Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Unitarian Universalism

  • Mary Rotch, An Inspired Life

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained extemporaneous remarks and improvisation. A version of this sermon with footnotes and bibliography is available. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is a letter from Margaret Fuller to Mary Rotch. [Due to copyright restrictions, only a portion of this letter is included here.]

    “I am anxious to get a letter telling me how you fare this winter in the cottage. Your neighbors who come this way do not give very favorable accounts of your looks, Aunt Mary, and if you are well enough I should like to see a few of those prim, well-shaped characters from your own hand…

    “I wore your black dress at Niagra and many other places where I was very happy and it was always an added pleasure thuse to be led to think of you. — I wish, dear Aunt Mary, you were near enough for me to go in and see you now and then, I know that, sick or well, you are always serene and sufficient unto yourself, and that you have a most affectionate friend always by your side [i.e., Mary Rotch’s companion, Mary Gifford], but now you are so much shut up, it might animate existence to hear of some things I might have to tell….”

    [from “My Heart Is a Large Kingdom”: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller, edited by Robert Hudspeth (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2001), pp. 187-188. This book contains three other letters to Mary Rotch.]

    The second reading is from Orville Dewey’s Autobiography. Dewey was minister of our congregation from 1823 until 1834:

    “I should like to record some New Bedford names here, so precious are they to me. Miss Mary Rotch is one,– called by everybody “Aunt Mary,” from mingled veneration and affection. It might seem a liberty to call her so; but it was not, in her case. She had so much dignity and strength in her character and bearing that it was impossible for any one to speak of her lightly. On our going to New Bedford, she immediately called upon us, and when she went out I could not help exclaiming, “Wife, were ever hearts taken by storm like that!” Storm, the word would be, according to the usage of the phrase; but it was the very contrary,– a perfect simplicity and kindliness.”

    [Orville Dewey, Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D., edited by Mary E. Dewey (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883), p. 67.]

    Sermon

    A few years ago, the Quaker writer Parker Palmer wrote a book called Let Your Life Speak; and it seems to me that the title of that book is good advice. I don’t care so much what you say, because people really tell about their deepest values in the way they live their lives. This morning I’d like to tell you the life story of Mary Rotch, who was part of our church from 1824 until she died in 1847. She wasn’t a writer like her friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller; nevertheless, she still can speak to us through her life story, and it is in that story that we shall find her deepest spiritual values expressed.

    Mary Rotch was born on Nantucket to a Quaker family on October 9th, 1777. Her mother was Elizabeth Barney, and her father was William Rotch, and at birth she had three older brothers and two older sisters. It started out as a prosperous family — William Rotch was a shipowner and merchant in the lucrative whaling trade. But during the Revolutionary War, all those involved in the whaling trade on Nantucket went through hard times because they were caught between the American navy and the British navy, and subject to raids and confiscation. Beyond that, William Rotch lived out his pacifist Quaker principles in spite of great pressure to support the American revolution — for example, during the revolution, he threw a large number of bayonets into Nantucket harbor rather than let them be used in the Revolutionary cause. This did not make him popular with his countrymen; and his strength of character in the face of adversity helps us understand how the same strength of character later manifested itself in his daughter Mary.

    After the Revolutionary War ended, the British slapped a huge duty on all imported whale oil. William Rotch had to sell whale oil at a loss in the British market, and the British market was nearly the only market there was. Rather than lose money, William Rotch relocated his business to Dunkirk, France, and in July, 1790, he and his wife Elizabeth and their daughters set sail and moved their household to France. Mary Rotch was just 13 years old.

    Not long after they moved to Dunkirk, the French Revolution began to erupt around them, and war between England and France was imminent. As William put it in a memoir, “it was time for me to leave the country, in order to save our vessels if captured by the English.” The family left France in January, 1793, and stayed in England through 1794 so that William could oversee business there, returned to Nantucket for a year, and then settled in New Bedford in 1795. Thus, by the time she was 18 years old, Mary Rotch had lived through two revolutions, and had lived in Nantucket, Dunkirk, London, and New Bedford.

    When they came to New Bedford in 1795, the Rotch family moved in to a house William had had built, a house called “Mansion House” on account of its size and grandeur. You can see what this house looked like in William Wall’s painting “New Bedford in 1810,” which hangs in the Whaling Museum — it’s the house on the northeast corner of Union and Second streets. By coincidence, 1795 is the same year our congregation built a new church building in the growing village of New Bedford, at the northwest corner of William and Purchase, just a block or so from the Rotch’s house.

    Not that the Rotches went to the Unitarian church! They were Quakers, or members of the Religious Society of Friends, and they worshipped at the Friends meeting house. Indeed, William Rotch was what is known as a “weighty Friend,” that is, a prominent Quaker, who more than once represented New Bedford at the New England Yearly Meeting. Mary Rotch was also a weighty Friend, a prominent Quaker, and when she grew up she became an elder of the New Bedford Friends Meeting.

    But Mary Rotch did not limit her reading to Quaker writers, as did many Quakers of her day. By 1812, when Mary was in her mid-30’s, “she and others formed a discussion group, wrote papers, and read books by such writers as Dugall Stewart and Johann Kaspar Lavatar.” Stewart was a philosopher in the Scottish Common Sense School of philosophy; Lavatar was a Swiss mystic. This was intellectually challenging reading, and well beyond what the average Quaker of the day would read.

    We get a more personal picture of Mary in an 1818 letter from one Anna Shoemaker of Philadephia. Shoemaker describes her visit to the William Rotch household in December, 1818, saying, “…Mary (Rotch’s) mother treated me with great cordiality, and Mary, herself, paid me the most grateful attention. She is a lovely girl and dressed as plain as Anne Paxson but on her it looks very well, her figure is so large and majestic….” Apparently, all that generation of Rotches “were physically very big, with large frames.” And yes, at age 41 Mary was still living with her parents, for she never married and lived there in Mansion House until both her parents died.

