Bless us all. We are all in this together.
— Molly
“Healing Mother Earth”— Earth Day Sermon Transcript
Yes, let us wake up now!
In 1983, I did something I’ve done a lot since. I called
up a person I wanted to learn from. I called up Apollo Nine astronaut Russell Schweickart.
I was 30 years old. And I wanted to interview him about something. And he was
nice enough. He answered the phone. He agreed to do a recording. And I’ve since
reviewed what I wrote about that in a book where I quoted him. And I’ve
reviewed the interview. And I wanted to share with you this idea that he shared
with me — which is one of
those ideas…it’s a world-saving, Earth-healing, extraordinary insight
into what we need to do collectively. Humanity.
And everything that I’m going to talk about in my sermon — 15 or 20 minutes — no more — Diane you just
let me know if I’m going over — is
leading up to that idea, that I want to share — is
something for all of us to ponder and think about, and decide whether we want
to embrace that idea. So more on that later.
Forty-eight years ago the first Earth Day occurred. Now
if you’re over 50, you have a chance of remembering that. If you’re under 50,
you’ll have to take our word for it. We had an Earth Day in 1970.
That was the same year I had a chance to circumnavigate
the entire world with my dad who was an airline pilot. And I took ten flights
from Kansas City to Kansas City, the long way around — New York, Athens,
Bombay, Bangkok, and so forth, Hong Kong, Okinawa, Guam, Honolulu, LA, and back
to Kansas City. I was in the cockpit, a lot. That was in the old days, where,
you if you’re the pilot’s kid, you get to sit up there, and play in the
cockpit, and hang out.
So it was a wonderful experience to see our world — the whole world,
at least the northern hemisphere — to
get a sense of the Earth — as a teenager — and all these
different places, which I was totally changed forever. To see Bombay, for
example. And I understood what poverty was about. In Kansas, we didn’t
have shantytowns of hundreds of thousands of people. So it was a huge eye-opener.
And so that first Earth Day,
in 1970 — invented by a
gentleman named John McConnell — is
a way of reminding us, kind of like a wedding anniversary, if the Earth is our
mom, or our wife. We want to have an anniversary to remember. It’s
like a birthday. And so, Earth Day is a way we can remember Mother Earth, or we
can call her Our Earth, or we can call her Mother Nature, or we can call her
Gaia, or the Earth System — all the same. The
Earth is all around us. The Earth produces the air we are breathing. Try not
breathing it for a minute or two, and you’ll
appreciate it, like when you’re swimming
underwater, or holding your breath. So it’s extraordinary that we have an Earth
Day — that we’ve
had 48 of them.
And what I’m going to do under the topic of “Healing
Mother Earth” — is a kind of
medical approach:
• Diagnosis
• Treatment plan
• Figure out how to do the treatment
• Treatment plan
• Figure out how to do the treatment
so that we can heal Her, and us, as part of Her. And to
do that, I’m going to invoke a couple of Unity Principles, so…
• Principle Three — The
power of thought to create.
• Principle Five — Action — live what we know; what we learn; what we think.
• Principle Five — Action — live what we know; what we learn; what we think.
Those two — thought
and action.
And it’s like Karen said in a sermon a couple of weeks
ago, intention and commitment add up to, or equal, faith. That you create these
experiences and concepts that lead to something new, something else.
And we need faith in order to not
experience despair. Particularly, in light of problems with the Earth. Cynicism
is the psychological defense — a self-fulfilling psychological defense — of weakness to power.
The last song we heard invited us to
wake up: “I need to move.” And so we all need to move.
Please go here to watch the full video talk or to continue the transcript: https://medium.com/@KellyGerling/healing-mother-earth-earth-day-sermon-transcript-30c70b19a38e
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