Urgent Slowing

Order of Service for November 17, 2024

Bayo Akomolafe, a Nigerian writer and professor of psychology, shares as an African saying: “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” Today we explore the wisdom of that saying and how we might lean into–and lean on–our values as we navigate a complicated, confusing, and difficult time.

Urgent Slowing

Rev. Joe Cleveland

November 17, 2024

 

To slow down. To be a star thrower.

If you took out your smartphone right now, connected to a search engine and searched the internet for “The Starfish Story” you will come up with many, many versions of the story.  Most often, the main characters are a boy and a man (because patriarchy). They’re out on a beach.  The man is walking along and up ahead sees the boy looking down, bending down, picking up a starfish, and flinging it out to sea.  There are little 90-second movies telling the story, and people posting the story over and over again.  

Storybook version of “The Star Thrower” called Starfish on the Beach, written and illustrated by Tom and Lindy Schneider.

The story tugs the heartstrings and offers some hope.  The beach is covered in starfish.  They are in danger of dying.  So the child is throwing them out to sea to save them.  The adult, being a rational adult who has lived in the world and knows how big and complicated things are and has gotten used to what seems like a commonplace bit of knowledge: There are problems so big that one person can’t possibly make a difference.  Sharing this wisdom to edify the child, the child pauses.  And then rejects this wisdom, bends and throws another starfish into the sea.  “I made a difference to that one,” the child says.  It’s such a pure motive of care, a pure desire to help, the adult is moved.  The adult can’t disagree with that.  The adult smiles, looks at the kid, then bends and throws a starfish into the sea.  

The moral of the story seems to be something like: even when it seems that you can’t make a difference big enough to make a difference, even to do what you can, however small, will in fact make a difference.  That would be reassuring.

In lots of the versions of the story, a credit is given: they say that the story is adapted from an essay by a writer, anthropologist, and educator named Loren Eiseley.  Eiseley wrote an essay called “The Star Thrower,” which he published as part of a collection of essays in 1964.  

Me, I’m kind of a fanatic about chasing down sources.  The internet is littered with quotes attributed to people and it turns out all the time that they never said that. Lies are everywhere.  However pithy and full of wisdom the quote might be, I won’t use it if I can’t actually find the book or essay or speech that it is from.  I am a Unitarian Universalist minister, and I deal in truth, doggone it.

So I found Eiseley’s essay and read it.  I’m not really sure I understand it.  It’s not really much like the kid’s version or the inspirational quote version.  It’s way more complicated, way more ambiguous than that, way more spiritually mystical.  Eiseley is walking on a beach.  It’s after a storm.  And after a storm, all sorts of things get thrown up on the beach, and, the way he tells it, people engage in what he calls a “vulturine activity.”  People get out there with their flashlights and sacks and start collecting shells and sea creatures alive and dead, to eat, but mostly it, as Eiseley tells it, to add to their collections.  It’s in this context that he meets the star thrower.  

At one point he looks ahead and sees 

a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence.  Somewhere toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow, though unconscious of his position.  He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.

Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf.

In the kids version, the adult is a bit jaded, and in his essay, Eiseley does seem to be skeptical.  He feels downright depressed, actually.  He can’t quite understand what the Star Thrower is doing.  He can understand people being collectors.  We do that.  We claim things as ours, and will try to out-collect each other.  But the Star Thrower isn’t doing that.  The Star Thrower is looking for starfish that are still alive, but flinging them out to sea instead of keeping them.  Eiseley seems perplexed. the Star Thrower says, “The stars throw well. One can help them.”  Eiseley says 

[the star thrower] looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes, which seemed to take on the far depths of the sea.

“I do not collect,” I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments.  “Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector.” 

Bleak! That feels so bleak!  As the essay goes on, Eiseley starts describing how humans start with belief in the supernatural, but then start doing science, and in a way the magic goes out of the world.  I think what Eiseley is trying to do is to describe how to re-enchant the world.  We treat nature as something that we can impose order on.  He quotes a line from the Christian gospel of John: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.”  You can hear his heart break:

“But I do love the world,” I whispered to a waiting presence in the empty room.  “I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again.” … “I love the lost ones, the failures of the world.” 

Eiseley is a scientist, but he can’t help but love the world.  He can’t help but want to live in the world, with the world.  

The star thrower was mad, and his particular acts were a folly with which I had not chosen to associate myself. I was an observer and a scientist. Nevertheless, I had seen the rainbow attempting to attach itself to earth.

Eiseley goes back out to the beach, finds again the star thrower he had first glimpsed framed by a rainbow, says to him: “I understand. … Call me another thrower.”  Eiseley writes, “Only then I allowed myself to think, He is not alone any longer. After us there will be others. We were part of the rainbow…”  

It’s not that he’s making this cute, heart-warming, but ultimately futile effort. It’s not that he’s found a way to make use of the world for some sort of gain. He’s not trying to collect it and make it his and not yours. It’s that he is choosing to live in the world. He chooses to love the world.  He chooses to love the world even though it’s hard and there is death.  But there is also life and he is not alone.  He is part of the rainbow.  

 

The psychologist and writer Báyò Akómoláfé shares an African saying: The times are urgent; let us slow down.  What Akómoláfé urges is that we not rush into the patterns that we are so used to, the patterns that may have been what got us into whatever fix we’re in.  The main “pattern” that Akómoláfé wants us to break out of is the idea that we can be the controller, the fixer, the collector.  He wants us to slow down and recognize that we are part of the world, a member of a species among many other species.  We don’t wrestle with the world to get it under our control.  Akómoláfé wants us to we are part of a world “where a becoming-with is how things change, where we are not in charge of the outcomes but an ephemeral aspect of the process.”  

In an urgent time, slowing down we claim a moment to recalibrate, reframe, gain a new perspective.  We gain the freedom to act purposefully as part of the world rather than as reactively attempting to deny or escape. Let us not act out of reactivity.  Let us not respond to crisis with crisis.  The authoritarian wants us to be freaked out.  The impulsive one who thinks only of himself wants us to be impulsive and self-involved.  The authoritarian doesn’t understand the star thrower.  

There are and there will be starfish on the beach.  The authoritarian wants us to think it’s futile to join in with the starfish, with the beach, to be part of the rainbow.  

Today I’m thinking of the people I love who are transgender or gender non-binary.  This afternoon at 3:00 at Skidmore, we will hold a vigil in recognition of the Transgender Day of Remembrance.  We will hear the names of people who were subject to life-ending violence of one kind or another because of anti-transgender bias and hate peddled and fed and legislated. We will join together.  Call me another thrower.  We are not alone.  We are part of the rainbow.  

Yesterday, Unitarian Universalists gathered at Albany UU to join together with one another and with justice partners in New York State.  I attended with two members of your Social Justice team.  The event was a justice convocation organized by New York UU Justice, our state-wide UU justice advocacy network.  NYUUJ, affectionately called “nudge”, brought in partners in each of the four areas of justice work that it is prioritizing: Climate, Housing, Criminal Justice reform, and Medical Aid in Dying.  Much of the work we need to do today is the work we needed to do yesterday.  In a sense, what we did was gather together to give ourselves a chance, in this urgent moment, to slow down, be with one another and realize, we can be another thrower.  We are not alone.  We are part of the rainbow.  

Báyò Akómoláfé writes: 

The world is a going-on together. A becoming-together.  This has vast implications for how we think about ourselves, others and the world.  Perhaps, today’s new openings in thought and action afford us an opportunity to build sanctuaries, places where people can feel safe and held… 

May that be so! May we accomplish some urgent slowing, that we might perceive new openings, new possibilities for connection and collaboration, for joining together.  May we know ourselves to be not alone, to be part of the rainbow.  May we admit that we do love the world.  May we join together to build sanctuaries—sanctuaries of wood and stone and glass and steel, sanctuaries of people joined hand to hand and heart to heart.  May we create sanctuaries where people feel safe and held.  May you, today, right now, feel safe and held.

 

I love you, my friends.  On we go.

 

Meditation

As a meditation in the November 17, 2024, service, we included this video by Carl Heilman II of the northern lights that danced in our Adirondack skies this past October.  He set his images to the song “Mountain Air” by UU Saratogian Dan Berggren.

Resources

If you are interested in the ideas of Báyò Akómoláfé, here’s a short video interview with him:

 

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