    …

    Now we come to the time when Mary went through a major spiritual crisis in her life. In order to understand that crisis, you have to understand a little bit about early 19th C. American Quakerism.

    The Quakers had a number of peculiar practices that tended to keep them apart from the rest of the world. They were strict pacifists; and so we already heard how, during the American Revolution, Mary Rotch’s father lived out his pacifism. Quakers adhered to strict plainness in their clothing, staying away from bright colors, ornaments, anything that tended to set one person above another person. They used the old words “thee” and “thou,” because when Quakerism formed in 17th C. England, to say “you” was to elevate another person to a higher social level than yours. And all Quakers of that era were required to adhere to a strict written code of religious discipline, which codified what they were and weren’t allowed to do and say, and even think.

    But by 1816, Mary Newhall and other Quakers in Lynn, Massachusetts, were evolving some new and liberal ideas. Mary Newhall and her followers were soon called the “New Lights”; the more conservative Quakers became known as the “Old Lights.” Mary Newhall and her followers accused the Old Lights of sinking into a “dead formality.” The Old Lights accused the liberals of being, well, liberal. The Old Lights managed to eject Mary Newhall from membership with the Quaker meeting in Lynn, using some questionable parliamentary procedures. But that didn’t stop Newhall. She continued to preach her new liberal religious ideas wherever she could.

    In January, 1823, Newhall came to New Bedford to preach, and here she found that the liberalization process was already well begun. She preached in the brick Friends meeting house at the corner of Spring and Seventh streets. On February 9, she preached; was denounced by some of the New Bedford Old Lights; was defended by one Samuel Rodman; and finally Newhall sank to her knees to “appear in supplication,” as the Quakers of that day put it — we would say, “knelt in prayer.” When a Quaker appeared in supplication, the custom was that the rest of the Quakers present would stand, showing they were united with the prayer. Mary Rotch, who was by then an elder of the New Bedford Quaker meeting, and most of those present rose to their feet to show unity with Mary Newhall — but the determined Old Lights did not. Two days later, Mary Newhall preached in our old church building at William and Purchase streets — and after Mary Newhall spoke, Mary Rotch also spoke, thus emerging as the leader of the New Lights in New Bedford. The battle was joined, and continued for some months. Finally, in March, 1824, the Old Lights maneuvered the meeting to officially disown Mary Rotch. The meeting should have reached consensus, but even though nineteen members of the meeting disagreed, the Old Lights pushed it through — Mary Rotch was no longer a Quaker.

    Why did the Old Lights consider Mary Rotch and the other New Lights so heretical? It was because of their liberal religious beliefs. The New Lights believed that what they called “the Light Within” was a sufficient guide for all religion, and that the Light Within was far more important than any rules or disciplines that might be imposed upon individuals by organized religion. The New Lights believed that the Bible is less important than this Light Within; and they also believed that the Old Testament is not the literal truth, but rather it is allegory. The New Lights did not believe the Devil existed; nor did they believe in heaven or hell, except insofar as heaven and hell are states of mind here and now on this earth. The New Lights believed that Jesus was not divine; and they did not believe that Jesus’s death somehow atoned for the sins of all humanity. If you think that these New Light Quakers sound like Unitarians, I think you’re absolutely right. And in fact, most of the New Light Quakers came over and joined with the Unitarians.

    Here is what Job Otis, one of the chief Old Light Quakers, said in 1825 about the New Light defection to the Unitarian church: “The disaffected party generally have withdrawn from us, and left our meetings, both for worship and discipline, quite undisturbed. Some of them occasionally attend the Unitarian Congregational meeting…. But a withering evidently attends them all, and their reputation as religious characters is very much lost with all sober and reflecting people. Most of them, even to Mary Rotch…, have thrown off all regard to plainness, and the younger part attend places of music and dancing. Much confusion, contradiction, and inconsistency appears among them in their principles, professions, views, and reasonings; and but little else than vain speculations, abstract reasonings, impiety, and unbelief.” Let me translate that for you: Job Otis is saying that the New Lights have gone over to the Unitarians, which isn’t really a church; that they now wear bright-colored clothing on occasion, listen to music, and go dancing, all of which is very bad; and instead of blind faith, they rely on Reason, which is also very bad. Or, from our point of view, no wonder the New Lights felt comfortable in the Unitarian church!

    As comfortable as they might have felt in their new church home, surely it must have been a terrible thing to leave behind friends and relatives, some of whom perhaps would no longer speak to them. And surely a string of deaths in Mary’s family only made things worse for her: her sister Lydia died in Salem in 1822; her brother Thomas died in Ohio in 1823; and her mother died at Mansion House in May, 1824.

    …

    Now we come to a most interesting part of the story — how Mary Rotch influenced the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the feminist Margaret Fuller. We’ll start with Emerson.

    Sometime around 1830, Emerson came down to the New Bedford church as a substitute preacher — this is some years before his well-known stay here in 1833-1834. On this visit to our congregation, “Emerson had been deeply impressed by the sight of the leading Quaker of the town, Miss Mary Rotch, quietly leaving the church when the rite of the Last Super was about to be observed.” Most of Emerson’s biographers agree that Mary’s example influenced him in 1832 when he resigned from Second Church in Boston. Emerson resigned from Second Church because he said he could no longer in good conscience preside at communion, then a monthly feature at every Unitarian church. This became the subject of his most famous sermon; and it became one of his most important theological points, that inner truth is more important than empty ritual. So Mary Rotch had a deep and early influence on Emerson.

