Video: Book Event: The Planet You Inherit

On April 20, 2023, Religion and Public Life hosted a talk with Larry L. Rasmussen, Christian Environmental Ethicist, and Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary. He was in conversation with Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life; Lecturer on Religion, Conflict, and Peace; and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, as well as Terry Tempest Williams, author, environmental activist, HDS Writer-in-Residence; and john gehman, MTS '24, Council of Student Sustainability Leaders.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: The Planet You Inherit book event, April 20, 2023.

DIANE L. MOORE: Welcome to this book talk on The Planet You Inherit, by my beloved mentor, Larry Rasmussen. I'm Diane Moore, and I am the Faculty Director of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School, and my colleagues and I are so honored to sponsor this important book talk, both for the power of this particular volume, but also for what it represents in terms of one particular life long lived, devoted to these questions well ahead of the curve, before many of us caught up.

I also just want to take a moment, before I do introductions, to thank my colleagues, Natalie Campbell, who is responsible for the beautiful publicity, and any information that found you all to find your way here, you can thank Natalie for that.

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Yes, really.

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To Judy Beals and to Reem Atassi, Reem, right here, for all the background work, there is always so much that goes into these events that is hard to see, but to know that if, it goes well, with wonderful food, with a beautiful space, with clarity of timing, it's because of these two beloved colleagues. So, I also want to thank my wonderful colleagues on the panel. John, it's great to have you with us, and I look forward to hearing your wise voice. Thank you so much for being here.

And special Thanks to my dear friend, Terry Tempest Williams, who is responsible for reuniting me with my beloved mentor, Larry Rasmussen, after 30 years, and his wife and partner, Nyla. Thank you, Nyla and Larry, for traveling to be here with us, for the honor of having you with us, and, finally, Larry, to you, for writing this beautiful book that brings us here today.

So, our timeline today will be that I will give a few more introductions, formal introductions, to our wonderful panelists, and then I will read a short poem, and Larry, then, will take the podium for a 20-to-30-minute introduction to the book, for those of you who haven't had a chance to read it, so you'll get a feel for what is present here, and his motivation for writing it.

And then all three of us will take turns responding briefly, beginning with John, to the book, and then offer Larry one or two questions to respond to, and then we will open it up for audience questions for at least the last 20 minutes. So, we will definitely have time for that, so please take note, if you have questions along the way.

So, John Gehman is a member of the Council of Student Sustainability Leaders, and a first-year Master of Theological Studies student here at Harvard Divinity School. He's concentrating in the philosophy of religion, and studies the topics of body trauma and healing in the context of colonialism, racism, and white supremacy.

He considers these issues through the lenses of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and decolonial studies. On the Council, John is interested in exploring the relationship between sustainability, racial justice, and healing.

Terry Tempest Williams joined HDS as a Writer in Residence for the 2017-18 academic year, and is continuing, thankfully, to us, until June 30 of 2025, and at that point, we will try to have her stay for another 10 years. That's the plan.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, and the writer of numerous books, including the environmental classic Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, published in 1991, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, published in 2008, and is the title of her very popular seminar, that writing seminar that she teaches here at Harvard Divinity School, The Hour of Land, a personal topography of America's national parks, which was published in June 2016, which coincided to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Erosion: Essays of Undoing, published in 2017, and The Moon is Behind Us, with her friend and photographer Fazal Sheikh, which was just published in 2021.

Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide. Terry is a crucial voice, and inspiring voice, for ecological consciousness and social change, and yet another pioneer in this work.

And Larry Rasmussen, Larry is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His book Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, received the Nautilus Gold Prize for Ecology and Environment, and the Nautilus Grand Prize for the best 2014 book overall, out of 27 categories.

An earlier volume Earth Community: Earth Ethics, published by Maryknoll Books in 1996, won the prestigious-- How do you pronounce this? I'm sorry, I should have checked this out and put this--

LARRY RASMUSSEN: Grawemeyer. The W is V. Is

SPEAKER 2: Grawemeyer Award. I stumble over it every time, and I should just give up, and be humble, and what I just did. So, Grawemeyer Award, which is a prestigious award, even if no one can pronounce it, in Religion in 1997. A volume written with Bruce Birch, and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, and Jacqueline Lapsley, entitled Bible and Ethics: A New Conversation, appeared in 2018.

Larry served as a member of the Science, Ethics, and Religion Advisory Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I want to highlight that, because it is rare for religious studies scholar to be able to gain the kind of respect that Larry was able to gain to hold this position in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and I think that's just another commentary on his important voice.

He was also a recipient of the Henry Luce Fellowship in Theology, the Fjellman Award for Distinguished Christian Ministries in Higher Education, the Joseph Sittler Award for Outstanding Leadership in Theological Education, and the Unitas Award from Union Theological Seminary, awarded as a distinguished alumnus. In 2021, he was granted the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of Christian Ethics.

So, to me, Larry was my mentor, one of two beloved mentors in my time when I pursued a doctorate at Union Theological Seminary, and there are many things that I learned from Larry. I learned rigor. I learned what it means to be committed to a cause and a vision for the long haul, both by his own writing, and by his own experience, and his embodiment of these values.

