Some weeks ago, I went with my daughter Ali to the 60th Anniversary celebration of the local Quaker school that she attended.
There was a talk and interview with the founders of the school, Peter and Martha. Peter, holder of two Ph.D. D.s was Director of the Department of Zoology at Duke University for many years.
Visionaries in founding this school in the 1950s, Peter and Martha encountered significant challenges in the early days. All the schools in our state, North Carolina, were segregated, including those in the counties accessible to the Friends School. Quakers, Peter and Martha disagreed with that policy; they believed that welcoming racial and class diversity would enhance everyone’s education! They made scholarships available to make this happen.
Peter and Martha donated land adjoining their private home plot. Entry to the school was a road that diverted off from the couple’s private driveway. They received death threats, scary people doing scary things driving down their driveway, and a bomb was found in the lower school. In their talk, they shared that all the county sheriffs’ cars had bumper stickers that read: “SLKB.” The letters stood for “Support Local Klan Business,” so Martha and Peter had little protection from local law enforcement until the bomb in the lower school caught the ear of the FBI, some distance away.
How did Peter and Martha handle these challenges? Quakers, like we in Unity, believe that we all have the Divine inside, and they have been peacefully standing up for justice for centuries. The Civil Rights Act had already been passed. Peter took their case, either about their right to integrate the Friends’ School, or another case related to integrating a local café all the way to the Supreme Court and prevailed.
There was a time for questions and answers after the talk. One woman raised her hand a nano-second before I did, which was fine, because she asked the very same question I wanted to ask: “What advice do you have for us in these times?”
The response from Peter and Martha, and another speaker was that in times like they encountered, and in times in which we find ourselves now, they went back to their Quaker roots, beliefs, and foundations, and then took action from that place.
Sounds like Unity’s fourth and fifth principles, yes?
Recently, Reverend Victoria Loveland-Coen, minister at my Unity church, Unity Center of Peace in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, launched a Sunday message series based on the Earth. I was asked to speak about Grandmother Earth’s amazing trees. I learned that trees have much to teach us about “What on Earth are We To Do In These Times?”
Trees are literally deeply rooted in the ground—Grandmother Earth!—a demonstration, a manifestation of the nourishing, holding aspect of God, Source.
Einstein said that we will not solve the problems of the world from the level of thinking and feeling at the time that the problem was created. That kind of thinking and those emotions tie us to the problem, without successfully addressing them. If we work only in the Third Dimension, we can’t fix things.
We have to go to the ground of the Divine. Through prayer and meditation, Unity’s Fourth Principle, we must nourish and ground ourselves in the Fifth Dimension.
The roots of all the deciduous trees are inherently and intentionally connected with the roots of all the other trees. They organically seek out one another. In Source, we are all One; One in the Divine and One with All of God’s creation, including other people, even those with whom we strongly disagree, and even if it is hard.. Granted, we are each at different stages of our spiritual evolution, and still, we are brothers and sisters in God. We ALL have the Divine at our core. We can speak to one another with that in mind.
Through their organically, deliberately entangled root system, trees have this amazing, complex way of communicating with one another! Information comes down through their roots through electrical impulses and/or smell. Then there is the magical fungi that are part of this communication system. Fungi help the tree roots transmit messages to the tree roots entangled with the sending tree, and the adjoining trees transmit to the trees adjoined with them.
Get this! One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these hi-fidelity fungi that can network an entire forest! I like to imagine that the mushrooms and other wonderful fungi are like angels in the heavenly divine realm, these tree angel fungi spreading word to all the trees on earth.
Their communication system allows the trees to do all kinds of things to protect one another and the forest. They are very social beings! They pump sugar to ailing trees to help them stay alive. Sometimes they even share food with their competitors. Trees inherently know that when alone, their own survival and the survival of the forest ecosystem are threatened.
The trees together create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, they store supplies of water for when needed for self and others, and they create humidity when they need to. They do this so they can all live to be very old in a system in which they maintain one another. The community must remain intact, no matter what. If not, many trees would die.
Fatalities would create gaps in the forest canopy, making the forest vulnerable to storms or to summer heat reaching and drying out the forest floor. Therefore, every tree is valuable to the community. Sick trees are nourished until they recover. Next time, the supporting trees may be ones in need.
