Changing Views of Motherhood

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

Readings

The first reading was the poem “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats,” by the Unitarian poet Sylvia Plath.

The second reading was a poem titled “Mother’s Day” by Bruce Lansky, from his book If Pigs Could Fly and Other Deep Thoughts: A Collection of Funny Poems.

Sermon

The past decade or so in the United States has been an interesting time for those of us who consider ourselves to be feminists. Feminism has become a bad word, a pejorative term, so much so that now when I use the word I have to define what I mean. It actually has a very simple definition. A feminist is someone who believes that all genders are equally worthy as human beings. A feminist is someone who does not believe that there is one gender that is stronger, smarter, more authoritative than other genders. Or, as we used to say back in the 1990s, a feminist is someone who believes that women and girls are just as good as men and boys.

For us Unitarian Universalists, feminism also has a religious dimension. We are the inheritors of the Universalist tradition. The old-time Universalists decided that if God really was good, then God would extend God’s love to all persons everywhere. These days, not all Unitarian Universalists believe in God; but regardless of our belief or lack of belief in God, we still remain convinced that all persons are equally worthy as human beings. Because of this, Unitarian Universalists almost have to be feminists — because of our religious worldview, we will affirm your inherent worthiness and dignity no matter what your gender is.

Those of us who are feminists have a perspective on motherhood that differs in some respects from non-feminists. If you’re a feminist, you tend to see each woman or girl as an individual, as a separate and unique human being with distinctive talents and abilities. Traditionally, there was a tendency to equate motherhood and womanhood — if you’re a woman, then you have to be a mother. But those of us who are feminists recognize that the universe is more complicated than that. Some women want to be mothers, some women don’t want to become mothers, some women are ambivalent about motherhood, some women cannot become mothers regardless of their wishes. Just because a person is a woman, it does not mean they must be a mother. Our feminist worldview has changed our understanding of motherhood.

I became very aware that I’m a feminist during last year’s presidential election cycle. This awareness hit me especially hard during the childless cat lady kerfluffle. If you’ve forgotten the childless cat lady kerfluffle, let me remind you of how it played out. Back in 2021, J. D. Vance claimed that the United States is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”(1) That is a direct quote taken from a video clip. The video clip of Vance saying this was posted on Twitter, and caused a bit of a buzz across various social media outlets. Perhaps the most notable social media buzz occurred when Taylor Swift posted a reply on social media in which she openly proclaimed herself a childless cat lady.

Now it turns out that the cat-lady trope is not a new invention. According to Dr. Corey Wrenn, lecturer in sociology at the University of Kent, Great Britain, there is a long history of stereotyping feminists as cat ladies. Over a hundred years ago, women were seeking the right to vote were portrayed as cats in anti-suffragette propaganda. According to Corey Wrenn, “anti-suffrage postcards often used [cats] to reference female activists. The intent was to portray suffragettes as silly, infantile, incompetent, and ill-suited to political engagement.”(2)

Knowing this helps give us some more insight into the cat lady we heard about in the first reading this morning, in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats.” Before I talk about that poem, I have to tell you a little something about Sylvia Plath. First, of particular interest to us, Plath was a Unitarian: she grew up in Unitarian churches; in college, she described herself an “agnostic humanist”; and in her twenties, she called herself “a pagan Unitarian at best.”(3) Second, Plath was born in 1932, and based on what I’ve seen of that generation of Unitarian women (which includes what I saw of my Unitarian mother), I’d say many of those women were strong-minded feminists, even if they didn’t describe themselves using the term “feminist.” In short, Plath was both a Unitarian and a feminist; that is to say, in terms of her worldview, she was one of us.

Plath’s short life — she died at age 30 — was not an easy life. While still a girl, she showed promise as a writer. But after a summer internship in college, she had a major depressive episode which culminated in a six month hospitalization. After recovering her health, she went to study in England on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met the poet Ted Hughes. They married, but Hughes turned out to be an abuser who physically assaulted her; he also conducted affairs with other women. After the birth of her second child, Plath separated from Hughes, only to die by suicide less than a year later.

I know, this is a pretty grim story for a Mother’s Day sermon. I apologize.

