The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

On March 7, 2010

The poor. That’s my assignment. Every year both Erin and I have a sermon title or topic put up for auction to help raise money for the church. I thank Barbara Buell for her generous bid and for having thought of a title for me to take on. In all the years I have been doing this, I think she has proposed the shortest subject: just seven letters. The poor.

The poor have always been with us, as Jesus pointed out several millennia past. But a review of the history of America’s response to that fact shows two fascinating fluctuations. First, care for the poor has varied between what the seventeenth century distinguished as indoor or outdoor.

In the small communities where folks from England settled from 1620 on, care for the poor was provided outdoor, before that was the name for it. Which is to say, care was provided to a person in need, whether from illness, hunger, or poverty, at their home, as still happens to some degree in the small community that we are as a congregation. People were taxed for this purpose, and congregations and charities helped out, too.

But in time care was also provided indoor, which is to say, in facilities like poorhouses, almshouses, and poor farms. Polly Oliver, who grew up in Concord, can remember they still existed in some neighboring towns. Many a town still has a Poor Farm Road.

A similar fluctuation has occurred with the care of the mentally ill, treated locally or in collective facilities. To some degree the treatment of prisoners has fitted the same pattern.

To return to the poor farms, though, and the county homes for the needy, they also fit into a second and even more powerful fluctuation, between two different views of poverty. Because one of the functions of communal homes for the poor was to insure that these people were not simply too indolent to work. To stay in the poor house, or on the farm, required that you work. Society was not ignoring your need, it just wanted to guard against rewarding and thereby encouraging lax behavior.

Of course, in most cases exceptions were made for the poor who could not, with any sense of fairness or decency, be expected to work the farm or go to work, the most common case being women with children who had been widowed or abandoned. But society in this swing of the pendulum takes care to notice carefully and judge narrowly just who qualifies for its support. A fund here at First Parish, created a century ago, allows Erin or me to make donations to “the worthy sick and needy of the parish.”

That same concern finds expression in our current national welfare policies, adopted during the long period of conservatism in American politics that has prevailed since 1968, following the previous, liberal era that began in 1932, from the programs of the New Deal through those of the Great Society, before Ronald Reagan immortalized the welfare mother driving her Cadillac to pick up her check.

This swing between caring and expecting relates to the more common, easier characterization, between liberal and stingy support for the poor; but it is more fundamental. It has to do with how we understand poverty, its causes, and its alleviation. And I will tell you right now, on that score I think neither side is altogether right.

And that is why I think we fluctuate, in a free society where ideas compete and there is no cultural consensus that prevails — as it can in other, less diverse societies. We have a tradition of caring for those in need. At the beginning of this current, long-term conservative national mood, there was still serious talk of a negative income tax, where people of a certain income paid no income tax, those who made more paid more, increasingly, and those who made less were given money by the IRS, the more the less they made.

That arc of the pendulum swing reflects an understanding of poverty as something one is born into, or falls into, through no fault of one’s own, or maybe through fault, but after all, we’re only human, all of us, and those of us who can need to alleviate the want of those in need.

And then we also have a tradition of individualism, of expecting people to earn their own living, to take care of themselves and their family by showing up at work and putting in the labor. Some people credit our small religious movement with being a strong supporter of liberal political views, including generous welfare benefits; but others can cite one of our erstwhile ministers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with giving a strong philosophical foundation for conservative economic policy, as in his essay on “Self-Reliance.”

That arc of the pendulum swing goes with an understanding of poverty as something people bring on themselves through lack of ambition and effort, or just by failing when society for its smooth operation needs to reward success and not shortcoming.

Either answer, taken alone, is wrong. Rewarding effort and success serves society well to a point, but punishing the poor with disrespect and neglect is unfair and cruel. Relieving the burdens of poverty and seeking its end is virtuous, kind, and also relieves social tension; but underwriting indolence and unnecessary dependence can heighten tension of an opposite sort, on the part of providers, and it can serve poor people badly.

So we go on grappling to find the balance. The Bible itself has some ambivalence on the subject, and when it comes to a phrase like “the poor,” the Bible springs quickly to mind. There are few subjects on which the Bible has more to say. You have to look long and hard to find anything the Bible has to say about homosexuality, contraception, abortion, or stem cell research, anything at all. Whereas one list of all the quotations in the Bible regarding the poor takes up ten pages, and I found a few that the listing left out.

As I say, among the writers there are some who regard poverty with a matter of distain, although they are few, and all in the book Proverbs: “Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty; open thine eyes, and thou shalt be satisfied with bread.” [Prov. 20:13] Likewise, “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands in sleep: so shall thy poverty come….” [Prov. 23:33-34a]

I have been reading Ben Franklin, who would surely concur; although one might worry that a critic of the poor could turn things around to suggest that if a person be poor, it is because they sleep too much. Maybe they do, maybe not – just like many a rich person. Just so, in Proverbs we read that “the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty” [Prov. 23:21], but surely that is not the only or even the main way people get there.

Otherwise, the Bible is a rich resource for the view that society and its members are to be judged by their generosity to those who are poor. There are numerous rules that make the point, although sadly they often do not apply in obvious ways to how we live today. In that agricultural society, the demands included not using your land every seventh year, that the poor may get food from it [Ex.23:11]; not going over your vineyard a second time or picking up the grapes that have fallen – “Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the Lord your God.” [Lev. 19:10] The list goes on and on. It demands justice for the poor, and their care.

And when poor Job tries to justify his life, saddled mysteriously with disaster, he says, “Have I not wept for those in trouble? Has not my soul grieved for the poor?” [Job 30:25]

I quoted Psalms before in one way. I could do it twenty times over in defense of the poor, as in Psalm 82: “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy from the hand of the wicked.” [82:3-4]

Another recurrent biblical theme is that God acts on behalf of the poor. “I know the Lord secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy,” [Ps, 140:12] it says in Psalms, and “He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.” [Ps. 113:7]

As I say, this is what the Bible cares about, far more than about what many conservative Christians have focused upon. They even pretend that the Bible is against homosexuality because one explanation of why Sodom was destroyed was because a mob of men demanded that Lot turn over two male travelers to them for sex, despite Lot’s attempt to offer them his two daughters instead. It is not a pretty story.

But it is only one story, one of two accounts that explain Sodom’s destruction. In the book of Ezekial it says, “Now this was the sin of … Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned: they did not help the poor and needy.” [16:49]

That is what the Bible cares mostly about. In the book of Jeremiah, God, describing Josiah, King of Judah, says to Josiah’s son, “He defended the cause of the poor and needy…. Is that not what it means to know me?” [22:16]

Eventually we get to the Jewish upstart Jesus and the quote I referred to at the outset, “you have the poor among you always.” [Mt.26:11;John 12:8] It has been used in one odd and regrettable way. It sometimes gets cited as if its import were, there is no point trying to do anything about poverty – it has always been here, it always will be, don’t give it a thought. There is no justification for that outlook in the Bible, which cares a whole lot about poverty and wants us to give it many a thought.

Here’s the story: It was almost Passover. The climatic events in Jerusalem leading to Jesus’ execution were near. To quote the Gospel of Mark, “Jesus was in Bethany, in the home of Simon the leper. As he sat at table, a woman came in carrying a small bottle of very costly perfume, pure oil of nard. She broke it open and poured the oil over [Jesus’] head. Some of those present said to one another angrily, ‘Why this waste? The perfume might have been sold for thirty pounds and the money given to the poor‘; and they turned upon her with fury. But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone…. It is a fine thing she has done for me. You have the poor among you always, and you can help them whenever you like; but you will not always have me. She has done what lay in her power; she is beforehand with anointing my body for burial.’” [14:3-8] The same story in much the same form appears in Matthew [26:7-12], and in John [12:1-8], although there the challenge comes specifically from Judas Iscariot.

I have always taken the words, “the poor you shall always have with you,” to mean exactly the opposite of the interpretation that says, “why bother?”, but then again both my parents trained as social workers and worked in that field. To me it means, people will always have work to do, as the Bible itself demands, to protect people when they are poor from predation and oppression, and to tend to their needs.

Right before the episode in Bethany, Jesus tells his disciples that on the day of reckoning, when the Son of Man comes to judge people, he will tell those destined for heaven, “When I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was a stranger you took me into your home, when naked you clothed me….” [25:35] When did we do that?, they ask. Whenever you did it to anyone, however humble.

The Book of Deuteronomy puts it plainly: “There will always be poor in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded … toward the poor and needy….” [15:11]

But that is not the full or only answer. There must be as well a passion for ending whatever it is that causes the hunger, the thirst, the homelessness, the nakedness. Eastern religions do well to raise compassion up as a goal, but the belief in karma and reincarnation can justify indifference to structural injustice, just as can a wrong interpretation of the reality of poverty’s persistence.

To imagine the war on poverty can ever be totally, lastingly won requires more optimism than I can muster personally, although I love the dream and I will work toward making it come true as I can, and urge others and the world to do likewise, while in the meantime we try to do what we can for the poor with us now.

A few final thoughts. First, I apologize for using the word “we” as if it were impossible that anyone here in this room today could be poor, as though if you are poor, you don’t belong here. I don’t know how to solve that and still keep the sermon to twenty minutes; the best I can do is to say I don’t mean it that way. One of the side benefits of our housing homeless families four weeks a year is the confirmation it provides that folks who find themselves in a bind for a while are folks like us, and any of us may find our self in the ranks of the poor some time.

Second, the very term “the poor” is open to challenge, if it fortifies the notion that there is some permanent group of people who are different, like in a caste system. But there is a class system in the United States, as elsewhere, and some people in it are particularly deprived and vulnerable for lack of assets or income. The Hebrew Bible points out that they exist, and wants them cared for and protected. I was talking with the husband of a colleague of mine about this topic. He grew up Jewish and said, it never occurred to him growing up that poverty said anything negative about a person but only about a society.

And finally, I need to cite last Sunday’s eye-opening editorial in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof. He notes that most of us have not noticed that over the last decade, American evangelical Christians “have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues” involving injustice and inhumanity around the world. “The largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization [is] World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has nearly tripled over the last decade. [It] now has 40,000 staff members in nearly 100 countries.”

Kristof says “Some Americans assume that religious groups offer aid to entice converts. That’s incorrect. Today, groups like World Vision ban the use of aid to lure anyone into a religious conversation.”

He concludes, “If secular liberals can give up their snootiness [about faith-based organizations], and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.” Maybe poverty, too.  

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Mass

On February 14, 2010

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

          Here it is, Valentine’s Day, and the choir is favoring us with four numbers that capture four kinds of love: eros, philia, agape, and caritas. So it seemed that I should preach about love, unless I preached instead about President’s Day, which is tomorrow, or the Olympics, or the Westminster Dog Show, none of which I will deal with, or immigration reform or the afterlife, which I will.

          Immigration reform I can deal with quickly. It comes up because a number of advocacy groups, including UUMassAction and the Standing on the Side of Love Campaign, hope we will re-imagine Valentine’s Day and send Valentines to our federal delegation in support of Rep. Gutierrez’s proposal for national comprehensive immigration reform and join the effort to stop the raids in the Commonwealth. 

          “Standing on the side of love” is a phrase that is used a lot in Unitarian Universalism these days. It is the title of a song often sung at denominational meetings. As you just heard, there is a Standing on the Side of Love Campaign, usually devoted to promoting marriage equality.

          The large banner that flew last June in front of the conference center in Salt Lake City where General Assembly was held said, “Standing on the Side of Love.” It was intended to proclaim boldly in that most Mormon of cities our support for same-sex marriage, although I suspect that meaning was lost on everyone but us.

          The conference center is near Mormon Square with the tabernacle and all, and the casual passer-by may have thought the banner was a Mormon thing, standing on the side of good old-fashioned, traditional marriage. So on this day, Valentine’s Day, let me be clearer: we stand on the side of love between couples of whatever gender.