    When Emerson came back to New Bedford in the winter and spring of 1833-1834, he got to know Mary Rotch better. At that time, Mary Rotch told the young Emerson something of the controversy between the New Lights and the Old Lights, and Emerson wrote in one of his notebooks that she had been “driven inward, driven home, to find an anchor, until she learned to have no choice, to acquiesce without understanding the reason when she found an obstruction to any particular course of action.” That is to say, she learned to be self-reliant, to rely on her own inner strength, her own inner light; ideas which Emerson would integrate into his own thinking and writing.

    Mary Rotch told Emerson another story. A little girl came to her and asked to do something. “She replied, ‘What does the voice in thee say?’ The child went off, and after a time returned to say, ‘…the little voice says, no.’” This story affected Emerson greatly. It affirmed for him that each of us can know what is right and what is true, if we would just listen to “the voice in thee.” Many years later, Emerson quoted (or perhaps paraphrased) Mary Rotch in his essay titled “Greatness,” expressing this same point in a different way:

    ”  ‘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.’  ”

    If we assume that this is a fairly accurate transcription of Mary Rotch’s actual words, this gives us the very heart of her religious faith. When the voice within you tells you not to do something, then don’t do it.

    Now, you might want to say that that voice within is the voice on conscience, or you might say that it is the voice of God. Orville Dewey said this about Mary Rotch: “when speaking of the Supreme Being, she would never say ‘God,’ but ‘that Influence.’ That Influence was constantly with her; and she carried the idea so far as to believe that it prompted her daily action, and decided for her every question of duty.” So perhaps we don’t have to draw a distinction between God and that internal influence; perhaps Mary Rotch is telling us that God can be interpreted to mean exactly that inner voice that prompts us towards right action.

    So that is how Emerson was influenced by Mary Rotch. I’d like to mention briefly the ways in which Mary Rotch influenced Margaret Fuller.

    Margaret Fuller met Mary Rotch through Mary’s niece Eliza Rotch Farrar. Eliza had lived in Mansion House with Mary from about 1819 until 1828, when Mary’s father died. Within a few months of old William’s death, young Eliza had married Professor John Farrar of Harvard College. They were married by Orville Dewey in Mansion House, and then the young couple went up to Cambridge to live, where Eliza soon met Margaret, and began to serve as something of a mentor to Margaret. I’m not sure when Eliza introduced these two amazing women, but it probably earlier than 1840.

    The relationship between Emerson and Mary Rotch appears formal; but the relationship between Margaret and “Aunt Mary” seems to have been much closer. By about 1840, Margaret was staying with Mary Rotch at Mary’s summer house. No later than 1842, Margaret was staying with Mary Rotch here in New Bedford, in the house that Mary had built for herself and her companion, Mary Gifford, on South Sixth Street (our church later bought that house as a parsonage in the 1890s). They wrote many letters to one another, and we heard one of those letters as the first reading. Emerson’s letters to Mary Rotch tend to concern ideas and thinking. Margaret fFuller’s letters to Mary Rotch talk about health, and travel, and clothing; they are letters one friend would write to another. Margaret’s letters to Aunt Mary show a real love existed between the two.

    How did Mary Rotch influence Margaret Fuller? With Emerson, we can find specific influences; with Margaret Fuller, the influence seems less specific but broader. I imagine that Mary Rotch could have been a role model for Margaret Fuller. Mary Rotch was a strong, confident, self-possessed woman who lived alone and who didn’t feel the need to marry a man (indeed, one of Fuller’s biographers senses a cooling of their relationship once Margaret married). Mary was not afraid of being an intellectual, and had organized her own discussion group here in New Bedford, not unlike the “Conversations” for women for which Margaret later became so well-known. We may not be able to trace a direct intellectual influence, as in the case of Emerson, but we can certainly claim Mary Rotch had a profound personal influence on Margaret Fuller.

    …

    There is only a little more to tell about Mary Rotch. She lived the remainder of her life peacefully in her house on South Sixth Street, attending church here in this building, quietly walking out before communion was served — I imagine that by setting that example of leaving before communion began contributed to the weakening of that ritual in our congregation, so that it is not at all surprising that communion died out completely here in the 1860s, without any fuss at all. In 1843, when she was 65, Mary ordered a grand tea service from Paris, quite elaborate and richly decorated, and copies of letters to and from Paris regarding this tea service are in the Whaling Museum’s Research Library. Five years later, Mary Rotch died, on September 4, 1848, at age seventy.

    I suppose sermons are supposed to have a solid moral, or summing-up, at the end of them. I don’t have a moral, but let me sum up this sermon by saying, quite simply: I wish I knew more about Mary Rotch. Even though she spoke through her life, through the way she lived her life, I wish someone would ferret out some of her letters and publish them, so we can read her own words. I wish someone would write about her, not as a footnote to Emerson or Fuller, but for her own sake, as a deep religious thinker, as one of the most interesting members of our church. Hers was truly an inspired life; and her 19th C. life continues to inspire our lives today.

  • Glory Days, or, Hit by a Fish

    On this Sunday, we recognized a Unitarian church which, like First Unitarian Church in New Bedford, is also celebrating its three hundredth birthday this year. Thus, the readings did not relate to the sermon, but instead celebrated the birthday of All Souls Unitarian Church in Belfast, Ireland. These readings are included here:

    Greetings to All Souls Belfast

    Whereas All Souls Church in Belfast, Ireland, affiliated with the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland and with the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, will celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of their founding this week;

    Whereas First Unitarian Church in New Bedford, a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, was established three hundred years ago this year when Rev. Samuel Hunt was settled as minister in what was then called the town of Dartmouth;

    Whereas both congregations are a part of the worldwide Unitarian fellowship, sharing in the values of liberal religion;

    Whereas we feel a special connection with All Souls because Maggi Kerr Peirce has been a member of both congregations;

    Therefore, we do extend our warmest greetings to the congregation of All Souls Church, wishing that their congregation may thrive and continue to uphold the values of liberal religion for at least another three centuries.