So on a more positive note, let’s consider Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ella Mason and her Eleven Cats.” This is a poem that’s both funny and serious. When the unnamed narrator of the poem was a girl, she and her friends used to go to spy on Ella Mason. They would peer into Ella Mason’s house, where they could see her eleven cats purring around her — this is the funny bit, with little girls peering in to Ella’s house to stare at all the happy cats. The little girls giggled when they saw the cats purring on antimacassars. The girls had heard that when Ella Mason was young, she had been a fashionable beauty, and so they make fun of her because by conventional standards Ella had thrown away her opportunity to get married. Now Ella is old, and she has to settle for the love and admiration of eleven cats. But in the final stanza of the poem, the girls have grown up, and as they begin to marry they look upon Ella Masson more kindly. They realize that they had misunderstood Ella Mason. Ella did not suffer from vanity, as the girls had assumed, but instead Ella possessed a sense of self-respect which allowed her to realize that in her case, her happiness did not require marriage.(4)

The point of the poem is not that every woman should become a cat lady. Nor is the point of the poem that every woman should get married and have children. The point — as I see it — is that each of us has choices about how we’re going to live our lives. Many people make their life choices based on the expectations of society, while others among us make our choices based on knowing our deepest selves. Sometimes someone winds up making a choice that society disapproves of — when, for example, a woman chooses not to get married, causing little girls peer in her front door and giggle at her — but when they make that choice based on a deep knowledge of self, they are able to ignore the the disapproval of other people. In fact, given the diversity of opinion in human communities, no matter what choice you make, you can be fairly sure that someone is going to disapprove of it. Thus it is always best to make your choices based on a deep knowledge of who you really are.

I see something of a parallel between Ella Mason and Taylor Swift. Swift, who is now 36 years old, has thus far chosen to focus on her career instead of marrying and/or having children. She knows that there are people who disapprove of her for not following a conventional path and putting aside her music to become a mother; but she also knows herself well enough to know that she is being true to her self. When Swift saw J. D. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” because she knew who she was and why she had made the choices she had made, she was able to post a very measured response on Instagram (in which she urged her followers to register to vote). And she was secure enough in her own self that she could sign her post “Taylor Swift / Childless Cat lady.”(5)

So why am I talking so much about childless cat ladies on Mother’s Day? The point I’m trying to make is that there are quite a few people in our country who feel that the single most important role for all women is to bear children and be mothers. People with this viewpoint seem to find it quite threatening when some women — like Taylor Swift — prioritize their careers, putting off motherhood, or maybe choosing not to become mothers at all. They say they have a good reason to feel threatened: they see that the birthrate is falling in the United States, and they worry that the future of the human race is threatened by women who don’t have children. But I suspect that they are really worried because the old gender norms to which they have grown accustomed seem to be fading out — those old gender norms that say the primary purpose of women is to bear children and be mothers. And so they grow anxious when they see women who prioritize something other than motherhood.

By contrast, we Unitarian Universalists do not assume that just because someone is a woman, their primary duty is to bear children and become a mother. We are also quite aware that some women who might want to become mothers cannot do so, for a wide variety of reasons. We are also aware that there are many different ways to become a mother: there are mothers who give birth to a child, there are mothers who adopt a child, there a mothers who become a mother by marrying someone who already has children.

And finally, we even understand that there can be many kinds of mothers. For example, there are people who serve as mothers to children who are not their biological children, adopted children, or step-children. Sylvia Plath had a biological mother, but she also had a literary mother. The Unitarian novelist Olive Higgins Prouty adopted Plath as a kind of literary child, paying for Plath’s college education and paying for Plath’s medical expenses during her first hospitalization for mental illness.(6) Or in another example, some decades ago I knew a teenaged girl who had a difficult home life and got her mothering from a woman in her church community who was not her biological mother; this girl spent as much time as she could in this other woman’s household (and sadly, this teenager’s biological mother was actually glad that the girl spent so many of her waking hours away from their home; not everyone enjoys motherhood).

As feminists, we understand that men can also be mothers. I remember a gay couple I once knew who had adopted children, and both men in that couple served as both mothers and fathers to their children. But I also think of a co-worker of mine back in the 1980s whose mother had died when he was an infant; from the way he talked about his upbringing, it was clear that his father had been both a father and mother to him. Most non-feminists probably wouldn’t admit that men can be mothers; but the evidence of my own experience shows that men can indeed serve as mothers.

Once you adopt a feminist viewpoint, the category of “mother” becomes a little bit broader than just a biological woman who has biological offspring. Mind you, we who are feminists acknowledge the great importance of those women who physically give birth to infants. Giving birth is crucially important, it can put a huge strain on a woman’s body, and we are grateful for women who choose to give birth. But we also understand that motherhood, broadly construed, means more than physically giving birth. Motherhood encompasses all of the intensive nurturing that a human being needs to grow from infancy into adulthood; and this includes both physical, emotional, and spiritual nurture.