          That said, let me move on to the afterlife, fully intending to get back to love again before I am done. How did the afterlife get in here? It began when someone suggested, after I gave a UU take on the Bible with the children two weeks ago, that I give a UU take on death with the children. That connected in my mind to a book about the afterlife or afterlives I had just read with delight, and I thought I could relate them both to love on Valentine’s Day, if not to immigration or American presidents, in this sermon.

          But I could not bring myself to deal with death with the children on Valentine’s Day, even if death features prominently in the story of Valentine himself, a third-century priest who went on marrying people, in secret, after the emperor Claudius II banned all marriages and engagements so more young men would enlist in the army. As Susan Sherwood noted in the Town Crier, “In due course, [Valentine] was apprehended, dragged before the court, and condemned to be beaten to death with a club and have his head hacked off … on February 14, probably in the year 270.” It’s a good story, but I couldn’t see using it with the children. And I had this story I almost used last week, so I went with that instead.

          But I still wanted to use that book I referred to earlier. It is called Sum: forty tales from the afterlives, by David Eagleman. I thank John Gantz for introducing me to it, and I have been pressing it on others. The reactions have been mixed, as they no doubt will be here.  

          The forty tales are all short, only a few small pages long. Each depicts an imaginative view of what the afterlife might be. I will tell you a few, like the first. It begins, “In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

          “You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes.” And so forth, until at the end he writes, “Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of things. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is bliss: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.”

          Eagleman regularly throws in surprising twists like that; a child hopping on burning sand is not exactly a happy image, and it may describe how our lives can feel sometimes, too rushed and uncomfortable. As elsewhere, Eagleman suggests our situation is better than others he can imagine in the afterlife.

          I’ll read you one more, because love comes up in it, and I have not forgotten it is Valentine’s Day:

          “As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are – which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst.

          “Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don’t do our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate, and important work.

          “After three centuries of this toil, we have the option of a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth.” [I apologize to the people of Haiti and anywhere it is impossible even with the greatest imagination to think of being at a resort.]

          “The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse – instead we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.

          “Those are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.”

          You see, he did it again, in this case contrasting our desire for big, meaningful experiences with how blessed we are in fact that our experiences are meaningless and small compared to what we might return to in the afterlife.

          I have recommended the book to three colleagues, suggesting they read a story or two to see if it wasn’t something they’d like. One read tale after tale, laughing aloud, and said she’d be buying the book. A second read story after story, without laughing once, and concluded that the book was depressing and he didn’t get what the author’s point was. The third had not only read it already, he leads a weekly discussion at the church he serves and at every session he reads a tale and the group discusses it.

          But back to the meeting of eyes, the glimpse of flesh, to experiences of love and joy, back to eros, philia, agape, and caritas, classical forms of love. I quote my colleague Margo McKenna: “The Greeks recognized four kinds of love over 2,500 years ago.  And, it is their influence that comes down to us in western civilization as we look at love in our modern society.  The four most commonly understood kinds of love are: 1. Eros, the basis for the word erotic, meaning love that is desire, and usually associated with sexuality.  2. Philial, the basis for word family, meaning love based on a blood relationship or a group.  3.  Caritas, love for [all people].…  4. Agape, … love for the universe, a love that transcends reason, and desires good not only for all humanity, but all living beings, and the earth itself.  This love is one that is entirely selfless … without possessiveness, without self-interest, and without limit.”

          So we had an erotic prelude and music, an offertory that had included both filia and agape, and the postlude, “Ubi Caritas,” is about … caritas.

          In my mind, pairing love of every sort and the afterlife, or death, if you will, pairing love and death as this sermon does, is perfectly natural: it is what a minister does at every memorial service.

          We say then that a time of death can make us treasure all the more the days that are ours still to live, and our chances to love and be loved. Eagleman has a tale in which, when you die, you are offered a chance to make any change you want and live your life over. You choose to be the one who eradicates death. You are informed that this is a choice you have made before, and been frustrated. You persist, and you do eradicate death. “But eventually, as … warned, your success begins to lose its shine. People come to discover that the end of death is the death of motivation. Too much life, it turns out, is the opiate of the masses. There is a noticeable decline in accomplishments. People take more naps. There’s no great rush.

          “In an attempt to salvage their once-dynamic lives, people begin to set suicide dates for themselves.” And things go from bad to worse until the mob breaks in, shuts down the computers that established deathlessness, and eventually you die and end up being offered the same choice again.  

          No, it is not deathlessness we seek, but the re-awakening to life that can come when we remember that our time is finite and that chances for love abound. There are words I say sometimes at graveside, quotes from I do not know who: “In a world where our most precious goods are perishable, we pray that we may honor our dead by being so good in our living, so kindly, so understanding, so transcendent of pettiness, that in our love for those who remain and who need us and our strength, we shall partly make good our loss, and in the beauty of our lives erect the noblest monument to our dead.

          “We pray that when we go back to the daily round of our duties, we may be more eager to be helpful and kind, as though in the presence of death itself we had learned to know the deeper meanings of life. Thankful as we are for this fine life, may we go forth to be better and more loving in the years that remain for us here on earth.”

          And we also say then that love persists beyond loss, the love we have for a person, and love of various kinds, depending on our relationship with the deceased.

          Some of you have heard these words only too often, as we often say them here at such times. We say, “We gather in the presence of unfathomable mystery; with humble hearts we bow before the veil which has fallen between us and one beloved. But don’t fear: for greater than sorrow is love, and love endures through pain and grief. Love binds all hearts in bonds of friendship and courage.”

          Then we may quote the poet John Hall Wheelock:

“The fragile network of love that binds together

Spirit and spirit, over the whole earth,

Love–that by the very nature of things

Is doomed, is destined to heartbreak, mortal love,

Which is a form of suffering–here and now,

In its brief moment, yes even in its defeat,

Triumphs over the very nature of things,

And is the only answer, the only atonement,

Redeeming all.” (John Hall Wheelock)

          “And so,” we say, “while we meet in the presence of death, we honor to the spirit of life. We make this time the time of love, and these simple rites love’s confessional. For it is Love’s tribute that we come to offer here today.

          And sometimes we say a brief poem found on an ancient sundial. One of you recently lost a close family member, and asked for short quotes, one of which might be used on the program for the service. She picked that poem, which I first used in the first memorial service I conducted here. It is:

Time flies

Suns rise

And snows fall.

Let time go by.

Love is forever over all.

          But maybe I should close with something more romantic this Valentine’s Day. I will tell you the best little quotes I came upon this week. Judy Garland is quoted as saying, “It was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.”  And the novelist Robert Heinlein noted, “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” May you know such love, and may a touch of it be part of all our relations here.

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

On February 7, 2010

I suppose it is probably time to forgive Jimmy Boyd, who opened the cage door, letting my parakeet fly away. I don’t think he was entirely aware what the consequences of his action would be. After all, when the act was committed, in 1954, Jimmy was three years old.

I am even prepared to forgive Bobby Morris, who did know just what he was doing, and was older by seven or eight years when, in that same era, he devoted himself with determination to beating up his male classmates, at least the few of them that included me.

Not that I have changed my mind about the reprehensible nature of a bully’s behavior. But who knows what he was going through at the time; the attacks were maybe less personal than they seemed. Anyway, Bobby is now a man in his mid-60s, like me, if he is still around; and life goes on.

According to Talmudic wisdom, “If a person hurts or offends you, you are entitled to be upset with him for … two or three days…. If the bitter feelings extend to a fourth day, it is because you are … nursing the grievance, keeping it on artificial life support, instead of letting it die a natural death.” [106]

This fact was passed along by Rabbi Harold Kushner. He does modify the point by adding, “We are talking about routine arguments and misunderstandings here, not major offenses.” [106] But while Bobby’s beatings were more than routine arguments and maybe justified some extra days of upset, I do not think of them as major offenses … and it has been fifty-four years. Bobby, by-gones are by-gones.

I am even willing to classify a junior high school classmate’s telling me the secret to “Psycho” in the middle of the movie, which he had seen, as less than a major offense. Likewise, reluctantly, every lie I have heard over the decades from people trying to sell me cars.

Bad driving I have witnessed, points of view I have heard that were totally and annoyingly at variance from my own, rude salespersons I have encountered, contractors who did not come through – well, you can make a list of your own – if the episode happened more than three days ago, it may be getting toward time to let go, if possible, leaving space in their going for happier thoughts.

You may be wondering, just how do we do that, let go of grudges? Well, one way is represented by a cartoon by Jules Feiffer that has a man about my age saying, “I can’t remember names, obligations, where I put things, if I did something already or just hope to do it. That’s the bad part. The good part is, I can’t remember 45 years of grudges.”

I am not sure if the years as they accumulate do not help in other ways, too, although it may just be that it takes years for some of us to see what other folks knew all along, like, how much of what could seem annoying in behavior is not worth thinking about, or how little annoyance contributes to happy solutions, outside us or within.

Rabbi Kushner provides theological encouragement for our forgiving. Harold is now retired from the congregation he served in Natick, having had enormous success as an author, beginning with When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Today I am drawing on his later book, How Good Do We Have To Be?: A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness.

Now I know that there are some of you who are understandably uncomfortable with the notion of forgiveness because of the awfulness of things that were done to you, or you fear that talk of forgiveness is going to encourage people to put up with behavior they should be confronting, reporting, or fleeing.

Kushner’s focus is narrower. When forgiveness confronts monstrous behavior, other answers than his are called for. That would be a different book, and a different Sunday – an important one, but not this one.

The questions of forgiveness that Kushner deals with have to do with our more common failings, our derelictions of duty, our lapses of judgment, our angry outbursts, our insensitivities, our hurtfulness and greed. While recognizing that people do commit such acts, he says we are also capable of being “very good indeed.” [177] We are able to repent of our mistakes, learn from them, and improve, become better people.

But not perfect, ever. That is his basic point. No one is perfect, or can be, because “as human beings the situations we face are so complex that no one could possible be expected to get them right all the time.” [64] I acknowledge again that there are people whose imperfections go to extremes. Kushner knows that, too, but he wants to talk about the most of us who are pretty okay and try to do right and mostly succeed, but not always.

He wants us to lighten up on each other and on ourselves, without losing our own high hopes to do right – that is to say, to ease up on our judgments while we keep our aspirations high. Try to do good, but accept that you will not always succeed, for “our choices are so complicated and temptations so strong” [174]; and let that insight make gentle your judgment of yourself and of others as well, even as we go on “struggling to be as good as we can … never letting our failures be a reason for giving up the struggle.” [174]

He notes with regret that religion has not only failed to get this forgiving point of view across, more often than not it has been on the other side, often with a vengeance. “It is unfortunate,” he writes, “that so many of us have been brought up to think of religion as a scolding voice that makes us feel guilty. I wish we could learn to see religion as the source of healing and of relieving guilt….” [62] “Religion properly understood is the cure for feelings of guilt sand shame, not their cause.” [43]

He has a prime example of how religion has been misused, in his view, and how a familiar story could be told in a new, important, and virtually opposite way: the story of Adam and Eve. Kushner thinks that in our culture there is an attitude toward mistakes bred of that story as it is usually told, where Adam and Eve are given clear instructions not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil, do so anyway, and are horribly punished by God, doomed with their progeny to hard labor, painful childbirth, and death.

Christianity compounded the negative message – St. Paul and St. Augustine in particular – with the notion of Original Sin, adding the curse of some taint we all bear because of the transgression in Eden, a native inclination to do wrong. Sin becomes not just a wrong deed, requiring repentance and reform, but a genetic condition, forgivable only by the atonement of Christ on the cross.

Why, I once saw in the newsletter of a church here in Wayland a quote by a contemporary writer [Oswald Chambers] saying, “Never build your case for forgiveness on the idea that God … will forgive us because He loves us…. God forgives sin only because of the death of Christ.”

