” and out steps into the room a four foot six inch robot, a really good robot that can say words, bend over, pick up things with its hands and has beautiful black curly hair. . Now if Madeline actually did that, you would be flabbergasted. You would fall down in amazement. What an incredible achievement! You would be quite certain she had created a miracle. Now here’s the thing—you do have one of those amazing fabrications. Her name is Madeline. And Madeline is a bazillion times cooler than any robot. And you made her by making love, which is pretty much how the universe works. So when you think about affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, don’t do that just to be nice, don’t do that because it seems like the right thing to do. Affirm the inherent dignity and worth of every human being because no matter all the small stuff that vexes our minds and hearts, we each are an amazing and miraculous creature. Live with the immensity of self, and loudly lift up and readily proclaim that immensity in all that you meet. We do need to go back to nature—we need only realize we never left it.