It is actually quite astonishing how much nurture human beings need to get from infancy to adulthood. In contemporary Western culture, we like to pretend that all that nurture can be provided by a nuclear family with one mother and one father, but that really isn’t true. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that it takes a much bigger community than that to provide the nurture that children and teens require. Lawrence Mbogoni, a retired professor from William Paterson University who was raised rural Tanzania, put it this way:

“[The proverb] ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child’ reflects a social reality some of us who grew up in rural areas of Africa can easily relate to. As a child, my conduct was a concern of everybody, not just my parents, especially if it involved misconduct. Any adult had the right to rebuke and discipline me and would make my mischief known to my parents…. The concern of course was the moral well-being of the community.”(7)

While Lawrence Mbogoni was speaking specifically of rural Africa, the same principle applies more generally to all human beings and all human communities. It does in fact take a whole village to raise a child. In rural Tanzania, that community was the village in which the Mbogoni family lived. In the industrialized West, where villages no longer exist except in fantasy, it is more difficult to find a community of adults who will help raise children and teens, who can help provide all the nurture that a child or teenager needs.

But such communities do exist, and our First Parish congregation is one such intergenerational community. As a community, we know that a central part of our identity is to be the whole village that raises a child. We do not want to supplant a child’s own parents, but we are here to support and help parents. We see this happening at social hour, where there are many adults, not just parents, who know the names of First Parish children and who talk with the children. We see this in our Religious Education Committee, which includes two people who do not have children in the Sunday school, a grandparent-age person, and a high school student. We see this in programs like the current pen-pal program, where kids and adults get to know one another through exchanging weekly pen-pal letters. We are doing our best to be the kind of village that it takes to raise a child.

This is how we help support motherhood. And our support of motherhood is firmly rooted in our feminist worldview. Our feminist worldview helps us understand that the rest of us can help take a little bit of pressure off the biological and adoptive mothers who are part of our community. Those biological and adoptive mothers know that they can come here to First Parish and for a couple of hours each week there will be a whole community of other adults who will help look after their children. Because if it takes a village to raise a child, that implies that motherhood is more than a full-time job for one person.

Without denying the importance of biological and adoptive mothers (some of whom may be men), we recognize that entire communities also provide mothering. In such communities, the mothering provided by biological and adoptive mothers is supplemented by the mothering provided by elders who may be other people’s grandparents; by young adults who may still be thinking about whether or not to have children of their own; by child-free couples like my wife and I; and, yes, by childless cat ladies. We have embraced a changed definition of motherhood, where nurturing children is the responsibility — not just of two parents in a nuclear family — but rather of an entire village, and entire community,.

So on this Mother’s Day, we honor and support biological and adoptive mothers. We also honor communities that provide the additional nurture that children need; we embrace the proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child.”

Notes

(1) My transcription of a video clip of Tucker Carlson interviewing J. D. Vance in 2021, as posted on X / Twitter by Ron Filipowski @RonFilipkowski on 22 July 2024 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1815503440983867598 accessed 9 May 2025.
(2) Corey Wrenn, “Woman-as-Cat in Anti-Suffrage Propaganda,” posted on 4 December 2013 in the Sociological Images category on The Society Pages website https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/12/04/the-feminization-of-the-cat-in-anti-suffrage-propaganda/ accessed 9 May 2025.
(3) Details of Plath’s Unitarianism and personal theology from Wesley Hromatko, “Plath, Syliva,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, Unitarian Universalist Study Network https://www.uudb.org/plath-sylvia/ accessed 10 May 2025.
(4) I’m basing my interpretation of the poem’s last stanza on Valerie Doris Frazier, Battlemaids of Domesticity: Domestic Epic in the Works of Gwendolyn Brooks and Slyvia Plath (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Georgia, 2002), pp. 119-120. Frazier writes: “When the speaker grasps at an answer for Miss Ella’s unmarried state, a sense of tension erupts in the last lines. Miss Ella’s flaw is apparently vanity, as the young women of the town have learned. But those in the town have misread the textual meaning, for there is a significant distinction between Narcissism and self-love. For narcissism means vanity or love for one’s physical body, but self-love which takes on a spiritual rather than physical quality means a concern for one’s happiness.”
(5) Swift’s Instagram post, which includes a photo of her holding a cat, is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_wtAOKOW1z/
(6) Hromatko; see also Lynn Gordon Hughes, “Prouty, Olive Higgins,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, Unitarian Universalist Study Network https://www.uudb.org/prouty-olive-higgins/ accessed 10 May 2025.
(7) Lawrence Mbogoni as quoted by Joel Goldberg, “It Takes A Village To Determine The Origins Of An African Proverb,” on the “Goats and Soda: Stories of Life in a Changing World” blog on the National Public Radio website, 30 July 2016 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/30/487925796/it-takes-a-village-to-determine-the-origins-of-an-african-proverb accessed 10 May 2025.

