Presented by: Rev. Web Kitchell

Coyote materialized on my green sofa. He looked very elegant, wearing a long mink coat and an Aussie hat. He was please with himself.

“Wow!” I said, “You’re looking fairly swift! What’s with the mink coat?”

“Oh, this old thing? Well, now that I’m a celebrity, I have to do my part on the conspicuous consumption front. I mean this is Santa Fe. We’re not in Raton.”

“Do you dress differently in Raton?”

“Of course; in Raton I just wear my old Coyote fur.”

“So you dress for success in Santa Fe?”

“I get my commission on all those wooden coyotes, and what with all the popularity of books about me, I’m a celebrity when I come to town. I have my image and public to think of!”

With a little sarcasm, I must admit I said, “Well, I guess that’s progress. Do you eat at the coyote Cafe?”

He looked at me archly, “I don’t mind scamming the tourists, but I’m not one to be scammed. Anyone who voluntarily goes into something called the ‘Coyote Cafe’ doesn’t know the menu is roast roadrunner and they are the road-runner!”

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “I need some help with a sermon on Progress. It sounds as though you’ve made progress, moving in off the range into Santa Fe and making a killing off the Californians and Texans!”

I had caught his interest as well as his vanity. He lit a Santa Fe brand cigarette… “Natural,” he said, ‘No unhealthy additives!” and pulled a cold LA beer out of his pocket. He thought a moment, grinned, and said, “Yeah, I guess you could call this Progress!”

I said, “I was reading something by Richard Feynman this morning… he’s a Nobel Prize winning physicist who was something of a coyote himself, and he said words to the effect that if you took everything the ancients knew and everything we modern humans know and put them all together, you’d have to admit that we don’t know anything… about the meaning, I mean.”

“So what’s that got to do with progress?” said Coyote.

“Well, ” sez I, “I would think that if humanity had made any progress during the past few millennia, we might have made at least a little progress in making a kindlier, gentler civilization. I would think that with all the philosophers and theologians putting all the energy into wondering about the meaning of things, we would have come up with some idea of what it all means; what this pain and emotion and joy and love and hate and war and technology all mean, and what they’re for.”

“Nah,” said Coyote, “Progress means you get to drive faster in cooler-looking cars.”

“Hey,” I said, “That just means more coyotes get to be road kills.”

He blanched and didn’t say anything. He took off his hat and mink and threw them on the floor and lay back in his old coyote fur and scratched himself vigorously and happily and obscenely. “You may be on to something,” he said. “Maybe it just looks like progress, but really it’s the same old disasters in new form.”

“The Unitarians aren’t going to like that,” I said. “The Unitarians have been preaching the progress of mankind onward and upward forever. We have been assuring ourselves that humanity can pull itself up by its own bootstraps if humanity really wants to, and we are convinced that we are the ones called by our own Ultimate Goodness to convince humanity of that… if we could just get humanity to listen to us and be reasonable.”

Coyote gave me a leer and an obscene gesture.

“Now come on, Coyote, there’s a lot of people who really believe and hope that George Bush and Mike Gorbachev are going to bring peace and international harmony to the world. The cold war is over, and China and the Soviet Union are rediscovering capitalism, and we’re going to have free trade and computer links everywhere, and maybe even the Jews and the Palestinians will come to respect each other, and military spending will be diverted into low-cost geodesic domes for peasants everywhere.”

If I thought you people really believed that,” said Coyote, “I’d hang around some other church. I mean, that’s whistling Dixie while Wall Street burns. Stop looking at the big picture. Just look at the little picture… look at certain lives, and then you can see Progress. You got a free society, right? That means a guy can start out poor and with luck and little larceny, he can end up rich. That’s progress. In Europe in the fifteenth century you couldn’t do that. Or take the Soviet Union… out where you were this summer in Central Asia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, those people didn’t have decent water and there was a conquest every other Thursday. Now they have decent water and as long as they pay their tithe to Moscow, they get to live easy and sit around and drink tea and commit socialist larceny instead of private larceny. That’s Progress! Feynman is right, looking at the big picture, it’s hard to make a case for Progress or anything other than just saying the big wheel goes round and then it goes round again and again, and so it goes. But if you concentrate on the small picture like the development of answering machines and the technology of skiing… well, then there’s a lot of real Progress!”

“You’re a total cynic, Coyote!”

“Of course I am! So are you! You either have to be a fool or a cynic if you think you can convince those people of yours that there is such a thing as Progress in the big picture. I know them. There’s a few naive ones, but most of them are dues-paying car-carrying cynics.”

“So,” says I, “why do you think they hang around a nineteenth century liberal church that says it believes in Progress?”

“Well,” says he, “Being a cynic doesn’t mean you have to be a cynic! It’s one thing to be an intellectual cynic and understand, as did your Nobel Prize winner, that we really don’t knownuthing when it gets to the big picture. They should have given him the Nobel Prize for that insight, rather than for anything he did in physics, because the insight that we really don’t know nuthing is real Progress. When humans understand they really don’t know the big answers, then they are in a place where they can start to get smart. It’s the humans who think they know everything that are dangerous, like that fellow Teller and Star Wars. Now that was dangerous! There are cynics who are mean and angry, and there are cynics whose cynicism leads them to humility. Now that’s progress when cynicism lead to humility!”

“You’re confusing me!”

“No, I’m not. It’s just that you don’t want to act on what you know is true. As I said, Progress only happens in the small run, the short term. Someone who understands there is no sign of Progress in the big picture has made personal progress. They have been disillusioned, and getting disillusioned is always progress because illusions, no matter how pleasant and rosy, are always a fog between your perception and what is real. When you go traveling 75 miles an hour down the freeway in a pea-soup fog, you’re making real progress toward real disaster!”

Coyote was more serious than I had ever seen him.

We looked at each other for a moment. then I said, “So cynicism and disillusionment are the first steps in the individual’s progress in being real?”

“Right,” he said. “You knew that. Paul Tillich taught you that 35 years ago.”

“You know about Paul Tillich?”

“Hey, man, I was there! Tillich and I worked together for years. That’s why you always liked what he said. His coyote spoke to your coyote. That man likes it out on the edge!”

“So all this lead to the edge?’

“Hey, man, that’s where you want to be if you’re going to live! Out on the edge! You can drive 90 in a plastic Japanese car if you want, that’s living on the edge. But moving through cynicism and disillusionment to affirming life and love anyway despite everything, despite not knowing the big picture, despite knowing it’s all going to crash into the BIG BRICK WALL AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE… despite all that, if you choose to live with love and compassion and laughter and a smile on your face… and man, that’s PROGRESS!”

“Did William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson know that?”

“No,” he said, “They were Easterners. They didn’t know about coyotes. Some Easterners knew there was something wrong with life in the East and they came West looking for something, they didn’t know what, and they found us… found us coyotes.”

“I thought they came west for Opportunity, to get rich, to bring the blessings of civilization to the empty places.”

“No, that’s what the politicians were saying in Congress when they wanted to justify a war with Mexico to steal the land. That’s what the historians said later when they were trying to justify killing all the native people who knew what a coyote was all about. That’s all hog slop. The West was settled by ordinary people saying to themselves, ‘Dear God, this civilization is a bore. It couldn’t be any worse out west with the blizzards and droughts and hostile Apaches. Let’s saddle up and go see what happens.’ And those people, you know, were the descendants of all those people in Europe who said, ‘Civilization is so bad we’d rather take a chance on a steerage passage across the dangerous stormy Atlantic.’ Now that was progress for those people in their lives. But it wasn’t progress for the Apaches or the coyotes.”

“But there’s mischief-makers in every culture, right?”

“RIGHT!” Coyote grinned, “and without the mischief-makers, there isn’t any progress… just dull boring status-quo inhumane mean judgmental culture… Victorian piety!”

“So let me get this straight. You think I should tell these nice liberal hopeful Unitarians that the only progress has its basis in cynicism, disillusionment, rebelliousness and mischief-making?”

“You got it, Baby!” and he stood up and started putting on his mink coat.

“They’re not going to like it,” I said.

“Sure they are,” he said, “Trust me! They’re all coyotes, but they’re all in disguise.”

“Maybe I should say Paul Tillich told me this, not you.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, “but I’m more fashionable than Tillich. Tillich was just a coyote in theologian’s clothing with a German accent. You know what his wife wrote about him after he died.”

“Yes,” I said, “and they both lived on the edge and seemed to love each other with a deep love that transcended everything.”

“There you are,” said Coyote, “That’s the whole point. A person gets past the illusions, gets disillusioned, is healthily cynical about the politicians and historians who are trying to flummox us into believing that we are better than we really are. When a person comes to understand with Mr. Feynman that we only know how little we know, and when a person accepts that being civilized is an overwhelming bore… like me being a celebrity in Santa Fe… well, then they’re on the track and they can live on the edge and they can forgive other people for not being any better than they are, and they can love themselves without worrying what Queen Victoria would think… and that, my friend, is progress!”

I couldn’t resist a little resentful dig after he had disposed of all my good theology and rhetoric. “So, how come you’re wearing a mink coat? Don’t you have any respect for your fellow creature?”

He grinned condescendingly. “All road kills, Baby! This one was a Mercedes. This one by a Toyota Camry. This one was by a truck full of illegals coming up from El Paso. Here, you can have it!”

And he disappeared, and I have this mink coat that fits perfectly. I guess that’s progress.

The idea of Progress is a concept in the collective human mind of some cultures. Quintessentially, it is nineteenth century American liberalism, either capitalist or socialist. Spiritually it has been at he very core of the mythology of Unitarianism and Universalism. It really doesn’t seem to work any more as a mythological description of reality. Like any beautiful myth, there is an aura of nostalgia about it. But the evidence overwhelms us that the cost of unending progress for humanity as a whole is more than the planet can bear… even assuming that we could get all the humans in favor of progress for everyone, including the favored few at the top who think progress is maintaining the status quo. Socialism has devoured the planet as voraciously as free enterprise. Nor has socialism tamed the wild animal and moved humans to being more humane. The illusion of progress for the whole of the human race seems to be a myth which has been overwhelmed by reality.

Yet I agree with Coyote that in small time frames and within individuals there is such thing as Progress… which I shall define anthropocentrically as growing in the art of being humane. If the point of being a coyote is to be the best coyote one can be, if the point of being a badger is to be the best that a badger can be; if the point of being an eagle is to fly high; then the point of being a human is to be as humane as one is able to be in the context of one’s time, the context of one’s society. Martin Luther King, Jr. perhaps. Or just Joe and Mamie Whoziz who anonymously try to be as decent and good people as they can manage.

I have a growing hunch, a painful sort of hunch that perhaps the Peublo Indians lived in about as good a relationship with the planet and each other as humans are designed for… and then the Spanish came with Christ and greed and pride and progress, to be followed by the Americans with individualism, pragmatism, greed and progress!

I don’t want to leave you with a sense of despair. So I will close with the Night Chant:

In beauty, happily, I walk.With beauty before me, I walk.

With beauty behind me, I walk.

With beauty below me, I walk.

With beauty above me, I walk.

With beauty all around me, I walk.

It is finished again in beauty.

It is finished in beauty.

[This and other coyote stories are published in two volumes by Skinner House:

God's Dog (Cat. # 4388)

Cayote Says (Cat. # 5319)

Both books are available at the UUA Bookstore, 1-800-215-9076]