Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Religion in society

  • Early Education and Unitarian Universalism

    Sermon copyright (c) 2022 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon text may contain typographical errors. The sermon as preached included a significant amount of improvisation.

    Readings

    (Read by Mary Parker, chair of the Carriage House Nursery School Advisory Board)

    The first reading is a draft of the revised mission statement of Carriage House Nursery School, which is operated by First Parish.

    Carriage House Nursery School encourages learning and growth, curiosity and enjoyment, self-esteem and respect for others.

    Our commitment to children [is] to provide:
    Support for families through strong school partnerships;
    Child-centered education;
    Attention to the health, safety, and responsive care of all children;
    Active, individualized, developmentally appropriate learning;
    A culture of respect for one another and for all people and the world in which we live;
    A culture of respect and awe for the natural environment, of which we are a small part.

    The second reading comes from an article by Abigail Adams Eliot, titled “Nursery Schools Fifty Years Ago,” published in the April, 1972, issue of Young Children magazine:

    “Day nurseries had been established for the sake of working mothers, mothers who needed somebody to take care of their children safely during the day…. Nursery schools had a new motivation — program. In fact the nursery school movement grew from a conviction that some definite educational plan is necessary before the age of five…. Nursery schools were no babysitting agencies, nor were they dedicated to the business of getting children ready for elementary school. Rather, they were interested in enrichment — in guiding children toward a more rewarding life….

    “In addition to providing a rich program for children, nursery schools tried to educate adults. Contact with parents was an important phase of the work, as it is in good nursery schools today…. I myself told an early graduating class [of teachers] at the Ruggles Street Nursery School and Training Center, ‘If the nursery school movement does not result, ultimately, in better families, it will be a failure.”

    Sermon: Early Education and Unitarian Universalism

    Recently I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Unitarian Universalism and early education recently. I should explain that “early education” is educational jargon for learning that happens before about age 8. Thus, early education includes first and second grades in school, kindergarten, and pre-primary school or nursery school.

    If you’ve ever been in our Parish House on weekday mornings, you’ll know why I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Unitarian Universalism and early education. Each weekday our Parish House houses dozens of young children, ranging in age from two to five, who come to the Carriage House Nursery School. Carriage House Nursery School is owned and operated by First Parish; it’s by far the largest program we provide to the wider community.

    Unitarian Universalists have been involved in early education for over a century and a half. I believe that our interest in early education springs directly from our religious commitments. And to explain what I mean, I’d like to tell you about two Unitarians who were innovators in early education, and how their work in education grew out of their Unitarian religion. Then I’m going to tell you a little bit about our own Carriage House Nursery School, and how that relates to our Unitarian Universalism.

    I’ll begin with one of my heroines, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Elizabeth Peabody was born in Billerica, Massachusetts, in 1804, and was raised in a Unitarian church by a Unitarian mother who was also a school teacher. It is no wonder, then, that Elizabeth Palmer Peabody became an educator who, like a good Unitarian, valued the individuality of each child in her care.

    Elizabeth Peabody began her teaching career in and around Boston, and on Sundays she would attend services at the Federal Street Church. The minister there, William Ellery Channing, was the most prominent Unitarian minister of that time. Channing recognized that this young woman had unusual intellectual and spiritual gifts. William Channing so respected Elizabeth Peabody that he formed the habit of taking a walk with this twenty-something school teacher every Saturday so he could discuss that week’s sermon topic with her.

    After teaching for a number of years, Elizabeth Peabody opened the West Street Bookstore in Boston. This bookstore became the center for Unitarians and Transcendentalists, and Elizabeth got to know most of the great Unitarians of her day, including: Ralph Waldo Emerson; the early feminist Margaret Fuller; and educational reformer Horace Mann. The bookstore was, in it own way, an educational institution.