I learned how to enjoy humor. He is wickedly funny. I don't know if that will come out here, but he is very funny, and that laughter was an important balm, if you will, through the rigors of a doctoral program.

But the thing that I come away from, and that Larry cultivated with his beloved wife, Nyla, was a home and a presence of profound warmth and generosity, acceptance and kindness, consistently. So, with that, as a tribute to you, Larry, and your impact not just on me, but to all of who I know have crossed your beautiful home, and had the privilege of learning from you in your classrooms, I'd like to share the poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, "Kindness."

"Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment, like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go, so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness, how you ride and ride, thinking the bus will never stop. The passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever."

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be how. He too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans, and the simple breath that kept him alive."

"Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it 'till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows, and you see the size of the cloth. Then, it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say, it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere, like a shadow, or a friend."

This book, Larry's work, his joy, his kindness, his love is not born of superficiality. It is born of deep confrontation with the challenges of the world, and the incredible opportunities and beauty that it also yields. So, with that, Larry, I'll turn it over to you.

LARRY RASMUSSEN: May I borrow a copy of that beautiful book of yours?

DIANE L. MOORE: Sure, you can.

LARRY RASMUSSEN: I forgot to bring mine up here, so I'll use it here. I'll use it, just the book. Yeah. After that poem of "Kindness," we could just say, class dismissed. That's a beautiful way to start the day. But Nyla and I are having such a good time at this little love feast. We came yesterday, and it's just been pure pleasure and joy since. So, thanks, from both of us, especially to Diane, and Terry, and John, and Judy, and Reem, and Natalie for all that you've done for this event.

Diane suggested that I say how the letters and the book came about, and speak to some of the themes. First of all, I'm going to say how good it is to be safe here at Harvard. Our daughter-in-law, Lina Vijegas is from Colombia, and she was explaining to the two boys, who are the recipients of the letters, that we were coming to New York.

And Lina speaks beautiful, fluent English, but once in a while, she'll give a Spanish twist to an English word, and she said, "You know, Grandma and Grandpa are coming in, and they're going to be at Harvard, and then Grandpa is going to jail." And it was Eduardo, the eight-year-old, who said, "Grandpa is going to jail?" Yale. So, tomorrow, I go to jail. I'm glad to be safe here at Harvard today.

I started writing the letters in 2018, and they continued into COVID, until April of 2021. The book was never in view. A book was never in view, only a sheaf of letters that I was going to pass on. But when a book offer came, I was very pleased with the audience, millennials and Generation Z, that the publisher has in mind, but they said it couldn't be more than 200 pages. They don't read books more than 200 pages. They haven't consulted with our grandson, who is on his second round, at age eight, with all the Harry Potter books.

So I haven't been writing, because I've been attending to selecting letters and editing them, but I'll start again, and when I do, I'll take up one of the big topics that isn't in the book. Most of the letters are big topics. I mean, this is a time when humans are, for the first time, the creators of a geological epoch, and not just a historical era.

Global warming, climate volatility, ecosystem uncertainty, biodiversity loss, mass extinction, the nature of human nature itself, and what we can and can't count on as Homo sapiens, who and where is God in the Anthropocene, letters about a spirituality for a time such as this, how the boys and we might become good ancestors, et cetera, those are all big topics.

But the one that isn't there is a letter on mortality. And Martín, whom I call "Spud," was asking his mother-- he's four, pressing five-- "Mom, are you going to die?" And Lina said, "Yes, but not for a very long time." "Can I die with you?" And Lina said, "Oh, how sweet." And then he turned to his dad, and he said, "Dad, when you die, can I have your watch?" I'm thinking about willing him my watch, so that he isn't sitting around, waiting for his dad to die at a young age.

So, the letters' gravity, and there's lots of it, is matched with stories, and humor, like Martín's. And maybe you'll recognize the human condition and be amused. "Humor," after all, shares the same root as "humble" and "human," namely, the root of "humus." All are from "fertile topsoil."

Now, Luther calls us "clods," but he says, the clods became the cultivators, and they had developed culture, and "cultuus," which is "worship." "Cultus" is the root there. So, you've got humus, soil, land, and cultus, worship. It captures a good bit of our humanity in these letters.

But the letters came about because of age, our age, and Nyla and I are octogenarians, and the boys' age, grandsons who are only eight and almost five. The kids are in their tender years, while Nyla and I are living in the autumn and the winter of our lives.

And because we will not see them come of age, we wanted to leave them with more than just a few wispy memories, thus, some sharing of our lives, as we look through our eyes at what they face. The boys are our biological grandkids, but there are five other grandkids on the dedicatory page. These are our bonus grandkids, who call us "Grandma and Grandpa," in most cases, because one or the other of their parents, before they became their parents, lived with us, while going to school.

I was thrilled when Terry Tempest Williams said she'd write the foreword. In fact, I tried to convince Broadleaf Books to put her name in very big letters on the cover, and mine in small, and then people would buy it, thinking it was one of Terry's books, and when they got home and discovered otherwise, they might not bring it back. So, that's wonderful.

Let me speak to a couple of themes in the book. I draw on James Baldwin often. I reread Baldwin during COVID, and I try to be as radically honest as he is. "Not everything that is faced can be changed," Baldwin writes, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced," and I'm hoping that that kind of radical realism about our planetary plight inhabits these pages. So, that's one theme.