Kushner goes back to the original account in the Bible and instead of a story of God’s condemnation of humankind, finds “an inspiring, even liberating story, a story of what a wonderful, complicated, painful and rewarding thing it is to be a human being.” It is “a tale, not of Paradise Lost but of Paradise Outgrown, not of Original Sin but of the Birth of Conscience.” [21]

“I am suggesting,” he goes on, “that the story of the Garden of Eden is not an account of people being punished for having made one mistake, losing Paradise because they were not perfect. It is the story of the first human beings graduating, evolving from the relatively uncomplicated world of animal life to the immensely complicated world of being human and knowing that … there are such things as Good and Evil. They enter a world where they will inevitably make mistakes, not because they are weak or bad but because the choices they confront will be difficult ones. But the satisfactions will be equally great.” [30-31] “I read the story of the garden … as an account of Eve – in a terribly brave act – giving us humanity, with all its pain and all its richness.” [24-25]

In this retelling, “religion is not the carping voice of condemnation, telling us that the normal is sinful and the well-intentioned mistake is an unforgivable transgression that will damn us forever. Religion is the voice that says, I will guide you through this minefield of difficult moral choices, sharing with you the insights and experiences of the greatest souls of the past, and I will offer you comfort and forgiveness when you are troubled by the painful choices you made.” [31-32] 

I should probably get us back out of the garden, but those of you who remember your Bible may be wondering how Kushner finesses what you may recall as God’s clear directive and God’s imposition of woeful life on the couple outside the garden. Kushner suggests that God might have wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, so he would not be the only one who knew the difference between good and evil. And when he “told Adam not to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, He gave it not as a prohibition but as a warning, like the person telling a friend in line for a promotion” that he may want to think twice before he takes on new and difficult tasks. And when God told them their lives would be painful, he was only giving them the wisdom of his own experience.

Kushner goes on to develop the idea that the three traditional curses are not really curses anyways, for work makes us feel useful, needed, and creative; love and sexuality can be painful, but also the source of much satisfaction and pleasure; and death … well, he notes, the so-called curse could not have been death itself, for all things die, but the awareness of death, without which we would not so use and delight in the days that are ours.

Kushner has some other points, too, including an extended consideration of sibling rivalry; but his main point is the one about perfectionism, guilt, and forgiveness.  We are not perfect and can not be, nor can our partners, parents, children, siblings and friends. It comes of living in this world east of Eden, where people can’t help but make mistakes. It profits us little to hold fast to those memories, to hold on rather than moving on.

I was at a meeting this week of a committee that is, over the course of several years, re-writing the professional code of conduct for UU ministers. It is nearly done. It runs 41 pages. Should someone roll their eyes at the length, the chair will say, well, you have a choice: 41 pages, or the shorter version, which is only three words: Don’t be stupid.

Many of the Guidelines concern not just relations with parishioners but also with fellow clergy, and some on the committee have stretched the list to three commandments: Don’t be stupid. Pick up the phone. And, Get over it. Move on.

There is a custom during the Jewish High Holy Days. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, congregants may go together to a nearby body of flowing water and cast into it bread crumbs or lint from their pockets – or sometimes these days, pieces of bread – to symbolize their sins in the year being left behind. This is called Tashlich [or Tashlikh], which means “casting off.” Ten days later on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, there is a reading from the book of Micah, thanking God for “washing out our guilt, casting all our sins into the depths of the sea.”

Tashlich, casting off — I like the idea. Maybe next time you or I am near a body of flowing water we might send our misdeeds out toward the depths of the sea, and maybe as well, memories we nurse of grievances and our futile expectations of human perfection.

It does not forsake our hopes of living decent, loving, kindly lives to admit that we do not always measure up. Instead, it recognizes how impossibly hard the effort is, forgives us our fallings short, and frees us to renew the precious but ever imperfect endeavor.

A Sermon Preached at the First Parish in Wayland, Mass.

by the Rev. Ken Sawyer

on January 31, 2010

It seems that about every ten years it occurs to me that I haven’t discussed the role of the Bible in a typical Unitarian Universalist church like our own, that the newer among us here may wonder about that, that longer-time members may appreciate a retelling, and that I might have something new to say – and I will eventually, having recently read the latest edition of the book of Genesis, one illustrated by the cartoonist R. Crumb. Then we will return again this morning to one of the most beloved of Bible texts. [The 23^rd Psalm was both the responsive reading, in a modernized version, and a choir number.]

First, some historical context. When this congregation was begun, back in 1640, not only was the Bible read at every service, elucidating the text and relating it to their lives was largely the point of the service. The minister would take a single sentence from the Bible and over the course of the next few hours he or she … well, he … would ruminate about it aloud, in the style of the time, saying that there were two interpretations of the text; and upon choosing one, that there were two possible interpretations of that interpretation; and so forth. And then after lunch, the congregation would be back to hear another bit of scripture explained, at equal length, using the same method.

After all, these were people who understood their whole existence, as individuals and as a community, in biblical terms. They saw themselves like the Israelites of old, in a covenant with God to settle a new land if they would abide by God’s laws, as set forth in the Bible. Even as the churches of eastern Massachusetts became more liberal in the course of the eighteenth century, even as they drifted away from the harsher doctrines of Calvinism, there was little apparent weakening of their belief that the Bible was the source of all truth, wisdom, and guidance.

By the 1820s, when the old system called the Massachusetts Standing Order began to come apart, with liberal and conservative congregations declaring themselves for the Unitarian or Trinitarian side, both sides turned to the Bible to support their views. And so in the covenant of this congregation adopted in 1829, a year after the conservative members of the First Parish had pulled out to form the Trinitarian Church across the street, the liberals here would still declare that membership meant, among other things, acknowledging “the divine authority and sufficiency of Sacred Scriptures….”

When they revised their covenant in 1845, it still included the expectation that in joining, new members were declaring that they would “take the Bible as [their] rule of faith and practice[,] prayerfully search for its holy teachings and conscientiously follow its light.” Indeed, that had become the only requirement to be welcomed into the congregation’s fellowship.

But by then, dramatic changes were underway. Unitarianism was confronting its first internal dispute, as to whether the truth of its message depended on its grounding in the Bible, as the old guard contended, or whether its message wasn’t simply true, eternally, everywhere true, whether one encountered it in the Bible, in nature, in one’s own soul, or even in the sacred texts of other religious traditions, Hinduism being the first that came to be known to New England minds.

The New England minds in particular were those of the Transcendentalists, headquartered up the road in Concord, led by the former Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and representing the American wing of German Romanticism. But by then, another German development was gathering power that would also dramatically alter the place of the Bible in the life of the church, a scholarly effort called “higher criticism,” that took the Bible as a text to be explored like any other historical set of documents and studied by critical means.

What head-spinning changes! And there were more: While the Bible was becoming just one way of knowing truth among many to many people, including churchgoers and their clergy, while it was becoming just another book that could be studied to some scholars, along came scientists, Darwin among them, to undermine claims that the Bible was at all an accurate guide in biology, anthropology, geology, cosmology, history, or many another area of knowledge.

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, less than a half-century after the covenant of 1845, ministers of First Parish still cited the Bible, but without the sense of its being a singular or even necessarily a powerful source of inspiration or guidance. One of our ministers wondered why we even bothered pretending any more that the Bible had any significant role to play in religious understanding, and left the denomination to join the Ethical Culture Society. Another minister was much less impressed with anything the Bible had to say than he was with the writings of the economic theorist, Lloyd George.

And that was over a century ago. In the years since, the Bible has not recaptured its normative place at the center of our common faith, even though it remains very much a normative source of wisdom for many individual members, and even though many an effort has been made by ministers and others to keep some of its importance alive.

I have lent myself to that effort over the years. In fact, when I gave a sermon like this one in the 1980s, I quoted the nineteenth century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who said, “As a master, the Bible were a tyrant; as a help, I have not time to tell its worth.” I said I wanted to take time to make better friends with the Bible, gain easier access to its wisdom by better understanding its parts, and hear again “the beauty and inspiration of words that people have turned to for centuries.” So I began giving sermons devoted to the books of the Bible, in order, one per every season.

In my version of this service from the ‘90s, I had to admit that with the years those efforts had grown less frequent. But I was still saying, “I do not want to let the Bible fade too far from our congregational awareness,” and I gave lots of reasons why.

I don’t seem to have gotten very far in convincing even myself, though, for I have turned to the Bible since then no more than before and probably less. We did have a study group just a few years ago that I led that met monthly and read through the three synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke). We read Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus every Christmastime at the tableau.

And as I said, I read Genesis again recently. Reading it again reminds me what happened years ago when I set off into that series of sermons on the books of the Bible I had promised to give. Right off one has Genesis to deal with, and its tales of murder, betrayal, incest, polygamy, the flood God uses to kill all humans except one family, Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s willingness to murder his son – I tell you, it isn’t easy to find a story I could imagine using with the children here.

All these episodes are graphically illustrated by R. Crumb, whom many will have not heard of while others can remember “Keep On Truckin’,” Fritz the Cat, or a character in the movie “American Splendor.” And I do mean all the episodes – he spent five years and illustrated the entire book, including the racy scenes, some of the genealogies, otherwise know as the begats, and lists like, “These are the sons of Reuel, son of Esau: the Chieftain Nahath, the Chieftain Zerah, the Chieftain Shammah, and the Chieftain Mizzah.” Crumb draws a face for every one, hundred upon hundreds of bearded Semitic faces, and women, and landscapes, and animals. 

In his introduction, Crumb points out that he has faithfully reproduced every word of the original text, and he notes: “Every other comic book version of the Bible that I’ve seen contains passages of completely made-up narrative and dialogue, in an attempt to streamline and ‘modernize’ the old scriptures, and still, these various comic book Bibles all claim to adhere to the belief that the Bible is “the word of God,” or “inspired by God,” whereas I, ironically, do not believe the Bible is the word of God. I believe it is the words of men.

“It is, nonetheless,” he goes on, “a powerful text with levels of meaning that reach deeply into our collective consciousness, our historical consciousness, if you will.” He believes the various stories evolved over time, some being variations of earlier stories from other religions of the area, like the Sumerian flood story; and that they were compiled and edited by the priesthood during the Babylonian Captivity, about 2600 years ago, who quite possibly altered the stories to serve their own political purposes.

And then in his commentary on the text, he makes clear that he thinks those purposes included strengthening not just their own power but also the patriarchal model that had taken over a society that had previously been a mixture of male and female leadership. He finds that over and again power is exercised by women if you pay attention, and an odd story makes sense if you see through to what the original might have been.

A case in point: three times in Genesis one of our male heroes, traveling with his wife, arrives in a foreign country and passes his wife off as his sister to the king, so the king can add her to his wives. This is explained as a way of gaining safety for the man, who would otherwise be killed, so beautiful was the wife.

Crumb prefers to believe we are seeing, though disguised, a remnant of a “sacred marriage,” which was a ritual that high priestesses performed to invest power on men whom they favored. So that would have been the reason why Sarah, for instance, was paired off with the Pharaoh, who would ordinarily not even have know she had arrived in his vast territory. It is because high priestesses women had that kind of authority, though the priests have covered that over in the retelling.

So ideas keep bubbling up about the Bible, and one thing about Unitarian Universalists, we are not afraid to give them a hearing. Maybe there is more to find there than is commonly noticed. Rereading Genesis with Crumb’s brief commentary in mind, one starts seeing how powerful the women are, along with the men, how often the women make the decisions and the men go along, how the women manipulate matters to their children’s advantage, how the Bible at times provides a genealogy or story that gives away that this society was once matriarchal, too, as when the begats pay more attention to the wife’s offspring than to the husband’s.

And then there are in the Bible for many of us a character, a story, a lesson, or maybe just a phrase that speaks to your heart, your mind, or the depths of your soul from that ancient collection of texts. (It may even be in Genesis.) Maybe it is one that we read together today.

