Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Unitarian Universalism

  • Lidian Jackson Emerson’s educational method

    The sermon below was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Parish of Concord, Massachusetts, at 10:00 a.m. The sermon text below is a reading text; the actual sermon contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2011 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is from The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, by Ellen Tucker Emerson. Ellen Tucker Emerson, born in Concord in 1839, was the eldest daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson.

    “Mother used to come up to me to hear me say my prayers and my evening hymn, and then pray for me, every night after I had gone to bed, long before Edith [her sister] slept with me. When she [Edith] came she had her prayers and hymn to say, too. When we were very little Mother began to have Sunday readings and I think also daily readings with us. Chiefly hymns and the Old Testament stories, but she used some other books which were not very interesting to us. I believe she avoided the New Testament, for I found it new to me when I began to read it myself…. she seemed to think the Old Testament stories were the children’s part of the Bible. I think so too.

    “I was brought up keep Sunday fitly by having tasks to occupy me. Every Sunday I was to learn a hymn [that is, the text of a hymn, not the tune]. Most of them had five verses of four lines, sometimes they had six. After I was sure I could say that smoothly I was to review another. As I advanced in years I had two to review, finally three. By the time this grew easy, the task of writing out the idea of the hymn in prose was added, varied sometimes by rendering one of Mrs. Barbauld’s prose hymns into verse. These were my solitary labors…. When Mother was ready for us [after church and dinner] I had to recite my hymns new and reviewed and the other children theirs. Then she read to us, and as we grew older she was apt to read to us one of Jane Taylor’s Contributions of Q.Q. and she read more from the Gospels. She used to say to us poems….” [pp. 101, 103]

    ———

    The second reading this morning is taken from the essay “Philosophical issues in spiritual education and development” by Hanan A. Alexander and David Carr. If you don’t do philosophy, feel free to let your attention wander now, because I’ll make the same point in the sermon.

    “…[L]iberal society requires that citizens with robust visions of the good actively and substantively participate in democratic debates and discussions…. [T]he quest for spiritual perspectives and values is driven by the failure of thin political liberalism … to provide sufficiently substantial conceptions of the good to guide appropriate and significant life choices…. [A]ny sensible approach to spirituality and spiritual education should aim to steer a middle course between extremes of local cultural attachment and complete disengagement from any and all rooted values. Arguably, however, some such moral and spiritual middle way is a desideratum of liberal polity, insofar as such society precisely aims to foster the critical autonomy necessary for the demands of democratic citizenship without undermining the conditions for substantial identity formation that any society requires for the making of meaningful life choices.”

    [“Philosophical issues in spiritual education and development,” Hanan A. Alexander and David Carr, The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence, Eugene C. Roehlkepartain, Pamela Ebstyne King, Linda Wagner, Peter L. Benson, ed., Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2006, pp. 73 ff.]

    Sermon: “Lidian Jackson Emerson’s educational method”

    It’s good to be back here, preaching to this historic congregation, in the historic town of Concord, Massachusetts. And with this congregation approaching its 375th anniversary, I thought I’d speak with you this morning about the congregation’s most famous family, the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson. Specifically, I’d like to speak with you about how Ralph Waldo Emerson and his wife Lidian Jackson Emerson raised their children, and how that might cause us to reflect on the way we raise our children.

     

    In the first reading this morning, you heard a little about how Lidian Jackson Emerson and Ralph Waldo Emerson raised their children to be moral and religious persons. Lidian and Waldo used what we would consider to be traditional methods of religious education. Each day, Lidian went up to say good night to Ellen, and Ellen said her prayers, then Lidian said her own prayer over Ellen. On Sundays, religious and moral education continued the whole day. Ellen writes: “Mother’s method in the religious education of her children [was] to have them made familiar with many hymns, and with all the interesting Bible stories[, t]o accustom them to hearing some serious writing read aloud to them regularly, to make it a habit to omit play on Sunday and have it a day devoted to church and to religious study at home.” (1) The family went to church, the children went to Sunday school; the family went home and ate dinner together. The children would then memorize a new hymn each week while their mother went to church again in the afternoon. Afterwards, the children would recite their hymns, and their mother would read aloud to them. And when the children were old enough that they found it easy to memorize hymns, they were sometimes given the additional task of setting a prose hymn into verse.