The second theme is wonder. The two meet in a Sabbath prayer from Reform Judaism that I discovered too late for the book, but it captures much of what is there. Here's the prayer. "Days pass, and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with searching and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when Your presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed, and we, clay, touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder how filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it."

The very first letter, to three-year-old Eduardo, includes this. "What I most want for you and the little brother you say is swimming in your mommy's tummy is that you let yourself be overwhelmed, overwhelmed by wonder, and lose yourself in the kaleidoscope of creation, not to escape the harsh world, but better to inhabit it. Wondering is a way of experiencing truth. Of course, you should follow science fiercely. Tested expertise is indispensable. Yet rational analysis can miss the most essential things in life, which are bonds of love and belonging, and they are most at home in the wonder and awe that lead to knowing deeper and caring more."

OK, I'll finish the remarks with three excerpts. The first is the author's note. While it doesn't really give you the tone and timber of the letters, or the humor in the stories, it does set the framework for the book. "I knew my grandchildren confronted the harrowing challenge of moving from industrial to ecological civilization. "The great transition," it's called, epic times."

" I was ready for that. But my pen was startled to discover a truth that has taken us by stealth. For the first time ever, humanity has become a geologic force. We've slid off the back end of one geologic epoch, the Holocene, onto the front end of another, the Anthropocene, the age of the human. Thus, we face epoch times, as well as epic times, and a further daunting transition."

"These transitions are the great work-- Stansberry's phrase-- that awaits my grandchildren. Though they were never asked, and didn't get a vote, remapping and remaking the world amid uncertainty is their calling, as it is ours. Although their world cannot be ours, and shouldn't be, I wanted to step away from an academic career teaching social ethics, and just write love letters, love letters that face what they face on a changed and changing planet. I'm certain the letters are urgent, not because the kids' grandparents are frail, but because their world is."

So, let me then fill that framework out with a few pages of a letter, one of three on the changed nature of human responsibility. There are three letters on human responsibility. This is the second. The first one is "The Kindness of Microbial Strangers," and our responsibility for the bacteria and microbes, without which we don't live a minute. And then the second letter is "Responsible by Degrees," and then the third one is called "It's All in the Pronouns." So, here's a few lines from "Responsible by Degrees."

"Dear, Martín, and dear, Eduardo, August 18, 2020, I had imagined these letters as a cascade of stories, a few a reflection on our lives and yours, and some humor. Instead, they turned somber, as I tried to say how your years look for the planet you inherit."

" That has shown certain questions front and center, landing there because your lives and ours are home to different epochs. In several letters, the lead question has been the difference it makes if the human condition is the same or not. Does it matter that you are Anthropocene kids, and Grandma Nyla and I are Holocene kids? If so, how?"

"We'll eventually finish this line of questioning-- don't give up hope-- by outlining what's most important for you and everyone else, renewed human responsibility. What makes another look necessary is that we now wield powers once reserved for the gods. As Stewart Brand put it in 1968, 'We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.' Later, he became more emphatic, 'We are as gods, and have to get good at it.' Homo deus, the God species, is who we've become.

"We're named as such by big history writers, like Yuval Noah Harari, who says that, 'Until recently, evolution has followed the unchanging principles of natural selection. Now, however, humankind,' I'm quoting him, 'is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design," end quote. Intelligent? Maybe in the future. But so far, design has been too happenstance and without conscious, shared intention."

"Planetary ecosystems are, quote, 'managed,' end quote, more as a consequence of an assumed way of life and powerful technologies than deliberation. That's more accident than design, and not very intelligent."

"Biologist E.O Wilson is even more skeptical. Quote, 'We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient, or intelligent enough to be much of anything,' end quote. Spud, do you remember Richard Leakey's remarks that we're the only species he knows that consistently makes bad decisions?"

"But Harari is correct that our powers do take the evolutionary process beyond natural selection, and any account of responsibility is truthful only if it confronts our powers on this novel scale, in these novel ways. 'Assisted evolution' is the going term for what we're doing, but it's deceptive, because it hides the depth and breadth of the evolutionary changes we're affecting."

"Would you have guessed, from 'assisted evolution,' that our extra carbon would remake the world, alter marine chemistry, flood coastlines, strip glaciers to bare bones, embolden deserts, warp the circulation of ocean currents, supercharge extreme weather events, and rearrange the distribution of animal, plant, and microbial species across the globe?"

"Would you have guessed that every major taxonomic group, animals, insects, plants, fungi, and microorganism, is being driven down new evolutionary paths by human-assisted changes? 'Assisted evolution' is room temperature talk that doesn't begin to reveal what we've done. We've created no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future. 'Hijacked and hacked evolution' would be more honest.

"The stakes of a human-dominated no-analog world are stark. If Homo dominatus, Holocene status, has become Homo deus, Anthropocene reality, does the iron rule of empires, namely, they fall, hold for Earth as human empire? The reality is that modernity's dream, exercising mastery over unruly nature, failed. Instead, we bound ourselves fatefully to Earth as a single wild, evolving force."

"There is no outside for us, or Archimedean point. There never was. There was only more room for error and weaker powers. Nature has always included us. It's rather ironic, isn't it, that, just when we realize we're major players in a no-analog world, we discover we're a lot less important than we thought? Wild Earth can get along fine without us. For most of its life, it has." I'll stop there, and invite you to pursue responsibility for that.

OK, here's the final letter, albeit much, much abridged. It's entitled "Leaving a Legacy."

"Dear Eduardo, dear Martín, these are love letters from first to last. In the very first one, love bridges geologic epochs. Spud hadn't made his grand entrance yet, so that letter's only to you, Eduardo, but you told us he was on his way, swimming in Mommy's tummy."

"This one, to both of you, will end the same, with love bridging from our world to yours. Despite that love, or because of it, writing has been wrenching at times. Why should you two be saddled with a global civilizational challenge amid a geological shift in a no-analog world?"

"Unexpected crises made the letters difficult, and deep enough that the planet's physical tumult and social chaos began to feel like the loss of worlds that African and Indigenous peoples have long experienced. Somehow, they had to survive loss of their civilizations and land, only to begin on alien terrain."

"While the world did not end, some worlds did. Their worlds dead. Now that's reality for more than the colonized. The outcome is a stack of uncharted challenges and the need for a different great work. If there's a humorous version, it's Pogo's, you know, Pogo, the cartoon character."

"Quote, 'What we face, friends, are insurmountable opportunities.' What's the rigging for insurmountable opportunities? It includes radical honesty. The early Anthropocene is already baked in to such an extent that your world simply will not escape immense suffering, together with the displaced peoples, flora, and fauna, nor will compromise and defeat be avoided."

"Wild cards guarantee uncertainty as the one sure thing. Big, complex, interacting systems determining futures you cannot control will ratchet up risk, frustrate the best of intentions, and assure failures. Life always dishes up more than we can plan for, some of which will turn out to be wonderfully good. But much will not. In any case, all of it mandates radical realism."

And I quote Baldwin, as I quoted him earlier. "This takes a toll, and the toll is greater, not less, when remaking the world is your calling, and you love what you're doing. That's love's cruel side. Pain, loss, and responsibility are more poignant when you care. Don't push away the pain. Accept it. It's not there by accident. It's a life imperative. On the other side is healing and new resolve."

"President Barack and Michelle Obama were in Oslo in 2009 to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The President was coming off a very difficult time in the White House, agonizing over ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He would return to that and much more, not least, an impasse on health care legislation and the Great Recession."

"As the Obamas were about to leave the hotel for the Nobel dinner, one of the American delegates knocked on the door and told them to look out the window. They opened the drapes, and there were several thousdan people, each holding a candle, a traditional ritual for the city to salute the Peace Prize recipient. When the Obamas appeared, the crowd cheered wildly."

"Here, amid the president's preoccupations with agonies that wouldn't pause, was a pool of stars, held aloft by those who refuse to give up on the idea that the world could be better. President Obama's response to himself was, 'Whatever you do won't be enough, I heard the voices say. Try anyway.'"

"Obama did not achieve everything he wanted to. Oddly, failure while trying anyway is a fine criterion. If what you want to do with your tombstone dash-- the dash on your tombstone, between your birth date and your death date-- if what you want to do with your tombstone dash isn't big enough to risk failures in multiple tries, some of which will fail, then your vision and your goal are too humble, too shallow, too unworthy of your one wild and precious life."

"So accept the wisdom that, because remapping and remaking is civilizational work in a no-analog world, whatever you do will not be enough. It cannot be. If nothing else, your lives, however long, will not be long enough. You belong to a vital transitional generation. But that's not the generation that slaps the final coat of paint on the wall, or gets to spit polish the shoes for the victory dance."

"Do you recall my response to Niebuhr and Baldwin about race reckoning that has still needed this century? My generation's idealism was dashed by that prospect. But the two of them waded in with renewed energy. To them, a century of good work for undoing legacies as deep as race and caste seemed hopeful and realistic."

"So take your first steps, and make your way, knowing that others will add more cairns. The stones will keep talking. Still, my generation's impatience was right in one way. It's vital to dream an ideal world, and go big with confidence. Especially the young often get things done, because they didn't know they couldn't. Impossible gets nudged into the possible columm."

"So dream a world, and lace it with a little utopia. That's a world that levels the standard of living with a steady, staid economy, attentive to Earth's regeneration, a world of jobs and health care for all in need of them, a world where quality of life for household and community is the economy's purpose and focus, not the profits of big firms and corporations, a world of widespread public transportation in and between green cities, a world of clean, renewable energy sources, a world of diets low in the use of animals, a world where spiritual well-being replaces gaudy consumerism, a world where diversity plays out as strength, not inequity, and where colonialist and environmental debt is settled with reparations on the way to liberty and justice for all, a world attentive to the whole community of life and its glory, with sapiens present neither as devils, nor divines, but the world's true wonder-- that's Maya Angelou-- and not least, a world full of music."

"While music can't cure everything, with it, you can sing down the grimness in front of you. Add your dreams to these, with Dr. King's beloved community in view, and Amanda Gorman in your ears. Amanda Gorman, 'One thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy, and change, our children's birth right.'"