The sometimes, somewhat Unitarian Universalist, existentialist novelist the late Kurt Vonnegut, dared to say in print, as regards William Shakespeare, that “I am here to suggest that the greatest writer in the English language so far was Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), and not the Bard of Avon (1564-1616). Poetry certainly was in the air back then. Try this:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want;

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still

     waters,

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness

     for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear

     no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:

     thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I

     will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

“Lancelot Andrewes was the chief translator and paraphraser among the scholars who gave us the King James Bible.” [Timequake 131-2]

Subsequent scholarship has revealed quite a number of errors, or at the very least, a goodly number of disputable translations in the Elizabethan version. But when someone has died, as often as not the one text that I am requested to say is the 23^rd psalm – and in the King James Version, if I would, please. And I would, and I do.

Because I know how potent and decent and healing are both the text and the cause of its request. A memorial service is often a time to listen to words that help, maybe ones that that are ancient and communal, that comfort and heal. In our particular branch of the human family, the 23^rd Psalm often seems to do the trick.

The Bible can boring, inaccurate, and even unhealthy, even stupid, even venal, but it has carried across the century words and images with a power deeper than argument or reason.

As Unitarian Universalists, we are free to say both things: that the book has much that is wonderful, and much that isn’t at all. There is many a passage, a story, a lesson, well worth holding to heart, even while we are free to reject what does not serve religion’s great goal of adding to the world’s supply of love and kindness, justice and wisdom.

And we are free to say something just as important: not only does the Bible not contain only truth, there is much truth it does not contain. “Revelation is not sealed,” in the words of the hymn; “truth and right are still revealed” and they always have been in other places than biblical writ.

So that’s how it is here, and has been for a while: open to the Bible’s haunting dreams of peace and justice, its insights into human behavior, and the loveliness of its language, even if we know that not all its words are lovely, insightful, or pacific, or just.    

And we try to value the richness elsewhere — in other faith traditions, in contemporary arts and sciences, in the unfolding thought and drama of our own lives — hoping with effort and good fortune to find — from the Bible perhaps, but from many another source as well — texts that strive to be as sacred, sustaining, and sufficient as the Bible alone was to those who sat here back in 1829.

So may it be.

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

On January 17, 2010

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

I heard an interview on National Public Radio with the prolific author Richard Holmes, who has written extensively about the Romantic poets of early nineteenth century England, Coleridge and Shelley in particular. He was discussing his latest book, which is also about that era and those same poets, but more so about the great scientists of the time, whose remarkable advances were a major focus of European culture, including those poets.

The book is called, The Age of Wonder. Having stared longingly at it in the window of the Concord Bookstore one day in December when my wife Carol and I were walking by, I ended up getting a copy for Christmas.

I knew from the interview, there was a sermon to be had. I grew up a Unitarian, and “wonder” was one of the big words in that religion, and it still is. We don’t talk much about redemption, justification, or sin, but when Unitarian Universalists most recently set down the sources that our tradition draws on, first on the list was, “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and sustain life.”

One could say that that is just a crafty way of saying “God” without upsetting people who prefer not to use that word. But no, it is more than that: it is the whole universe that is wondrous, life itself is shot full of wonders. Which to a remarkable degree was the experience of people in England, as well as in France, Germany, and elsewhere, in the period Richard Holmes calls the age of wonder, the time of Romantic science, which he dates between “two celebrated voyages of exploration. These were Captain James Cook’s first round-the-world expedition … begun in 1768, and Charles Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos Islands … begun in 1831.” [xvi]

When the era opens, “science” is not even a word, and one can make a case that few had been closely observing nature, nor trying to learn its deeper truths directly. Truth was to be found in the church or in works of philosophy – which is what science was classed as initially — until people started looking for themselves, people who would by 1834 be called scientists. Holmes wonders “when people really did first begin to look at objects in nature carefully, for their own sake,” and argues that “the precise, even reverent contemplation of nature is clearly associated with the Romantics, and can be seen arriving in private journals and letters from the 1760s onwards.” [249n]

The term Romantic science may seem odd, and Holmes notes that “Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe that this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notice of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can do so still.” [xvi]

This period is also known as the second scientific revolution. Holmes says “It was inspired primarily by a sudden series of breakthroughs in astronomy and chemistry…. [It brought] a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work. It was driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery.”

So when the great chemist Humphry Davy decided that “All mental problems – including pain and unhappiness – might be cured by the chemistry of drugs and gases,” [255]  he personally undertook to try it out, and nearly killed himself breathing carbon dioxide. He persisted, though, and discovered that nitrous oxide, now known as laughing gas, had a jolly fine effect on the mind and he began taking it three or four times a day, and sharing the knowledge and the gas with friends and patients.

Ballooning had its dangers, too, which didn’t stop people from going up, for science or for fun. Talk about discovery, this is the first time people are able to leave the earth and see it from the sky. Eventually there was an accidental death, and then two French balloonists, attempting to cross the English Channel for the first time from that side, died when their balloon caught fire.

“The idea of the exploratory voyage, often alone and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science.” Other notions common to it were what may be called the Newton syndrome, the idea of the scientist as a lonely, driven genius; and the Eureka moment, when that scientist suddenly hits upon a great discovery.

Holmes pays a lot of attention to three figures who tower over the times: the botanist Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain James Cook on his three-year voyage around the world, collecting specimens, including over a thousand plants new to English eyes,  and ingratiating himself with the natives during a long stay in Tahiti, about whom he wrote after his several trips there; the astronomer William Herschel, a German immigrant and professional musician who with his sister scanned the skies with extraordinary telescopes he made himself; and the chemist Humphry Davy, whom we have already met.

Banks went on as President of the Royal Society to nurture the scientific advances of the time. Herschel is a great tale, a man who laboriously, with great skill and patience, fashioned telescopes and was only discovered by the larger scientific community when come upon, outside his house in Bath, England, viewing the stars, by a local physician whose father was in the Royal Society. Herschel became hugely famous in time not only for his ever-larger telescopes but for discovering the planet, Uranus.

Humphry Davy comes along when chemistry was “becoming the Romantic science par excellence,” [244], replacing alchemy with experimentation. Up until then, the world was thought to consist of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. But in the 1780s it was discovered, using the newly-invented voltaic battery, that water was really composed of two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. Air wasn’t just air, it was (and still is) comprised of hydrogen, oxygen, and small amounts of other gases. The fact that we take oxygen from the air and exhale carbon dioxide, and plants do the opposite, was determined by our own Joseph Priestly, who was among other things a Unitarian minister. Likewise, earth and fire were not so basic and simple.

Davy went on to many successes, most famously a lamp that could be used in mines that would not set off the kind of explosion that had been a terrible, deadly problem.

But the advances were more than interesting, clever, and often useful. Some transformed the way people understood the world. They were wonders. It was a wonder that Herschel spotted this tiny blur of a dot in the midst of all those stars, planets, and nothingness. But he did a lot of looking, he had a great telescope, and he knew that the dot was something unusual. Other people had seen it before, but thought it was a star. In fact it took a while before the scientific community conceded a new planet had been found, the first in over a thousand years.

And it was very far away. “Uranus became a symbol of the new, pioneering discoveries of Romantic science. An unfathomably larger universe was suddenly opening up, and this gradually transformed popular notions of the size and mystery of the world ‘beyond the heavens.’ Indeed, the very terms ‘world,’ ‘heaven’ and ‘universe;’ began to change their meanings.” [106]

Herschel went farther. As reported at the time, “Mr [sec] Herschel is of the opinion that the starry heaven is replete with … nebulae, and that each of them is a distinct and separate system…. The Milky Way he supposes to be that particular nebula in which our sun is placed….” And he had its shape figured out. He even surmised that the heavens were not “architecturally fixed by the creator, but appeared to be constantly changing and evolving…. The nebulae themselves [were] constantly forming new stars out of condensing gas, in a process of continuous creation. They were replacing stars which were lost.” [123]

He pretty much got it all right, except for an early paper he wrote about the people who lived on the moon.

And over in the world of chemistry, “The disappearance of the traditional world of the ‘four elements’ was revolutionary.” [247]

Science opened up a world of wonders to explore. Electricity was under investigation, and magnetism, and the study of clouds and weather patterns. And through it all, the sense of wonder and hope, for there was this sense that science was a force for goodness and progress.

“The Wonder of It All.” That was the working title of this sermon, sharing some of the excitement of these Romantics at encountering the world, a spirit I like to encourage in myself and others. Well, even then the title was “Nonetheless, The Wonder of It All,” but it ended with an exclamation point. The wonder of it all! The wonder of the world.

But as the week worked out, as the disaster in Haiti unfolded, I awoke one morning with the title I ended up using, “The Awesome Ambiguity.” Wonder and awe go hand in hand, awe being the larger of the two, the somber silence with which we view enormity. This is how many spoke of viewing the heavens, realizing their vastness, feeling not just the beauty but what they called the terror of it, feeling so small, so in awe.

There was ambiguity even in the scientific heyday of which Holmes writes, famously captured by Mary Shelley in her novel, Frankenstein. I have been wanting to preach on the book ever since I listened to it this fall. It is a much better book than the movies would lead you to believe. The differences are extreme, like the monster in the movies speaks in grunts and groans, while the monster in the novel – he never has a name – is the most articulate character, and his reasoning is deep. He is a profoundly tragic character, and it is a heart-breaking story as well as good tale of horror. It is about loneliness and not being accepted, and when the monster turns monstrous and is condemned by Frankenstein, the monster notes that he is who Frankenstein made him who he is, raising theological questions about God and free will.

But yes, the book is also about what everyone says, how science can get out of hand, and scientists be overcome with hubris. It was an optimistic age. Davy “showed that applied science could be a force for good previously unparalleled in human society, and might eventually liberate [hu]mankind from untold misery and suffering.” [371]

For those who don’t recall, as young, brilliant Victor Frankenstein himself said, “After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of germination and life. Nay more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”  So he gathers up the necessary parts of the human body and – working alone, whatever the movies say about Igor – he brings life to a person he has put together.

This turns out to be a bad idea, and much ill comes of it. Let this be a warning.

The episode relates to a big issue of the day then, that of Vitalism, which wondered, “What is this … vivifying principle?” [316] Is it blood, or spirit, or God, or what? Maybe someone will figure it out and bring dead bodies to life. And somebody tried! There had been rumors that an Italian professor, Giovanni Aldini, had put on dazzling “re-animation exhibitions.” In 1803, “in London, surrounded by eager publicity, Aldini attempted to revive the body of a murderer, one Thomas Forster, by the application of electrical charges six hours after he had been hanged….” [317]

There was some muscle activity, and, it was written, “Vitality might have been fully restored, if many ulterior circumstances had not rendered this – inappropriate.” [317] Attempts were made using the bodies of other animals until public outcry led to their banning, “and Aldini was forced to leave the country….” [317]

There was also a wealthy eccentric who “spent most of his fortune on installing ‘an extensive philosophical apparatus’ with which he later claimed to have generated spontaneous life forms.” [420]

Mary Shelley may have had either man in mind when she undertook to tell her tale. Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, helped. They both knew their science, as the matters I have been discussing captivated the general culture but especially the Romantic poets like Shelley himself and most of all Coleridge. So it was not science itself being chided, but its potential to get out of hand.

No one in 2010 does not know that science has wrought miracles and led to much human progress, and likewise caused much ill and devastation. Back then, the novelist Horace Walpole said of the ballooning mania, “Well! I hope these new mechanical meteors will prove only playthings of the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race – as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the results of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures.” [135]

It is a struggle we as a species will go on having, to try to amplify the benefits and control the destructiveness of our abundant talent.

But at least I hope we can avoid the charge that Thomas Carlyle made in 1829, when declaring the end of Romanticism and “the relentless arrival of ‘the Age of Machinery.’” [435] Science had gone from Newton’s “silent meditation” to a world of lab machinery. He concluded, “The progress of Science … is to destroy Wonder….”

I think wonder and the wonders it finds are still to be had from science, from life, the tragedies notwithstanding, nor even the machinery. (I think some of the lab equipment from back then is pretty wondrous.)