    But in the 1850s, Elizabeth Peabody returned to teaching school. She became one of the most important figures in the American kindergarten movement. The kindergarten movement was started in Germany by pioneering educator Friedrich Froebel. Elizabeth Peabody brought her own Unitarian beliefs to Froebel’s child-centered education. Here, for example, is how she defined “kindergarten” in her “Lecture No. 1 on Nursery and Kindergarten,” published in 1874:

    “A kindergarten means a guarded company of children, who are to be treated as a gardener treats his plants; that is, in the first place, studied to see what they are, and what conditions they require for the fullest and most beautiful growth; in the second place, put into or supplied with these conditions, with as little handling of their individuality as possible, but with unceasing genial and provident care to remove all obstructions, and favor all the circumstances of growth. It is because they are living organisms that they are to be cultivated — not drilled (which is a process only appropriate to insensate stone).”

    In Elizabeth Peabody’s day, “drilling” children meant forcing them to memorize and repeat facts and words; it was the main educational technique used in most schools back then. By contrast, Elizabeth Peabody favored a child-centered approach to education. For her, children had to be treated as individual human beings, and this was a direct result of her Unitarian beliefs. Today we might say she affirmed the inherent worth and dignity of every schoolchild.

    Elizabeth Peabody also adhered to the Unitarian belief that education is one of the best ways to address social problems. She raised enough money to open a free kindergarten in a poor neighborhood in Boston. When that school proved to be a success, she traveled throughout the United states advocating for free public kindergartens. She also began training kindergarten teachers who could teach in those new schools. While there were others also promoting public kindergartens at this time, Elizabeth Peabody was perhaps the most important advocate, so I think of her as the mother of kindergartens in America.

    The next Unitarian educator I’d like to tell you about is Abigail Adams Eliot. Born in Dorchester in 1892, Abby Eliot graduated from Radcliffe College in 1914, and became a social worker. But she quickly learned that social work was not the right career for her. Instead, around 1920 she found herself involved in the then-new nursery school movement. By the 1920s, kindergartens had become fairly widespread. But educators began to see that children under the age of five would also benefit from schooling. Yale professor of education Arnold Gesell put it this way: “The educational ladder of the American public school is a tall one and a stout one, but it does not reach the ground. It does not have a solid footing.” The nursery school movement aimed to bring the ladder of the American public school down to the ground, by providing schooling for children from age two to five.

    Abby Eliot went to England to train at one of the first nursery schools, the McMillan Nursery School in London. She learned a great deal in her six months there. Sometimes she learned what not to do. She said: “One of the things I learned very well was never, never to put 32 two-year-olds together in one room. We came close to a panic about 4:30 one Friday afternoon when a think London fog rolled into the open-air shelter we used. The children got to fighting over toys or something, and the fog was so thick that my student helpers and I could not see the children. It was nip and tuck to quiet them before they hurt each other.” This is one of the best arguments I’ve ever heard for small class sizes for young children.

    Abby Eliot also quickly discovered the importance of engaging the whole family, and even the wider community. When the school could engage the parents as well as the child, the result — so said Abby Eliot — was to strengthen families. And in one school that Abby Eliot ran, she invited high school students to come learn child development practices, so that when they eventually had children of their own, they would be better parents.

    In 1921, Abby Eliot opened the Ruggles Street Nursery School in a disadvantaged neighborhood in Boston. Like Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, she had the same Unitarian-influenced goal of strengthening democracy and addressing social ills through education. Abby Eliot quickly proved to have real talent working with young children, and her school became a center for training nursery school teachers. Eventually, Abby Eliot’s training efforts were incorporated into the Eliot-Pearson Children’s School, part of the Department of Child Study at Tufts University. (A parenthetical note: Tufts is a Universalist college.) The Eliot-Pearson Children’s School remains a training site for teachers working with young children.

    I will make one small critique of Abby Eliot, a critique that also applies to Elizabeth Peabody. Like many Unitarians, they saw their mission as helping the poor and disadvantaged. This they understood to mean helping other people, seeing other people as the recipient of their good works. While it is admirable to help others, sometimes Unitarians have forgotten that we have our own problems that need to be addressed. However, after she retired to Concord, Massachusetts, Abby Eliot addressed a social problem within her own family by founding the Community Mental Health Center. She started this clinic based on her experiences of her own relatives who had struggled with mental health issues.

