First Parish Sermon

We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  (Chief Noah Seattle)

To paraphrase a verse from ECCLESIASTES, "Cast your net upon the waters and it will return to you after many days full to overflowing with fish." If you change "days" to  "centuries" you have a description of the growth of the Christian church into the largest of the major world religions with Buddhism and Islam a close second. In the course of those centuries the church played a significant if not dominant role in fostering the culture of the west. In the 16th Century the Guttenberg press created a major information revolution that eventually transformed western culture and helped to bring about the democratic form of government. 

The first thing that Guttenberg published was not a newspaper but a Bible in the language of the people. That led to the Protestant Reformation and the decentralization of spiritual power in the Christian church. The pope was no longer in control of the far flung realms of Christendom. There were too many Protestant sects and churches that were emerging, growing and flourishing , each of which had their own views of authority, leadership and doctrine. They did not want a centralized church hierarchy telling them what to believe or preach or practice. They could decide for themselves based on their own reading and interpretation of scripture and tradition, and in consonance with their  reason and conscience. 

One of the sects and denominations that emerged out of this stew of Protestant decentralization was our own Unitarian Universalist heritage which took the principle of freedom of religious belief and conscience for all adherents, and the use of reason in religion, extended it to the nth degree, and created a form of church governance that was completely democratic at both the local and denominational level. All of this would have been inconceivable apart from the information revolution that was unleashed with the invention of the Gutenberg press and the publication of the Bible in the 16th Century.

Today we are at the threshold of another information revolution at the close of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st Century. We might call this the cyberspace revolution brought about by the information explosion fostered by the creation of the Internet and the World Wide Web. It will have far reaching implications, both religiously and culturally, and on a far wider scale and much more rapid pace, than Guttenberg could ever have dreamed. 

It is estimated that there may be between 100 to 300 million persons  around the globe linked into the Internet, and that by the end of the first year of the millennium in 2002, there could be as many as 500 million. 

It is simply staggering to contemplate. And it was all brought about, (not by Al Gore who did in fact introduce the Supercomputer Network Act in 1986), but by, wouldn't you know, a Unitarian Universalist. His name is Tim Berners-Lee, a British, Oxford-trained physicist, now a member of one of our New England UU congregations. 

According to my colleague, the Rev. Bruce Southworth, minister of the Community Church of New York,  Tim Berners-Lee had "something of a poor memory. As a computer programmer, he devised a way to keep track of various research projects in different databases and especially how to link them to one another. Thus, the World Wide Web came into being."  Berners-Lee had the option of  commercializing  and patenting his work, and thus accumulating vast wealth and fame, maybe even more than Bill Gates, but he chose instead to share it and promote it as a creative and expressive tool for cooperation and sharing of information. 

When Jesus asked his disciples to cast their fishing nets on the other side of the boat as a metaphor for gathering more adherents into the Christian fold he had no idea that there would ever be such a thing as the World Wide Web and Internet which could be used as a tool for further evangelization. But that is exactly what is happening. The problem now is  when you cast your net of faith into the sea of the World Wide Web you no longer catch only Christian fish, but a vast array of  oriental and other varieties--Hindus, Buddhists, Druids, Pagans, Taoists, Zoroastrians, Gnostics, Sikhs, Mormans, Jains, Twelve-Steppers,  New Agers, far-out cults, even the Church of the Mighty Gerbil, you name it--they're all out there on the Web--and moreover you run the risk of  being changed and getting caught in someone else's net. A lot of folks are fishing out there.

In the reading from JOHN 21 the disciples haul their net ashore full of large fish, and although there were so many of them, it is reported the "net was not torn." And so it is when you go fishing on the Internet. You can bring in vast amounts of information, a lot of big fish, religious and otherwise, but what do you do with it? There's no way all this information can fit into a Christian boat or Hindu boat or even a UU boat, although we have a lot more room for varieties of religious fish.

Years ago Canadian sociologist, Marshal McLuan, wrote a book entitled The Medium Is The Message. He was referring to the shift from a print culture to a visual culture via the television medium. It was McLuan who coined the term "global village" to describe the instantaneous linkages that this communications revolution had brought about. He died before computers, monitors and the Internet, joined the two cultures together--print and visual--into a vast web of connections across national, cultural and religious boundaries. 

If the medium is the message, then what is the message of this new medium of communication? It is as follows: that information is free, there is no central control or hierarchy that can restrict the flow of information on the Net, no one owns the Net, it belongs to anyone who chooses to link-up. You can go anywhere you want, talk to anyone you want, process any information you want, share any information or opinion you want, and make up your own mind what it is you wish to do with whatever information you take in. You can throw some of the fish back into the sea if you don't want to keep them, or you might even try to create a new interspecies version by joining one to another. 

As a medium the Net is anti-totalitarian, anti-hierarchy, pro-democratic and pluralistic, and even a bit anarchistic in the sense of  unrestrained individual expression. For governments that are totalitarian or dictatorial in nature, or religions that are authoritarian and highly centralized, this is not a friendly medium for promoting a message that is completely antithetical to the medium which it is using.