Question Box Service

On April 27, we had a “Question Box Service,” where people in the congregation asked questions of me, and of Kate Sullivan, our Director of Religious Education. Kate and I addressed address as many of your questions as we could during the service. But we didn’t have time to consider every question. And for the questions we did address, we didn’t have time enough to give full and thoughtful replies. So next fall, I’m going to devote a series of sermons to consider your questions in more depth.

Here are the questions you gave to Kate and me on April 27. The questions appear within quotation marks. I’ve added comments in square brackets, like this: [ ] .

[I’ve grouped the following three questions together, because they all concern the future of our congregation. On Oct. 21, I’ll give a sermon titled ‘What Are Our Visions for the Future?”’]

“What will happen to the church after the older people can no longer come?”

“Where do you see our church in 15 years, and how will we get to that vision?”

“How do we connect better / attract new members?”

“How have you created this spectacular inclusive environment in our congregation?” [I interpret the “you” in this question to be in the plural, for it is everyone in the congregation who has created an inclusive environment.]

“Can we become a Green Congregation again?” [The Green Sanctuary program of the Unitarian Universalist Association is a certification showing a congregation has adopted best practices for environmental sustainability in its operations.]

“Yesterday I attended a United Church of Christ memorial service. The message of a better life after this one and rejoining loved ones after death is very appealing. What is the Unitarian Universalist answer to that?” [On Nov. 2, I’ll give a sermon titled ‘What about the Afterlife?’]

“How to deal with loss and unrelenting grief?” [On Sept. 28, I’ll give a sermon titled ‘What Do You Do with Grief?’]

[I’ve grouped the next two questions together, and on Jan. 25, 2026, I’ll give a sermon titled ‘Faith, Hope, and Kindness.’]

“Is it enough to have hope and be kind?”

“Your thoughts on faith — What is it? Is it religious?”

“Dan, when did you know that you were ‘called’ to ministry? Was it a journey — how purposeful, spiritual, challenging? Were there times when you were tempted to leave that journey?” [I don’t have a traditional calling like Christian ministers, and I hate talking about myself, so I have difficulty answering this question as asked. But I think there’s a broader issue here. In the past, many Protestant Christians believed that every single person has a calling. I think that would be great, if it could work in the real world. So on Aug. 31 — Labor Day weekend — I’ll give a sermon titled ‘Your Job as a Calling (No, Really).’]

“What’s a brief theological history of First Parish? It’s got to be an interesting story, going from a Puritan church to the non-creedal church we know and love today.” [On Nov. 30, I’ll give a sermon on exactly this topic.]

“When kids come home with questions about god/God, what should we say? How should we respond?” [On Oct. 26, I’ll give a sermon titled ‘What Do We Tell Kids about God, Death, etc.?’ Because she’s a developmental psychologist, Kate has a unique perspective on this, and I’ll try to figure out how she can address this topic with me.]

“What can we do about the reality that there is so much injustice and inequality in the world while we are surrounded by such abundance?” [This is a big huge question. I had already planned a sermon on homelessness on Sept. 24, and a sermon on White poverty on Oct. 5. Those two sermons will begin to address this big huge question.]

“The great truths of the teachings of Jesus that are common to all major religions in the world.” [This is another big huge question that I can’t possibly cover in just one sermon. But I’ll try to address this question on the Sunday before Christmas, in a sermon titled “Jesus, the Solstice, Diwali, and Hanukkah.”]

[The following two questions both address the question of what our worship services are the way they are — and how our worship services compare with those of other Unitarian Universalist congregations, as well as those of other religious groups. I’ll talk about this question in the Jan. 4, 2026, service, in a sermon titled ‘Alike and Unalike.’]

“In the Baha’i faith, there would be a spiritual talk and after the talk the leader would ask people to give their perspectives on the topic.”