    Over time, the Emerson family changed their Sunday routine somewhat. They still went to church in the morning, and when Lidian went to church again in the afternoon the children still stayed home and memorized their hymns, and recited them to Lidian when she returned home, and listened to their mother read aloud to them. Then at four in the afternoon, the children would walk with their father to Walden Pond, even when it was raining or snowing. When they returned home, they would all have tea with their Mother. Ellen writes: “This was a very easy and happy Sunday to us all, and when we wanted hours of solitude we found space for them.” (2)

    Lidian also taught her children the principles of social justice, as it grew out of her Unitarian faith. Lidian was a zealous abolitionist right up until slavery was finally abolished. Ellen writes: “She read the papers faithfully and their pro-slavery tone made her hate her country. She learned all the horrors of slavery and dwelt upon these, so that it was as if she continually witnessed the whippings and the selling away of little children from their mothers.” On the fourth of July in 1853 — that is, a couple of years after the Fugitive Slave Law had been in effect — Lidian was so disgusted by the United States that, rather than decorate their front gate in red-white-and-blue bunting, she hung black fabric instead, as if in mourning. Ellen writes: “I think the children were a little mortified, but Mother said it did her good to express her feelings.” (3)

     

    There you have a brief picture of how the Emerson family taught religion to their children in the middle nineteenth century. Compare this picture to how we teach religion to our children today.

    First, consider how many hymns the Emerson children had to memorize. If they memorized one hymn a week, even assuming they forgot a good many over time, by the time they were in high school they would know perhaps two hundred hymns. We rarely memorize verse today, but in the nineteenth century, most educated people had large quantities of poetry and verse that they had memorized. Thus while it seems odd to us, memorizing hymns fit into a larger cultural pattern.

    While we might vaguely understand the idea of memorizing hymns, the idea of Lidian setting her daughter the task of rendering prose hymns into verse is completely alien to us. I don’t know of any liberal religious parents who would ask their children to write anything on a religious or moral topic. We expect the schools to teach children how to write, but it is a rare family that asks children to write verse or prose compositions on moral and religious topics.

    Keeping Sunday as a Sabbath day, a day of rest focused on moral and religious thoughts, is also foreign to us today. For today’s families, Sundays are as active as any other day of the week: in the morning, there are sports practices and games, and for a few families there might be regular or irregular attendance at Sunday school; the afternoons may be taken up with errands and household chores, and the evenings are most likely devoted to homework in preparation for school on Monday. If there are any spare hours on Sunday, they are filled with social media and video games and similar pursuits. Not many families find space in their lives for “hours of solitude,” even if they should want solitude.

    We do share some things in common with the Emerson family. Liberal religious families are still devoted to social justice. We may not hang back fabric on our front gates on the fourth of July, but parents might wear t-shirts that express a desire for justice in the world, and mortify their children in the process. We still teach our children about humanitarian causes, and explain to them the moral reasoning underlying those causes. Beyond teaching our children about social justice, I know of some families today who still take walks together on Sunday afternoons, just as the Emerson family did in their time.

    But in general, we devote far less time and energy to intentional religious and moral education of our children than did the Emersons. We fit in religious and moral education when we can, but it is quite impossible to fit in as much religious and moral education as did the Emersons.

     

    Not that I believe we should go back to the ways of the Emerson family. Our society today is not the same as society in the middle of the nineteenth century. We do not live in a society where the home, the schools, the church, and the town government are all founded on liberal Protestant ideals. First Parish of Concord stopped receiving direct financial support from the town government a mere six years before Ellen Tucker Emerson was born, and in her day the church was supported by income from pew rentals, where the wealthiest families paid the most and got to sit in the best pews. There was not yet a Roman Catholic church in town, there certainly weren’t any Jews, and the schools openly taught Protestant Christian values and religious concepts. A few free African Americans lived in town, and more than a few escaping slaves passed through this town on the Underground Railroad, helped on their way by families close to the Emersons; but blacks had no political or social influence, and this was a white town. That is not a society to which I would like to return.