"Yours is certainly not a moment for caution. Toss it, and resist the advice of conservatives, who say, never try anything the first time around. It's fine to start small and to get help. In the raised bed on your deck, I've seen you sow seeds as tiny as the little black poppy seeds on your favorite bagel. Next, you tend the fresh green shoots, and then you do some weeding. That's only a start, I know, but it's enough. It's enough, in that it's a microcosm of the future, as little, so big.

"And it's enough, in that you're joining multitudes of great workers, who, taking responsibility for their own seed beds, join you. A word to Benjamin, from a Canticle for Leibowitz, could go on your wall. Quote, 'To sense your responsibility is wisdom, Benjamin. To think that you can carry it alone is folly.' You need not, cannot carry it alone, and you shouldn't try. But action is indispensable. To take action is the antidote to Anthropocene anxiety, anxiety that otherwise slips into depression."

"Through it all, don't forget the paradox you are. Our past shortcomings and mistakes, some of them doozies, are real. Blemished is who we are, and you will be too. Yet magnificence is yours as well. Grandma Nyla's favorite poem has it right. 'Oh, God, help me to believe the truth about myself, no matter how beautiful it is.'"

"We can tell you how beautiful it is. Spud was in his crib, supposedly on his way to sleep, but jabbering, on now with the complete sentences that come when a two-year-old is ambling toward three. Your dad was nearby, but Martín was in his own world, and said to no one in particular, 'I love Grandpa so much.' We should all believe such unsolicited truth about ourselves, no matter how beautiful it is. And on our better days, we do."

"You've heard me say that my worldview is one of tragedy. Yet life with Nyla is graced at every turn, and never have I felt so much gratitude or satisfaction as I do now. Tragedy sits alongside a deeply felt conviction that the existence of the universe is utterly astonishing, with life a miracle."

"I love Emily Dickinson's line, 'To live is so startling, it leaves little time for everything else.' Life's miracle and mystery brings serenity and surprise. Thus does my tragic view partner with a somewhat unexpected giddy love of life, or, rather, a giddy love of unexpected life. Is it different for you?"

"I close with a rabbi, and then add to Grandma's poem, a favorite of mine, and some wisdom from earlier, 'Love gets the last word all around.' The old rabbi says, 'I am dust and ashes.' He also says, 'The world was made for me.' So humble are we, and so magnificent. See what your friends say if you put, 'We are dust and ashes' on your backpacks, right above, 'The world was made for me.'"

"I've cited a favorite poem often, but never have I felt its force the way I feel it now. It's from Denise Levertov's drops collection Candles in Babylon. Early on, I wrote that we are now both the ark and the flood, the exiled and the exilers. Babylon is where we've exiled ourselves. Babylon is us. But Leviathan poem itself is "Beginners." How apt is that for remappers and remakers?"

"The poet's words, like the prophets', are for you. Note the use of 'love,' 'imagine,' 'hope,' 'justice,' and 'mercy' in the very first lines. They rise to the top, like heavy cream, for such a time as this. 'Beginners.' 'But we have only begun to love the Earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How can we tire of hope? So much is in bud. How can desire fail? We have only begun to imagine justice and mercy, only begun to envision how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors.'"

"'Surely, our river cannot be hastening into the sea of non-being. Surely, it cannot drag in the silt, all that is innocent. Not yet. Not yet. There is too much broken that must be mended, too much hurt that we have done to each other that cannot yet be forgiven. We have only begun to know the power that is in us, if we rejoin our solitudes in the communion of struggle. So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture. So much is in bud.'"

"And Neibuhr's wisdom to Levertov's inspiration, with this preface. Your worst tragedy as beginners would be to have no sense of tragedy. Lacking its realism and lacking action, you will fall into despair. Grab hold of the saving alternative, namely, fragments that reflect the whole.

"Here are Neibuhr's. 'Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history. Therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.'"

"Above all, keep saying yes to life, in spite of everything, and I love you so much. And don't forget the birds, or your carrots. With hovering love, Grandpa and Grandma. P.S., I have a request. If, by the time you read this as young men, I am dead, as dead I well may be, would you to join your mother's lovely voice, maybe your dad's too, at my memorial service, and would you sing not just any song, but rather this one, where you're living and my dying meet in a love that casts out fear and is stronger than death, and even bridges geological epochs?"

"The first stanza is-- well, the stanza is in Spanish, and then the English is, 'In all our living, we belong to God, and in our dying, we are still with God. So, whether living or whether dying, we belong to God. We belong to God.'" Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

I have cards, if anyone is interested, information about the book and the website that asks you to write some letters of your own and submit them, if you'd like.

DIANE L. MOORE: We're going to have a little conversation among us, and then we'll open it up for questions.

LARRY RASMUSSEN: Yeah, did I go too long?

JOHN GEHMAN: Larry, thank you very much. I hear it as a prayer, especially for my generation. And I want to offer a question that I often think about. What does it mean to promise your wounded and dying child, who is scared to death, that they will not die, and then, a moment later, be the last one they caress in this lifetime, and to know that their death was of our own doing, so that we could live?

I think this question, for me, always puts into perspective what really is at stake here, what truly is at stake, and it's the risking of sacred parenthood, and the risking of the true love. And you write about this in a prayer that I hear you offer to us on page 116.