    Now that I’ve told you about Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Abigail Adams Eliot, I’d like to turn to the Carriage House Nursery School, a Unitarian Universalist educational project right here in Cohasset.

    When I heard Mary Parker the educational goals of the Carriage House Nursery School in the first reading this morning, I could hear echoes of the Unitarian values of Elizabeth Peabody and Abigail Eliot. Carriage House provides child-centered education — that’s like Elizabeth Peabody studying children to see who they are, and then helping them attain “the fullest and most beautiful growth.” Carriage House provide support for families — just like Abigail Eliot engaged families in her nursery schools. Carriage House fosters a culture of respect for one another, and for all people — just as Elizabeth Peabody treated the children in her care with respect, and fostered a sense of the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. And the mission statement of Carriage House Nursery School — to encourage learning and growth, curiosity and enjoyment, self-esteem and respect for others — sounds exactly like something both Elizabeth Peabody and Abigail Eliot might have said. So you can see that Carriage House Nursery School, even though it is a distinctly non-sectarian school, fosters values that are thoroughly aligned with Unitarian Universalism.

    In fact, I’d say that Carriage House Nursery School is our congregation’s largest social justice project. It is clearly the largest community program we run, both in terms of the size of its budget and the number of people it serves. And I would call it a social justice project for several reasons. First, Carriage House aims to strengthen families. We often think that it’s only families in disadvantaged neighborhoods that need to be strengthened, but as a minister I can tell you that there are plenty of families in affluent neighborhoods that need support.

    Second, Carriage House nurtures a culture of respect — as it says in the mission statement: “A culture of respect for one another and for all people and the world in which we live; [and] a culture of respect and awe for the natural environment of which we are a small part.” A culture of respect for all people is essential for a civil society essential for democracy. A culture of respect for the natural environment is absolutely critical to helping us address climate change and other ecological disasters.

    We tend to forget that education can be a social justice project in itself. Social justice goes beyond providing direct services to those in need. Social justice goes beyond influencing policy makers. Social justice has to include education. When we influence young people, when we instill in them a respect for all human beings and a respect for the interdependent web of life, we are changing the world for the better. And the change that happens in education goes far deeper than providing direct services, or influencing policy makers: we are changing people’s souls.

    And do not underestimate the power of early education to change people’s souls. A nursery school like Carriage House can do so much to influence a child’s character, to nurture their growth towards becoming more human, and more humane. Given that democracy is always fragile, we have a constant need to raise more children who are imbued with a respect for all people, and a respect for the web of life. This is why so many Unitarian Universalists over the centuries have gotten involved in education: education is one of the best ways for us to live out our religious values.

    And maybe we can think together about how to make this social justice project have even more impact. Can we reduce the amount of money we draw from Carriage House so that we could offer more scholarships? Can we find ways to support the innovative outdoor classroom that was built over the summer? Can we get student teachers to come to Carriage House to experience our educational approach? How can we support the Carriage House Advisory Board, the group of people from First Parish who oversee the work of the school?

    And finally — when you think about our First Parish social justice programs, I hope that the first social justice program you think of is Carriage House Nursery School. For Carriage House Nursery School is one of the most powerful ways we live out our values in the wider community: strengthening democracy, and helping children grow in respect for themselves, each other, and the whole world.

  • Thanksgiving

    Homily copyright (c) 2022 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The homily text may contain typographical errors.

    [This homily followed a play, which showed how many myths of Thanksgiving simply aren’t true.]

    For many of us, Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday. It hasn’t gotten too commercial. You don’t have to do anything except eat. And it’s all about giving thanks. What’s not to like? — Which means it can be hard to hear that some of the things we thought we knew about Thanksgiving aren’t exactly true.

    I think the most depressing thing for me is that after that first harvest celebration in the autumn of 1621, that one day when the Native people and the European colonists sat together in peace, the European colonists went back to treating the Native peoples badly. Just two years later, European colonists who had settled on the Fore River in Weymouth, not too far from here, carried out the massacre of Wessagusset, killing seven native people for no good reason. And in the years to follow, people of European descent went on to sell Native men into slavery, break treaties, steal Native land — a centuries-long litany of abuse that continues to this day. It’s fine for us to remember that moment of racial harmony on an autumn day in 1621, but we must also remember the other four centuries of history of the Native people of Massachusetts.