There is an inherent hopefulness in the trees’ storing water and sugar for their future survival and for the future survival and protection of their neighbors.
What can we learn from this? Going back to the ground of our Unity principles, we remember that we are all Divine. We are all important! Each one of us! Even if sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.
In the times in which we are living today, community is important. Thank God for our Unity communities! When we isolate ourselves, like the trees, we are more vulnerable to external events and to stress secondary to holding our fear alone.
Additionally, in Unity, we have tools to release our fear, to affirm that all is in Divine Order, and that we ARE the Protection of God; Affirmative Prayer! The trees remind us that it is important to care for one another, to care for the ailing and the vulnerable. And to graciously and gratefully receive when it is our turn to be helped. Harm to any part of our human or natural collective is harm to every other person in the system!
Like the trees, we have to do our best to deal with the situation at hand. We avoid or release despair and hopelessness at all times. The trees express their own version of hopefulness as they store sugars and water, and chemicals that ward off things that bit them, to help themselves and/or to help the other trees.
Martin Luther King Junior said that “We cannot capitulate to finite disappointments. We must confront these finite disappointments with infinite hope.” We stand in courage, through our grounding in the Divine.
Presidential historian Jon Meacham says that fear is a good starter for demagogues, and not a good finisher. “It is hard,” he says, to keep a lot of people afraid for a long time. But to fight fear, we need courage, and courage is one of the most contagious things you can imagine!” Meacham uses Harvard’s current courage as an example.
Speaking of “imagine,” let’s remember to use our Power of Imagination! Divine Love, inside us, and all around outside of us, is stronger than any power on Earth!
And why help our competitors? Because it sets a good tone, a good energy, and adds something better to the collective consciousness. As competitors, we play hard in the field of life, and then we hug and congratulate one another for how well and hard we have played, and thank one another for what we have learned in the process.
Together with a more kind, loving, and just world that we can imagine, we must have a willingness to leap forward into a new way of thinking, and especially to avoid duality thinking: us versus them. Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Can we hold the vision of a better world?
It doesn’t take a majority either. The Hundredth Monkey theory, scientifically debatable, but whether true or not, a great metaphor, suggests that when a critical number of individuals in a group adopt a behavior, the behavior spreads to all related groups, no matter how far away. That is how it works in our collective consciousness. Are you and I ready to be part of the critical mass that holds that vision?
Here is something else that trees do. Trees hurt when an herbivore bites them, whether the herbivore is a big giraffe or a little bug. So when the tree gets bitten, it pumps substances into the leaves that the biting animal doesn’t like. Then, the trees emit a warning gas, signaling to other trees to begin pumping these deterrent substances into their leaves.
When we are threatened or see others threatened, we must sound the alarm to others when something painful, hurtful, and unjust is happening.
In Unity’s Fifth Principle, after we spend time in prayer and meditation connecting with the Divine, we take right action. Now we go back to the Third Dimension, the material world, as an expression of that greater power. We stand up for Truth, not with venom, not with hatred, not with a dualistic bad/good mentality, just the facts. In my opinion (some may disagree), anger is acceptable; there are things we should be angry about.
In the same vein, if we are called to, we make our voices heard in peaceful protests, or write to our congressperson, or fund our beliefs, whatever we are called to do.
Additionally, let’s remember Joy! One of my favorite quotes of Eric Butterworth’s is that God loves it when we affirm Joy! Let’s face it, joyful people are harder to mess with!
In Garth Stein’s wonderful book, The Art of Racing in the Rain, a dog is telling the story of his life with his owner, a race car driver. Many of the race car drivers’ stories told to the dog contain priceless existential messages. The owner tells his dog that when he is racing in the rain and his car hits a puddle, goes into a skid, and heads toward the wall, that’s where the driver’s eyes go, and the car goes. If the driver stares at the wall, the car will hit the wall; if the driver stares at the road ahead, the car will follow.
Do we want to focus on the wall of despair and hopelessness, or the road of Joy, Love, Unity, and Hopefulness? Let’s stand for Peace, and Love, and Joy.