“What about our service is most similar to other Unitarian Universalist congregations?”

“Where does honest dialogue begin in a time of such deep division?” [Another big huge topic. No, I don’t have the final answer. But in the service on Dec. 28, I’ll have us take a look at some practical tips for opening the door to honest dialogue.]

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg? (metaphorically)” [My metaphorical answer is: Yes. Actually, I can’t figure out how to address this question in a sermon. If I think of a way to do it, I’ll add it to the schedule of next year’s services.]

Another View of Easter

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

Easter is one of those holidays that has spread out beyond its original religious setting. For Christians, Easter is the culmination of Holy Week, a week of religious observance. Holy week begins with Palm Sunday, which commemorates the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth into Jerusalem to celebrate Pesach, or Passover (remember they were all observant Jews). Then there’s Maundy Thursday, which according to tradition was when Jesus and his followers had a Seder. Good Friday is a solemn observance of when the Romans executed Jesus. Then Easter Sunday is the joyous celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.

Now all this was confusing to me as a Unitarian Universalist child. By the rigid religious divisions that existed in Massachusetts back then, Unitarians were called Protestants. But — just like here in Cohasset — the Unitarian congregation I grew up in started out as a Puritan church. For those who inherited the Puritan tradition, there was only one holy day, and that was Sunday; any other holiday was considered to be mere superstition. As a result, when I was a child I didn’t understand Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and all the rest. Even today, I have to admit I still default to the Puritan tradition that says Sunday is the only holy day.

Some years ago, I was the Director of Religious Education at First Parish in Lexington, which like our congregation started out as a Puritan church. One year, just like this year, Easter happened to fall on the Sunday closest to April 19 or Patriots Day. Most of you probably think of Patriots Day — if you think of it at all — as that three day weekend in April when they run the Boston Marathon. But if you live in Lexington or Concord, you quickly learn that Patriots Day is when all good Americans celebrate the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Now as the oldest church in Lexington, First Parish in Lexington was the church of the Minutemen. On the Sunday closest to Patriots Day, there would always be men dressed up in Minuteman costumes, and women wearing 18th century dresses. In my recollection, the Sunday nearest Patriots Day was also the only Sunday during the year when they celebrated communion. In the Unitarian tradition, communion typically is a simple commemoration of the Last Supper. But in First Parish in Lexington, it became more than a commemoration of the Last Supper; with the men and women in 18th century garb, and with the congregation’s 18th century communion silver making its annual appearance, communion also become a sort of historical reenactment of 18th century communion services. Then when Patriots Day fell close to Easter, there would also be an Easter celebration layered on top of all that.

While this may sound weird and confusing, this is actually the way most religions operate. Pop culture, local history, and religious traditions get all mushed together, making a glorious celebratory mash-up. The fundamentalist Christians and the hard-core atheists are both highly critical of this kind of cultural mash-up, because (as they rightly point out) it does not make rational sense. This is why atheists and conservative Christians criticize Easter eggs, and the Easter Bunny, and Minutemen at Easter services in Lexington. But for the rest of us, cultural mash-ups are loads of fun. We eat our chocolate eggs, we don’t worry about the contradictions, and we welcome the Minutemen on Easter.

One reason I happen to be thinking about all this is because yesterday was the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and today is Easter. I went to the celebration in Concord yesterday, and there is something inside me fully expecting someone to walk through the door of our 18th century meetinghouse, all dressed up in 18th century garb.

Another reason I happen to be thinking about all this is because over the last century or so, liberal Christians have been thinking about Easter and Holy Week in new ways. The Christian tradition makes it clear that Jesus and his followers went into Jerusalem to celebrate Pesach, or Passover. Pesach celebrates the Exodus, when the ancient Israelites escaped from the bondage and political oppression they experienced in Egypt. In the time of Jesus, Jews no longer lived in Egypt, but they were once again oppressed, this time by the Roman Empire. In an essay published last week in the New York Times, Episcopal priest Andrew Thayer wrote that Palm Sunday celebrations “often miss an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’ procession: At the time, it was a deliberate act of theological and political confrontation. It wasn’t just pageantry; it was protest.”(1)

In this interpretation of the Easter story, Jesus came, not just to save souls for heaven, but also to push back against the economic policies of the Roman Empire that kept so many Jews living in poverty. Jesus may have wanted to get people into heaven after they died, but he was also seriously concerned about the well-being of people here and now, while they were still alive.