    And I find it disconcerting to learn that our modern celebration of Thanksgiving is really just a fictional invention of Sarah Hale in the mid-nineteenth century. A big dinner with a roast turkey wasn’t central to Thanksgiving until Sarah Hale made it so. In fact, Thanksgiving wasn’t even a national holiday until Sarah Hale started petitioning the president of the United States to make it a holiday. Thanksgiving as we know it today really has no historical connection to the Pilgrims.

    While all this may sounds depressing and disorienting, I feel this actually frees us Unitarian Universalists to reinterpret Thanksgiving in some positive ways. Here are some of my ideas:

    First, turkey becomes optional. If you like turkey, go ahead and have turkey. But if you’re vegan or vegetarian, or if you’re cutting down on eating meat to lower your carbon footprint, then there’s no reason to serve turkey. Or if you just don’t like turkey all that much, then don’t cook something you don’t like.

    Second, we can be more realistic about what happened to Native peoples in southeastern Massachusetts. At some level, we all knew that the old myth of Thanksgiving whitewashed Native history. We all knew that old myth was at least misguided, at worst an outright lie. It’s a relief to be able to let go of a myth that really isn’t true. After all, isn’t that what Unitarian Universalism is all about? We try to find the truth, and not remain mired in misleading myths.

    Third, all this means we can start creating a new kind of Thanksgiving. Instead of following the lead of Sarah Hale, we can create a Thanksgiving that’s more in tune with our hopes and dreams and values. We can keep those Thanksgiving rituals that work well for us, and let go of whatever doesn’t work well for us. For myself, I’d like to keep gathering together with family and friends to share a meal, but I don’t feel a need to cook a turkey any more.

    Going beyond the Thanksgiving rituals, we might also reconsider the purpose of Thanksgiving. Which means it’s OK to revise the old myth of Thanksgiving, and tell what really happened to the Native peoples. And as we revise that old myth, we can put the emphasis back where it belongs: on giving thanks. We can give thanks in spite of everything that’s going wrong in the world. Last Thanksgiving, I did that for myself by rereading the poem “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay. I’m going to do that again this year, but this time in public — at this afternoon’s community Thanksgiving celebration, I’ll be reading an excerpt from Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” I especially like Ross Gay’s approach to gratitude, because he gives thanks in spite of his father’s death, in spite of his friend’s drug addiction, in spite of all that can go wrong in this world. Just as I’ll be giving thanks this year in spite of serious health problems in my extended family.

    All this makes Thanksgiving simple. We gather together, with friends or family or chosen family — and if prefer your alone time, you can even gather together with just yourself. We gather together, and we give thanks. We give thanks in spite of all that’s wrong with the world. We give thanks for those little moments of joy that burst into our lives, often when we least expect them. We give thanks for whatever is good, for whatever is true.

    And that’s all we have to do. Gather together. Give thanks. Anything else we choose to do is icing on the cake. So go ahead and cook that elaborate turkey dinner, with five different kinds of pie, and thirteen side dishes. Go ahead and set up a table that will seat twenty-three, and bring out the fancy dishes and flatware, and create elaborate centerpieces. Go ahead, just so long as you remember to gather together and give thanks. In my household, we might just opt for a Thanksgiving picnic at the beach; that’s what we did for the last thirteen years in California, and it might be warm enough here in Massachusetts this year. It doesn’t matter where you gather, as long as you gather together and give thanks.

    May your Thanksgiving be what you want it to be. May your Thanksgiving be as elaborate as you want, as long as you remember the two simple things at its core: to gather together, and to give thanks.

  • Labor of Love

    The sermon below was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California, at the 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. services. The sermon text below is a reading text; the actual sermon contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2016 Daniel Harper.

    Opening song:
    The opening song, sung by Lewis Santer, was “Commonwealth of Toil” by Ralph Chaplin. See note (4) for the lyrics.