And that is where Holmes ends his history, and with his words I will close: “The old, rigid debates and boundaries – science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics – are no longer enough. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.” [469]           

May it be so.        

WHEN THE GOING GETS HARD”

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

On January 3, 2010

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

[The sermon was preceded by the choir singing, “Hard Times Come Again No More.”]

Still, the hard times they do come around once more, and then again, and again, although sometimes only cause for sighing, while sometimes cause for a dirge.

And people get through. I have been amazed all my professional life with the resiliency of the human spirit, how people face crisis and loss you would think would be unbearable, and they bear it.

Believe me, I have been there, over and over, when the crisis and loss, the turmoil and anguish, have been nothing to speak of lightly. But awful as the situation has been, and will be again, sorry to say, people survive; and then they recover, almost always, although almost always too, not without some lasting if diminished effect.

How do we do that? People lose jobs, even whole careers; they are heavily invested in ways that witness their financial security vanish; the diagnosis is daunting, theirs or that of a parent or partner or sibling or dear friend or even a child.

How do we do that? And we do. I confess my own personal assignments of grief have been minor in the balance. But I have been with many of you as you have faced an awfulness of life when your tenacity, even buoyancy, has been awesome, even if while you went through it, you felt anything but overwhelmed.

Early on in the week Sandy Hoyt emailed me the link to a book review in Tuesday’s New York Times, which was amazingly fortuitous, because the author has the same point to make. “Resilience in the face of loss,” he writes, “is real, prevalent, and enduring.”

The author is George Bonanno, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College and a clinical psychologist. The book is The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After a Loss. It seems to be catching on quickly, because it was checked out of every library in the Minuteman system, and not only did no local bookstore have copies, neither does the publisher. But Suse Keyes arranged for me to borrow her neighbor’s Kindle and bang, there it was. I get by with a little help from my friends – which turns out to be a point made by Bonanno and just about everyone else.

One could say Bonanno’s main point really is that people experience loss and other traumas in a whole variety of ways. This insight grows out of the research that he and others are doing in the science of bereavement. There are people whose recovery from a loss or other trauma is only slow and gradual, and others who have chronic grief reactions, diagnosable as Prolonged Grief Disorder. But Bonanno believes we have “underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely adverse events.”

He writes, “The good news is that for most of us, grief is not overwhelming or unending. As frightening as the pain of grief can be, most of us are resilient. Some of us cope so effectively, in fact, we hardly seem to miss a beat in our day-to-day lives. We may be shocked, even wounded, by a loss, but we still manage to regain our equilibrium and move on. That there is anguish and sadness during bereavement cannot be denied. But there is much more. Above all, it is a human experience. It is something we are wired for, and it is certainly not meant to overwhelm us. Rather, our reactions to grief seem designed to help us accept and accommodate losses relatively quickly so that we can continue to live productive lives. Resilience doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone fully resolves a loss, or finds a state of ‘closure.’ Even the most resilient seem to hold onto at least a bit of wistful sadness. But we are able to keep on living our lives and loving those still present around us.”

He offers some observations about what things help people cope, and I have been collecting others. But first let me go back to his point that the research shows that bereavement is not one-dimensional, the same for all. Freud wrote about “the work of mourning” and “modern theories of bereavement have … retained the idea that grief is work – work that is time-consuming and must be done before full recovery can take place…. The work of mourning is now commonly viewed as requiring a series of tasks or stages,” as in the writing of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

But people experience loss and mourning each in their own ways. And there are positive natural forced at work, like sadness, that helps us reflect deeply on our loss and to come to accept it, to recalibrate our lives without the lost one, and – this is an interesting point – it elicits sympathy and caring. That response in others seems to be hard-wired in people, and good that it is, because that caring, that human interaction, that engagement with others, is important to receive.

I invited you in the newsletter to share your own experiences of what helps in hard times. I was not flooded with responses, but Dorothy Dunlay noted that after her husband died, what really helped – and she said I could quote her — was reaching out to friends and accepting their kindness, not being afraid of asking for help, and being able to give as well. She quoted Beverly Sills: You can’t always be happy but you can be cheerful.”

Bonanno points out that if you can’t be cheerful at least part of the time, sadness stops being the positive short-term emotion it is, and becomes not inviting but alienating, which is not what you want. He portrays an oscillation between sorrow and other, cheerier states of mind. Joy returns at times, and even laughter. In time the cycle widens and equilibrium happens. There will still be those times, especially at anniversaries and holidays, when the sorrow cycles back, but not as often and not to stay.

Bonanno says that humans have a surprising ability to bring about positive states of mind, and it helps in the grieving process. Optimism helps those who can muster it, and self-confidence, and some sense of control. People who cope well during bereavement tend to be like that, to have a “deep-rooted sense that they can and should be able to mourn,” so they “gather their strength, regroup, and work toward restoring the balance in their lives.” And they have their good memories, and maybe the comforting awareness that the deceased person would rather they be happy than sad.

And then there’s “coping ugly.” The Chicago White Sox in the mid-1970s managed to win more games than likely; it was referred to as “winning ugly,” doing whatever it takes. “When bad things happen,” notes Bonanno, “people often find the strength to do whatever is necessary to get back on track.” Like indulging a self-serving bias, distorting or exaggerating so we come off looking and consequently feeling better. “Yes, I did do everything I could have” is good protection against dangerous doubts, even if the facts are more murky. Finding a silver lining, counting our blessings, noting that it could have been worse – Bonanno says these are not acts of denial but of coping.

I came upon a quote by Anne Hathaway, the actress, who apparently had a god-awful divorce or break-up last year. “As horrible as what I went through was, it’s not the worst thing that could happen to a person. In the history of humanity, it doesn’t even come close” – a criterion that covers anything that is apt to happen to her or to any of us.

Hathaway also said this: “I started making fun of it around my friends and family and also to let everyone know it was okay to be struggling with it, as well. If I can find humor in it, that means I’m going to be okay. If something happens to me that I can’t laugh about, look out, there goes my soul.” Bananno writes, “What realty matters, in terms of our long-term health, is the ability to crack a grin…. It is [such] respite from the trench of sadness that makes grief bearable. It is the marvelous human capacity to squeeze in brief moments of happiness and joy that allows us to see that we may once again begin moving forward.”

For some, the laughter comes easily, for others not, and of course it all depends on the circumstances. The key point is, bereavement is different for everyone, even though there is conventional and professional wisdom that suggests otherwise. When people cite the book, besides Bananno’s emphasis on resilience, they note how controversial the book is for its attack on that wisdom, an attack he says arises directly from the results of research, his and that of others in the field.

It is commonly thought that people need to express their pain after a loss, that dealing with grief involves hard work over time and a set of necessary stages to go through, that it is wrong to skip steps or to bounce back too quickly, that positive emotions are a sign of denial, that hidden unresolved grief can linger and be experienced later as delayed grief, and that “the only way to recover from a loss is to sever the emotional bond with the deceased.” Bananno says none of those beliefs is supported by the research.

And the conventional wisdom can stand in the way of people welcoming their progress, the return of laughter, the mellowing of memory, their ability to get back to enjoying their work and their leisure, the easing of the pain and the mental disorder. People can worry that their ability to move on demonstrates a lack of love for the deceased, something wrong about that relationship or wrong about them.

Of course, not everyone is resilient, and not in every situation. Thank goodness there are trained professionals to work with people who need that help. It’s just that, from Bananno’s perspective, as a culture we have projected those struggles on everyone, whereas he can cite abundant evidence that people, if they survived, bounced back remarkably well after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the SARS epidemic, and 9/11.

There are other things in the book I won’t get to, like his resolution of his troubled relationship with his late father; and descriptions of how most other cultures deal with grief through communal ritual, whereas we focus not on things we do but on how we feel; and reflections on maintaining emotional bonds with the dead.

But I close but repeating, as he does, his point about resilience. “…Humans are wired to survive. Not everyone manages well, but most of us do. And some of us, it seems, can deal with just about anything. We adapt, we change gears, we smile and laugh and do what we need to do, we nurture our memories, we tell ourselves it’s not as bad as we thought, and before you know it, what once seemed black and bottomless has given way; the dark recedes and the sun once again peeks out from behind the clouds.”

May it be so for you. 

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland

The Rev. Ken Sawyer

October 4, 2009

For many years, I have met monthly with people as together we read our way through a book or the work of an author. One can come as often or as infrequently as one chooses, and you only have to have read whatever the selection of the month is.

Back in 1981, we took on the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the group was so successful that I have given it once since, but not for a while, even as we read other Transcendentalists: Margaret Fuller and Thoreau’s Walden, as well as Van Wyck Brooks’ history of the era, The Flowering of New England.

This year we will take on Emerson anew, on the third Thursday of every month, beginning at 7:45 in my office. The first essay will be the first he published, “Nature.”

I know some of you are already Emerson fans, who read him for pleasure, and keep up with the unending flow of biographies published about him, while others may wonder what Emerson has to do with us, or even who he was. In what little time I have, I doubt I will edify the Emerson experts, who already know more about him than me anyway. But let me see if I can give the quickest of biographies, and then talk about his thought, his writing style, and why I think he is worth your hearing about, even if you are not drawn to go straight to the library to check out his work.

Emerson was born in 1803. The Emerson family had deep roots in ministry and in Concord, beginning with the first minister there, Peter Bulkeley, and including Moodys and Ripleys as well as Emersons in the Concord pulpit and elsewhere. One of his grandfathers had been minister of the First Parish in Concord. That minister’s successor became his step-grandfather. His father William was minister of the prestigious First Church of Boston.    

But William Emerson died at forty-two, when Ralph was only eight. With support from the church and its members, and by taking in borders, Ralph’s mother supported the family thereafter, managing to send her sons to Harvard, where Ralph began at the age of fourteen. She was aided in raising the children by her sister-in-law, Mary Emerson, a woman with strong views about religion who had a profound influence on Ralph and his siblings.

One thing about Emerson is, all along the way, every detail of his life’s story has been studied and written about, so the temptation toward tangents is strong. I will resist, but if you want, you can find much description and analysis of his relationship with Mary Moody, as well as those with his parents, his siblings, his wives, followers, and especially with his friends and neighbors – a subject that I have also preached about, including on the occasion of the publication of American Bloomsbury only a few years ago.

I am also skipping over other topics, like his ancestors who were Waldensians, a pre-Reformation Protestant movement begun by Peter Waldo in Italy in the twelfth century, some of whose members, Ralph Waldo’s ancestors, were forced to flee Europe in the seventeenth century, coming to America with the Puritans. As a boy, Ralph signed his name R. Waldo, and while in college decided to be known as Waldo, which he was ever after. He named his first child Waldo, too.

So while it was Ralph Emerson who graduated from Boston Public Latin School, it was Waldo Emerson who graduated from Harvard in 1821, and from Harvard Divinity School four years later, there being some delay along the way because of health problems, including a time of failed vision. He was licensed as a minister the next year; and finally, after further health problems and time spent teaching, in 1829, at twenty-six, Waldo Emerson became associate minister of the Second Church of Boston, a Unitarian church also known as Old North. He became active in community affairs. He served on the School Board.

The same year, he married Ellen Tucker, a beautiful young woman of fragile health, with whom, all agree, he was deeply in love. She died of tuberculosis eighteen months later. The next year, he resigned from his ministry at Second Church. His stated reason was that he had come to believe that Jesus never intended to institute communion as an on-going practice or sacrament, and he could not in good conscience go on administering the rite, as the church still expected.

Others have offered other possible explanations, like his need to move on to some new stage in his life, beyond the grief at Ellen’s death, or his growing realization that no matter what his father and grandfathers had done, ministry just wasn’t for him – it involved more personal interaction than an introvert could handle.

He then spent almost a year in Europe, recovering his well being and also making important contacts. He had already been introduced to some of the new ideas being put forth by people like the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and the historian/philosopher Thomas Carlyle, ideas that had been stimulated by German Romantics like Goethe. It has been suggested that Emerson’s objection to communion was a consequence of his reading Coleridge. Emerson had discovered a God which was both universal and personal, not to be confined to any one tradition nor requiring communal act.

