The Twelfth Camel

The Twelfth Camel

A Sermon for Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Rev. Dr. Clare Butterfield

Call to worship:

From Isaiah 55:

For as the rain and snow come down from heaven,

And do not return there until they have watered the earth,

Making it bring forth and sprout, 

Giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

It shall not return to me empty,

But it shall accomplish that which I purpose

And succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Reading: 

 “Dessert” in the Talk of the Town, New Yorker, September 12, 2011 edition, pg. 25 by Colum McCann

The sky would always be this shade of blue. The towers had come down the day before. Third Avenue on the Upper East Side was a flutter of missing faces, the posters taped to the mailboxes, plastered on windows, flapping against the light poles: “Looking for Derek Sword”; “Have Your Seen This Person?’’ “Matt Heard: Worked for Morgan Stanley.” The streets were quieter than usual. The ash fell, as ash will.

Everything felt honed down to the necessary, except for one woman who sat alone at an outdoor table in a restaurant on Seventy-fourth Street. She had just ordered a piece of chocolate cake. It arrived in front of her, and the waiter spun away. A slice of two-layer cake. Dark chocolate. A nipple of cream dolloped on top. A sprinkling of dark powder. The woman was elegant, fiftyish, beautiful. She touched the edge of the plate, brought it to her.

At any other time it would have been just a piece of cake, a collision of cocoa and flour and eggs. But so much of what the city was about had just been leveled – not just the towers but a sense of the city itself, the desire, the greedy appetite, the unrelenting pursuit of the present. The woman unrolled a fork, from a paper napkin, held it at her mouth, tapping the tines against her teeth. She ran the fork, then, through the powder, addressing the cake, scribbling her intent.

Our job is to be epic and tiny, both. Three thousand lives in New York had just disintegrated into the air. Nobody could have known it for certain then, but hundreds of thousands of lives would hang in the balance – in Baghdad, Kabul, London, Madrid, Basra. The ordinary shoves up against the monumental. When big things fall, they shatter into fragments. They crash down and scatter over a very large landscape. It was apparent, even one day after the attacks, that so much of the world had felt the impact.

Still, there is a need, now and always for sharply felt local intimacies. I stood by the corner and watched the woman’s dilemma. It could have been grief, it could have been grace, or even a dark, perverse sense of humor. She held the forkful of cake for a very long time. As if it were waiting to speak to her, to tell her what to do. Finally, she ate a bite of it. She sat, looking into the distance. She pulled her lips along the silver tines to catch whatever chocolate remained there, then turned the fork upside down, ran her tongue along it. It was the gesture of someone whose body was in one place, her mind in another. She pierced the cake again. 

The darkness rose over the Upper East Side. The woman finished her dessert. She didn’t pinch the crumbs. She placed the fork across the plate. She paid. She left. She didn’t look at anyone as she turned the corner toward Lexington Avenue, but she still returns to me after all this time, one corner after another, a full decade now.

My mind is decorated with splinters. Ten years of enmity and loss. Bush, Cheney, Blackwater, Halliburton, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, bin Laden. Another long series of wars another short distance travelled. We do not necessarily need anniversaries when there are things we cannot forget. Yet I also recall this simple, sensual moment. I still have no idea – after a decade of wondering – whether I am furious at the woman and the way she ate chocolate cake, or whether it was one of the most audacious acts of grief I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Sermon:

Here we stand again together on an early Sunday in a new year. I like the new year, especially when there’s snow on the ground because it visually illustrates the tabula rasa that I like to think a new year is. Of course in the Whiteheadian sense, and in the real sense too, no year can be a blank slate after so many have gone before it. We make choices, yes, but our choices are limited by and therefore in relationship with, all the preceding choices leading up to this moment. I cannot choose to strap on my jet pack and fly away because no one has invented the jet pack yet and issued me mine, though I thought rather distinctly some decades back that this was part of the 21st century agreement.

Also I thought there would be no more war.

And that we would solve climate change.

I thought that last one as recently as thirteen years ago when I decided to spend most of my waking hours doing something about it.

I am, you see, as I must tell you every time I get up on my hind legs here, even though many of you know this off by heart by now, the Director of Faith in Place. I lead this organization as your community minister – Faith in Place is my ministry. We work with over 800 congregations in Illinois now, connecting the teachings of every faith tradition to practices of care for the environment, such as energy conservation, renewable technologies, like the geothermal system being piloted and hoped for here, support for local and sustainable farms like our winter farmers markets, one of which happens here in March, and more. All of this is about humans who are motivated by the deepest teachings and values of their faith tradition to live in a way that allows for the flourishing of other living things – a practice of faith. And we encourage policy advocacy by the faithful too. On things like fracking (we’re very hopeful about our bill’s passage in 2012) and other energy related measure which might allow us as a society to use less, demand less from the earth, impact less, and in exchange witness the flourishing of life around us. It is a way of loving the world.