    Given under our hands this fourteenth day of October in the two thousand and eighth year of the common era…

    [Signed by members of the Board of Trustees of First Unitarian Church in New Bedford.]

    A short history of All Souls Unitarian Church in Belfast, Ireland

    Read by Maggi Kerr Peirce

    John Abernethy, called “the father of non-subscription”, was a prominent Irish Presbyterian minister who led many ministers and congregations out of the Synod of Ulster into a separate liberal-minded denomination, known today as the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, and affiliated with the worldwide Unitarian movement.

    In 1705 Abernethy founded a meeting, subsequently known as the Belfast Society, of ministers and lay people who gathered to discuss the Bible and recent theological scholarship. Members pooled their resources to buy new books and prepared papers on the latest publications. They trained themselves to engage in theological disputation and gradually began to challenge accepted religious notions of their day. A nineteenth-century Presbyterian historian described the Belfast Society as a “seed-plot of error”.

    James Kirkpatrick, an Irish Presbyterian minister, was the first minister in Belfast to argue for the principles of non-subscription. He was a founding member of the Belfast Society. In common with Abernethy and others he adopted an increasingly critical attitude towards humanly formulated creeds, particularly the Westminster Confession of Faith.

    In 1706 he accepted a call from the Belfast congregation as colleague to the Reverend John McBride. The Belfast congregation, which had grown rapidly, numbered more than three thousand members. At the time of Kirkpatrick’s call McBride had fled to Scotland to avoid arrest for refusing to take the oath abjuring the claims to the throne of James II’s son. McBride had suggested that the original Belfast congregation should be divided and a second meeting house built. Eventually, after complicated negotiations, the Belfast church did just that. A new meeting house was built immediately behind the first as the home of Kirkpatrick’s Second congregation. This was the beginning of unitarianism in Belfast.

    [From material written by David Steers, minister of All Souls’ Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church, Belfast from 1989 to 2000.]

    Sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. About half the sermon as preached was extemporaneous, and the text below is a rough reconstruction of the actual sermon. Additionally, the text below has been slightly corrected based on further historical research. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

    Sermon — “Richard Huff, Quiet Revolutionary”

    Years ago, I was watching some stupid television show, and I saw a comedy routine in which, much to his surprise, a man got slapped in the face with a fish. I said it was a “comedy routine,” although if you think about it, getting hit in the face with a fish is not really that funny. In fact, I don’t remember anything else about that comedy routine, so it couldn’t have been very funny. But I have retained this image of a very surprised man, and since then I’ve sometimes thought that that image of getting hit in the face with a fish is a good image for the way life can surprise us in very unpleasant ways.

    So I tell you this, and it occurs to me that it’s possible that when you go home, you’ll be sitting down to eat lunch and ask yourself, “Now what did Dan talk about today? Something about a fish?” — and that’s all you’ll remember about this sermon. If you remember nothing else about this sermon, please also remember this:– when life slaps you in the face with a fish, you don’t have to blame yourself. It can be tempting to blame yourself when life is hard — but please don’t. You don’t have to blame yourself when life is hard on you.

    Because that’s what happens in real life sometimes. Even when everything is going astonishingly well, even when you’re doing everything right, suddenly the rules of the game can change on you. This is what has happened to many of us, financially speaking, over the past few weeks:– We thought we were doing everything right, when suddenly the stock market falls apart, retirement plans lose a third of their value, the state can’t borrow money so it makes major cuts, unemployment rises, and so on. We thought we were doing all right when this financial crisis slapped us in the face with a fish, metaphorically speaking.

    As Unitarian Universalists, we already know that we have to be always ready to change and grow and transform. That’s why we don’t like creeds or doctrines:– the creed that we adopt today may strangulate growth tomorrow. Therefore, out of religious principle, we like to remain ready to change and grow and transform ourselves. And yet even with our openness to change, even with our willingness to transform ourselves to meet new realities, sometimes we too get surprised by events.

    This morning, I’d like to tell you about one such event that happened here in our own church some fifty-three years ago. Back in 1954, our church seemed poised for explosive growth; but the very next year Sunday morning adult attendance began to decline rapidly, the Sunday school began to decline more slowly, and that decline continued pretty much right through the quarter century. So here’s the story:

    …

    Like every church, our church has always had ups and downs. In the 1920s there were years when this church had more than a hundred children and teenagers in the Sunday school each week, and more than a hundred adults sitting in the pews for the morning service, and even more adults at church for the Sunday evening vespers service (yes, we used to have a vespers service here). And there have always been times when we weren’t so successful. In the 1930s, adult attendance dropped, and the Sunday school shrank in size. Fortunately, during the 1930s, most of the membership of First Universalist Church transferred to First Unitarian, and those folks kept us from declining even further.

    In 1938, when Duncan Howlett became our minister, our attendance shot up, and stayed high the entire time he was here. After Howlett left in 1946, on the surface it seemed as though our church declined in energy and numbers for a half a dozen years. But growth and change and transformation were happening underneath the surface: the old pew rental system finally disappeared; the minister was integrated back in to the governance of the church and was allowed to address the annual meeting without having to ask permission first; the Sunday school stayed strong and large; and many groups and organizations within the church remained strong and vibrant, including the Women’s Alliance, the Sewing Circle, the Murray Club organized by the old Universalists, and other groups. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, this church may have looked a little sleepy on the surface, but good healthy activity was taking place below the surface.

    The society around the church was changing rapidly at this time. Even though New Bedford slowly continued to lose manufacturing jobs, the economy finally emerged from the Great Depression. After the Second World War, lots of young couples got married and had babies, and this was the beginning of the famous Baby Boom. There was a resurgence of civic engagement; that is, people were eager to become active in community groups; the 1950s were the high point of civic engagement in the twentieth century. With the rise in civic engagement, lots of people started going to church.

    In the midst of all this societal growth and change and transformation, our church called a new minister, Richard Huff. He seemed exactly the right man to be minister at our church in that time. He was a former Navy chaplain, so he could relate to all the returning soldiers. After the war he became the minister at the Unitarian church in Stoneham; when he arrived there, they were a dying church, but when he left they were thriving and growing. He was a “kind man,” a man of “great charm” and a “good preacher” (here I’m quoting what people have said to me about him); he was just the right kind of personality to be the minister of this church. All these characteristics were evident when he arrived here in 1953. But I think he had another, less obvious, characteristic that perfectly suited him to be the minister of this church at that moment in time: he was the kind of man who knew that both people and churches have to constantly change and grow and transform themselves in order to continue to thrive.

    When Richard Huff arrived in 1953, attendance skyrocketed. Our church had gotten up to an average attendance of 130 adults on Sundays when Duncan Howlett had been here, probably the highest attendance our church had seen for most of the twentieth century. After Howlett left, attendance dropped down to about a hundred adults, but when Richard Huff arrived attendance shot up to 167 — that is, attendance increased more than fifty percent in his first year here! And the next year, attendance remained just about as high.

    The number of children in the Sunday school did not shoot up, however. On the surface, the reason appeared obvious: we didn’t have adequate space to accommodate all the children. On Sunday morning, I have been told that there were groups of children everywhere; one Sunday school class even had to meet in the balcony of the Tryworks Auditorium upstairs in the Parish House (if you’ve seen that space, it’s hard to imagine how you’d have a Sunday school class up there). So our church began to build additional Sunday school space: part of the basement was renovated in the early 1950s, and the lower basement was renovated a few years later.

    But Richard Huff and a few other forward-thinking lay leaders in the church began to realize that it wouldn’t be enough to simply build more classrooms. They began to realize that if the church were going to be serious about the Sunday school, it was time to hire a paid director of religious education. However, these were the years when many Unitarian and Universalist churches were hiring their very first paid directors of religious education; many churches were looking for qualified people to fill those jobs, and there just weren’t enough qualified people to go around. Our church tried to hire one of those qualified people, but at the very last moment she decided she did not want to leave the place where she had been living. The lay leaders and the old Sunday school superintendent tried to keep things going, but Sunday school attendance slowly began to drop.

    The number of adults on Sunday mornings dropped even faster. By 1958, when our church celebrated its 250th birthday, adult attendance had dropped down to just over 100 adults on a Sunday.

    In the midst of all this, Richard Huff and his family were going through a serious and major family crisis, that apparently involved all of his immediate family. He resigned as minister, and apparently left the ministry for a number of years. Eventually, though, he returned to the Unitarian ministry, and wound up as the minister in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

    Our church’s attendance continued to decline after all this happened. The Baby Boom was slowing down, so there weren’t as many families bringing children to church. Then in the 1960s the social and economic situation in New Bedford grew more difficult, with urban riots and growing unemployment. And all across the nation, people just stopped going to church as much. The net result was that, like many Unitarian Universalist churches across the country, we kept shrinking right through the 1960s and 1970s.

    …

    So our church started shrinking around 1956. It would be easy for us to blame this on the changes in the society around us, the changes in New Bedford. But if it were the changes in the society around us which stopped our growth, I think the decline would have been more gradual, and I think it would have come five years later. Instead, we stopped growing so suddenly, it was as if someone smacked us in the face with a fish. I’d like to briefly explain to you what I think happened here in our church around 1956.

    When Richard Huff arrived, the minister of this church was the central node through which all church communication passed. The minister was the only one who really knew everyone: the shut-ins, the staff, the people who never came to church, the children and the Sunday school teachers, as well as the people in the pews on Sunday morning. There’s even a name for this kind of church: it’s called a “pastoral-size church,” a name which tells us that the pastor, or minister, is the central communication node for the whole church. If you have a really good minister, you can take a pastoral-size church up to an average attendance of about two hundred men, women, and children; but if you get above that, one minister simply can’t manage all the communications that need to happen. Yet from 1953 through 1955, our church had an average of about two hundred and fifty people on Sunday morning: we went over that magic number of two hundred, and then we dropped right back down.

    Over the past thirty years, church experts have done a lot of research on how to make the transition past an average attendance of two hundred — it can be done, but it requires a church to change the way they do just about everything. Indeed, this is the current crisis of the liberal churches. Most of our liberal churches, of whatever denomination, never get above that magic number of an average Sunday attendance of two hundred. Sometimes a really skilled minister will keep a church above that level for a few years or a couple of decades, but when that person leaves, attendance declines back down.

    …

    There’s a moral to this story. Of course, there’s a moral to this story, but it’s not the moral you expect. In fact, there are two morals to this story.

    This first moral is very simple: If things don’t work out the way you expect, you don’t have to automatically blame yourself. Sometimes life slaps you in the face with a fish, and when that happens, it’s not your fault. When life is hard, please go easy on yourself.

    The other moral of this story has to do with our church. It turns out that the evangelical Christians are having a similar problem, but in reverse. Brian McLaren, an evangelical Christian who has been working hard on church growth from the evangelical side of things, has said that the Christian “conservatives tend to be rigid theologically and promiscuous pragmatically and liberals tend to be rigid methodologically and a lot more free theologically.” In other words, the Christian conservatives stick rigidly to their doctrine and dogmas, but they’ll try all kinds of new organizational strategies; whereas us religious liberals are pretty free and open about what we believe, but we are pretty rigid when it comes to the way we do church. Then McLaren goes on to say: “Maybe we could trade.”