As it happens, his meetings with Coleridge and Wordsworth were not very successful, but he and Carlyle hit it off grandly, and began a lifelong correspondence. Emerson returned from Europe fired with a new religious outlook, one that would become known in America, as it was in England, as Transcendentalism. And it would be Emerson who would be its first and foremost exponent.

But first there was the matter of making a living. He moved to Concord, started work on a book, and did supply preaching, filling in when a Unitarian pulpit was vacant for a Sunday. He preached here. He preached often in East Lexington. And he began a new career, a career that had not even existed before, a career as a lecturer.

The timing was remarkably fortuitous. Suddenly, in the 1830s, a lecture circuit sprang up. Lecture halls were built in towns all over the country, right to the edges of the moving frontier. And Waldo Emerson was just the man for the job: accustomed to public speaking, afire with ideas, and gifted with an ability to write memorable sentences.  

Meanwhile, the estate of his first wife having been settled, and a second marriage approaching, Emerson bought the house in Concord in which they would live and bring up their family. It is still there, and you can tour it at certain times. Almost any day you can visit his study, which has been reconstructed in the Concord Historical Museum. A month after buying the house, he married Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, who had heard him lecture and preach. He had her change her name to Lydian.

That was 1835. The next year his first book, “Nature,” was published, calling for people to seek religious truth in themselves and in nature. The next year, his Phi Beta Kappa lecture at Harvard made a similar plea on a national level, calling for an American culture, new and unbeholding to European example.

He was still attending the Concord Unitarian church, with which he had so many family connections. But just about then, a new minister was settled, one highly regarded as a minister in every way except his preaching. But preaching was the part of ministry that Emerson cared about, and he was none too happy listening to the Rev. Barzillai Frost.

Without mentioning Frost by name, Emerson turned this unhappiness into his most explosive lecture, the Divinity School Address of 1838. In some ways it was the same message as in the prior two major addresses: talking to graduates, soon to be ministers, and with their faculty sitting right there, Emerson told them to look to their own souls, their own experience, their own lives, passed through the fire of thought, as the source of religious truth, not some book from long ago or far away.

The students thought this was great, as did younger ministers in the room, like Theodore Parker, who would become one the most important voices of American Transcendentalism, and the most controversial. But others regarded Emerson’s ideas as dangerous nonsense, and his selection of that forum for an attack on the clergy to be in poor taste and uncharitable in the extreme. His style was called arrogant, divisive, fatuous, unreasonable, absurd, incoherent, and contradictory.

But Emerson was not ever trying to present a systematic theology, for three reasons. First, that would close us off from tomorrow’s truth, which may be altogether different from today’s. Therefore Emerson was never fazed at all by criticism that pointed out his inconsistencies and contradictions. As he famously said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and his protégé Walt Whitman echoed, “Do I contradict myself? All right then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The job is not to confine yourself within some box to which a label can be fixed, some consistent set of ordered beliefs. The job is perceptively to experience one’s life as it happens, to know it at first hand. And what arrives tomorrow may have a message the opposite of today’s situation. Then we shall record that. Let there be no bounds on the self’s discoveries, certainly no bounds of foolish consistency, no bounds on the living of our own special lives.

Second, he would have also rejected attempts at a systematic, rational system of belief because, while we get at truth through thought, it is thought of a particular kind, less indebted to logic than to intuition. In the language of the day, confusingly enough, he was taking the side of Reason against Understanding. In this way of talking, borrowed from Carlyle, Understanding is analytic, mathematical, sensory – in a word, empirical. How do we know anything? Because we experience it with one of our senses. This was the outlook of the philosopher John Locke; and the first generation of American Unitarians, contemporaries of Emerson’s father, they believed it.

Some of their children did not. They said we know the material world by Understanding, but religious or spiritual truth by intuition, by the innate wisdom of the soul, discovered by inner search, awakened by Nature, expressed in poetry – the part of us that participates in the cosmic mind of which the universe is a manifestation. Their name for that was reason. Their first and primary spokesperson was Emerson.

And third, for Emerson, truth itself is contradictory. “I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies,” he wrote. Truth is not one thing, with falsehood as its opposite. No, truth itself is a fullness that contains opposites, and the seeker must be willing to accept both as they arrive. He repeatedly tried to find the metaphor that would make his point: there are parallel truths, he wrote, and we must live on the diagonal between them. Or competing negations are poles between which our lives are suspended.

So don’t be confounded if you find Emerson making a point that seems to contradict a point he make not just a few years ago but a few pages back. He thinks they’re both true, and he is going to say each one as brilliantly as he can. He liked balancing opposites. He thought the finest people were those of both sexes, and he held up Hermaphrodite as a model.

And my goodness, the contradictions he contained himself! He said he hated preaching, and spent a lifetime at it, in a way, on the lecture tour. He castigated ministers like the Rev. Frost for not sharing more of their personal stories in their addresses, and shared almost none in his own. He opposed the injustices of society and most projects to correct them. He favored a socialist view called union, and said it could only come from less government and more individualism. He was an idealist who inspired the founders of the communal experiment at Brook Farm, and a practical Yankee who could see no future in the project. He championed passion, and was criticized for his own “cold intellection.”

So tips for reading Emerson include, do not expect consistency; understand he was a Transcendentalist, so he believed that the material world is but a representation and symbol of a spiritual reality, an over-soul, in which all goodness, beauty, and right are one; and know that when he speaks of reason, he means intuition.

A few more tips, these regarding his writing style, which many people find cloudy, clumsy, redundant, rambling, and difficult. Even a sympathetic critic (John Morley) conceded that “There are pages that to the present reader, at least, after diligent meditation, remain mere abracadabras, incomprehensible and worthless…. Nothing is gained by concealing that not every part of Emerson’s work will … bear reduction to honest and intelligible English.”

But the style relates to his goal, which is to trace the truth as he glimpses it in his life. For Emerson, truth is captured by just the sort of poetic, evocative prose he employs. Emerson always saw himself first as a poet, and his poetic skills infuse his prose. He uses prose to do what poetry attempts: to find in just the right words a rendering of experience at its deepest.

He tries to find the imagery that will put a point across, and he tries several times, offering images of a variety of sorts, visual, auditory, tactile, intellectual, this one and that. If four out the five images miss the mark for you, perhaps the fifth will hit home in a way that will open up a glimpse of truth deeper than clear logic could have achieved.

It is a style well suited to the lecture tour, where all his essays had their trial runs. A lecture cannot be so terse and tightly reasoned that a listener cannot wander off on a thought and return unable to catch up. A lecture has to move at a different pace than a written essay, which allows you to ponder a point without the text moving on.

As important a tip as any in reading Emerson is, relax. He is going at his own lecturely pace. He is trying to say something that may be wonderful to hear when he finds the expression of it that resonates in you. In the meantime, relax; he’s finding ways of reaching the people around you, and not getting too far ahead of the crowd.

I think that that’s as much as I hope to accomplish today. At one point this week, straining hard to keep the sermon as short as I could, I had one that went thirty minutes. Obviously, there is more I might say and maybe will before the year is out, especially as those of you (in the study group or not) interact with Emerson and each other and me. There are criticisms of Emerson to acknowledge in time, not just the mystical murkiness of his language at times, but his over-emphasis on the individual, his under-emphasis on community and tradition, his over-emphasis on life’s positive aspects, his under-emphasis on suffering and evil, and then what Whitman as an older man, no longer a protégé,  would refer to as Emerson’s “cold and bloodless intellectuality.”

And yet, so long after, Emerson retains the power to stir up and to stir with his faith in everyone’s inner self, his call for all of us to believe in our own worth, our innate wisdom, our personal experience, and the integrity of our own minds. After all, ironic as it may seem, here we are, still thinking about Emerson, singing his hymns and reading his words, in some ways following in his footsteps, even though his message was, don’t do that, but find out your own truths. “Why should we grope among the dead bones of the past?” he asked. “The sun shines today also…. There are new lands, new men [and women], new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

But that is just what we do. We are not bound to Emerson’s beliefs, while we remain inspired by his spirit. As Whitman wrote, “The best part of Emersonianism is, it breeds the giant that destroys itself. [The question,] Who wants to be any [person]’s mere follower lurks behind every page. No teacher ever taught, that has so provided for his pupil’s setting up independently….”

So here we are, independent souls, in a movement blessed with a reverence for the individual, with a love of personal integrity and the quest for private truth, which were willed to us in no small part by a teacher who as he teaches sets us free. To most of us, he offers not so much the particulars of his theology, but the spirit in which he held it, tentative, open-minded, curious, vigorous, self-reliant, and devoted to the search.

Whatever Emerson’s failings may be, there are few voices that offer so many “inspiring hints,” as they were called by James Russell Lowell, so many provocative glimpses of one person’s effort to discover religious truth. Few voices call us more urgently to join in our own personal journeys of the spirit, our own quests for the deepest truths of our lives. 

A month ago, I preached about silence. That sermon is on line at www.uuwayland.org, and printed copies are available. I drew on a book by the Cape Cod writer Anne D. LeClaire called, Listening Below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence. I have been gratified by the discussion I know the sermon has provoked, and personal reflections as well, I like to think.

While not suggesting anyone go as far as Ms. LeClaire does, not speaking on two Mondays every month, as she has for seventeen years, I did share her concern at the degree to which silence has become much less common in our everyday lives than it was throughout most of human history.

I had an experience since then that brought her thoughts back to mind. I was outside at Logan Airport, awaiting the Logan Express bus in the early evening. As many of you can imagine, the noise was constant with buses and cars arriving and leaving constantly. A man I would guess to be in his mid-30s was standing next to me, and out of the blue he complained to me that the powers that be at Logan Airport had not arranged for there to be music playing for those of us waiting. Maybe he thought the music would drown out the buses; but all I could think was, he was wishing it was even noisier than it already was!

Preaching a sermon in praise of silence has its own irony, of course, although there are those of you who like being silent yourselves at least for a while on Sunday morning in order to hear and think about something being said, or you could have gone to a Quaker meeting. But I did stop short of what I was calling to myself the heady part, the analytic, scholarly, kataphatic part (more on that later), when I would have taken up an erudite schema like that offered by Urban T. Holmes III in his book, An Analytic History of Christian Spirituality.

Having that day spoken in praise of stillness to balance the busyness of our lives, including our wonderfully vibrant congregational life, so amazingly engaged in social action and community service, I hoped to make the transition into the heady part by saying, “Those who just want inner stillness, look out the wavy windows, be at peace. I have been where you are, and I honor your choice. In fact, the rest of the sermon is on your behalf.” And I said to anyone who had had enough stillness, thank you, and were ready for the Social Action Fair that was that day, or for a trip to an orchard in Groton,” it still being October, “that time will come soon, and you may meet me at one place or the other.”

I offer the same solace today, although apple-picking time has gone by. But I do want to get back to Urban T. Holmes III, who uses two sets of variables in his phenomenology of prayer, and he and I both apply them to spirituality more broadly. They produce four quadrants, and I am going to try to help us think in which quadrant we each belong, in the hope that it will help us both to see how differently others can come at their own spirituality, and how our own ways might be enriched by seeing those other possibilities.

So: One way of thinking about spirituality or one’s own religion is, it is of the heart or of the mind; or in Holmes’ language, it is speculative, dealing with the illumination of the mind, or affective, having to do with the heart or emotions. Well, it is probably both to some degree for almost everyone. But think, if the question were about your own faith, personal religion, or spirituality, and you were required to position yourself along an imaginary line between one end of the room and the other, with the north wall being “MIND: To know or understand,” and the south wall being “HEART: To feel or be moved,” where might you choose to stand? (Don’t worry, you won’t have to.) Think of Sunday morning services: Are you more often apt to appreciate being intellectually stimulated or emotionally stirred (although of course all our services accomplish both)?

