CREATION STORIES Creation stories are stories about how we came to be here. They also frequently include some notion of how things "got to be the way they are or "how we got to be the way we are. Many of us know the myths or stories about creation which come from other cultures, like the Genesis story, the story of Zeus, and perhaps a Native American tale or two. It is fun to read these various stories - I wish I could read many of them to you. But there is a good collection in this book by Virginia Hamilton called In the Beginning: Creation Stories From Around the World." The book is aimed at a young adult reader, but the clarity of the stories makes it very good reading. So we are familiar with the stories from other cultures, but frequently we don't take much time to think about what our current cultural "story" is. Of course, we often don't even think of this in terms of begin a "story" - but as fact. The accumulation of scientific evidence has created a lot of knowledge, but then we as a culture have used it to construct a cultural understanding, call it i myth or a story, which we think of as the way in which we came to be here. For most people of our culture, the story begins with a BIG BANG, although we know there are some other current theories with other ideas, we generally agree that that detail of what happened first doesn't stop us from telling our story. What's important is that galaxies and universes formed - stars were formed and matter began to coalesce around these stars, which then condensed into planets. On our planet, as it cooled, a fragile atmosphere developed along with oceans: eventually, maybe three and one half or four billion years ago, life appeared - as single celled micro organisms - bacteria and algae. Eventually life began to spread onto land. As the number of plants on the planet increased, the CO2 level decreased, animals developed and helped balance the CO2 - O2 levels in the atmosphere, surviving on plant matter instead of the sun. Fish evolved to amphibians, amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to mammals. The world spawned all sorts of life in myriad sizes, shapes, colors. Mammals were originally small critters in small niches during the dinosaurs reign:, from the tree mammals came primates, and eventually humankind appeared around three million years ago. Forgive my gloss of the story, but this is just the outline-given the way most High School kids or your average person living in much of the world would know it. You may be thinking, this isn't a story - its just a science lesson - But what I just told you was not an unbiased account of creation or evolution. This is a cultural myth (don't hear myth as ion a falsehood - but rather myth as in a cultural story which shapes our lives, the way which we understand the world, and teach our children about their environment.) This story focuses on us, humankind, not just evolution - for in fact evolution continues on now - and certainly continued on beyond three million years ago and the arrival of humanity. The end to our basic creation story is "and finally humankind appeared." Although we may or may not personally believe this, our cultural creation story has humankind as the climax, the pinnacle in the whole cosmic drama of creation. So if creation stopped, evolution stopped; in actuality our appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of a jellyfish or a bumblebee. Our disturbances came later. The most important thing to me, to take note of in thinking about this story, is that it causes us to regard the world as a sort of human life - support system, a resource for humanity. If you asked a more traditional western religious thinker - they would even say that God created the world for us to tend and use. My point is that, although we may have left the story of Genesis behind as archaic and antiquated - its premise, namely that the world was made for humanity, that it belongs to us and we can do what we please with it - has remained. This is why we hear people talking about "our environment" "our seas" "our wildlife" for even a sense of stewardship is truly a claim of the knowledge to run the world. Many creation stories include a sense of "how things got this way" which stretches beyond the beginning of humankind to explain some of the nature of humanity. We see this in Genesis - with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, succumbing to the temptation of the fruit from the tree of good and evil, and being outcast from the garden, never to eat from the tree of life. We all know this story, and how people, preachers and theologians particularly have used it to speak about our human nature, pointing to it when asked about "how things got this way." So, we know that story - but what does our cultural story say about how we come to live here like this - with environmental problems, over-population, poverty, etc.? Well, we all know that for a long time, humans lived like other animals, at the mercy of the world, and during this time, no civilization developed - so we call this long period of humanity's existence Pre - Civilization. Humans couldn't settle down and develop a civilization while hunter-gatherers because their food supplies would quickly become exhausted. Then about ten thousand years ago, agriculture developed - it used to be said the Fertile Crescent was the birth place of agriculture. now I understand that it is thought to have developed in several different places in the world. But at any rate - this was our biggest moment. At last we were free from the restraints and limitations of the previous life-style. Settlement developed and gave rise to division of labor which gave rise to technology. With technology came trade and commerce. and with trade and commerce, the written word, as well as math, science,. and much more, quickly spread throughout the settled communities of people. I want to stop our story again because think it is developing another interesting point. That this, that civilization was our destiny. Before this time, we were just going along, not living up to our potential - until we developed the skills required to achieve civilization. That we were destined to be more than just animals, but to be civilized, to be above the rest of creation, yes even to rule it comes through as a premise in our current cultural creation story. We know this isn't a fact, but we must recognize that it comes through in our cultural mythology. And we are captives of this myth just as animals in the midst of a stampede. But I want to go back to our cultural myth - and continue the story. We found that the world did not meekly submit to human rule. We built and the wind and rain tore down. We carved fields and the jungle or the plains fought to reclaim. We sowed seeds, which were eaten by birds. The shoots which did grow up were nibbled by insects. What we could harvest was plundered by mice. Animals bred and fed were stolen by foxes, wolves, lions. suffered with the weather - droughts, blizzards, floods. We were forced into a battle with the world, an attempt to reign in the chaos, a struggle to maintain our grasp, to succeed and develop. There developed a sense that we were at war and we must conquer the world. One step at a time, of course, we conquered desserts, we conquered oceans, we conquered small pox and polio, we conquered the atom, we set out to conquer outer space. So here we are with population soaring out of control, environmental damage looming in many areas of our life, malnutrition and mass starvation rampant. So many troubles we don't know where to begin - although we do continue to try and make things better as best we can. What frequently amazes us though, is how calmly it seems that people are rushing through life towards all of these crises of population explosion, ozone