    Nevertheless, we lost something when we progressed beyond that old society. Religious education scholar John Westerhoff says that mid-nineteenth century small town America had a “robust ecosystem” of religious education, where the home, the church, the schools, and the community all taught similar religious values. (4) Ellen Tucker Emerson received substantial religious and moral education at home, and that education was supported by the church, the schools, and the whole community. That old educational ecosystem is now broken, and the average child today gets very little time spent in religious and moral education; a child might attend Sunday school perhaps twenty-five hours a year, with perhaps some additional moral instruction at home.

    A democratic society needs citizens who have thought deeply about what it means to live a good life. A great part of the success of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was due to its roots in the highest moral and religious ideals of the black church. Democracy does not work well when people vote selfishly on the basis of what they think will benefit them; democracy needs people to have a larger vision of a good society.

    We need a middle way between two cultural extremes. On the one hand, Ellen Tucker Emerson’s family and community lived lives and taught values that were too narrow, and did not include racial and religious diversity: African Americans, Catholics, Jews, all were left out of the Emerson family’s narrow cultural ideals. On the other hand, today’s society goes too far to the other extreme: we offer so little religious and moral education to our children that our democracy has devolved to the point where many people only vote to protect their own selfish interests. (5)

    We cannot change the way families live their lives in this complicated world we inhabit — we cannot tell people that they must devote an entire day each week to focus on moral and religious thoughts — no one is going to do that. Indeed, we want people to be immersed in the wider democratic society, engaged with citizens with different values, engaged with all the problems and challenges of the broader world.

    We cannot change the way families live their lives, so we must figure out the best ways to help people grow and learn, religiously and morally. We’ll still have our Sunday morning services, and we’ll keep Sunday school, too — both continue to serve us well. But we will add to them, and I would suggest that we should add intensive short-term retreats and camps and conferences.

    Last week, I was at just such a camp, Ferry Beach Religious Education Week. Over the past couple of decades, this annual conference has become a sort of laboratory for religious education professionals and ministers to experiment with creating a week-long intentional community that welcomes children and teenagers with their parents, and other adults with no children including both young adults, empty nesters, and people like me who have never had children.

    In this week-long intentional community, people of all ages live for a week in a community governed by the liberal religious ideals of Unitarian Universalism. In addition to explicit moral and religious education — classes, chapel services, and so on — this week-long camp provides a great deal of implicit religious and moral education. The conference center provides vegetarian and vegan food, and more than one teenager has made the moral decision to commit to a vegetarian or vegan diet while at this camp. The inevitable conflicts that arise are managed by referring to shared religious and moral values — and if you really want to put your values to the test, try resolving a conflict based on your values. The camp has a culture that allows any responsible adult to guide or correct a child when needed. Teenagers play games with children; young adults reach out to and mentor teenagers; all adults mentor each other, and all the other age groups as well. (6) This year, I had a long conversation with a young man whom I have watched grow up over the years, whose marriage had just ended;– and for my part, other adults listened to me talk about my own personal and career struggles.

    Consider a child who attends this Unitarian Universalist camp. In one short week, this child gets more than a hundred hours of explicit and implicit religious and moral education. Compare this to the child who attends Sunday school for one hour a week on twenty-five Sundays a year. The child who attends this week-long summer camp gets the equivalent of four years of Sunday school in one intensive dose. Some years ago, a teenager of my acquaintance described her experience this way: all year long she would be on a sort of plateau, and then she felt as if she made a quantum leap upwards in her personal development in a week-long Unitarian Universalist camp; then she would proceed on pretty much of a plateau until the next summer camp. This teenager is now thirty years old, and after working in the public sector, moved to a job in the non-profit sector where she does conflict resolution. This is exactly the kind of spiritually developed and religiously grounded individual who can participate in democracy with a robust understanding of the good.

     

    As you listen to me describing this camp, you’ve probably become aware that there are problems to be solved. Week-long camps of the kind I have just described are expensive, and not everyone can afford them. And many week-long camps are not intentional communities that provide solid religious and moral education of the type that serves democracy. And many week-long camps are not good at including the older generations, the grandparents and great-grandparents, people who can provide so much rich religious and moral insight and instruction.

    Well, we will have to solve these problems: we’ll have to have scholarships, and better intentions, and we’ll have to include grandparents and great-grandparents. And we’ll have to try other formats:— weekend retreats in addition to week-long camps; extended families and other multigenerational groups; evening events and small groups; and more. We are in the beta testing phase; we will need to keep refining these ideas until we get it right. And you are already doing many of these things here at First Parish of Concord;— you will keep refining them, keep on working to make small groups and extended families and weekend retreats into intentional communities that help us to grow religiously and morally.