But when it comes to gauging a service’s mood, or prayer, or anyone’s spirituality, Holmes suggests there is another scale, and there are really erudite words to describe the difference: apophatic and kataphatic. These are real words, and they have hundreds of years of history behind them. Turning to the ever-reliable source of religious knowledge, Google, I learn that “Apophatic mysticism [is] from the Greek, ‘apophasis,’ meaning negation or ‘saying away’ [as] contrasted with kataphatic mysticism from the Greek, ‘kataphasis,’ meaning affirmation or ‘saying with.’

“Apophatic mysticism claims that nothing can be said of objects or states of affairs which the mystic experiences. These are absolutely indescribable, or ‘ineffable.’ Kataphatic mysticism does make claims about what the mystic experiences. An example of apophatic mysticism is in the classical Tao text, Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tsu (6th century B.C.E.), which begins with the words, “Even the finest teaching is not the Tao [or the way] itself. Even the finest name is insufficient to define it. Without words, the Tao can be experienced, and without a name, it can be known.” (Lao Tsu, 1984)”

In the language of Urban T. Holmes III – the kind of devout Episcopal priest and scholar who dates his Foreward, “The Feast of Thomas a Kempis” — apophatic spirituality emphasizes the mystery of God, kataphatic spirituality emphasizes the revealed God. Apophatic meditation is an emptying; kataphatic meditation is, in Holmes’ word, imaginal, or, one might say, a filling up, a matter of increase and growth, the opposite of an apophatic assumption that less is better.

So start from where you were (in your imagination) as to mind and heart, and head off toward Sudbury if you think life at its deepest is a mystery and wisdom comes through giving up on hope of knowledge, and toward the Weston-sided wall if you think the religious quest is about establishing truth.

Holmes insists that these are all fine ways to be; and not just for Christians, as some of us here are, but for those of us who are not as well. But Holmes also notes that there are excesses to be wary of.

So picture yourself in one quadrant of the room. Over there [back left, seen from the pulpit] are heady folks who tend to think the big questions that religions typically try to answer are unknowable or of no concern. Religion may be about thinking and decisions and action, but hey, life is ultimately a mystery. Holmes thinks your main spiritual goal is Societal Regeneration, and you focus on social action, peace, and justice.

For those from this perspective who want to know God or to be at one with an ultimate reality, it will not be by learning but by the opposite, the emptying of the mind. Holmes cites the 4th-century Christian author Evagrius, who wrote that “Blessed is he who has arrived at infinite ignorance.”

Holmes says the excess you should watch out for if you are in that quadrant is moralism. The warning seems to be, if one is given to using one’s brain about what religion is about, and one thinks that that means something other than right belief, creeds and the like, but decision and action, one might guard against an inclination to think of oneself as especially righteous. Mysteriously, he refers to this excess as encratism. I had to look it up. The Encratists were a second century heretical Christian group so into their heads and denial that they gave up on the body, renouncing meat, wine, and marriage. (Such movements rarely thrive.)

Over there [back right, seen from the pulpit] are heady folks (relatively speaking) who think truth is knowable. Your main spiritual goal might be Theological Renewal, featuring right thinking based on reasoned beliefs. Holmes thinks they run the danger of over-rationalism; they need to be in touch with affective and apophatic forms of knowing, with their feelings and their ignorance.

I like having those kinds of people here. I think we all do. Just as we like having those for whom religion is more a matter of heart than of mind, like those who would be seated in this section over here [front right, as seen from the pulpit]. They are kataphatic, bless their hearts, and think truth is pouring forth but not as doctrine but as what Holmes feels is their main goal, Personal Renewal. In other faith traditions, these are the born agains. Here Holmes sees the main excess as pietism, that sense that one is holier, more spiritual than others, that special insight has been revealed, unchallengeable by tests of the mind.

And then there are those who would have ended up over here [up front to the left of the pulpit], whose inclinations I was singing the praises of in October, and would again today. Not that they are right or better, but that their kind spirituality should find place in our common religious life and in our own personally, at least to some degree.

Remember, few of us fall neatly into any of the quadrants – we are all people of mind and of heart, balancing truth and mystery. But for these people who are sitting over here in their minds (and isn’t it good that I’m not the sort of preacher to have made you change your seats), the foremost spiritual goal in Holmes’ mind is The Inner Life, contemplation, and inner peace.

They are apophatic (which sounds so much like a condition that could be cured by an analgesic), of heart more than mind. In traditional UU terminology, maybe they care less about truth than about love. And their excess? Holmes warns against quietism, that cosy peace in the heart that refuses to notice that there are in fact some knowable truths, and some necessary causes for action.

So that was part of what I thought I was going to preach about when I spoke in praise of quiet, because I have thought about Holmes’ phenomenology ever since his book came out in 1980, in particular this idea that a religious faith or prayer or what have you can be either kataphatic or apophatic, something to come by through filling, adding, gaining, learning, or through emptying, negation, denial, silence, unknowing. UUs can be a bright and wordy bunch, and it is probably worth my remembering that there are religious guides like the Tao Te Ching which advise, “Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace.”

So I was all set to return to apophatic spirituality, and then I went to a convocation of UU ministers a few weeks ago, up in Ottawa. These happen every seven years. The theme of the week was stories, and the keynote speaker, the author Thomas Moore, stressed emptiness stories as part of his focus on the via negativa, the path of negation, which is another traditional Christian term for apophatic spirituality.

Moore is all for it. He thinks the twentieth century was all about acquisition, adding things, and it did not get us where we should go, which is deeper into our own spirituality – and the way to do that is by emptying, especially for people much given to talk (maybe like the 400 UU ministers he was addressing).

Moore offered a quote from the Gospel of Thomas: The kingdom of God is like a woman who bought a bag of seeds that dropped out of the sack by the time she got home. And he suggested – only semi-facetiously, he said – a new model of education, an emptying school, where on the first day you’re granted a PhD., four years later they take it away and give you a Masters, and four years later they take that away and you can be a teacher. (My thanks to my colleague Don Southworth for helping me remember those.)

Buddhism is a good source of inspiration along these lines. My colleague James Ford, a Buddhist UU, says one of his “friends, an old Zen hand, when asked what he believed, responded, as little as possible.” James goes on, “I believe (don’t you love irony) that beliefs stand in the way of wisdom. As another old Zen hand once declared, only don’t know.”

So I will give you no more information. (This has to be the most kataphatic sermon ever given on apophatic spirituality!) Instead I will tell you two more brief stories, both of them Buddhist:
(1) “Subhuti, a disciple of Buddha, had reached the enlightenment of Great Emptiness, where the Eternal Real and the passing unreal are one. Sitting under a tree in this enlightenment, he found flowers drifting down on him from the tree. And he heard voices. ‘We are praising your eloquence on Emptiness,’ said these voices like gods’ voices.
“’But I have not spoken of Emptiness,’ murmured Subhuti.
“’You have not spoken of it. We have not heard it. This is true Emptiness,’ said the voices, and the flowers fell like rain.”
(2) “The nun Chiyono studied for years but was unable to find enlightenment. One moonlight night she was carrying an old pail, filled with water. She was watching the full moon reflected in this water, when the bamboo strip that held the pailstaves broke.
The pail fell all apart; the water rushed out; the moon’s reflection disappeared. And Chiyono found enlightenment. She wrote this verse:

This way and that way
I tried to keep the pail together
Hoping the weak bamboo
Would never break.
Suddenly the bottom fell out:
No more water:
No more moon in the water:
Emptiness in my hand!”
[Enlightenment.]

I wish you wisdom, I wish you exciting calls to action, I wish you newness and fullness of life; and I wish you times away from all of those. I wish you times of emptiness, of stillness, of peace.

The First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts
The Rev. Ken Sawyer
November 8, 2009

I met last week with both of our youth groups in turn, which was a great pleasure. In both cases there was some fun and there was some heady, thoughtful discussion, mostly about religion. In both groups, one of the questions that came up was, Is Unitarian Universalism a religion? And if it is, or if it isn’t, is that a good thing?

The high schoolers got to talking about the nature of UUism, what defines us as a religious movement. It was after a while that one of them, Brett Baker, wondered if a high regard for reason isn’t a defining characteristic – which of course it is, and always has been. Since 1985 it has been right there in the UUA’s statement of Principles and Purposes, as one of the sources our living tradition draws from: “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

When the greatest of Unitarian historians of the first half of the twentieth century, Earl Morse Wilbur, published his two-volume history of Unitarianism from the earliest days of the reformation, cataloging all its various incarnations – as any UU minister can tell you, for we have all been required to read Wilbur — he said there were three characteristics that recurred in place after place, century after century: freedom, toleration, and reason.

But reason as a distinguishing characteristic had not sprung quickly to the group’s mind nor mine, although I know that at Brett’s age I would have thought of it right away, and in adult groups I have led here, it is often a priority for many.

But maybe I have come to take it for granted. The last and only time I have preached a sermon about reason before was thirty years ago, and then it had to share the spotlight with individualism, another traditional UU value. It had become popular back then, as it has been since, to say that we had — and now have — too much of both. I had probably said so myself, but I did not want either value to lose too much of the honor and respect we have traditionally given them.

I still don’t, and so I got out my file titled “Reason,” three or four inches high, to have another go at it, to speak again in praise of reason as a way we have of searching for religious truth, and in favor of an effort for greater reasonableness in society at large that I consider a religious endeavor.

Take the Rapture, when true believers will waft off to Heaven while the rest of us undergo extraordinary unpleasantness. The Rapture is the subject of a series of books that has sold millions of copies. And I don’t know for absolutely sure that these visions from the Book of Revelation are not about to come true.

We have a religion that encourages us to think, and to wonder, is that at all likely, does it comport with what I know about how things are? But it is possible that the Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Scientologists, and others who hold to beliefs that seem especially odd to others may be right. Their track record so is not great when it comes to prediction. But as I said, it may well be, as some of our neighbors believe, that Jesus or some other messiah will come to earth soon and the end of days arrive.

Or maybe, three years from now the world as we know it will come to an end because an ancient Mayan calendar only extended that far, as is the plot of the latest apocalyptic movie, “2012.” It may be a fun movie to watch. I have nothing against imagination, far from it. But we have a religion that encourages us to think, and to wonder, is it likely at all, is that how life works?

It does not take a lot of research to know that messianic and apocalyptic predictions have been made since approximately forever. A classic case was that of the Millerites here in New England back in the 1840s.

William Miller of Vermont had evolved from a Freemason Deist to a Baptist who believed that one Bible passage [Daniel 8:14] foretold when Jesus’ return would come. He could not be more precise than that it would be in the year that began on March 21, 1843. Tens of thousands of people were ready and waiting. When it did not happen, it was decided that the wrong Jewish calendar had been used, and the right date was April 18. Still no returning Jesus of the sort predicted in the Book of Revelation.

A Miller follower reworked the numbers, and hordes of people came to Exeter, New Hampshire, for October 22, 1844, which thereafter was known as the Great Disappointment. But the disappointment was not so great but that several denominations survived to carry on the expectation of Jesus’ imminent return, including the Seventh Day Adventists, which is a denomination vastly larger than our own.

We are among the other folk, the ones who wonder, is that likely, that some date in some old book, or some old Mayan calendar, is likely to have any predictive power? That does not seem reasonable now, does it? Well, no.

We have been like that for a long time, we First Parishioners. Heirs of a Puritan, seventeenth-century founding, the generations that followed carried the part of that tradition that involved an independent, challenging, and learned intellectual spirit.

But of course there was another part of that tradition, the actual content of their theology, a stern Calvinism that was tinder to the fire called the Great Awakening that swept across England and then in the 1740s the United States. Camp meetings were held and attracted huge crowds. These sessions included terrifying accounts of the torments of Hell that awaited any who did not have a conversion experience, which from Jonathan Edwards on involved extreme emotional manifestations, as one’s situation sank in and one grasped the need for salvation in Christ.