    And that’s the other moral of the story. As religious liberals, we are already free in our thinking; we are already quiet revolutionaries in our religion. And perhaps we can now free up our organizational thinking so that we are just as free. Perhaps now we can become quiet revolutionaries in the way we do the business of the church, in the same way that we have long been quiet revolutionaries in the way we do theology.

  • Duncan Howlett, Quiet Revolutionary

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained more than the usual number of ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. In addition, minor factual errors have been corrected in this text. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is from an undated typescript by Duncan Howlett in the church archives. In this essay, Howlett the question of what Unitarians “believe”:

    “No really satisfying answer to the question, ‘What is Unitarianism?’, is possible because of the assumptions that are implicit in the question itself. Alfred North Whitehead used to say, and I’m quoting, ‘If you cannot agree with a man’s conclusions, but cannot find anything wrong with the argument by which he reaches them, look at his premises — spoken or unspoken — admitted or unadmitted — and there you will find the answer to your question.’ I believe the difficulties we encounter [in] describing Unitarianism are found in the assumptions that we bring to the question itself….

    “Our error lies in the fact that we, like the orthodox [Christians], have always taken the creed structure of Christendom for granted. We have tried to explain ourselves in terms of it and apparently it has never occurred to us to do otherwise…. [But] You don’t say anything really significant about a Unitarian when you give a summary of the theological opinions he happens to hold….”

    And, later in the typescript, Howlett continues:

    “Unitarians, rejecting fixed creeds and confessions of faith, hold that the task of religion is to state its first principles, constantly to test the validity of those principles in open encounter where every voice may be heard, and to be ready to restate them whenever clarity requires. The Unitarians believe that truth in religion, as in all things, lies at the end of the process of inquiring. Every possible facet of human experience must be brought to bear upon such an inquiry if any approximation of truth is to be achieved as a result of it. Unitarians believe that religious differences between men [sic] ought to be measured by their belief in this process or by their lack of it.”

    The second reading comes from a sermon delivered by Howlett in 1941. A little background is necessary: In 1940, Howlett addressed the annual meeting of this congregation, the first minister of this church to be allowed to address an annual meeting for perhaps a century. In that address, Howlett had told the members of the annual meeting that he expected them to attend church on a regular basis. This apparently caused an uproar, and a year later, in this sermon, Howlett was still trying to explain himself. Characteristically, although he softened his words, he continued to strongly affirm his basic points, as we will hear in this excerpt. Howlett wrote:

    “We are growing steadily in every phase of our activity. This includes the congregation. And eventually, our normal growth will carry us to the point where this church will be comfortably full. But most of us do not want to wait for that time to come. We want now to have a congregation in this church that will make possible natural growth without losses.

    “…people will go to the church whose members believe in it, because they want to belong to a church of which they can be proud.

    “Our church can be that church. The congregation we have here this morning is testimony to the potential power we possess. There is no reason why we should not be a great church. There is no reasons why we should not enjoy the steady growth to which we are entitled. If each of us will realize the part which he [sic] can play in the whole task, it can easily be done….

    “People gravitate naturally to the church in which the members themselves believe. They want to be part of a church that is alive and growing, and that is able to command the loyalty of its adherents. The impression this church makes, its impact upon the community, depends far more upon the people than the minister. Let us be true to the greatness of this church in the past; let us realize its growing power in the present, and let us carry it to even greater things in the days to come. And having done so, our church shall become one of the greatest churches in this city and one of the largest in the denomination.”

    Sermon

    This morning, I propose to tell you three stories about Duncan Howlett, who was the minister of our church from 1938 to 1946. There can be no doubt that Howlett was the greatest minister this church had in the 20th C. Under his leadership, this church saw higher sustained Sunday attendance than at any other time in the past hundred years for which we have accurate records. We can include the 21st C. as well: Duncan Howlett stands head and shoulders above any minister of this congregation for over a hundred years. However, great ministers do not exist without great churches. Any story about Duncan Howlett’s ministry here must also be a story about the greatness of this congregation, so when I say I’m going to speak about Duncan Howlett, I’m also going to speak about this church.

    I am calling Duncan Howlett a “quiet revolutionary.” When I call him “quiet,” I don’t mean he was quiet in the sense of being mousy, or having a soft voice, or being a shrinking violet. When I say “quiet revolutionary,” I mean he was not the sort of revolutionary who wanted a sharp break with the past, or who wanted to stir things up just for the sake of stirring things up. Howlett was a revolutionary who looked for continual ongoing change because of his deepest religious beliefs.

    Howlett studied with Alfred North Whitehead, the great process theologian, and from his studies with Whitehead he learned to believe that change is inevitable. As he wrote in the first reading this morning, he believed that “the task of religion is to state its first principles, constantly to test the validity of those principles in open encounter where every voice may be heard, and to be ready to restate them whenever clarity requires.” That is to say, the world is constantly in a state of flux, and therefore the purpose of a religious community is to continually move forward. This theology of process, of continual change, was the deep religious belief that drove Duncan Howlett to be a quiet revolutionary.

    I’m going to tell you three interlocking stories about Duncan Howlett, beginning with his tenure here in New Bedford, and ending with his retirement in Maine. But I had better start by giving you a brief overview of his early life:

    He was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1906; and was the son of a “well-to-do-painting contractor” [profile of Howlett in Washington Post, August 27, 1983]. After graduating from Newton North High School, he went to Harvard College, graduated in 1928, went on to Harvard Law School, was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1931 and practiced law for two years. In 1933, he entered Harvard Divinity School, where he studied with Alfred North Whitehead, graduating in 1936 with honors. While in divinity school, he began serving as the minister of Second Unitarian Church in Salem. In 1935, he traveled around the world, crossing from Europe into India via the famed Khyber Pass. (1) Our own church lured him away from the Salem church in 1938, and it is in our own church that my first story about Howlett takes place.

    …

    When Duncan Howlett arrived here in 1938, our church was not exactly thriving. Sunday attendance had been declining since before the Great Depression — this decline took place even though most of New Bedford’s Universalists joined this church when First Universalist Church on William St. closed its doors in the 1930s. So why was attendance declining?

    One problem was that this church had maintained the old pew rental system that most New England churches abolished in the early twentieth century. In the early 19th C., many people owned pews here (literally owned the pew, for there were deeds and taxes); later, families no longer owned the pews, they rented them from the church. By 1938, most pews were rented by specific families, yet some of those families never came to church. Some people rented pews here, but were members of other churches! On Sunday mornings, the ushers closed the doors to the pews that were owned by various families. If you were a newcomer, you’d walk into this church, be placed into one of the few open pew, and look around and see all these empty pews that no one sat in, and that no one was allowed to sit in. It must have been a kind of spooky experience — pews full of ghosts that you couldn’t see! — and needless to say, most newcomers never returned. (2)

    Another problem lay in another old, outmoded way of doing things:– the minister was absolutely barred from taking part in the financial and business affairs of this church. Indeed, the minister was not even allowed to say anything at the annual congregational meeting. Back in the 18th C., this congregation was established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony government, and according to law, Massachusetts Bay and the town government had authority over the financial and business affairs of the congregation. Back then, Massachusetts Bay congregations consisted of two separate organizations: the society, which governed the business affairs such as the building and the salary of the minister and so on; and the church, which governed the religious affairs such as communion (yes, they had communion in those days), the church covenant, and church membership. In old Massachusetts churches, the church was governed by the minister and the deacons, while the society was governed, initially by local government, and after 1833 by a separate corporation. What happened in our congregation is that in the late 19th C., Rev. William Potter stopped communion, let the old covenant die off, and basically let the church wither away entirely; while the society remained strong.

    But by the 1930s, all the other Unitarian churches that I know of had abolished or greatly restricted pew rentals and ownnership; and they combined the old functions of the church and the society, so that the business and religious aspects of the congregation were more or less integrated. But Duncan Howlett arrived at this church to find the church side of the congregation had withered away, and on top of that he wasn’t even allowed to speak in front of the annual meeting of the society.

    As I have said, Howlett was a quiet revolutionary. He knew that times had changed, and were continuing to change. He got permission to address the annual meeting, and by all accounts he let them have it with both barrels. He told the members of the annual meeting that this church was more than a business venture that oversaw a historic building. He told them that it wasn’t enough to pay for a pew, and show up once a year for annual meeting. He told them that he expected every man Jack and every woman Jill of them to show up at church on a regular basis, and he told them in no uncertain terms. If you read the text of the talk he gave that annual meeting, you can see that he brought the whole of his Harvard Law training, and his Harvard Divinity School training, to bear on making his case.

    Apparently, he caused quite a ruckus — I mean, a genteel sort of ruckus, for this was a genteel church back in those days. At least seventy of the lay leaders agreed with him, and they formed a “Committee of Seventy,” and they called on every one of the three hundred and fifty members of the church. These lay leaders asked people to give up their pews, and requested they come regularly to Sunday morning worship. Duncan Howlett pointed out the problem; and a group of strong, dedicated lay leaders worked with him to bring our church out of the 19th C. and into the 20th C.

    Then the Second World War intervened. Howlett was in the middle of that, too — in the summer of 1939, he went to Europe to help Martha and Waitstill Sharp with their relief efforts in central Europe, and in November of 1940, he welcomed Rev. Maja Capek to New Bedford after she escaped from the Nazis, and he and this church supported her in her efforts to revive North Unitarian Church in the North End of this city. The Second World War put a temporary halt to the effort to make this church grow. And then, in 1946, the then-prestigious First Church in Boston hired Howlett away from us. (3)

    So ends my first little story about Duncan Howlett. I will only remark that everything Howlett did while he was here was consistent with his theology of process, of moving continually forward in an ever-changing world.

    …

    Duncan Howlett stayed at First Church in Boston for a dozen years, and then All Souls Church in Washington D.C. called him. The famous A. Powell Davies had just retired as minister of All Souls. You probably haven’t heard of A. Powell Davies, but in those days he was well-known — the Washington newspapers held their Monday editions until they could get the manuscript of his Sunday sermon. All Souls was huge — something like 1500 members — and included several congressmen in its membership.

    Howlett stayed at All Souls for ten years. In that decade, he was active in fighting racism. He participated in Civil Rights marches in Alabama, Mississippi, and Washington. When James Reeb, the associate minister at All Souls, was beaten to death by racist white thugs in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, Howlett took a leave of absence to write Reeb’s biography — a book which is still in print more than forty years later. In 1968, he expressed sympathy for the Black Power movement. One Washington newspaper did a poll which indicated that Howlett was one of the five most-trusted white men among the African Americans of the city.

    Remember that Howlett’s religious faith was founded on his theology of process, on his belief that we must continually forward in an ever-changing world. Thus it was entirely consistent with Howlett’s religious faith when, in 1968, he resigned as minister of All Souls, saying he wanted to make way for an African American minister to take charge of that church. The Washington Post reported on Howlett’s resignation, and I’d like to read you an excerpt from the March 24, 1968, edition of that newspaper:

    “The Rev. Dr. Duncan Howlett, a civil-rights leader here and a national figure in the Unitarian Universalist denomination, resigned yesterday as minister of All Souls’ Church to make way for a Negro minister.

    “Unitarian Universalists, in the forefront of white liberalism, have yet to call a Negro to the pulpit of one of their churches….

    “With a membership of nearly 1500, a budget of $173,000 [that’s over one million in today’s dollars], and an endowment of $1.4 million [that’s 8.2 million in today’s dollars], All Souls is one of the more vigorous churches in the denomination. Dr. Howlett has been its minister since December, 1958, when he succeeded the Rev. Dr. A. Powell Davies.

    “ ‘One of the strongest motives in my stepping down,’ he said in his resignation sermon, ‘is the conviction that All Souls’ Church can and should take the lead in integrating the ministry of our Unitarian churches.’

    “All Souls’ doing this, he said, ‘would be one more breakthrough for the Negro into leadership in American culture.’

    “The first major church in Washington to have an integrated membership, All Souls has had a Negro director of its school of religion, and Negroes in other leadership capacities. The first integrated police boys’ club in Washington meets there.

    “Dr. Howlett did not suggest a particular Negro candidate to succeed him.” (4)

    Duncan Howlett saw that the world was changing, and he saw that white men like him who were in positions of leadership would have to step aside to make room for people of color to take on leadership roles. So he stepped aside. That was a quietly revolutionary act.

    All Souls Church in Washington did in fact call an African American minister. It remains a big, powerful city church, with a racially integrated membership — last time I was there, it looked to me that the church was about half white, half black, and half a mix of other skin colors and racial identities. So many urban churches have seen slipping membership in the past half century, but not All Souls Church in Washington.

    I like to imagine what would have happened had Howlett stayed here through the 1960s, and had resigned from this church in 1968 to make way for a person of color to become minister of this church. Would that have made an impact on the wider racial unrest that was happening in this city back then? Would this church have become even more racially integrated than it is now? I have no idea, but it’s fun to think about. (And I suspect someone else from this church has imagined the same thing, because why else would I find that Washington Post clipping about Howlett resigning upstairs in our church’s archives?)

    …

    Let me continue on with a third, very short story about Duncan Howlett. When he left All Souls, he retired and went on to a new project. He moved to Center Lovell, Maine, where he and his wife had purchased on old farm, and he proceeded to manage that farm as a forest. He was an early believer in the environmental movement, and he believed that a good way to maintain the natural environment was through sustainable management practices. He disapproved of the timber industry’s forestry practices, which tended to degrade the woodlands, rather than improve them; and he managed his own woodlands with sustainable management practices. Ever the organizer, in 1975 Howlett organized the Small Woodlot Owners Association of Maine, to further his goal of sustainable management of forests. (5)

    Moving from anti-racism to environmentalism might seem like a radical change of direction for Duncan Howlett, but I don’t see it that way. Remember that Howlett’s religious faith was founded on his theology of process, on his belief that we must continually forward in an ever-changing world. He saw that caring for the environment was going to be the next big issue that we had to face. Given his religious faith, it should be no surprise that he felt he had to address this newly emerging problem.

    …

    Duncan Howlett believed that the truth in religion lies in an ongoing process of inquiry. He continually tested the validity of his principles in an open process of inquiry. He saw that our church here in New Bedford had to abolish pew rentals, and he worked with lay leaders to make that happen. He saw that All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., should have an African American minister, and he provided leadership to make that happen. Then in retirement he saw that environmental problems had to be addressed, and he did what he could to promote sustainable land use practices.

    He was a quiet revolutionary, someone who continually challenged the validity of his and other people’s principles. He did not run away from change, but he embraced it. He was a visionary leader who made things happen, sometimes through unorthodox means. As a quiet revolutionary, he pushed others beyond what they felt comfortable doing. And his leadership got results:

    The Small Woodlot Owners Association of Maine continues to promote the combined goals of protecting Maine’s woodlands resources while encouraging optimal sustainable productivity through good forestry practices. SWOAM established a public land trust in 1990, and the first girt of land they received was 300 acres of Duncan Howlett’s forest. (6)

    All Souls Church remains a big, powerful, racially integrated urban church. They have continued to move forward, and they now have two ministers, one of whom is white, the other of whom is black.

    And our own church thrived after Howlett left. The lay leaders modernized the way this church operated. By the early 1950s, our Sunday attendance had skyrocketed, with two worship services and a huge Sunday school. The only thing that stopped our continued growth was a systemic problem called “the pastoral to program size transition” — but that’s another story, one which I will tell in another sermon later this fall.

    Even though we have not yet become a big church, we continue in the belief that we share with Duncan Howlett: that we must continually move forward in an ever-changing world. We are more racially integrated that most other Unitarian Universalist congregations — we still have a way to go before we’re fully integrated, but we are moving forward. Many of our members are involved in sustainability, and if you go to the Bioneers sustainability conference here in New Bedford October 24-26, you’ll see lots of our members there. And we have taken on issues that Howlett never dreamed of — for example, we were strong advocates for legalizing same sex marriage here in Massachusetts.

    May we continue to be influenced by Duncan Howlett’s theology of process. May we continue to move ever forward in an ever-changing world.

    Notes

    (1) Biographical information from a typescript written by Howlett in the First Unitarian archives.
    (2) Information from the second half of this paragraph from Howlett’s 1941 sermon.
    (3) Information in this paragraph from documents and newspaper clippings in the church archives.
    (4) “Pastor quits, opens way for Negro” by Kenneth Dole, Washington Post, 24 March, 1968, pp. A1 and A5.
    (5) From a 1983 clipping in the church archive from the Washington Post.
    (6) According to the SWOAM Web site, accessed 2 October 2008.