    And when you come right down to it, we have the same goals that the Emerson family had. We want our children to grow up into adults with high moral values. We want our adults to keep on growing and refining our religious and moral understandings, so that we can better work with others to infuse the highest values into our democratic society. We want to support each other as we grow, and we want to hold the wider society accountable to the highest moral values.

    This is what the Emersons wanted to do. This is what this congregation has been doing for the past 375 years — guiding people towards the highest moral standards, nurturing people who will go out and create an earth made fair and all her people free.

    Notes and additional information

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  • A Patriotic Faith

    The sermon below was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California, at the 10:30 a.m. service. The sermon text below is a reading text; the actual sermon contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2011 Daniel Harper.

    Happy Independence Day weekend! Aren’t you glad that Independence Day is on a Monday this year, so we get a three day weekend? It’s a three day weekend, and all of us came to church anyway! But then, I like having that peaceful moment in the Sunday morning service at least once a week.

    Because tomorrow is Independence Day, I would like to reflect with you on the relationship between patriotism and liberal religion.

    When it comes to Independence Day, you probably know that quite a few of the people who were deeply involved in the Revolutionary War belonged to Unitarian or Universalist churches. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, belonged to a Universalist church. John and Abigail Adams belonged to a Unitarian church, and John was first vice-president and second president of the new country. John Murray, minister of the Universalist church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, served as a military chaplain, and so did Dr. Samuel West, minister of the church in Dartmouth, Massachusetts that later became Unitarian. We Unitarians and Universalists were deeply involved in the struggle for American independence. And for some of them, liberal religion and political independence were definitely connected. Dr. Samuel West, in one prominent example, preached sermons in which he justified the Revolution from a liberal religious point of view.

    And the connection between patriotism and liberal religion continued up through the middle of the twentieth century. Many Unitarian and Universalist churches used to display framed honor rolls of all the people who saw active service in the Second World War. Up until 1993, we had “American, the Beautiful” in our hymnal; I remember singing it in Sunday services when I was a boy. Even today, a good number of our Unitarian Universalist congregations display American flags in their main meeting space, often alongside the United Nations flag; for we have always been concerned with international community, as well as with our own nation.

    Yet these days we increasingly shy away from any mention of patriotism in our congregations. Too often these days, patriotism is reduced to an overly simplistic conception based on an unquestioning acceptance of political slogans. But as religious liberals, we can never be unquestioning, and our liberal religious conception of patriotism is a complex affair; it cannot be reduced to a political sound bite. With this in mind, I’d like to tell you three stories of three different notions of liberal religious patriotism.

     

    First let me tell you about Robert Gould Shaw. He was born in Boston in 1837 to a wealthy family. His parents were Francis George Shaw and Sarah Sturgis; they had inherited money from Francis’s father, and Francis was involved in business and philanthropy. The family moved to West Roxbury, near the famous Brook Farm community, when little Robert was five, and then to Staten Island, where the family helped found the Unitarian church, when Robert was in his teens. The Shaws were abolitionists, and they may have been active in the Underground Railroad, helping escaping slaves to flee to the northern states.

    Given the wealth and influence of Shaw’s family, he surely could have avoided military service during the Civil War. But he chose to enlist. On April 19, 1861, Shaw joined the private Seventh New York Volunteer Militia. when that short-lived unit disbanded, he then was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the Second Massachusetts Volunteers (Infantry), on May 28, 1861. He became First Lieutenant on July 8, 1861, and Captain, August 10, 1862. While with the Second Massachusetts, he took part in several battles, including the battle of Antietam. In late 1862, he was offered the chance to command a regiment made up entirely of free African Americans from the north. He became Colonel of Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry on April 17, 1863.