Many ministers welcomed the enthusiasm these visits brought to their communities, and the newly converted members in their congregations. But other ministers did not, especially as the Great Awakening had a more and more sordid side, the gatherings increasingly tainted with debauchery.

But from the beginning there were those like Charles Chauncey, minister of the First Church of Boston, who objected to the whole idea of conversion by enthusiasm, salvation by emotional outburst. These people – the religious liberals of their day – said God does not work that way, and salvation is a matter of steady self-improvement and upright conduct. It stands to reason.

Rather than accept the tenets of Calvinism, the liberals went back to the Bible, insisting that it be read in the light of reason. Before you know it, gone were the doctrines of predestination, election, native depravity, the divinity of Jesus, and the trinity. It was perfectly reasonable.

After coffee hour today, newcomers and others are encouraged to stay for lunch and learn more about Unitarian Universalism and the First Parish. The best part of such session for me, though, is the other way around, when I get to hear how it happens that people have come here. And the things to like here are many, people say – the music, the Sunday school, the warmth of the community.

But as often as not the story of how they ended up here begins back in grade school or high school or college or later, whenever it was that they realized, what I am being told in the religion I have been part of does not ring true to me. Again, it is not for me to say that the other religion may not be right – but it wasn’t right for me, people say – it did not make sense to me and I needed it to.

The counter argument can be, but reason, science, that part of your brain is fine for designing widgets and balancing the checkbook but religion does not need to make sense, it is a matter of belief, of faith, of myths and rituals and catechisms where reason needs to back off.

And I am all for myth and poetry and beauty and some ritual in religion. But I like being in a religion that does not expect me to ascribe to things in which I disbelieve, that expects its members from earliest ages to question and think for ourselves.

It is part of our heritage, one that is richer than Christianity alone but also includes the Enlightenment and thinkers back to ancient Rome and Greece. When I was growing up in a Unitarian Sunday school, we had a curriculum that included books we read about Moses; and Jesus, the carpenter’s son; and Akhenaton, the pharaoh who is remembered – along with being the husband of Nefertiti – as the first monotheist, who believed there was only one god, the sun; but also one about Socrates. To speak of a heritage that blends classical and Judeo-Christian streams is to speak of a faith of the head and the heart, of reason and compassion. That is who we are, or try to be.

The world needs us, as small a movement as we are, as miniscule as our efforts may amount to. But nuttiness is running rampant in the land, as numerous statistics testify. “One-fifth of Americans believe that the sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.” “Many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

In fact, a sizable group of non-Christians say they believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus. There are otherwise-sensible people who speak of Adam and Eve as if they were people who lived once, rather than characters in an old fable.

I bet I have a few things I believe that I shouldn’t. It is hard not to. My favorite headline in my Reason file is, “Your Brain Lies to You.” It is an editorial [by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt] that begins, “False ideas are everywhere.” They have political lies in mind. They think dispelling them is hard, because of how memory works.

There is something called source amnesia which “can lead people to forget whether a statement is true…. With time, this misremembering only gets worse…. Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked.” The authors cite the attacks on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the claim that then-Senator Obama is Muslim.

There are so many other examples out there now. You do not need me to tell you that our society has fragmented into groups that only hear what they already believe, however erroneous it may be. Reason does not always win the day, or even get heard sometimes, certainly not if your main source of information is talk radio or the wackier TV news channels.

That article I just quoted? It concludes, “In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court wrote that ‘the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’ Holmes erroneously assumed that ideas are more likely to spread if they are honest. Our brains do not naturally obey this admirable dictum, but by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps we can move closer to Holmes’ ideal.”

Perhaps. But reason has to compete with other opponents. As a prime example, “it is human nature to look for meaning where there isn’t any.” That is a quote from a book that came out earlier this year, The Numbers Game. Having quoted that line, a book reviewer added parenthetically, “(see under: religion),” putting me in mind of something the cartoonist Scott Adams wrote: “Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion” – which, I would admit in modestly, others might say about our own aspirations for a just society and a peaceful world.

The British authors of The Numbers Game “devote an entire chapter to chance to explain why the public sometimes sees a pattern where there is no such thing.” The book reviewer [Barry Gewen] writes, “Tattoo this on your arm: a pattern doesn’t always mean a plan. Throw some rice in the air and you will most likely see patterns in the way it lands.

“Statisticians even have a name for the phenomenon: it’s called the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. ‘The alleged sharpshooter,’ the authors write, ‘takes numerous shots at a barn (actually he’s a terrible shot – that why it’s a fallacy), then draws his bull’s-eye afterward, around the holes that cluster.’

“Public misinformation and even panic are fed by all sorts of people who draw post-hoc bull’s-eyes: agenda-driven activists, incompetent or demagogic politicians, journalists who like a good story, clueless ‘experts.’”

Reason has much to compete with, but I have got to stop; and alas, with at least three more inches of material still unused, including what I might have said about the book that I thought this sermon was going to be about, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism by Paul Boghossian.

Let me say two more things, though: As I may have said before over the years, a time or two or a hundred, it is of course a matter of balance, or maybe creative tension.

People bemoan a style of sermon or discourse that is overly academic, or a preacher or fellow parishioner who is all in her head, and I do not doubt such people exist; indeed, maybe I qualify myself some weeks, perhaps when I finally preach about relativism and constructivism. But I have heard a lot of UU preaching and conversation in my day, and while I think I rarely heard reason abandoned, or at least not very far or for very long, I do not think it was often oppressive.

And I know there are times when someone is being more imaginative and credulous, or more rational and incredulous, than is in the usual comfort zone of the other person or people there; and we bear with each other, for the most part, I think.

And that’s my final point, how both reason and imagination can flourish in community. I think relationships and interactions can strengthen them both. And I think it happens here, certainly for me, and I hope for you as well.

The Thanksgiving Sunday Homily
At the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts
On November 22, 2009
By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

There is a new documentary film out about Lydia Maria Child, produced by a California film-maker, Constance Jackson, narrated by the actress Diahann Carroll, and featuring numerous shots of the First Parish in Wayland, both of the front of the meetinghouse and of the pews in this room. Repeatedly, when they need an image on screen when religion or the churches of the time are mentioned, there we are again; and for one fleeting moment, when they need an image of a preacher, I appear.

The film is called “Over the River … Life of Lydia Maria Child: Abolitionist for Freedom” I thank Tom and Jane Sciacca for lending me their copy. It is much about the issues of the era – from the beginnings of the struggle for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery in the 1820s through the Civil War and into the years thereafter, including a picture of the home here in Wayland, on Sudbury Road, where Child and her husband David moved to be with her father, who later died, as then did David. Child lived on in the house until her death in 1880, twenty-five years after moving here.

As anyone who has been attending services here for a while can attest, I am capable of sharing the many accomplishments of her remarkable life at the drop of a hat and at length. Even so, there are some achievements I have barely mentioned, as major as they were: founding the first magazine for children; authoring the best-selling guide, The Frugal Housewife; writing the first history of the condition of women everywhere, in two volumes, and a three-volume introduction the world’s major religions. And so forth.

Mostly we dwell on her vital role in the movement for emancipation and abolition. But she was also much the champion of American Indians, a cause that comes to mind as Thanksgiving nears. It is a fine holiday, celebrated by some as a rare celebration that has nothing to do with a war, nationalism, or some famous person; but one that carries with it in the minds of many a mythology they learned as children, one about a “first Thanksgiving” when native Americans and British subjects fairly newly arrived sat down in what we now call Plymouth to feast together in friendship.

And it is not all that far-fetched a myth, except it wasn’t a Thanksgiving ceremony – the Pilgrims would not have one of those for a while. It was a ceremony called a harvest home, and it was celebrated together, Pilgrim and native, and the feast was owed to the help the natives had provided the new folk, there was a harmony, and it was one that would last for a while, the Pilgrims being happy just to be on their own, while the Puritans here in Massachusetts Bay Colony were quickly joined by a swarm of settlers whose settlements spread ever-deeper inland.

But Indians have every right to have unhappy associations when it comes to the arrival of so-called white people. Already, before that first harvest home, European illnesses against which the natives did not have immunity had decimated the tribes, in some cases literally decimating them, with a 10% survival rate.

The historian Carolyn Karcher notes in the documentary that Maria Child “learned at a youthful age to identify with … groups excluded from the ‘inalienable rights’ America’s founding creed promised to ‘all men.’

“The first such group to awaken young Lydia’s sympathies” – Lydia being her given name; upon coming of age she had herself baptized as Maria [pron. ma.RY.a], and that was the name she used ever after – “were the Abenaki Indians she encountered in Maine, where she lived for six years after her mother’s death…. Driven off their land and reduced to destitution, yet blamed for their own plight by the very white settlers who occupied their territory, the Abenakis opened Lydia’s eyes to her country’s plundering of the Indians.”

This homily is titled, “Memory, Gratitude, Remorse, and Resolve.” Thanksgiving is a time for family gatherings and a national holiday, a time for remembering, and with that comes the gratitude for all the goodness life has graced us with, individually, as families, as a country, as a world. True, for some people it may be hard to focus on the blessings, if there is much weighing on the other side of the balance. But surely it is good to pause and note what good things there have been and are in our lives, and for many of us that side of the balance is heavy with good fortune.

And then there’s the remorse, the memory of family times that did not go well, of personal failings, and of national shame, even local shame. The film points out that by 1641 – two years after this town was settled – “Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth were the first colonies to authorize slavery through legislation as part of the ‘Body of Liberties.’”

Two centuries later it had long since been banned here up north, but the shameful institution lived on in the south, was spreading to the west, with defenders strong in Congress; and even in the north, there was resistance to ending a southern practice which provided cotton for the mills and consequent wealth.

Maria Child was not one to merely rue the situation. No, her remorse was coupled with resolve. She teamed with William Lloyd Garrison, her husband David, and others to challenge slavery, to demand its abolition, in fact to insist on full freedom for people of every color or race to enter into society, to be educated, to vote, to intermarry, everything.

So let us return to young Lydia, whose eyes have been opened to the awful damage done to the Abenakis of Maine. She could not but feel remorse at their plight, but with it came resolve. As Maria, Karcher goes on, “she would agitate for a fair and humane Indian policy throughout her life, beginning in 1829 with her protest against the forced ‘removal’ of the Cherekees from their native Georgia to Oklahoma … and ending in 1870 with her outraged denunciation of the brutal war being waged on the Plains Indians.”

Actually, her positive regard for native Americans was manifested publicly long before the Cherekees’ Trail of Tears, in her first book, the novel, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times, published in 1824 when she was 22. It features a romance and marriage between a young Puritan woman and an Indian, with whom she has a child. Other things happen, but her belief that people of every sort should know equal rights and enjoy each others’ society is as central to the book as it was to her effort after the Civil War to help ex-slaves gain the vote and a full place in society. That first year, she put together an anthology of writings, The Freedman’s Book, which both acknowledged the causes for national remorse, that blacks had been treated so horribly, but also sought to stoke the resolve to overcome the disadvantages slavery had burdened them with. It featured many black writers.

Gratitude, remorse, and resolve – having them all goes on being the challenge. Come Thanksgiving, some do not want to have the festivities interrupted by any mention of what was done to Indians over the years, the brutality, the betrayals, the thievery, the lies, not on Thanksgiving, not ever. And some want everything to stop so the spotlight is on the case for remorse and stay there.

I say, remorse is in order, but partnered with what gratitude may be due for goodnesses along the way, and paired with resolve, a determination to see justice and fairness and good will among all.

May I suggest in closing that we all have that same work to do with ourselves, that there are things we ought to feel remorse about, setting aside rationalizations and excuses and acknowledging error; but like Maria Child, not being content just to rue, but to pair remorse with resolve, the resolve to repair, to heal, to improve as we can; and partner them both with gratitude for all the goodnesses that have been ours despite our shortcomings, and that will be with us on Thanksgiving and beyond.

So may it be.