An Innate Sense of Life: Moral Grounding

In late September UCH will host a first ever Multi-Species Workshop, sponsored by our Animal Ministry group, in conjunction with an animal blessing Sunday Service.  


I’m awfully proud of our progressive religious ways.  Our relationship to animals  has a deep vein of identity and compassion that's now a burgeoning movement within our ranks.  

The three towering figures of early American Unitarianism are Channing, Emerson, and Parker.

In particular, Channing and Parker are known for their highly developed consciences.  They embody the Unitarian core notion of CHARACTER. 

From the current perspective of animal rights/liberation joined to the emerging  (scientific) understanding of an innate moral sense—particularly “do no harm,” the following two anecdotes are a propos.  In addition, these anecdotes beg the value of moral development and age-appropriate religious/moral education that we UUs have long promoted.

First, William Ellery Channning from a letter:

I can remember an incident in my childhood, which has given a turn to my whole life and character. I found a nest of birds in my father's field, which held for young ones. They had no down when I first discovered them. They opened their little mouths as if they were hungry, and I gave them some crumbs which were in my pocket. Every day I returned to feed them. As soon as school was not, I would run home for some bread, and sit by the nest to see them eat, for an hour at a time. They were now feathered, and almost ready to fly. When I came one morning, I found them all cut up into quarters. The grass around the nest was red with blood. Their little limbs were raw and bloody. The mother was on a tree, and the father on the wall, mourning for their young. I cried, myself, for I was a child. I thought, too, that the parents looked on me as the author of their miseries, and this made me still more unhappy. I wanted to undeceive them. I wanted to sympathize with and comfort them. When I left the field, they followed me with their eyes and with mournful reproaches. I was too young and too sincere in my grief to make any apostrophes. But I can never forget my feelings. The impression will never be worn away, nor can I ever cease to abhor every species of inhumanity towards inferior animals.

Second, Theodore Parker from an “Autobiographical Fragment:”

When a little boy in petticoats in my fourth year, one fine day in spring, my father led me by the hand to a distant part of the farm, but soon sent me home alone. On the way I had to pass a little " pond-hole " then spreading its waters wide; a rhodora in full bloom — a rare flower in my neighborhood, and which grew only in that locality — attracted my at­tention and drew me to the spot. I saw a little spotted tortoise sunning himself in the shallow water at the root of the flaming shrub.    I lifted the stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless reptile; for, though I had never killed any creature, yet I had seen other boys out of sport destroy birds, squirrels, and the like, and I felt a disposition to follow their wicked exam­ple. But all at once something checked my little arm, and a voice within me said, clear and loud, "It is wrong!" I held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion — the consciousness of an involuntary but inward check upon my actions, till the tortoise and the rhodora both vanished from my sight. I hastened home and told the tale to my mother, and asked what was it that told me it was wrong? She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and taking me in her arms, said, “Some men call it conscience, but I pre­fer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little' voice." She went her way, careful and troubled about many things, but doubtless pondered them in her motherly heart; while I went off to wonder and think it over in my poor, childish way. But I am sure no event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impression on me.

In my estimation an innate awareness of the value of life—one’s own and then in compassion with fellow creatures—is both traditional Unitarian and cutting edge, 21^st century progressive UU religion.  I’ll be searching Emerson to determine whether he had a similar childhood experience.