    A small volume titled “Memoirs of the War of ’61,” published in 1920 by George H. Ellis, who was the printer for Unitarian tracts and books, tells the story of Shaw’s military service through excerpts from his letters, and I will read those excerpts relating to the 54th Regiment, for they show his courage, and his growing realization that the men under his command were indeed his equals; for even though he was an abolitionist, like most white people of his day, he thought African Americans his inferiors:

    [Upon accepting command of the 54th Regiment, February 5th, 1862. Shaw wrote:] “There is great prejudice against it — at any rate I shan’t be frightened out of it by unpopularity.” March 25: “The intelligence of the men is a great surprise to me.” March 30: “The mustering officer who was here to-day is a Virginian, and he always thought it was a great joke to make soldiers of [blacks] but he tells me now that he has never mustered in so fine a set of men, though about 20,000 have passed through his hands since September. The skeptics need only to come out here to be converted.” Morris Island, July 18: “We are in General Strong’s brigade. We came up here last night in a very heavy rain. Fort Wagner is being heavily bombarded. We are not far from it. We hear nothing but praise for the Fifty-fourth on all hands.”

    Shaw was offered the post of greatest danger and greatest honor in the assault on Fort Wagner, and accepted immediately. Here is a contemporary account of what happened, written from South Carolina on July 22 someone attached to General Strong:

    “The troops looked worn and weary; had been without tents during the pelting rains of the two previous nights. When they came within six hundred yards of Fort Wagner they formed in line of battle, the Colonel heading the first and the Major the second battalion. With the Sixth Connecticut and Ninth Maine and others they remained half an hour. Then the order for ‘charge’ was given. The regiment marched at quick, then at double-quick time. When about one hundred yards from the Fort the rebel musketry opened with such terrible fire that for an instant the first battalion hesitated; but only for an instant, for Colonel Shaw, springing to the front and waving his sword, shouted, ‘Forward, Fifty-fourth!’ and with another cheer and shout they rushed through the ditch and gained the parapet on the right. Colonel Shaw was one of the first to scale the walls. He stood erect to urge forward his men, and while shouting for them to press on was shot dead and fell into the fort.”

    Thinking to humiliate Shaw and his family, the Confederate Army, shocked that a white man would serve with African Americans, buried Shaw in a common grave with his soldiers. But his parents were pleased by this, and wrote: “We can imagine no holier place than that in which he lies, among his brave and devoted followers, nor wish for him better company — what a body-guard he has!” (1)

    The story of Robert Gould Shaw is a classic story of patriotism. He gave his life in service of his country; more to the point, he gave his life while serving the highest ideals of his country, the ideals of freedom and equality for all persons. And in this case, the ideals of his country, and the ideals of his Unitarian faith, were clearly aligned. It is a classic story of patriotism, yet even so, Shaw’s patriotism questioned a dominant notion of his day, that African Americans could not serve with distinction in the military. So you see, this is a story of how a religious liberal pushed the boundaries of patriotism.

     

    Now I’d like to tell you about a different kind of patriotism. This is the story of Rev. William E. Short of Palo Alto.

    The first Unitarian church in Palo Alto was formally organized in 1906, and lasted through until 1934. In 1916, the congregation called Rev. William E. Short, recently graduated from divinity school, to serve as their minister. Short was a pacifist, and it is said that he found a good deal of quiet support for his pacifism among kindred souls in the Palo Alto church of that time.

    Short resigned as minister of the Palo Alto church in 1917, and became the Chairman of the Northern California branch of the People’s Council. The People’s Council was a nationwide pacifist organization that opposed the military draft. This was in the days when it was almost impossible to conscientiously object to military service on religious grounds, and I am inclined to understand Short’s service with the People’s Council as a kind of patriotic act: he was upholding the fundamental religious principle of religious tolerance on which the United States was founded. As a matter of incidental interest, the chair of the national organization was Scott Nearing, later known as the co-author of the back-to-the-land book Living the Good Life; William Short served on the national executive committee with Nearing.

    By late 1917, the United States had entered the war, and Major General Ralph Van Deman of the Army decided something had to be done about the People’s Council in general, and more specifically something had to be done about William Short’s activities. The People’s Council headquarters in San Francisco were raided twice — no search warrant was issued — and when that failed to turn up anything, Van Deman decided to bring William Short under military jurisdiction for draft evasion. Van Deman and the military lawyers successfully argued that once he was no longer serving a local church, Short was no longer a minister, and therefore was no longer exempt from the draft. He was taken into military custody in September 1918, interrogated, imprisoned, and eventually released, after the war was over, in early 1919. (2)

    The story of Rev. William E. Short is not what you’d call a classic story of patriotism. He actively the military establishment, and did so at great personal cost. Yet his was a form of liberal religious patriotism. He was holding his country accountable to its highest ideals. He challenged involuntary military service based on his understanding of the ideals of his Unitarian faith.