Let me cite a recent example. In the early 1990s Bishop Jacques Gaillot of the diocese of Evreux, in Normandy, ran into trouble with the Papal hierarchy because of his views on priestly celibacy, homosexuality, and the ordination of women which ran counter to the official line from the Vatican. In 1995 the Pope removed him from his post as bishop of Evreux and reassigned him to the diocese of Partenia. Partenia, for all practical purposes, is a nonexistent diocese. It "lies in Algeria, on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains", and is embraced by the Sahara desert. There are a lot of scorpions, lizards, and flies there, but not many people, the few that live there are Muslims. 

The Pope thought he had silenced the bishop for an indefinite period. But Gaillot got permission to go on-line and to create a virtual diocese "by moving Partenia into cyberspace, onto the World Wide Web." (from The Soul of Cyber Space by Jeff Zaleski) Now he is reaching more people than he ever could when he was confined to a single geographical location in Normandy.

About his new post as Bishop of a virtual diocese on the Net, Bishop Jacques Gaillot says: 

As far as I am concerned, to go onto the Internet is first of  all like a dream. It is the dream of a child who walks along a sand beach and looks at the ocean. He feels lonely and weak in front of the vastness of the ocean. And suddenly the wish to start a dialogue with all the people of the world who live on other shores grows on him. To go onto the Internet is also a venture. It is a magnificent venture which offers itself to me. I take the risk to let myself be welcomed by all women and men, whose face I do not know. Partenia calls to mind faraway lands, yet unknown. Partenia is a place of freedom.

Jeff Zalesky, in a marvelous book, The Soul of Cyberspace, describes the impact that the Net is likely to have upon the thinking and views of organized religions: 
Anywhere and anytime, anyone with Net access can now learn something about Catholicism, or about any other religion. How will this ease of access to the universal store of sacred knowledge reshape the spiritual life of our species? Will religions keep their belief systems and their body of believers intact in a virtual world where it takes only a click of a mouse to jump from one temple, one mosque, one church to the next?....Even as the Web carries organized religions into cyberspace, it allows a worldwide hearing of every voice within these religions. And online, not only can every voice be heard, but all voices are equal. Online, the words of the Dalai Lama look no different than those of an everyday Buddhist practitioner. How will this potential eroding of hierarchy change the way we worship?

It is clear, I would think, that the Internet is much more suited to a free an open faith like Unitarian Universalism which, in the words of  Channing, "welcomes new light and truth as an angel from heaven." Scott Wells, writing in the UU Christian Fellowship newsletter, notes that UUs "have been especially prodigious in producing web pages." In fact, even though we are a small denomination, "Unitarian Universalists have in absolute numbers more congregational web pages than (almost) any other association or denomination." 

If you go to the UUA web page at uua.org you will find references to scores of affiliate organizations--UU Christian Fellowship, UU Buddhist Fellowship, UUs For Jewish Awareness, Covenant of UU Pagans, the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, etc.--indicating we are already an interfaith religious movement--which makes it an easy fit for us to surf the web for many and varied sources of religious truth and inspiration and not have to give up our UU identity to do so! 

Teilhard de Chardin was a Catholic Jesuit priest and paleontologist who believed that the evolutionary process of life on earth was one which moved toward higher levels of consciousness in conjunction with organized biological complexity. Where was  this consciousness headed? Teilhard hypothesized that it was moving towards a point of   human and cosmic unity which  he called the noosphere, the spiritual thinking layer of the life force that links each to all and all to each. There are some who relate what is happening with the development of the Internet and World Wide Web as a movement towards Teilhard's mystical vision of unity. 

Thomas Mandel in his book on The Rules of the Net, refers to the Internet as "the first free and global republic of the mind", which "maps the human mind and soul", while Zaleski says that "cyberspace mirrors us in our entirety, including our souls. Our soul is its soul." This is not exactly Teilhard's vision, but it is certainly a nod in his direction. I was pleased that one of the members of this church, James Hayes-Bohanan, drew my attention to a number of books and articles that in fact relate what is happening with the growth of the Web with Teilhard’s vision of evolution and cosmic unity. James has his own website where you can go and visit and learn more about it.

In Hinduism there is the mythic image of Indra's net. As described by Sir Charles Eliot in Capra's book The Tao of Physics, "In the heaven of Indra, there is said to be a network of pearls, so arranged that if you look at one you see all the others reflected in it", a kind of holographic intuition that posits the whole of reality in the smallest of its constituent parts. Is the creation and growth of the Internet a movement towards the unity of  mind and reality envisioned by Teilhard and intuited in Indra's net? Certainly not yet, but the possibility towards greater human unity and understanding has been increased manifold by the advent of the World Wide Web. No religion and no nation or culture will ever be the same again because of it. 
 
In the years ahead we have a lot of fish to catch and information to process. To paraphrase Chief Noah Seattle, "We did indeed weave the World Wide Web, though we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves."