Unitarian Universalism – Dan Harper

Math and Religion

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has too many typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make the necessary corrections.

Readings

The first reading was an excerpt from the essay “A Mindful Beauty” by the mathematician Joel E. Cohen, from the September, 2009, issue of American Scholar.

“My grade-school education in mathematics included a strict prohibition against mixing apples and oranges. As an adult buying fruit, I often find it convenient to mix the two. If the price of each is the same, the arithmetic works out well. The added thrill of doing something forbidden, like eating dessert first, comes free. In any case, the prohibition against combining apples and oranges falls away as soon as we care about what two subjects, different in some respects, have in common.

“I want to mix apples and oranges by insisting on the important features shared by poetry and applied mathematics. Poetry and applied mathematics both mix apples and oranges by aspiring to combine multiple meanings and beauty using symbols. These symbols point to things outside themselves, and create internal structures that aim for beauty. In addition to meanings conveyed by patterned symbols, poetry and applied mathematics have in common both economy and mystery. A few symbols convey a great deal. The symbols’ full meanings and their effectiveness in creating meanings and beauty remain inexhaustible….

“The differences between poetry and applied mathematics coexist with shared strategies for symbolizing experiences. Understanding those commonalities makes poetry a point of entry into understanding the heart of applied mathematics, and makes applied mathematics a point of entry into understanding the heart of poetry. With this understanding, both poetry and applied mathematics become points of entry into understanding others and ourselves as animals who make and use symbols.”

The second reading was from the poem “Equation” by Caroline Caddy:

…working through difficult equations
was like walking
in a pure and beautiful landscape —
the numbers glowing
like works of art….

The third reading was from a letter written by Albert Einstein, as printed in Albert Einstein, the Human Side: New Glimpses from His Archives (Princeton Univ. Press, 1979):

“If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

Sermon: “Math and Religion”

In honor of Pi Day, which was yesterday, I’d like to talk this morning about the connection of mathematics and religion. The right-wing Christians who make so much noise these days keep trying to tell us that religion has nothing to do with either math or science. But the connection between mathematics and religion in Western culture predates Christianity, and goes back to the ancient Greeks.

The first great mathematician in Western culture was Pythagoras. Pythagoras is best known today for the theorem known as the Pythagorean theorem: in a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the squares of the two other sides. But Pythagoras was not just a mathematician. He also founded a religious community, which was remarkable for combining serious mathematical and scientific inquiry with some fairly strange religious beliefs.

Pythagoras was born in Greece, on the island of Samos. As a young man, he traveled around the Mediterranean Sea seeking learning and wisdom. He supposedly learned arithmetic from the Phoenicians, geometry from the Egyptians, and astronomy from the Chaldeans. He also learned some interesting religious rituals. Tradition tells us that the Egyptians didn’t want to teach him about geometry, so to dissuade him they made him follow strict religious rituals. But Pythagoras wanted to learn the secrets of geometry, and followed all the rituals carefully. So Pythagoras learned his math and science along with religious ritual.(1) Mind you, religion was not the same as it is today.(2) Rather than being focused on personal belief in a transcendent god, religion primarily consisted of ritual, most of promoted social cohesion.

In addition, much of what passed for scientific investigation in that time took place in what we would call religious communities. This actually makes a lot of sense. If you want to gather enough data to be able to predict eclipses — one of the major scientific achievements in Pythagoras’s day, and one which he was directly involved in — then you need a stable community that can support people who spend their time observing the night sky; a community that can collect and safely store data over fairly long periods of time; and a community that brings together people who learn from one another and strive together for the truth. In fact, this kind of community still lies at the root of scientific and mathematical progress. If you’re doing math or science, you have to be in a community of peers that can review your work; that’s how scientific progress happens. Pythagoras not only learned in such communities, he brought the concept back to Greece, and founded his own religious community.

The Pythagorean community was governed by a set of rules, such as the rule prohibiting the consumption of beans.(3) Pythagoras was convinced of the transmigration of souls, and he thought the movement of souls took place through bean plants. There mix of “semi-scientific observation” with superstition sounds alien to us today, but as one scholar puts it, “a network of cleverly designed reasons, with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls at its center, held the whole system together….”(4) Today we would not call this science, but it does represent the beginnings of science.

And the Pythagorean community managed to come up with some pretty interesting discoveries in math and science. The Pythagorean community discovered the connection between numbers and music; predicted eclipses; developed the idea of numbers as shapes, as in the square of a number or the cube of a number; and with the Pythagorean theorem helped lay the foundations for geometrical proof later perfected by Euclid. Finally, Pythagoras is supposed to have said that “all things are numbers,” which in a generous interpretation resembles the way science today uses mathematics to model reality.(5)

Also noteworthy is that the Pythagorean community admitted women as members.(6) By today’s standards we would doubtless consider the Pythagorean community to be hopelessly sexist, but by the standards of their day they were unbelievably progressive. Women in the Pythagorean community contributed to the theoretical work of the community, and wrote their own treatises. This may be the earliest recognition that women have just as much to contribute to math and science as men; a fact that certain elements in today’s scientific and mathematical communities are still trying to accommodate themselves to.(7)

We also get our word “theory” from the ancient Greek word “theoria.” For the Pythagorean community, “theoria” meant a kind of “passionate sympathetic contemplation” that came out of mathematical knowledge; it represented a kind of “ecstatic revelation.”(8) While I am not especially adept at mathematics, this does describe the feeling I’ve gotten at times when I’ve finally managed to follow a proof of a challenging theory — a very satisfying feeling that comes upon perceiving something that’s really true and good and beautiful and unchanging. Right-wing Christians would be horrified to hear me say this, but this is indeed a kind of religious experience.

This brings me to Kurt Godel, the next mathematician I’d like to talk about. You may have heard of Godel from the bestselling book Godel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, written in 1979 by Douglas Hofstader. However, I first encountered Godel in 1981 when I took an introductory course in mathematical logic. This class was designed to give us enough background so that we could follow the proof of Kurt Godel’s famous incompleteness theorems.

I remember being blown away by the implications of Godel’s incompleteness theorems. The first incompleteness theorem can be summarized like this: “Any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete; i.e., there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F.”(9) What I took from Godel was this: that within a logically consistent system like arithmetic, you have to accept some statements that cannot be proven within that system. And even though you might be able to construct another logically consistent theorem that would allow you to prove those unproved axioms, there would be other axioms that you couldn’t prove within that second system.

Godel’s theorems obviously have implications for mathematics, but Godel himself believed that they had also implications for all human thought. John W. Dawson, a mathematician and biographer of Godel, put it this way, quoting in part from one of Godel’s lectures:

“[Godel] believed [there was] a disjunction of philosophical alternatives. Either ‘the working of the human mind cannot be reduced to the working of the brain, which to all appearances is a finite machine,’ or else ‘mathematical objects and facts … exist objectively and independently of our mental acts and decisions.’ Those alternatives were not … mutually exclusive. Indeed, Godel was firmly convinced of the truth of both.”(10)

If Godel was correct, this becomes very interesting. First, if the human mind is indeed something more than the workings of the brain, what is that something more? Perhaps this is no unlike what the ancient Pythagoreans called “soul.” We Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worthiness and dignity of every personality. In this sense, we agree with Godel that human beings, and other sentient beings, are something more than mere machines.

Second, if mathematical objects exist objectively and independently of our mental acts, what does that mean for science? Most of us these days believe that mathematics is useful because it creates models to help us understand the physical world. We typically believe that the greatness of the mathematics in Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, is that the mathematics helps us understand observations made in real world scientific experiments. But Godel understood mathematical objects to have an independent existence. Since they are not bound to things in the real world, these pure mathematical objects are not perceived through the usual senses. We intuit them directly, through our minds. Compare this to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, a Unitarian who remains the biggest single influence on , was a Transcendentalist who said that we could directly apprehend truth and beauty. Thus, we Unitarian Universalists are like Godel in that we have a tendency to think that we can apprehend truth directly with our minds.

This brings me to the third and last mathematician I’d like to talk about: Karen Uhlenbeck, a Unitarian Universalist who also happens to be one of the greatest of living mathematicians. Uhlenbeck received a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1982, and in 2019 became the first woman to win the Abel Prize, the most prestigious prize in mathematics. The Abel award cited Uhlenbeck for “her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.”(12)

Sadly, I don’t have the background to understand Uhlenbeck’s mathematical achievements.(13) I did discover, however, that she has spoken about the connection between mathematics and introspection, and between mathematics and community. Both introspection and community are characteristic of Unitarian Universalist notions of religion, and I wondered if this might represent a connection between mathematics and religion.

Not long after she was announced as the winner of the Abel Prize, Uhlenbeck was asked if she though success in mathematics is partly due to concentration. She replied, “I think you can’t do mathematics without the ability to concentrate. But also, that’s where the fun is, the rest of the world fades away and it’s you and the mathematics.” In that same interview, Uhlenbeck said: “You struggle with a problem, it can be over a period of years, and you suddenly get some insight. You’re suddenly seeing it from a different point of view and you say: ‘My goodness, it has to be like that.’ You may think all along that it has to be like that, but you don’t see why, and then suddenly at some moment you see why it is true….”(14)

To me, the way Uhlenbeck describes what it feels like to solve mathematical problems sounds similar to how people who have meditation or mindfulness practices describe their epxeriences. The process goes something like this: you concentrate, and the world fades away, and it’s just you and something beyond yourself. Then, if you concentrate long enough, you may have an “aha” experience that really feels out of the ordinary, where you feel like you’ve seen something new and (dare I say it) beautiful. So I emailed Uhlenbeck to ask if she thought there was a similarity between doing math and doing meditation. She replied, in part: “When I try to meditate, I usually end up thinking about math. They are very similar.”(15)

Indeed, this experience occurs in many different pursuits. In the first two readings, mathematician Joel E. Cohen and poet Caroline Caddy both find a deep connection between poetry and mathematics, because both “create internal structures that aim for beauty.”(16) In these kinds of experiences, we use symbols to help us perceive the beauty and order of the universe. The poets and mathematicians have the original insights, and then we ordinary folks can experience some of the same wonder by following the mathematical proof, or reading the poem, or reading one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Although right-wing Christians would disagree, I would call these religious experiences.

Mathematics and religion are also connected in that human community is central to both. Most obviously for mathematics, when a mathematician thinks they have done some original work in mathematics, they have to write it up and publish it so that their work can be reviewed by other mathematicians. Individual mathematicians may work alone, but overall mathematical progress happens in community, as mathematicians check each other’s work, and then build upon the work of others.

Religion also requires human community, for much the same reasons. Take Ralph Waldo Emerson as an example. Emerson had one or two insights on religious matters, and wrote them up in an essay he titled “Nature.” When he first published the essay, some people thought it was brilliant and others thought it was garbage. Over time and after much discussion, a consensus arose that Emerson really had come up with some genuine insights into religion. Still others came along and extended Emerson’s insights, including people like Henry David Thoreau.(17) Emerson’s new ideas first had to be carefully considered by a human community, and then extended by other people.

Karen Uhlenbeck refers aspect of human community in an interview. When Uhlenbeck was doing postdoctoral work at the University of California in Berkeley in the 1960s, she found herself in the midst of tumultuous political activity concerning the Vietnam War, women’s rights, and so on. Uhlenbeck had always thought of mathematics as somehow separate from politics. But, she told an interviewer, “I was startled to see the politics appear in the math department. It was eye-opening to me… up until that time I had seen mathematics as a very bookish thing and that what went on in the mathematical community had nothing to do with the life out there on the streets, and this is not true.” In other words, Uhlenbeck realized that mathematics is a human activity that’s done by humans. This means that “all of what goes on between humans appears in the mathematics community, perhaps toned down quite a bit, but it’s not a world of pure brains, people behaving rationally and unemotionally.” (18)

One of the very human problems in the mathematics community that Uhlenbeck became aware of was that nearly all mathematicians were men. She told one interviewer, “if I had been five years older, I could not have become a mathematician because disapproval would be so strong.”(19) Thus while human community is necessary, human community also has problems that must be addressed. If you’re a mathematician, you can’t just take the human community for granted, you have to be willing to confront the faults and problems of that human community. Obviously, the same is true for any human community, including religious communities.

In today’s world, we have a strong tendency to separate religion from mathematics and science. Yet by so doing, I think we place unwarranted restrictions on religion. The right-wing Christians are wrong — religion, religious experience and activity, can not be restricted to the very narrow sphere of personal belief in a transcendent god. Religion includes the introspection that occurs not only in meditation and centering prayer and mindfulness practice, but also introspection of doing math and science. Religion and mathematics can both result in ecstatic experiences that come when you gain insight into truth. Both religion and mathematics are rooted in human community. And while you, personally, may not have ecstatic experiences or pursue introspective practices, yet as a part of a human community we accept the differences between us, and try to lrean from those differences.

Notes

(1) Christopher Riedwig, Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence, p. 8.
(2) See, e.g., Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of Modern Concept, Yale Univ. Press, 2013.
(3) Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosopy, p. 32.
(4) Riedwig, p. 71.
(5) Russell, p. 35.
(6) Much of what follows is taken from Sarah B. Pomeroy, Pythagorean Women: Their History and Writings, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2013.
(7) See, for example, the 2005 remarks of Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University. According to the Harvard Crimson, “Summers’ Comments of Women and Science Draw Ire” (14 Jan. 2005, article by Daniel J. Hemel), Summer said “the under-representation of female scientists at elite universities may stem in part from ‘innate’ differences between men and women….” Admittedly, this is not precisely what Summers said, but for a good discussion of the implications of Summers’s remarks, see “What Larry Summers Said — and Didn’t Say,” Swarthmore College Bulletin, Jan. 2009, article signed “D.M.,” available online: https://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/archive/wp/january-2009_what-larry-summers-said-and-didnt-say.html
(8) Russell, p. 33. The OED says that “theoria” refers to contemplation, including the contemplation of beauty.
(9) Panu Raatikainen, “Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/goedel-incompleteness/ accessed 15 March 2025. For an explanation of both Godel’s proof, and its implications, designed for the intelligent layperson, see: Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel’s Proof, New York Univ. Press, 1958; this book is available to read online at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/gdelsproof00nage/page/n5/mode/2up
(10) John W. Dawson Jr., Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Godel, p. 198.
(12) Isaac Chotiner, “A Groundbreaking Mathematician on the Gender Politics of Her Field,” New Yorker, 28 March 2019.
(13) For those who do have the background to understand Uhlenbeck’s work, a discussion of her achievements in variational problems in differential geometry is freely available online in Simon Donaldson, “Karen Uhlenbeck and the Calculus of Variations,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March 2019, pp. 303-313 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/noti1806. There may well be other such technical summaries available online and not hidden behind paywalls.
(14) Bjørn Ian Dundas and Christian Skau, “Interview with Abel Laureate Karen Uhlenbeck,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March 2020 [reprint of an interview originally published in Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society, September 2019], p. 400.
(15) Karen Uhlenbeck, personal communication, 11 Feb. 2025.
(16) Joel E. Cohen, “A Mindful Beauty,” American Scholar, September 2009.
(17) As an aside on Emerson: In his book The American Evasion of Philosophy (Univ. of Wisconsin, 1989), Cornell West argues that Emerson also lies at the root of the American philosophical tradition: “The fundamental argument of this book is that the evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy — from Emerson to Rorty — results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises.” (p. 5) Our Unitarian Universalist religious tradition is directly influenced by this philosophical tradition.
(18) Isaac Chotiner, “A Groundbreaking Mathematician on the Gender Politics of Her Field,” New Yorker, 28 March 2019.
(19) Ibid. A side note: To help inspire more young women to go into mathematics, Uhlenbeck wrote an essay for the book Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering: No Universal Constants, ed. Susan A. Ambrose, Temple Univ. Press, 1997, pp. 395 ff.; this essay is freely available on her website here: https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/uhlen/vita/pers.html.

Visual of text and mathematical formulae. — An excerpt from Simon Donaldson’s article mentioned in the Notes.

Spiritual Muscle

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

Readings

The first reading is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay titled “Greatness”:

I do not pretend to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some plan, propose a journey or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very well, — I let it lie, thinking it may pass away, but if it do not pass away I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and which the consent of all mankind could not confirm.

The second reading is from Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker by John Wiess. Parker was a Unitarian minister of the 1840s whose sermons attracted over two thousand people a week.

When a little boy … in my fourth year, one fine day in spring, my father led me by the hand to a distant part of the farm, but soon sent me home alone. On the way I had to pass a little pond-hole… [A] rhodora in full bloom… attracted my attention and drew me to the spot. I saw a little spotted tortoise sunning himself in the shallow water at the root of the flaming shrub. I lifted the stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless reptile; for, though I had never killed any creature, yet I had seen other boys out of sport destroy birds, squirrels, and the like, and I felt a disposition to follow their wicked example. But all at once something checked my little arm, and a voice within me said, clear and loud, “It is wrong!” I held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion — the consciousness of an involuntary but inward check upon my actions, till the tortoise and the rhodora both vanished from my sight. I hastened home and told the tale to my mother, and asked what was it that told me it was wrong? She … taking me in her arms, said, “Some men call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little voice.”… I am sure no event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impression on me.

Sermon: “Spiritual Muscle”

Rev. Danielle DiBona preached here on December 1. After the service was over, I went up to her to thank her for coming to First Parish. I always enjoy talking with Danielle, in part because she grew up in Weymouth and has that no-nonsense New England manner of speaking. So when she said something about Unitarian Universalist congregations needing to develop their spiritual muscle, I paid more attention that I might otherwise have done. If another person used the phrase “spiritual muscle” it might have sounded like just another spirituality catch-phrase that sounds good yet doesn’t mean all that much. But when Danielle said “spiritual muscle” in her no-nonsense South Shore accent, it sounded real. And maybe important.

I meant to ask Danielle what, exactly, she meant by “spiritual muscle,” but we got interrupted. I thought about emailing her and asking her exactly. But I was pretty sure I knew what she meant. I was also pretty sure that a good way to develop my own spiritual muscles would be to put my thoughts in order and speak to you about the topic, which is what I’m doing right now.

If we use the phrase “spiritual muscle,” obviously we’re making a comparison with physical muscle. It’s equally obvious how we develop our physical muscles: we exercise. Last fall, I noticed my physical fitness level going down, and I knew I needed to exercise. Since I hate going to the gym, I bought a compact rowing machine that fits in our apartment. For the past few months I’ve been doing at least twenty minutes five times a week on that rowing machine (that’s in addition to daily walks, and daily exercises). Using that rowing machine is sometimes painful, sometimes boring, but I really notice the improvement in my fitness level.

All this is obvious. If you want to build up your physical muscles, you have to use them; you have to do more than just use them, you have to push yourself. Similarly with spiritual muscles: obviously we have to use our spirituality regularly in order to retain our spiritual muscle tone. But what does that even mean?

The readings this morning offered two very simple examples of what I think of as using one’s spiritual muscles. In the second reading, the great nineteenth century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker told a story about his moral development. When he was four years old, he saw a turtle. He picked up a stick to kill it. But suddenly he heard a voice telling him “No.”

Even though Parker clothes the story in mid-nineteenth century sentimentality, it sounds like a true story. Four year olds do have these kinds of experiences: sometimes they do hear a voice that they can’t explain telling them to do the right thing. And Theodore Parker’s mother gives him just the kind of advice that a Unitarian mother would give to their four year old. She tells him that whether you call it Conscience, or the voice of God (or whatever other name a Unitarian Universalist might come up with), you should listen to that voice. This is one way we begin teaching young children how to exercise their spiritual muscles. We want to help them to become their best selves, and we do our best to help them grow into their best selves.

While this may seem hopelessly elementary, while it may seem trite and sentimental, it’s really not. Back in 1986, a Unitarian Universalist minister named Robert Fulghum wrote a bestselling book titled “All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Fulghum’s book used the basic lessons taught in kindergarten as a way to remind adults what they needed to do to exercise their spiritual muscles.

For example, Fulghum said we should learn to share everything. That’s how you word it when you’re teaching a four- or five year old, but all the great spiritual traditions of the world have some similar teaching aimed at adults. Muslims teach that zakat, or almsgiving, is one of the five pillars of Islam; Jesus taught his followers that whatever they did for “the least of these” they did for God; for Hindus, the Rig Veda teaches, “Bounteous is he who gives unto the beggar who comes to him in want of food” [Rig Veda 10.117]; and our latest wording of the Unitarian Universalist principles names generosity as a core value. When teaching a five year old, you may word it differently, but the principle remains the same: share everything.

Many of Robert Fulghum’s kindergarten lessons pertain to morals and ethics. We learn how to play fair. We learn that we shouldn’t hit people. We learn to put things back where we found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone. These are all pretty straightforward moral and ethical lessons, relatively easy to translate from the kindergartener’s perspective to an adult perspective.

But Fulghum also includes lessons that are are not about morality and ethics, and more about having a proper attitude towards life. Fulghum says that kindergarten (or, at least, a well-run kindergarten) teaches children how to live a balanced life. In good kindergartens, each day the children engage in a little learning, a little painting, a little singing, a little dancing, a little bit of playing, and a little bit of working. Translated into an adult perspective, we might talk about work-life balance and making time for our families. But it’s still the same spiritual lesson: how to lead a balanced life.

Fulghum also mentions that kindergarteners learn how to take naps. Now this may not sound like a spiritual matter at all. But several years ago, a divinity school graduate named Tricia Hersey started leading workshops in the spiritual importance of napping. While in graduate school, Hersey found herself working two jobs, going to school full-time, raising a six year old, and working an internship. She was living the American Dream, moving up in the world. But as a Black woman learning about the history of Black theology, Hersey also realized that the same kind of engine that drove slavery was driving her to work herself to a state of exhaustion. After receiving her divinity degree, Hersey started what she called Nap Ministry, in which she teaches people how to take spiritual care of themselves. But this is not some kind of pop culture self-care. In an interview, Hersey said, “That’s one thing I dislike about our work blowing up on social media…. [That] doesn’t allow for people to go deep…. They think it’s some cute wellness thing. [But] it really is held together by deeply liberating ideas and theories that come out of Black thought and scholarship.” For Hersey, taking time out to rest can serve as a spiritual force allowing us to honor our inherent divinity. (1)

I’d suggest this kind of spiritual rest may have deep roots in the ancient idea of Sabbath, where you deliberately take one day a week where you do no work. Of course, in our culture today, it’s difficult to take a true sabbath. I know very few people who actually take one whole day every week as a day of rest. Even when we take a day off, we feel we have to do something — we have to travel, or pursue hobbies. Thus not even retirement guarantees spiritual rest; many of my retired friends say they’re busier now than when they were working full time.

Sometimes it seems that it’s far more difficult to exercise our spiritual muscles as we get older. The spiritual task of resting is a perfect example of what I mean. When you’re five years old, your parents tell you to take a nap, and you can whine and complain all you want, but you have to take your nap. Then you become a teenager, and you have no time to rest because every spare moment is filled with school, sports or extracurricular activities, and a part-time job, to say nothing of figuring out what to do after high school graduation. When do you ever have time to rest? Then you become an adult, and you have even more to do, and even less time to rest. Even if you’re one of the rare people who is able to do nothing in retirement, doing nothing isn’t the same thing spiritual rest.

To get some genuine spiritual rest, most of us require outside structure. When I was in my twenties, I regularly worked fifty-five hours a week, plus I was taking classes at night to try to get ahead. I discovered that going to Sunday services at my local Unitarian Universalist church provided the structure I needed to actually take the time for spiritual rest. Actually, I was often bored by the worship services. I watched the older Unitarians who had been going to that church for decades. They sat through all the services, listening when the sermons were interesting, calmly staring out the windows when the sermons were boring. In a sense, taking time for sabbath rest is the adult equivalent of taking a nap.

Sabbath rest provides one example of how hard it can be to develop your spiritual muscles. We live in a society that teaches us that our highest purpose is to be constantly busy, constantly entertained. We have to have our constant doses of dopamine from scrolling through social media, or we have to feed our adrenaline addiction by working or studying too many hours. And if we no longer many responsibilities, then we can feel undervalued or even useless. Yet busy-ness and uselessness prove to be a false dichotomy. All the great spiritual traditions teach us to spend time in contemplation. While this may be interpreted in terms of contemplating God or trying to reach Nirvana, you can also think about contemplation in terms of the motto inscribed above the temple to Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. That motto said quite simply: “Know thyself.”

Knowing oneself — true and deep self-knowledge — requires exercise of one’s spiritual muscle. It’s easy to look in the mirror and see everything that’s good about ourselves. It’s even easier to look in the mirror and see what our own failings are. But it’s quite difficult to see ourselves as we truly are. And since human beings are constantly growing and changing, right up to the moment of death, to truly know yourself means you are constantly learning new things. I would even go so far as to say that all development of spiritual muscle begins with self-knowledge — or, more precisely, all development of spiritual muscle begins with the effort to attain self knowledge, for no one ever achieves final self-knowledge.

I’d like to take a brief look at three other things that Robert Fulghum says he learned in kindergarten: When you go outside, watch for traffic and hold hands and stick together. Everything dies. Be aware of wonder.

The first one — hold hands and stick together — can be surprisingly difficult. Often, we have the impulse to act like kindergartners, and go whichever way we personally want to go. We adults often say what kindergartners say: But I don’t wanna hold hands with them, I wanna go over there! That is in fact precisely what is going on in the United States right now. Instead of sticking together, we all want to do what we want to do; we don’t want to hold hands with the other children in the class. When it comes to holding hands and working together, we Americans have let our spiritual muscles become flabby. Nor is this a new problem, for this is what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was telling us in his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he said:

“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification’ — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

We Americans did exercise our spiritual spiritual muscle to the point where little Black children and little White children can sometimes now join hands with each other. But when it comes to racial harmony, or world peace, or environmental balance, or any other big problem that requires us to hold hands and stick together, we are still struggling. We have no kindergarten teacher to tell us what to do or how to do it; we have to develop our own spiritual muscles to enable us to work together.

Compared to that, the next kindergarten-level task sounds so simple: Be aware of wonder. But sometimes I believe we struggle more with this than with holding hands and sticking together. At least with holding hands and sticking together, there’s something we have to do. But to be aware of wonder, we just have to be. Being aware of wonder is closely related to sabbath rest, and it takes as much spiritual muscle. Being aware of wonder is also closely related to knowing oneself; you have to know who you are in order to know who it is that is aware of wonder. This gets us into deep spiritual waters, and we’d need another whole sermon to talk about it.

Similarly with the last of the kindergarten tasks I’d like to mention, which sounds so simple: Everything dies. Everything dies, including us. It sounds simple, but it takes a great deal of spiritual muscle to wrap your head around this simple thing. This, too, gets us into the advanced development of our spiritual muscles. This could be the subject of a whole series of sermons. Although I’m not sure I’m qualified to speak on the topic; I’m not sure I’ve developed enough spiritual muscle yet.

If you asked me to sum up the topic of spiritual muscle, I’d say this: It’s not easy being human. It’s not easy being part of the human community. It takes strength; it takes endurance; it takes flexibility. Just as we have to work on our physical muscles to build strength, endurance, and flexibility, so to we have to work on our spiritual muscles.

Note:

(1) Kathryn Post, “The ‘Nap Bishop’ offers rest as a tool of resistance,” Religion News Service, 25 March 2022 https://religionnews.com/2022/03/25/nap-bishop-offers-rest-as-a-tool-of-resistance/ accessed 24 Jan 2025

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from the long poem “Fasti” by the ancient Roman poet Ovid:

While I was musing, writing-tablets in hand,
The house seemed brighter than it was before.
Then suddenly, sacred and marvelous, Janus,
In two-headed form, showed his twin faces to my eyes.
Terrified, I felt my hair grow stiff with fear
And my heart was frozen with sudden cold.
Holding his stick in his right hand, his key in the left,
He spoke these words to me from his forward looking face:

“Do not fear, but learn what you seek, O poet who labors
Over the days, and remember what I say.

“The ancients called me Chaos (since I am of the first world):
Note the long ages past of which I shall tell.
The clear air, and the three other elements,
Fire, water, earth, were heaped together as one.
When, through the discord of its components,
The mass dissolved, and scattered to new regions,
Flame found the heights: air took a lower place,
While earth and sea sank to the furthest depth.
Then I, who was a shapeless mass, a ball,
Took on the appearance, and noble limbs of a god.
Even now, a small sign of my once confused state,
My front and back appear just the same….

“Now learn the reason for my shape:
Though already you partially understand it.
Every doorway has two sides, this way and that,
One facing the crowds, and the other the household gods:
And like your doorkeeper seated at the threshold,
Who watches who goes and out and who goes in,
So I am the doorkeeper of the heavenly court,
Looking towards both east and west at once:…
And I, lest I lose time twisting my neck around,
Am free to look both ways without moving.”

The second reading is from “Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye:

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers….

Sermon: “Looking Forward, Looking Back”

The ancient Roman gods and goddesses are part of our shared Western culture. We name planets and dwarf planets after them — Jupiter, Neptune, Ceres, Pluto. And most of us have at least some passing familiarity with these ancient deities: Jupiter, the ruler of the other gods and goddesses; Neptune, the god of the sea; and so on.

For the most part, the Romans gods and goddesses were said to have appearances that were much like humans. Some of the them, however, had a more bizarre appearance. Janus was one of those odd-looking gods: he had two faces, one which looked forward, and one which looked backwards. In the first reading this morning, we heard Janus’s own explanation for his appearance. “I am the doorkeeper of the heavenly court,” he told the poet Ovid, “Looking towards both east and west at once… [for] lest I lose time twisting my neck around, [I] am free to look both ways without moving.”

Janus also told the poet that he began as a part of Chaos, the stuff out of which the universe emerged. And Janus says, “as a small sign of my once confused state, my front and back appear just the same.” Because of that, he became the god of doorways, looking both outwards towards the crowds of people outside the door of the house, and inwards towards the household gods that preside over the safety of each household.

No wonder, then, that the Romans named the first month of their calendar year for Janus. He is the perfect god for the beginning of a new year, because of the way he looks both forward and backwards. So it is that we, at the beginning of a new year, feel an impulse to look both forwards and backwards. So I’m going imitate Janus, and at the beginning of this new year I’m going to take a look backwards at last year, then a look forward into the new year.

The most difficult task will be looking backwards. This is because looking back at 2024 seems to lead inevitably to conversations about the presidential election, and those conversations can be fraught. Either that, or people start arguing about the war in Gaza and Israel. Either that, or someone will bring up global climate change. When looking back at the past year, it’s all too easy to talk about topics which cause people distress.

But I decided that for this first sermon of the year, I didn’t want to cause distress to either you or me. In the second reading, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye tells us: “So much of any year is flammable,/ lists of vegetables, partial poems./ Orange swirling flame of days,/ so little is a stone.” That is to say, at the end of any given year there are a great many things that we can let go of. In her poem, she imagines the things you can let go of as being things that are flammable. Then she adds another image: “So little is a stone”; or to put it another way, when you look back over the year there are only a few things that are solid like a stone, things that won’t perish in the flames, things that are worth holding on to. For example, it is worth holding on to the memories of the love of family and friends. It is worth holding on the the memories of people who have died in the past year. It is always worth holding on to that which is true and good.

With that in mind, I’d like to suggest that we might also think about some of the good things that happened in the past year. Perhaps we can’t avoid thinking about what went wrong in 2024; but let’s take a moment to think about what went right.

First: a sign of hope in the seemingly intractable problem of housing insecurity and homelessness. As we all know, the rate of homelessness is rising both nationwide and here in Massachusetts; our state is now in the top five states with the greatest numbers of people who are homeless. Yet in spite of these increases, last year the city of Los Angeles bucked the trend with a 2.2% decline the total number of people who were homeless in their city, while unsheltered homelessness declined by 10.4%. They accomplished this through a combination of policies and programs to get people into housing. (1) Thus we can see that homelessness is not an insoluble problem. There are viable solutions out there, and we can learn from places like Los Angeles.

A second piece of positive news: three more countries legalized same sex marriage. Two of those were countries we might not have expected: both Thailand and Greece legalized same sex marriage last year. Thailand is the first Southeast Asian country, and the third country in all of Asia, to legalize same-sex marriage. Greece is the first majority-Orthodox Christian country to legalize same-sex marriage. (2) Estonia was the third country that legalized same-sex marriage last year, so there are now 38 countries around the world where same-sex marriage is legal. Same-sex marriage is now legal somewhere on all six permanently inhabited continents. This is not something I ever expected to see in my lifetime.

Third: there was actually quite a bit of good news in the environment. In just one example, as of last year the United Kingdom no longer produces any of its energy from coal; the last coal power generation station closed in October. Since England was the site of the first coal power generation plant, this is both a symbolic milestone and a practical milestone. (3) In other positive environmental news from last year, the sail cargo ship Anemos completed its maiden voyage from the Netherlands to New York carrying one thousand tons of cargo. The ship Anemos has, and I quote, a “projected carbon intensity per unit transport [that is] less than a tenth of that of a sub-Panamax container ship.” Anemos will soon have seven sister ships, and regular cargo routes are already planned. (4) Electric vehicle sales continued to increase around the world in 2024. We’re still waiting for accurate data, but it looks like the price of renewable energy continued to drop significantly in the past year. All this is good news.

Fourth: there was good news, perhaps unexpectedly, in the area of peace and nonviolence. Homicide rates in the United States dropped sixteen percent last year. That’s the third straight year homicides have declined in our country. (5) This is true locally, too — my recollection is that the Boston Globe ran a front page story a couple of days ago reporting that homicide rates in Boston for 2024 were the lowest since 1957.

And one last bit of good news from the past year: This past summer, the United Nations reported that as of 2024, “population size had peaked in 63 countries…including China, Germany, Japan, and the Russian Federation.” The United Nations report went on to say that “in more than half of all countries…the average number of live births per woman is below 2.1 — the level required for a population to maintain a constant size.” Admittedly, because of so-called “population momentum,” the overall human population is still growing and will peak around the year 2080. Nevertheless, the projection for total human population is now projected to stabilize at three quarters of a billion people lower than was expected a decade ago. (6) Since human overpopulation contributes to just about every major world problem, from the environmental crisis to the worldwide refugee crisis, this final piece of news is very good news indeed.

Now if you only read social media, these news items are unlikely to rise to the top of what your social media outlet is feeding to you. The people who design the algorithms that drive social media know you spend more time on their sites when you’re doomscrolling. As for traditional news outlets, they too are more likely to emphasize the bad news over the good news. On the Freakonomics podcast a couple of years ago, young adult author John Green pointed out: “a lot of times good news happens slowly and bad news happens all at once, and so we tend to focus on the bad news that’s crashing over us in waves and not on the slow long-term work that people are doing together to try to make a better world for us to share.” (6.5)

Yes, there are many bad things going on in the world right now. But if you focus only on the bad things in the world, you’re presenting yourself with a distorted view of the world. Not only that, but when you’re thinking about good news you have to consider long-term stories that might not be newsworthy. And with that in mind, let’s look forward into the new year.

I anticipate that some of the more interesting good news in the coming year will occur in the realm of public health. As one example of what I mean, consider the efforts to develop a vaccine for malaria. Beginning in 2021, a WHO-approved malaria vaccine has been made available to children in many high malaria transmission areas. In 2024, Cameroon was the first country to require childhood vaccination for malaria. We are in the middle of a long slow process to eradicate one of the more debilitating diseases on Earth. Some scientists are now predicting that malaria could be wiped out in another two decades. Because this is a long, slow process, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see it covered in social media or in traditional news outlets. But this represents a huge advance in public health, and a huge reduction in suffering world-wide.

In the coming year, I’m going to be watching another interesting development in public health, one that directly affects us here on the South Shore. Public health experts are beginning to work with an emerging concept known as “social health.” A group at Stanford University called “Stanford Lifestyle Medicine” defines social health this way: “Social health refers to the quality of our relationships and how often we interact with others. Since social connection is in our nature as humans, when we are isolated and feel a lack of connection, research shows that our mental health can be affected…. Research also shows that our social health profoundly impacts our physical health.” (7)

You may say this is just another case of university researchers catching up with good old common sense: we already know we’re going to have better physical and mental health when we have a good social network. But thinking about social health as an aspect of public health does represent an advance, because this allows us to think about how we might improve social health through communal effort. Two years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report about the health impacts of the loneliness epidemic in this country. (8) Treating loneliness as a public health issue means not blaming individuals for being lonely, but instead working on solutions that may include public policy, local community efforts, and so on.

So, for example, if we address social health from a public health perspective, we might develop public policies and public education campaigns that can deal effectively with the loneliness epidemic and the wider mental health crisis. This would be analogous to the way we used a public health perspective to develop public policies and public education campaigns that targeted the addictiveness of tobacco. Those public policies and those education campaigns led to a dramatic reduction in tobacco use, with a concomitant drop in the cancers associated with tobacco use. So I’m going to be watching what the public health community does to develop public policies and public education campaigns to improve social health, thereby addressing the loneliness epidemic and the mental health crisis.

And I feel we don’t have to wait for the public health community to do all the work. I believe we here at First Parish can contribute to this effort, because we’re already contributing to this effort through what we do here every Sunday morning. It is clear that one way to improve social health is by building local communities. That is something we actually do quite well here at First Parish: we’re actually quite good at creating a welcoming community. We’re not perfect, and of course there’s always room for improvement in every human endeavor. But I’ve noticed that during social hour following the weekly service, we are actually quite good at talking with one another, and reaching out to people we may not know well. Having spent the last thirty years working in nine different congregations, I’d say that our First Parish community is well above average in providing community and positive social interaction.

Now let’s put that into the context of the loneliness epidemic in the United States. When we think in terms of social health, what we offer as a community may be one of the most important things we do at First Parish. Simply by doing what we ordinarily do, we actually implement several of the U.S. Surgeon General’s recommendations for mitigating the loneliness epidemic: we “create opportunities and spaces for inclusive social connection”; we “embed social connection in … practices [and] programs”; and we “foster a culture of connection in the broader community by… leading by example.” (9) Just by doing what we would be doing anyway, we’re helping address a major public health crisis.

When I think about our First Parish community as a part of a larger public health effort to address the loneliness epidemic, two things occur to me. First, I believe we should recognize that we are in fact participating in this public health effort; I could reframe this slightly and say that this is yet another one of our unrecognized social justice projects. Second, we could also be a little more public about talking about how we are contributing to social health.

This would not require us to add any programs; we don’t have to do anything more, because we’re already promoting social health and fighting the loneliness epidemic. But the U.S. Surgeon General suggests that community-based organizations have a key role to play in advancing “public education and awareness.” And advancing public education and awareness could turn out to be quite simple. So, for example, if someone finds out that I’m part of First Parish, and if they express the least bit of interest, I make sure that the first thing I tell them is that First Parish is a good community. I make it clear being a community is one of most important things we do. Yes, I mention that we talk about moral and ethical issues; yes, I mention that we have good music programs; yes, I mention our beautiful historic Meetinghouse. But I always make sure to mention our sense of community first. I make sure to mention that it’s a good place to connect with other people.

While this may seem like a very minor point, it’s not. Most people here on the South Shore still think that religion is primarily about religious belief. Many people still think the only reason to do religion is to shore up your belief system. However, in the context of the loneliness epidemic, I’d argue that the most important thing we do here at First Parish is provide social connection. By pointing this out, we can contribute to public education and awareness; we can help others in our community to understand that any organization they join is going to reduce their social disconnection and improve their social health. We can help them understand that this is true for all the community groups we participate in — whether it’s Rotary, or the sailing club, or the town elder affairs group — any membership-based organization, civic group, or arts and education group.

We can all be a part of this low-key campaign of public education and awareness, and it doesn’t take much effort. All we have to do is just be a little more willing to talk with others about the community-based organizations we belong to, and to mention that belonging to such community based groups helps support social health.

As I look forward into the coming year — as I look for positive trends that I think may continue in the coming year –I’ve spent most of my time talking about social health. The way we can contribute to social health is just one among many long-term projects that people are doing together to make this a better world. I know many of you are participating in other long-term projects that are making this a better world; long-term projects that don’t make it into the news. The only reason that I’ve focused on social health is that it’s something that we do together here in our First Parish community; improving social health is a project that we all share.

Just by showing up here at First Parish, we help create a place where people who are lonely can come and find safe, healthy, supportive social interaction. Just by showing up here, we are helping improve our community’s social health, and thereby making the world a better place.

As we look back over the past year, as we look forward into the new year, it’s easy to be negative. It’s easy to think about everything that’s wrong with the world. But I think it’s more productive to think about how we are contributing to making the world a better place; and in the year to come, may we all think more about our positive efforts in this world.

Notes

(1) “Unsheltered Homelessness Drops and Sheltered Homelessness Rises in City and County of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority website, 28 June, 2024, https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=977-unsheltered-homelessness-drops-and-sheltered-homelessness-rises-in-la accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(2) “Thailand’s king signs landmark same-sex marriage bill into law,” Associated Press, 24 Sept. 2024 https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/asia/thailand-same-sex-marriage-intl-hnk/index.html accessed 4 Jan. 2025. — James Gregory, “Greece legalises same-sex marriage,” BBC News, 15 Feb. 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68310126 accessed 4 Jan. 2025
(3) Mark Poynting and Esme Stallard, “UK to finish with coal power after 142 years,” BBC News, 30 September 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(4) The Maritime Executive, “High-Tech Sailing Ship Starts Maiden Voyage With 1,000 Tonnes of Cargo,” 18 Aug. 2024 https://maritime-executive.com/article/high-tech-sailing-ship-starts-maiden-voyage-with-1-000-tonnes-of-cargo accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(5) Bill Hutchinson, “US poised to see dramatic drop in homicides for 3rd straight year: More than 5,000 fewer homicides have been recorded this year compared to 2023,” ABC News, 31 Dec. 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/US/united-states-drop-homicides-2024/story?id=116902123 accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(6) “Growing or shrinking? What the latest trends tell us about the world’s population,” United Nations News, Global perspective Human stories, 11 July 2024 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/07/1151971 accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(6.5) Freakonomics podcast, Episode 92, “John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride,” 11 Nov. 2022, transcript at: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/john-greens-reluctant-rocket-ship-ride/ accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(7) Sharon Brock, What is Social Health and How Does it Impact Longevity? Stanford Lifestyle Medicine website, 14 Nov. 2024 https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2024/11/14/what-is-social-health-and-how-does-it-impact-longevity/ accessed 4 Jan. 2025. Robert D. Russell of Southern Illinois University is usually credited with originating the concept of social health back in the 1970s: “With an interest in the holistic and ecological aspects of health and spirituality as components of personal health, he often gets credit from colleagues for creating the ecological model of health education.” Southern Illinois University News, https://news.siu.edu/2012/03/032812cjm12090.php accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(8) See: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (Washington, DC: Office of the Surgeon General, 2023), https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
(9) Ibid., p. 62.