Not what I wanted to talk about today, but not unrelated to it, as will become clearer. I will confess that when I started seminary I was God-drunk, in a way that I no longer am, and when I started Faith in Place I was hopeful in a way that I no longer am. I never believed in the orthodox God. Those ideas strike me as not only irrational but in some ways hateful (though I don’t think that’s how most orthodox believers intend them). I do find the world amazing – the universe wonderful – the experience of being here at all pretty hard to explain. I’m still pretty drunk on meaning – I like it.

And I have to keep looking for it while we wrangle with lobbyists from the oil and gas industry, and, in 2012, the coal industry, and try to pass some laws that will keep us from wringing every drop of fossil fuel that we can out of the tired earth so that centuries from now there might still be some beauty here, and most of the time we are not winning. Thirteen years and counting, and I will be here a while yet, resolved, now, in my less-hopeful iteration, to the idea that mostly we will not win.

So the new year is not quite the blank slate it appears. Holes have been dug already, and things will be got out of them. Projections have been made in business plans, investments in machinery, things will run their course unless great force is assembled to stop them. The opportunity is not completely fresh. Big things shatter. They shatter all the time. “Ash falls, as ash will.”

A lot of people have died. In this space we have read the names of all the US service men and women who have died in the two wards during our prayer times and there have been so many names. When I have preached here in the last few years and it has been my turn to read the names there have been so many and they were mostly so very young. Younger than my children. “My mind is decorated with splinters. Ten years of enmity and loss.”

So.

Here we are.

It may make you happy to know that I have encountered a book recently which was simply too hard for me to read.  I offer you this because it may give you a little dollop of schadenfreude, with my best wishes. But in the introduction to the book, which is called Thinking with Whitehead by Isabel Stengers, a French philosopher, she refers to what she says is a well-known story. It is the story of an old Bedouin who feels that he is about to die. He calls together his three sons and tells them how he would like them to divide his goods when he is gone. 

He leaves his oldest son half of his property, the middle son receives a quarter and the third and youngest one sixth. Then he dies, and they look to divide up his property which turns out to consist of eleven camels.

One half, one quarter and one sixth.

Hmmmm. 

They were unable to understand even what their father meant by his decree of how his goods should be divided – it was a mystery to them what he might even have meant. They wanted to follow his direction, and they didn’t want to come to bad feeling among themselves in doing so. In despair of ever being able to make sense of their predicament they went to an old sage for advice. The sage, being a sage, told them that there was nothing he could do for them except to give them his own camel, a broken down old thing. Which he did.

The brothers were then able to divide the twelve camels, giving half (or six) to the oldest, one quarter (or three) the middle son, and two camels (one sixth) to the youngest. In case you didn’t follow the math fast enough that’s eleven camels. They then gave the twelfth camel back to the sage and went their way, hearts lightened, father’s wishes fulfilled – made rational.

That is the point of this story from the Whiteheadian point of view. The twelfth camel, which doesn’t exist until it does for a minute, is simply the camel that rationalizes everything – that makes order and harmony possible and that fulfills the history of the wish of the father.

The twelfth camel is the thing we are looking for that we don’t know is there, but once we find it, rationalizes everything – makes things possible that were not possible without it – makes something actually possible which was only potentially possible before.

I’m sure I have your attention now if only because I’ve made you do math, and you have no idea what this could possibly have to do with that beautiful reading.

In my mind they relate in this way. We come here, or to places like this one, on a Sunday looking for something. As if there were a secret that when revealed would make everything else plain. In some places like this one those secrets are presumed to be known and certain. They are articles of faith. That is not the case here, and we are here because we prefer that lack of certainty. Certainty does not ring true to us about ultimate things. We have things we believe in, and believe in ultimately – things like lovingkindness, forgiveness, beauty and truth – but we wouldn’t swear to the ultimate accuracy of our descriptions. Those are subject to ongoing review. We know that our belief in these things is a matter of decision and a leap into unprovable territory.

But we come here on Sunday, even this early Sunday in a new year, looking for a secret that will, like the twelfth camel, rationalize and make beautiful and plain everything we have lived through. That recitation in the reading breaks my heart every time I read it – I almost cannot say the words out loud:

My mind is decorated with splinters. Ten years of enmity and loss. Bush, Cheney, Blackwater, Halliburton, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, bin Laden. Another long series of wars another short distance travelled. We do not necessarily need anniversaries when there are things we cannot forget.

I would add to that list fracking in the Marcellus Shale, climate change, the pine bark beetles and the loss of the northern arborial forests, hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the summer of tornadoes, Cline Coal’s projections about mining out central Illinois for coal, the Asian Carp, the rivers, poisoning of farm workers, consolidation of agriculture, death by pollution, death by toxin, death by storm, death by thirst, death by hunger, the scandal of the abuse of children, the scandal of homelessness, the scandal of any faith that can express itself with certainty in the face of a suffering child.

This is the daily fare of my working life at Faith in Place, thirteen years now of love and inspiration but thirteen years too of sorrow and loss and we have been at war almost the whole time, all those lives, all that destruction. One war finally, just ended, the other about to be, our children, many of them, home but so many not home. I too come on Sunday looking for some secret that will suddenly rationalize this world, when I fear my heart is now irrevocably broken.

And you are here this morning looking at me expectantly, for which I love you, hoping that I might know a secret that will serve in some way. And I believe the secret is simply that we come here on Sunday looking.

After everything that’s happened, here we come. 

We come on a morning like this morning because it is a new year and we are looking for that twelfth camel, that will sweep away the disarray the unsolvable problem, the sheer irrationality the inability to connect the wish, the poem of distribution and descent with the fact of scarcity or a misalignment that cannot be overcome. The wrong number of camels.

The loss everywhere.

Whatever it is about us that makes us wake up on a cold morning in a sorrowing world and come here is exactly the thing I believe in that makes the new world, the new harmonious world, possible. Simply that we have not only evolved into creatures of terrible destructive capacity but into creatures of great insight and hope, who are willing to form communities and be loyal to them and from those community interactions find the twelfth camels that will make the way forward plain, take them up for a moment to realign our resources and then give them back to the learned ones who lent them to us.

Now saying that by itself would not give us much comfort on a cold morning. I need to know, personally, that some human somewhere in history has gotten this right. That explains my fascination with Jesus, who I believe to be one of those humans. Oh I know – I took the classes at the U of C in Biblical literature, and I know that the Hebrew scripture is full of Mesopotamian mythology (or written in precise opposition to it while it incorporates it in a back-handed way) and that the New Testament scriptures owe far too much to the Greeks. They are bios like the bios of the demi-gods, which doesn’t make them particularly useful as autobiography. But the fact that I can still be here talking about him 21 centuries later, and if this disturbs you, the fact that it still disturbs you, points to some extraordinary power. I do not think that what Jesus was was unique to him. I think that the Buddah was pretty obviously of the same stuff, but from a different culture, and the Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, too. No doubt there are others as well – a few – these do not show up often – in places that I have never been and will never go and would not understand if I did. But I am, in essence, from the culture of Jesus – owing, myself, far too much to the Greeks for a girl from Chicago with three Jewish grandparents. So Jesus is the one of these phenomenal people who speaks to me most clearly, unique in the way that he was unique, unique in the way that he transmits to me a message of love which is uninterrupted by all the shattered time. 

This is a twelfth camel for me, along with the philosophy of Whitehead (rendered even more incomprehensible by the incomprehensible French), and the news of the world and the search for the Higgs boson, and the warming earth, and the fact that when I stand here and see your faces after what 20 years now, I am filled with love for you. I remember how you looked the Sunday after 9/11, because I was in the pulpit that day, and you were broken. We all were. 

We said the event had changed the world, but of course it hadn’t. It just woke us up to the world in a way that we had been privileged not to be awake before then. Because we humans have been dying a long time at the hands of each other.  We have been living without morals or reference, we have been taking whatever we could get, we have been rationalizing our rapaciousness with stories of the laziness or weakness of others, we have allowed ourselves to despise and therefore to dominate. For a long time. 

I need to know that someone ever perfectly did not give in to this, or I cannot make sense of my search for meaning and my love in a world in which we are so hard to each other. And so I need a twelfth camel. And the story of Jesus and the Christ event is a twelfth camel for me. So is the beauty of the sunrise, and the mystery of liquid water, the kindness, the purity of grief. The way that we can get up and get dressed and comb our hair and put on our good shoes, and deliver ourselves up to a restaurant, when we are beyond any description broken into more tiny dark sharp pieces than could be numbered or known but every one of which cuts, and we can order dessert. And in our distraction and woundedness cakes can be baked and still be, perhaps even more than they ever were before, delicious. The way the chocolate meets the tongue so completely. The way we come here on a Sunday morning and look at one another expectantly.

The story of the twelfth camel makes plain that the camel did not come from some other place, he was there all along, by the wise man’s hut. What makes plain, what makes love possible, what brings the new harmonious world is here within this world, it is not anywhere else. Latent here, not waiting to be imported from outside us. We are the Christ event. We are the war that has ended. We are falling through the sky, but we are also putting on our good shoes and going to the restaurant, seeking a burst of sweetness which we know is still possible in this weary, broken, brand-new, perfect world.

Benediction: From Isaiah 55

For you shall go out in joy,

And be led back in peace;

The mountains and the hills before you,

Shall burst in to song,

And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

While the year is young

Let it be beautiful, hopeful, delicious.

And go in peace.