If we think about Palm Sunday in this way, we might think about Easter differently, too. Instead of making a theological point about the salvation of individuals, we could also think of Easter as a holiday that celebrates the resilience of an entire community. Although it sometimes gets obscured, the central purpose of Christianity is to be a community with the goal to take care of all who are poor and downtrodden. The Romans could kill Jesus, but they could not kill an entire movement devoted to taking care of those who are less fortunate.

When we think about the Easter story in this way, then it doesn’t seem quite so odd that First Parish in Lexington sometimes had men in Minuteman suits show up on Easter Sunday. Even thought the political situation at the time of the American Revolution was very different from the political situation in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus — even though the underlying philosophies of the Jesus movement and the American Revolution had important differences — nevertheless, both Jesus’s followers, and the architects of the American republic, had a sense that each and every human personality was something to be cherished. When the founders of the United States said that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,” they were drawing on an ethical tradition that goes back to Jesus; that tradition goes even further back, to the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible, where it says: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (2). This is the ethical tradition of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do to you; and this same idea is not exclusive to Judaism and Christianity, but appears in somewhat different forms in nearly every human culture throughout history.

We live in a time when there are deep divisions in our country. I think most Americans still profess devotion to the Golden Rule — whether we use the words of Leviticus, or one of the other great ethical and religious traditions where the same principle is articulated. But we are deeply divided about how to apply this principle in real life. Does the Golden Rule apply to LGBTQ people? Does the Golden Rule apply to people who are poor? Does the Golden Rule apply to immigrants? Does the Golden Rule apply to both Republicans and Democrats?

While most Americans seem to agree that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we currently have bitter disagreements on how this might play out politically. And in our bitter disagreements, some of us have been descending into outright hatred. Sometimes we seem to forget that the Golden Rule applies not just to people who share our religion and our politics, but also to the people of other religions, and to people from other countries, and even to people who belong to a different political party.

This country experienced similar deep divisions back in the 1960s and 1970s. I was a child and teenager in those decades, and I remember listening to the news on television and hearing about the assassinations, the bombings, and the people throwing rocks at school buses right here in eastern Massachusetts.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., captured the feeling of that era in his 1968 speech at Grosse Point High School, when he retold the story of the Good Samaritan. This is the story, as you may remember, of the man who was going over the dangerous mountain road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This man was attacked by robbers, severely beaten, and left to die by the side of the road. A priest and a Levite — both solid upstanding citizens — walked by, saw the man lying there, and hurried away; King says that no doubt they both worried that this was a trap set by robbers to lure them in so that they would be robbed. Then a Samaritan — a member of a despised religious minority — came by, but he stopped to help. King concluded the story by saying: “…the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”(3)

By telling this story, Dr. King revealed an essential problem of human ethics. We know from the Golden Rule that we are called upon to help others; but over and over again, we think only of what will happen to us. Considering just our own country, we have seen this happen again and again in American history: over and over again, we have forgotten this high ideals of the American Revolution, and we have reverted back to a primitive selfishness. In a sermon he gave in 1967, Dr. King said that over and over again Jesus tried to show human beings how to follow the Golden Rule, but that over and over again we turn away from the truth — just as the priest and the Levite turned away from the man who had been beaten and left lying by the side of the road — just as the Roman Empire turned away from the truth of the golden Rule when they executed Jesus on trumped-up political charges. But although too often we turn away from the Golden Rule, we also feel that there is another way. Dr. King put it this way: “[People] love darkness rather than the light, and they crucified [Jesus], and there on Good Friday [when Jesus died] it was still dark, but the Easter came, and Easter is an eternal reminder of the fact that the truth crushed [to] earth will rise again.”(4)

And that is my Easter hope for you. Even though the deep divisions in our country are crushing the truth of the Golden Rule at the moment — even though the hatred that exists in our country is crushing the truth of this ancient teaching from the Hebrew Bible that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves — despite everything that’s going on around us, Easter is an eternal reminder that the truth crushed to earth will rise again.

Notes

(1) Andrew Thayer, “Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession,” New York Times, 13 April 2025.
(2) Leviticus 19:18.
(3) Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Other America,” speech at Grosse Point (Mich.) High School, 14 March 1968. In the opening sentence of this speech, King recognized the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Grosse Point, Rev. Harry Meserve; Meserve had served as the minister of First Parish in Cohasset in the late 1930s. Text from the Grosse Point Historical Society website: https://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/index.htm accessed 19 April 2025.
(4) Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon,” Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, 24 December 1967.