    Readings:
    The readings, chosen and read by Rev. Mary Ganz, were the following poems:
    “What I Learned from My Mother” by Julia Kasdorf
    “What Work Is” by Philip Levine
    “Heart Labour” by Maggie Anderson

    Sermon:

    I thought I’d speak with you this morning about whether you can find a job you love. One legacy of the Protestant Christian tradition which has deeply influenced United States culture is an assumption that our jobs should be both personally satisfying and good for the world. That old Protestant Christian tradition taught that each one of us had a vocation, a calling: it wasn’t just priests who were called by God, every single person in the Christian community was called by God to do their bit to make this world a kind of heaven on earth.

    This morning, on the day before Labor Day, I thought I’d question this old Protestant Christian assumption. So let me offer up an old story, supposedly told by Jesus of Nazareth, and first written down about the year 70 C.E. by a member of the Jewish reform movement that later became known as Christianity.

    As the story begins, a crowd has gathered around to watch that radical rabble-rousing rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, debating with the chief priests, scribes, and elders of the Jewish community in Jerusalem. At that time, the Roman Empire ruled Jerusalem and the rest of Judea, a land which not so long before had been an independent Jewish country. When the Romans took over Jerusalem, the chief priests, scribes, and elders had to learn to get along with the Roman overlords; and at the time of this story, they derived much of their power and authority from their association with the Romans.

    These chief priests, scribes, and elders are debating Jesus because they desperately want to get Jesus to say something, anything, that can be taken as critical of the Roman regime. If they can do that, then they can get the Romans political leaders to arrest Jesus and execute him. Avoiding all their verbal traps, Jesus proceeds to tell them a story, which goes like this:

    A man goes out and plants a vineyard. He puts a fence around it, digs a pit for the winepress, and he builds a watchtower. Then the landowner rents the land to some tenants, and he goes off live in another country. [At this point, the crowd listening to Jesus tell the story realizes the man must be quite wealthy, since he can afford live abroad.]

    Harvest season comes around, and the landowner sends a slave to go and collect the rent from the tenants. The tenants grab the slave, beat him, and send him back to the landowner empty-handed. So the landowner sends another slave; same thing happens, except the tenants also insult the slave. The landowner sends another slave, and this one the tenants kill. The landowner keeps sending slaves to collect the rent, and the tenants beat some of them up, and they kill some of them. [The crowd is getting a better sense of how wealthy the man his: he has so many slaves, he can afford to let some of them get killed.]

    The landowner finally decides to send his son, thinking: Surely the tenants will respect my son. But when the tenants see the landowner’s son, they say to each other: This is our chance, if we kill the son, the landowner will give up, and the land will be ours. So they kill the son, and throw his body out of the vineyard. [The crowd is now confused: are the tenants the heroes of this story, or have they just gone too far?]

    Jesus ends the story by saying: “What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.” [Mark 12:9] The crowd is thinking: Wait a minute, what is Jesus saying here? We thought this was an allegory of the evil Roman empire taking over Jerusalem. We thought Jesus was telling us to resist the Roman overlords. Is Jesus now telling us that “Resistance Is Futile”?

    And then Jesus quotes the Hebrew scriptures, Psalm 118: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.” Many of the people in the crowd are good observant Jews who can fill in the rest of the Psalm from memory, including lines like “All nations surrounded me; in the name of the Lord I cut them off!” and “With the Lord on my side I do not fear. What can mortals do to me?” So Jesus is NOT saying that resistance is futile after all!

    And indeed, the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders, all willing tools of Roman empire, know that Jesus is talking about them. Jesus is saying they are like the evil landowner who extorted too much money from the tenants, provoking the tenants to open rebellion. When Jesus quotes Psalm 118, it sounds to them like he’s calling for open rebellion. They dearly want to arrest Jesus, but they fear the crowd, so they do nothing.

    As for the crowd, Jesus has gotten them thinking.