The prayer that I hear is that, "My hope is that God, in the Anthropocene, Einstein's beloved ulta, is, as Bonhoeffer pleaded, God-found in what we do know, and in our strengths and power, not simply in their absence, but in our woeful ignorance. I'm hoping for a God that befits sapiens taking full responsibility for what we know and do. Goodnight, Martín Tio."

LARRY RASMUSSEN: Yeah.

JOHN GEHMAN: When I read this, I read this as a prayer, a collection of prayers, and the single prayer of your life. And throughout this entire book, you show us that there is profound beauty in life, as you continue to love, and as you grow deeper into love, you find even deeper pain, even deeper sorrow, even deeper joy, and even deeper love.

And you write, throughout this book, a remembrance and a recollection of that love, and it is through these allusions to land, to nature, to family that allows us to collapse time and space, and really feel your presence next to us as we read. And I hear that the prayer and the hope that you leave for us is that we truly know what is at stake here.

You got to live, from what I see in this book, a rich and overflowing life, and you want that for us. We want that for our planet, too. But we find ourselves unable to live that right now. And as we prepare our hearts and our voices to hopefully live that rich, overflowing life that you have enjoyed yourself, as you leave for us in your prayer, I find that, in this great moment of grief, it's very hard to turn to a source of hope, and the reason that prayer is so important for me is, when I think of prayer, I think of the first prayer to ever be uttered.

What was that great moment of desperation, desolation, and separation, that we had forgotten the love from which we come? And, also, when we called out to that God, who was that God to hear that prayer, and respond to call back, for us to imagine and remember love, and give us the light, so our bud can blossom and flower so greatly, even before we did before.

And you often write in the book about justice and light. And we currently live in, in my view, a world where our light is dimming, or our love is dimming, where we live in despair and injustice, and it is through this renewal of the light to shine upon us that allows our seed and its bud to grow.

And, often, I think, when I think of action, we often think that we ourselves are the ones who are doing the action. But it's really from the love and the care from others that we receive that we can really see the light in us, and the beauty of this rich and overflowing life.

I think there's not much more that we need to do than to open the eye of the heart, and see the care that we get from you, from our family, from our ancestors, that we can pass to future generations, and as we would hope that they do for us to, and you really highlight this throughout the book.

So, when I think of prayer, I think of hope, and I think of the sacred love, and the love and sacred parenthood, the one that Mary showed to Jesus, when she held him, the one that the Buddha's mother had shown him before dying, the one that my adoptive family received in the blessing from my birth family in Mexico, and then, also, the love and the caress of your writing that you give to your grandchildren.

You allow us to taste the love that you have for your grandchildren, and that love is deep and profound. In many scriptures, it's regarded as the highest form of love, and you invite us into that too, and I see this as an arc of a prayer, that we continue to come back and continue to remember that first prayer, and that true love that you cultivated, and see in the beauty of this life.

And the prayer breathes life, because life is a prayer, and each breath is a prayer itself. It's the prayer that remembers the beauty of your life, the ancestors, the future generations, and the beauty of love. And Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow calls this the "inter-breath of life." It is the breath that came to being on Sinai. It's the breath of a very sacred text, The Thunder, Perfect Mind. And I see it as the breath that we all share together, and it's the breath inside the breath, and the breath that allows us to recollect and remember the love that you give to us, and the love that is us.

So, your letters imagine and remember what that love is, even in a great moment of despair, and I think of it as maybe the first prayer that you are asking us to hear. And I have heard this prayer throughout reading this. So, in this climate crisis, devastation, catastrophe, apocalypse, extinction, you write a love letter to Earth, so that it may be heard, because we come from the Earth. Our lands are our bodies, and our bodies are the land. And the Earth is what keeps moving in this natural cycle, for us to truly be part of this greater love.

So, I read this as you leaving to us your call, your first prayer, the prayer of your single life, and our generation has the chance to finally call back. But in this great time, again, of despair, injustice, a fleeting hope, as you knw, you see the change of agribusiness, or change from agriculture to agribusiness, and you see this dimming light. This work, as you have noted in the book, deepens the despair, and the pain, and the suffering, as you continue to love. So how do you find balance between the grief and joy that are ultimately wrapped up in love?

LARRY RASMUSSEN: Whoa! I'm just going to sit with such lovely remarks. I, actually, John, hadn't thought about the book as a prayer, and that opens up some dimensions. I said that mine is a tragic view of life, and that is the honesty about what you talk, especially, about your generation, and what it faces.

But there's something about the fact that most human beings have lived on a spectrum that runs from hard to terrible, and yet they made love, celebrated, made music, danced, and found meaning in their lives. And it's really my generation, or Nyla's, growing up, grew up in a time that shared with us benefits that most human beings have never experienced.

So, what do we have to learn from all those people for whom life was hard, and yet they said yes to life, in spite of everything? I suspect it was love that they lived into, and shared, and felt, and made, and that that's what gave them grounds.

People ask me, oftentimes, why are you hopeful, and I took note of the fact that, in one recent study, a majority of your generation said they felt they were doomed, and those who were contemplating being parents said, no, we're not going to bring a child into this world. I think that is the reality for lots of folks, and that's why I say, you know, if most human beings have had to live with this kind of despair about the future, look to them to tell us how their ancestors made it through.

And that's why I mention, Indigenous peoples and African American peoples have been given apocalypse over and again, and yet what ingenious cultures, magnificent cultures were created by them out of that, by somehow saying yes to life, in spite of everything.

Desmond Tutu says it very, very simply, and these are my grounds for hope. "Goodness is stronger than evil. Life is stronger than death. Light is stronger than darkness. And love is stronger than hate." It's just the tipping point, or, as our pastor says, in Santa Fe, "We had 40 days of Lent. Now we've got 50 days of Easter time." The tipping point is 10 days of Easter time, over 40 days of Lent.

And, you know, all kinds of individuals will not be able to maintain hope through thick and thin. But it's a kind of confidence in the triumph of life there, and it may not be our lives. It may not be our life as the species. Every species dies. And that's true for Homo sapiens too. And, in fact, we're the only surviving line of 16 lines of human species.

So, I want to face the kind of despair that you talk about, and yet maintain this confidence in the triumph of life, in whatever forms. And, you know, unlike so much religious faith, the players here are not God and human beings. The players are God and creation, and the triumph of life and creation.

So, we belong to the journey to the universe, which began far earlier than our human life did, and which will be going on long after human life has not. Our moment is 7/100 of an inch in Earth's timeline so far. You know, let's not make ourselves the center of it all, magnificent as we are. We showed up very late for work, and we'll be leaving early. Our microbes will long outlive us.

So, thank you for the comments that this book is a prayer. I'd never thought about it in that way. I did think about what I wrote to Eduardo in the first letter about being lost in wonder, and from the Greek, understanding that the word "cosmos" is the word for both "order" and "beauty." So, embrace beauty as its own resistance to disorder and chaos.

And your comments, John, about love, I mean, the Gospel, the Epistle of John, puts it pretty simple. "God first loved us. Our response is love." It's a respondping love, and not only an initiating. It's initiating on some prints, but it's in response to the love of what Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev calls, simply, "living presence," living presence that hovers over all of the universe, and we belong to that universe. That's enough.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you, John, for articulating what I think we're all feeling, that these are prayers. And, Larry, I feel like all I can offer you in this moment are my tears. Of gratitude, of remembrance, of the invitation to be overwhelmed.

And I've been taught over and over by you, when you spoke about, the toll is greater, not less, especially when you're calling is loving the world, I think we don't cry enough. And that's the gift you've given me today, because I think the grief we feel, the overwhelming responsibility, what we are seeing, how to hold all that, and why, but to release it together as rain.

Our students, we talk a lot about grief and love, but I think what I've realized today is, do we have the courage to cry together? And that's the gift you've given me here. And that in itself is a cairn that you talk about. And I think one of my favorite letters is you wrote it on February 26, 2021, and you speak of, quote, "essential elements needed to thrive in the Anthropocene."

You say to your grandsons, "We'll build cairns. Cairns are small stone towers that serve as points of reference, where the trail does not yet exist, or is easily lost." And I think, you know, in the desert, we would be lost without the cairns that have been built and left by others, and I feel like that's what your letters really are. And I'm wondering if you could just speak to the cairns that were built for you, that you followed as a graduate student at Union, and where that has brought you today.

LARRY RASMUSSEN: Well, thank you, Terry, on all counts. Your mentioning of cairns reminds me that I wrote that there are four of them at the trailhead, mourning, grieving, organizing-- blessed are the organized-- and healing, you know, and you can't put cairns in your backpack. You can't load them up in your backpack. So, those, you have to have to remember, and return to mourning, grieving, organizing, and healing, as the trails at the trailhead, and then make your way from there.

Not having thought about this book as a prayer, I hadn't thought about my life in terms of cairns either. And they would have been cairns that others built, and that, as a child, and youth, and then the time that Nyla and I have had together, which will be 59 years in July, most of those cairns, I'd have to think about what they were, and who built them, and how they pointed out the way that I should go.

So, one reason I wrote the letters is that I never asked my grandparents about their lives. I had a wonderful relationship to all four of my grandparents. We lived in the same small village, but three of them were immigrants. I can't tell you what lives they lived before we kids came along, because we were only thinking of ourselves, as kids, and whether Grandma Rasmussen would have any chocolate chip cookies or not, if we went to her house.

So, I just don't quite know how to answer your question. I do know that those years that Union, and I was a student there in the last half of the 1960s, and the 1960s were formative for all of us at that time. But I got involved in things where we thought something terribly important was at stake, and we must do something about it. This was civil rights movement. This was anti-Vietnam War.

And a dozen students said, Chemical Bank, where Union has its money, and most of the students have our money, is giving loans to the apartheid government of South Africa. We'll show them. We'll take out our bank accounts, and we'll put them in Freedom National Bank, down on 125th Street, in Harlem, an institution of the civil rights movement.

But the notion, and I've said, and I don't know if it's in one of the letters or not, Nyla's account and mine never made three figures to the left of the decimal point. You know, that Chemical Bank was going to buckle under because Union students' bank accounts were being transferred out of there was ludicrous, but, to us, it was the right thing to do, and maybe it would make a difference, and Union Seminary did take out all of its money from Chemical Bank and put it down the bottom of the hill.