    His was not a blind unquestioning patriotism, he certainly pushed the boundaries of his day and age; nevertheless, Short was indeed a patriot. He did what he thought was best for his country. Many people disagreed with him; the American Unitarian Association itself disagreed with him. Yet that is the uncomfortable thing about patriotism: there is never a perfect consensus about what constitutes a patriotic act. Not everyone thought that Robert Gould Shaw did the right thing be commanding an all-black regiment. There has never been, and never will be, a perfectly clear definition of patriotism with which all Americans agree.

     

    The third story I have to tell you is short and simple. There have always been Unitarian Universalists serving in the military, but over the past decade or so, we’ve seen a number of Unitarian Universalists choose to serve their country by becoming military chaplains. When I was in seminary a decade ago, military recruiters were actively pursuing Unitarian Universalist seminarians; I was told that the military loved Unitarian Universalist chaplains because we knew how to minister to a wide variety of beliefs, and we don’t proselytize. And now there are several Unitarian Universalist military chaplains who are not only performing the usual duties of a chaplain, but also quietly, and by their very presence, challenging the norm of evangelical Christianity that has come to dominate the U.S. military establishment in recent years.

    That’s the story. Now I’m going to engage in some theological reflection with you. Recently, I met and have been corresponding with Rev. Seanan Holland. He is a Major in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, currently based in southern California, and preparing with his unit to be shipped to combat duty. In one email message, he outlined a Unitarian Universalist theological grounding of military service, and he has given me permission to read it to you:

    “In striving to come to a coherent universalist theology that captures both our hopes for a peaceful world and the reality that at the moment it is not, I see war as an organic reorganization within the web of life. It is a reorganization mediated by humans mostly through our shortcomings/dysfunctions. What this means to those of us who participate in war is that we are witnesses to the sorest of humanity’s dysfunctions — war. Warriors possess a knowledge of an aspect of humanity that most do not want to carry and hopefully won’t ever have to. However the nature of war is such that those of us who have pledged to protect our country don’t always get to choose which conflict to be in and we have very limited power as activists while we are in the military. Those who have more power as activists (many UUs) typically (and understandably) do not possess an intimate knowledge of warfare. This is a sketch of my theological grounding that warriors and non-warriors really have to work together on redeeming conflict — hopefully before it happens.”

    I’d like to read you that last phrase once again: “warriors and non-warriors really have to work together on redeeming conflict — hopefully before it happens.” If we follow this suggestion, we will be drawing on one of the great strengths of our liberal religious tradition. We know there are no simple answers to anything. We know that we have to continually question our assumptions. We know that no one person ever has complete access to universal truth. We also know that conflict is inevitable in human affairs, and that we must find ways to resolve or manage conflict as quickly as possible, before it leads to open warfare.

    For us religious liberals, patriotism is not a simple matter; like the rest of life, it is complicated, and we’ll never all agree on one single interpretation of it. Yet we know we share certain liberal religious ideals that relate directly to patriotism: the dream of a peaceful world where no person is exploited or subjugated; the dream of life in balance; the dream of a more harmonious existence for all humanity. As religious liberals, our patriotism will be colored by these liberal religious ideals. And so on this Independence Day weekend, may we dedicate ourselves once again to an earth made fair, and all her people free.

     

    Notes:

    (1) Quoted in Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-century Reform, by Lorien Foote (2003: Ohio University Press). Other information about Robert Gould Shaw from Memoirs of the war of ’61 (1920; the online biography of Shaw at the UU Historical Society Web site; and other online and printed sources.

    (2) Information about Short from: Roy Talbert, Negative Intelligence: The Army and the American Left, 1917-1941, (Univ. of Mississippi Press, 2008), p. 75-77. And: Ex parte Short. District Court, N. D. California, First Division. September 5, 1918. No. 16417. The Federal Reporter, Volume 253, 1919, p. 839.

    (3) Personal communication from Rev. Seanan Holland, Major, U.S. Marine Corps, 29 June 2011.

  • Another kind of good neighbor

    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) 2010 Daniel Harper.

    The following brief story was allegedly told by the wandering rabbi and political radical, Jesus of Nazareth:

    “There was a man going from Jerusalem down to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him up, and went off, leaving him for dead. Now by coincidence a priest was going down that road; when he caught sight of him, he went out of his way to avoid him. In the same way, when a Levite came to the place, he took one look at him and crossed the road to avoid him. But this Samaritan who was traveling that was came to where he was and was moved by pity at the sight of him. He went up to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring olive oil and wine on them. He hoisted him up onto his own animal, brought him to an inn, and looked after him. The next day he took out two silver coins, which he gave to the innkeeper, and said, “Look after him, and on my way back I’ll reimburse you for any extra expense you have had. Which of these three, in your opinion, acted like a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” [Luke 10.30-36, Scholars Version translation.]

    I read you that story by way of introducing you to Dana Greeley, who in May, 1961 — fifty years ago this coming May — became the first president of the newly formed Unitarian Universalist Association. I knew Dana Greeley — not well, but I knew him — because in 1970, he became the minister in my home congregation in Concord, Massachusetts. And Dana Greeley was, to my way of thinking, an example of a good neighbor, a Good Samaritan. I mean this not in the popular sense, in which a Good Samaritan is a smarmy conventional do-gooder who makes the rest of us look bad. Dana Greeley was not smarmy, and he was a Unitarian Universalist, which means he was not conventional. So I had better explain to you what I mean when I say that Dana Greeley was an unconventional, but not smarmy, Good Samaritan.

     

    To begin with, Dana Greeley was an internationalist. He understood that everyone in the world was his neighbor. And he worked hard to make connections around the world.

    And when I say around the world, I mean it; I grew up thinking it was normal for ministers to travel all around the world. He was in New Delhi, India, in 1982 for the New Delhi Peace March. He was in Hiroshima for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb. In 1962, he visited Albert Schweitzer at his hospital in Gabon in Africa. He was an invited observer at the Second Vatican Council, and sat within thirty feet of Pope John when the council was convened. He met with President John F. Kennedy at the White House, and with United Nations secretary U Thant at U.N. headquarters. Nor did he only travel overseas: he was one of the ministers who walked arm in arm with Martin Luther King on the streets of Selma, Alabama, in 1965 during the struggle for civil rights in America. William Schulz, who later became president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and then the president of Amnesty International, said, “What Dana did for Unitarian Universalism was to convince us that we were worthy of being taken seriously as a world-class faith.” [The Premise and the Promise, Warren Ross (Boston: Skinner House), 2001, p. 31.]

    Why did he do all this traveling? In a sermon delivered in October, 1972, Greeley said, “World brotherhood and world government are the realities that must more and more be recognized.” [Forward through the Ages, Concord, Mass: First Parish, 1986.] “Brotherhood” is a word we don’t use much any more; today we might say all human beings are relatives, but the truth behind the phrase remains the same. Greeley was an internationalist because he really believed that all human beings are siblings, in the best possible sense. He not only believed this, he lived it out in his life. He was a naturally gregarious person who could talk with anyone, and so it was the most natural thing for him to know people all around the world and to build friendships and relationships that over time would naturally lead towards closer ties between human beings. Dana Greeley was the kind of Good Samaritan who understood the whole world to be his neighbor.

     

    While he understood the whole world to be his neighborhood, Dana Greeley also made the effort to create good neighborhoods in his immediate vicinity. Another way to say this is to say that he was a good institutionalist.

    That word “institutionalist” is not widely used in our contemporary society, so let me define it for you. A good institutionalist is someone who is adept at building up and maintaining strong human institutions. A good institutionalist may be the kind of person who is good at serving on committees and boards, and who is good at filling elected offices. A good institutionalist may also be someone who works behind the scenes in informal ways to strengthen our various institutions.

    People who are good institutionalists are essential to a healthy democracy. Of course democracies need committed citizens who participate directly in government. But democracies also depend upon citizens who participate in voluntary associations, that is, those associations outside of government and business in which we are free to mingle with other citizens. The democratic right to free association is crucial for democracies because it is in voluntary associations — groups like the League of Women Voters and citizen’s groups and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto — where democracy really takes hold. It is in voluntary associations that most of us learn and practice the skills of democracy: public speaking; public listening; leadership and followership; learning to lose gracefully and learning to win gracefully; setting and reaching goals (goals, not profits); discussing big issues with other people and learning to trust in the democratic process to get us ever closer to an ideal world.

    Dana Greeley once wrote, “I have always like people and have put a sizable measure of confidence in people” [25 Beacon Street, Boston: Skinner House, 1973, p. 69]. I watched Dana Greeley act as a good institutionalist in my home congregation when he was minister there. He strengthened the democratic structures in that congregation by engaging as many people as possible in the decision-making process. When I was a member of the high school youth group of that congregation, I remember that he made sure to invite youth members to planning retreats; to his way of thinking, people should learn the skills of democracy at a young age. He went further than that: he engaged both his opponents and his supporters in the decision-making process. He always had confidence in the people around him, and they tended to live up to the confidence he placed in them.

    Having confidence in people happens to be a fine way to build democratic institutions. When you understand everyone to be your neighbor, and when you treat your neighbor the way you’d like to be treated, not only do your neighbors tend to treat you the way you’d like to be treated, and not only is everyone happier, but you also tend to get things done. In the sixteen years Dana Greeley was minister at my home congregation, the Sunday morning attendance more than quadrupled.

     

    More narrowly, Greeley also knew his neighbors to be the people who come together each Sunday morning in Unitarian Universalist congregations. He once said, “My mother jollied me always, and challenged me, by reminding me that I was born on a Sunday morning at eleven o’clock…. I admit that eleven o’clock on Sunday is the time of the week I like best.” [25 Beacon Street, p. 22] He said this, I believe, not for selfish reasons, not because he happened to like that time of week, but because he knew how many other people value that time of the week.

    Consider for a moment all the reasons we have for coming to Unitarian Universalist services on a Sunday morning. I remember John (not his real name) who was a meat-cutter at a supermarket, and who liked to go to his Unitarian Universalist church because the sermon gave him something to think about all week long while he was working; and, he said, that made him a better person. Mariana told me that if she missed the worship service on Sunday morning, she felt off balance all the rest of the week; Unitarian Universalist just made her feel good. Steve, who grew up Jewish, said he decided to join a Unitarian Universalist congregation because Sunday morning services helped him map out a moral course in his job as the owner of a large construction company. Then there was Irene, who often missed the service on Sunday morning because she was out in the social hall chatting with her cronies; but Sunday mornings was the center of her community, and she wouldn’t miss it for the world.

    And without going into specifics, there are the people who come here carrying a burden of grief, or illness, or despair, or many other burdens; you can come here, and have a measure of peace for just a moment while you are held in the love of this religious community. That kind of thing happens all the time in this very room, at this very time on Sunday morning; I have seen it, and I have talked to people who have experienced it. Someone who really needs it can come in here and receive a measure of comfort, maybe even a measure of healing from the love that is in this room.

    We come here on Sunday mornings, and each one of us, simply by showing up, is acting as a good neighbor. Just by showing up, we are part of a human community that provides comfort and peace and maybe healing to others. Just by showing up, your presence here supports those of us who come here to map out a moral course for the week; your presence supports those who come here to find some balance in their lives; your presence makes you a part of an intellectual community. And of course your presence here is of great importance to all those who are your friends, and who maybe come here to talk with you.

    Dana Greeley was on to something when he considered Sunday mornings spent in with a congregation to be the best time of the week. This is a community of good neighbors, a community that offers peace, maybe healing, intellectual stimulation, time to map out a moral course for oneself.

     

    I began this sermon with the well-known story of the Good Samaritan. At the end of that story, the wandering rabbi and political radical Jesus of Nazareth asks his audience a question designed to get them thinking about what it means to be a good neighbor. There are many answers to that question, which is why we still tell this story some two thousand years after it was allegedly first told. A good neighbor might be someone who sees the whole world as their neighborhood. A good neighbor might be someone who builds strong democratic institutions. A good neighbor might be someone who shows up here, week after week, just to be a part of this human community.

    This coming May we will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Unitarian Universalist Association. As we look ahead to that celebration, I would submit to you that Dana Greeley represents, in these ways, some of the best aspects of who we are as Unitarian Universalists. We are good neighbors: good world citizens, good neighbors in this congregation, good neighbors who have confidence in humanity.