    On the one hand, the image of the tenants killing the landowner’s son, then throwing the body outside the vineyard — that’s a pretty disgusting image. That’s the trouble with armed rebellion: you have to kill people, and you are not going to respect the dead bodies of those you kill.

    On the other hand, since they are Jewish, the crowd knows about Sabbath years, and about Jubilee years. (1) According to the book of Leviticus, every seventh year is a sabbath year, when you are supposed to let the land lie fallow. Everyone in the crowd would have known that the book of Leviticus was written by Moses, and they would have known that Moses wrote down the actual words of the god of the Israelites. The god of the Israelites told Moses: “When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord.” This was, by the way, an ancient Jewish practice for promoting ecological sustainability.

    So every seventh year is a sabbath year. Then every seven-times-seven years is a jubilee year. In the jubilee year, the god of the Israelites charged human beings to do the following:

    — let the land lie fallow, to encourage ecological sustainability;
    — proclaim liberty throughout the land for all inhabitants and free those held in bondage;
    — any land that was sold must be returned to the original human owners (this was because the God of the Israelites really owned the land, not humans).

    When Jesus quotes Psalm 118, he gets the crowd thinking about jubilee years. The crowd knows the Romans will never abide by the rules of the jubilee year; the Romans had their own gods, ignoring the god of the Israelites. And the crowd knows that the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders of Jerusalem — those among the Jewish people who should above all others uphold the laws of their God — the crowd knows that these Jewish leaders have been co-opted by the Romans; they are no longer serve truth and righteousness, they serve Rome. The Roman empire rules Jerusalem with their military might, ignoring the Jewish laws of ecological sustainability and human freedom.

    So ends this old Christian story. You will notice that there is no real resolution to the story. And here’s how I understand this story:

    The chief religious idea of Jesus of Nazareth is what he called “the kingdom of heaven.” But for Jesus, heaven meant something different than it does in today’s United States, where our religious culture is dominated by Protestant Christian ideas. For Jesus, heaven did not mean — to quote Joe Hill — “pie in the sky, bye and bye”; for Jesus, heaven is something that exists here and now. Heaven is, in fact, what we today call the “Web of Life,” that is, the interconnected relationships that bind together all human beings, all living things, and many non-living things. When we damage those interconnected relationships, when we damage the Web of Life, we are damaging what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. (2)

    In the story, the landowner set up his vineyard and rented it out to some tenants and then left town so he could live in some exotic foreign place. By doing this, landowner damaged many relationships of the Web of Life. As an absentee landlord, he damaged his direct relationship with the tenants. Because he did not live on the land, he damaged his relationship with the land, and he demanded that his tenants produce more from the land than the land could sustainably yield. He was a slave-owner, which damaged many human relationships; worse yet, he sent his slaves to do his dirty work so that he didn’t have to face up to his tenants.

    This story, then, is a case study in damaged relationships: damaged relationships between people, and a damaged relationship between human beings and the land. This is a case study in how human beings damage the Web of Life.

    Now let me say the obvious: this case study comes from two thousand years ago, from a place with a very different economic system than we have now. We probably can’t draw exact parallels with Silicon Valley today, much as we might be tempted to do so.

    But what we can say with certainty is that most of our jobs damage our interconnected relationships with other human beings, and with other living beings. Take my job as an example: being a Unitarian Universalist minister is all about strengthening relationships between people, and between humans and the rest of the ecosystem. That’s on the plus side. On the negative side, statistics show that ministry as a profession is correlated with a higher rate of substance abuse, and a higher suicide rate, and strong anecdotal evidence suggests that many ministers work long hours to the neglect their immediate families. Ministry as a profession may strengthen some of the interconnected relationships that make up the Web of Life, but it does damage to others. And this is a good job.

    You can do this kind of thinking about your own work. To get you started, I’ll give you three examples of how your work might damage the Web of Life. If there’s institutional sexism present in your workplace — and that is true of far too many workplaces in Silicon Valley — your job is doing damage to the Web of Life. If your work is not carbon-neutral — and that is true of most jobs in the United States today — that damages the Web of Life. If your workplace shows evidence of institutional racism — true of most workplaces in the United States — again, damage to the Web of Life.

    Now I do believe there are some jobs, a very few jobs, which are true vocations. These rare jobs provide a balance between several things: they benefit the world, provide an adequate salary to the person holding the job, allow you adequate time for family, the democratic process, and social service; all this, without burning you out. Mind you, I don’t happen to know anyone who has one of these rare jobs, although I like to believe they exist.

    But most of us have to compromise in one of these things. For example, many Silicon Valley white collar jobs provide an adequate salary and may even do good in the world by providing needed products or services; but when those jobs require you to work such long hours that you have little time to spend on democratic process, social service work, or even your family, then those jobs are damaging the relationships that constitute the Web of Life.

    When you consider the vast array of jobs that you could have, a Silicon Valley white-collar job is about as good as it gets. So you see, if even though a Silicon Valley white collar job is as good as it gets, no one should count on such a job to make life fulfilling.

    And this brings us around once more to that old story told by rabbi Jesus. He lived in a world where there were wealthy landowners who made their fortunes by exploiting the land, and by exploiting their tenants. When he told his story of the wealthy landowner and the rebellious tenants, Jesus did not give us a neat, tidy ending. He did not solve the problem for us. But one thing is clear: those tenants are never going to find their work to be fulfilling as long as the human relationships around them are so strained. They are never going to find their work fulfilling as long as the land is owned by wealthy business owners who are accurately described by Psalm 17, in this translation by the eighteenth century poet Christopher Smart:

    They’re swollen with fatness, as their days
    To sumptuous banquets they devote;
    Their mouths are filled with pompous phrase,
    As on their wealth they gloat. (3)

    And it is clear that those tenants are never going to find their work to be fulfilling as long as the relationship between humans and the earth is so out of balance.

    By now, maybe you have come to the same conclusion I have: those tenants are us. Many of us are like the tenants in the story: we toil in a kind of voluntary servitude, while someone else coins our life blood into gold. We are forced to live our lives out of balance with the Web of Life.

    Instead of placing all our hopes and dreams into a job, then, let us place our hopes and dreams and love into a vision of what our lives could be. Our real work is, as songwriter Ralph Chaplin puts it, to build a world in which “we claim our Mother Earth, and the nightmare of the present fades away, [and] we live with love and laughter.” And how might we do that? How, to use the old Jewish phraseology of Jesus, can we live to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth? How can we stay in balance with the Web of Life? Here are three possible answers for you to consider:

    First, remember the Jewish concept of the sabbath and the jubilee year, which promote ecological sustainability by letting the land rest. Humans need rest, too. Therefore, we can promote our own sustainability by letting ourselves take a sabbath and lie fallow, every now and then.

    Second, remember that the Web of Life already exists all around us — the Kingdom of Heaven is already here, in that Web of Life. We are already a part of an interconnected web of relationships that binds together all human beings, and binds humans together with non-human beings. So give thanks and praise for that web of relationships of which we are already part.

    Third, strengthen our relationships with other humans, and with non-human beings. Devote our best energy to family and friends and community. Spend time outdoors with non-human beings. Build wider relationships by participating in democracy, and volunteering our time.

    If we can manage to do these things — to find time for rest, to give thanks for the Web of Life of which we are part, and to strengthen our relationships with all beings — if we can do these things just a little bit, we may find the beginnings of true fulfillment.

    And so you see, this is our real labor, and it is labor of the heart. For our true calling, or true vocation, is not to have a fulfilling job; our true calling is to love and be loved in return.

    NOTES:
    (1) My interpretive methodology here is based in part on John Shelby Spong’s recent book Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy (New York: Harper One, 2016).
    (2) This interpretation from theologian Bernard Loomer. See, e.g., “Unfoldings: Conversations from the Sunday Morning Seminars of Bernie Loomer” (Berkeley, Calif.: First Unitarian Church, 1985), pp. 1-2.
    (3) Reprinted in The Poet’s Book of Psalms, ed. Laurance Wieder (Oxfor: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 25.
    (4) Lyrics for “Commonwealth of Toil” by Ralph Chaplin: (more…)