So, I think that participation in something that was bigger than us, with people both there and halfway around the world, in South Africa, was, for me-- I don't know if I would call it a cairn, but it certainly marked a pathway to walk.

And when Nelson Mandala came back, at Riverside Church, where we also were present when Dr. King gave his famous speech, "A Time to Break Silence," about the Vietnam War, but when Nelson Mandala came back, and said, thanks, you know, we all felt that we were part of that drama.

So, there are these moments. They may not always be big ones. They might be small ones. It might be a late-night conversation with one of your colleagues. I remember, at Union Seminary, people came because the faculty, but the most important conversations were not with faculty members. They were with each other, in the wee hours, oftentimes.

So, it's only kind of retrospectively that I can identify the cairns. That notion of a cairn actually comes from the passion? Narrative in Luke, where Jesus says, "And these stones will cry out, if you don't bear witness," and the stones are the cairns. They don't make the path. You've gotta do that. We've gotta do that. But they show where the path might go. And now the boys, and the other grandkids, will be the ones building cairns, and, I hope, noticing the cairns that others have put there for them, and follow them, yeah.

Incidentally, I think this question of weeping together, and finding joy together, is so important. I mean, I'm not one, as a social ethicist, who has ever done nearly enough in understanding the psychology of being assaulted, as we are now, and as future generations will be. I just have to spend much more time with that.

But I'm pretty sure Martin Luther is right. I didn't put this in the book, because some language of Luther is unfit for children. He says, "From a depressed ass can come no happy fart."

[LAUGHTER]

So--

[LAUGHTER]

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: This is why we love Larry, seriously. From the sublime to the ridiculous.

LARRY RASMUSSEN: Well, it's also pretty important. I mean, slipping into a depression, which happens all the time, and easily, more easily in our time, has to have antidotes, and it's beauty--

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: What's the quote, again? "From a depressed"--

LARRY RASMUSSEN: "From a depressed ass can come no happy fart."

DIANE L. MOORE: Well, on that note, let's open it up to questions. We have a few minutes, so, please, any questions for Larry that you'd like to raise? Please, we've got a few minutes. Let's use them well.

SPEAKER 3: I was just-- Thank you so much, everybody, for your beautiful book, and for the comments, and the beautiful introduction, and foreward, and, John, your very heartfelt insights, and very moving with your questioning.

I'm curious, because you mention, I guess, light and beauty so much, and love, and maybe you can talk a little bit more about that in terms of healing, yeah.

LARRY RASMUSSEN: Yeah, all these questions are questions I haven't thought about, but have probably written about, just weren't sure what I wanted to say to the grandkids. My inclination, as a prof, was always to give a rigorous rational analysis of, in social ethics, whatever the social issues were that we were attending to.

And like I said, while I think that's indispensable, rational analysis doesn't nurture and strengthen what is most important, and those are relationships. And I hope, in the book, I've been clear that the relationships are among us as human beings, but it's really the whole created order, and that last letter, on "It's All in the Pronouns," is from Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass.

She said, when she came to Santa Fe, "The word 'it' is the most insidious word in the English language, making everything it." And so she wants it to be "I" and "we," and not "you" and "they" as "its," the dehumanizing of the word "it." And she goes on to say that most Indigenous languages are verb languages, and English is really good at being a noun language, where the noun is an object, and we, as subject, act on the object, rather than subject-to-subject interaction, mutuality, reciprocity.

And that's what I'm trying to get at by saying what's key here is relationships, because relationships that are healthy relationships are reciprocal, interactive, subject-to-subject relationships. But I didn't really answer your question as to the particulars there on light and love.

I noted, Terry, that, in your piece in The New York Times on Great Salt Lake, at the end of that piece, you talk about mobilizing love. I'm one of those people who, due to the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, never did talk much about love, and it was because love was a sentimentality that didn't bring justice, and we were all focused on justice, and love, for Niebuhr, was a contrast. It was a personal thing, and it was always sentimentalized, and romanticized, and didn't make structural and systemic changes. But you want to do systemic change through the mobilization of love.

And I do too now, and one of the gifts of writing to your own grandsons is to understand what I would now call "prophetic love," which is love aimed at structural and systemic transformations. And there isn't a whole lot of sentimentality about this a lot of times.

So, I mean, Margaret Farley calls it "just love," or "justice love," and I would say the same thing about the kind of light and the other words that you used there. They're relational terms, where we have to mobilize what they mean for systemic change.

DIANE L. MOORE: Thank you for the question, and thank you for this remarkable conversation. I just want to say, as someone who knows you and, knew you, you may not have talked about love, but you lived love very profoundly, exuded love, always driven by love, and that was very clear to all of us who had the incredible good fortune to call you our teacher, and you continue to do so today. So, can we thank Larry?

LARRY RASMUSSEN: Oh, thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

You know that, if I had the means, I'd hire all of you as my agents here. This has been a beautiful event. Thank you.

DIANE L. MOORE: Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER 1: Sponsor: Religion and Public Life.

SPEAKER 2: Copyright, 2023, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.