depletion, air pollution, petroleum consumed, people starving, and on and on. Why is there no widespread panic? Let's consider our cultural creation story. If our destiny is to conquer and rule the world, the reason things are the way they are today is as a result, a direct result of humanity fulfilling our destiny - in other words it is seen as the price of being human. We could not be fully human without civilization, and people recognize this as the price they've had to pay. But the reason I've been telling you all about this creation story, is that I believe that this is not actually the price we must pay for being fully human. But rather is the price we pay for enacting a story that casts humankind as the enemy of the world. I believe it certainly would be possible to come to some co-existence with the world we live in, to maintain a civilization if we begin to re-think our cultural creation myth. Religion can play a big part in this re-thinking process, for it certainly has helped to spread and maintain the current myth. But it is important, I think, to realize it is not important to extract God from the myth - to help us save ourselves from mass destruction. But there are many issues which traditionally could be thought of as in the realm of God which need to be addressed. Many people believe that the reason we, as a culture, find ourselves at war with the world, is that we are truly wanting to be in charge of everything (from floods to crop production, to rainfall, to other animal's population levels.) Another way of saying this is, we want to be God in the traditional image of God - powerful ruler of the universe. Traditional Humanists and Christians alike have espoused this type of thought. And until only recently, many people felt that under humanity's reign, everything was just getting better and better. It is only recently that we have had some insights of doubt. We now are beginning to understand how little we really know even though we know so much and our knowledge continues to expand. But now we feel as though we are in a race against time, to learn more and control more , increase our stewardship to save the planet. Perhaps we could see that as a current end or actually, optional endings to our story: option 1 - we learn enough and control enough that the world is saved and option 2 - we lose the race against time and drown in our own pollution and waste, starve due to overpopulation or other visions of general chaos. And many or us, when pressed, +feel very optimistically pessimistic about this. I've heard many people say, "I'd like to believe that we will find a way, but I really don't know." We don't exactly trust human nature to overcome our greed, destructiveness and shortsightedness. And our basis for this lack of trust is not exactly unfounded. When we examine human history we find many examples to fuel our doubts. As Unitarian Universalists, many of us feel like we must be optimistic about human nature. But even we feel like there are times when this is a blind optimism. It is in struggling with this issue that find it so important to return to our current cultural story. When we look at this story - really look at it- we realize that the story ignores a vast amount of time that we were here on this planet: - the time from three million years ago with the arrival of Homo Sapiens up until about ten thousand years ago. We ignore, as a culture, much of our human past, focusing our attention only on the time in which we have been living out this story - this cultural myth. Part of being civilized" is to place those experiences outside the "civilized" realm as not having bearing for us. It is hard for us to overcome this strong cultural teaching of separateness, specialness - which calls us to not pay attention to much of our history because it was before we were "civilized". But this is a history of humanity's connection to this world, of a time before we found ourselves at war. What's most interesting about this - has to do with our cultural story again as well. Just as we found our story ignoring evolution beyond the creation of humans, our story ignores something else which has coexisted with us all along, and continues to exist - if in ever decreasing numbers. And that is communities of people who don't know our story and don't live by it. These are the African Bushmen, the Australian Aboriginal people, and the Rainforest Dwellers in Brazil, for example. These people are living a life based on their own stories. Stories which are different, but in some ways the same. It is in studying the similarities of their stories, and the differences of their stories and our story that some very important wisdom can be gained. One very important difference Daniel Quinn points out is that people of our culture accumulate knowledge about things and the production of things, and people of these other cultures accumulate knowledge about how people should live. Their stories come with the premise that humankind belongs to the world, which takes them out of the cycle of trying to control the world. Their stories connect them to the accumulation of knowledge about how people should live, for they have been developing and refining this knowledge since the dawn of humankind. Our story has us rejecting this knowledge as not pertaining to us - but perhaps now it is time for us to listen. The other element we find in exploring the differences between how these people view the world and us - is an expansion of this feeling a part of the world. These other cultures live within the community of the environment because they stay within the natural law which maintains balanced life on this planet. They recognize that the world was not made for one species. They value diversity. They follow what could be called a peace-keeping law of nature - one which is followed by all forms of life. We know that diversity is a matter which ensures survival of the entire community - but our cultural story has us trapped - enacting a story which causes us to do things which no other creature on earth does: 1..exterminate, or attempt to exterminate our competitors - (think of ranchers and coyotes) 2..we destroy our competitors food to make room for our own. The natural community only takes what it needs - and 3..we deny our competitors access to food. in other words competition is natural but waging war is not. By destroying diversity of life, we are breaking a natural law - and so we find ourselves in this situation - wondering what we can do. And this is why I think Unitarian Universalism is so important. Humankind is slowly beginning to realize the bits and pieces of what I have said today - there is a sense that all is changing, that at least some people are more aware. Some people say we are in the beginning of a paradigm shift - as we struggle with new ways to understand authority, as there is a return to Goddess worship recognizing the internal, this-worldly - holiness, as we value diversity of life more and more. We know we must change, we sense we are changing. But most important to recognize, is that for true change to take place we must begin to tell a different story. Again I'll say this is why I think Unitarian Universalism is so important. We are poised, ready to struggle with exactly what this story should be. In our affirmation of the goodness of humanity, we are on the right track. In our struggle to define relationship to the divine and to define the divine, we are on the right track. In our willingness to explore new ideas and religious truths we are on the right track. In our love for and nurturance of diversity we are on the right track. In our recognition of the Interdependent Web of Life, we are on track. Help me, to think of a new way to tell our story. Let us work on it together. And then we must tell it to the world.