Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.
Reading
The first reading was the poem “Forty” by Hoang Trinh, trans. Huynh Sanh Trong, from the book An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems: From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries Hardcover, ed. Huynh Sanh Thong (Yale Univ. Press, 1996). (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)
The second reading is a short poem by Lew Welch, number 2 from “The Hermit Songs.” (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)
The third reading was a short poem by Nanao Sakaki titled “Why climb a mountain?” from the book How To Live on the Planet Earth: Collected Poems. (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)
Sermon
I wanted to talk with you this morning about grief solely because so many of you have spoken to me about your own grief. So this is a topic chosen, as it were, by the congregation.
When speaking about grief, it’s easy to adopt a solemn and sad demeanor. However, I prefer a different approach. I’ll begin with some strictly pragmatic remarks about grief, and I’ll conclude with some thoughts about spiritual paths for handling grief.
Here begin the pragmatic remarks.
To begin with, we should recognize that grief is a normal part of life. Grief may not be fun, or pleasant, but it is not the same as trauma. Grief is normal, trauma is excessive. Grief can be associated with trauma, but trauma is when something happens to you that takes more than ordinary resources to cope with. If you’re dealing with trauma, I hope you’re able to get outside help; but what I’m going to talk about this morning is ordinary everyday grief.
It sometimes seems that we only think of grief as something that happens when a person you love has died. However, there are many other things that can cause grief. In fact, grief isn’t necessarily sad — during weddings, people often cry from grief, but it’s happy grief, not sad grief. Most often, grief happens when suddenly life isn’t the same any more; or to put it more precisely, we tend to experience grief when we experience loss. Since things are constantly changing, guess what — that makes grief a frequent occurrence, and a normal part of life.
Let me give you some examples of grief that does not involve someone dying.
Many people experience grief in midlife, often in the late thirties or early forties. The first reading this morning, the poem titled “Forty,” expresses this kind of grief very well. I remember being in a group of older people and one younger man; the younger man was feeling downhearted because he had just turned thirty-six. Most of the older people dismissed his grief, laughing and saying, “Oh you’re not old yet.” But to himself, he was old compared to someone in their late teens. He was, in fact, experiencing the loss of his youth. It was good he was aware of his grief, and could talk about it; maybe it wasn’t so good that older people laughed at his sense of loss and grief.
Next, here’s an example of what we might call good grief. When people leave a job they dislike and find a better job, they often experience grief. Even though you hated the old job that you left, there were probably a one or two things you liked about it — perhaps one or two co-workers you liked, or a place you went to lunch. Thus, even if you hated the job, you might experience some grief due to the change in you daily habits. It might be good grief — you now have a better job — but it’s still grief.
Another example of good grief: I already mentioned people crying at weddings. People experience grief at a happy occasion like a wedding for the simple reason that a wedding represents a moment of huge change; familes change, habits change, social status changes. I have a vivid memory of one wedding at which I officiated. Both people in the couple cried the whole wedding service — not just looking a little weepy, I’m talking about tears streaming down their cheeks. Of course they were happy, but they were also aware enough to know that their wedding meant big changes; changes not just in their relationship, but in the relationship of everyone connected with them. So they cried, because they were aware of the loss. Their grief was good grief, but it was still grief.
Grief can also arise from what’s going in in wider society. We live in a time in our country when an old order is being dismantled, and a new order is being constructed. The changes include everything from LGBTQIA rights, to the Department of Government Efficiency. As a result of all these changes, we have lost sight of old norms, and everything feels unfamiliar. We may support some of these changes, we may oppose some of these changes, but everyone is feeling grief, because the old order is passing away.
Now, the funny thing about grief is that it’s additive. For example, if you feel good grief from a recent wedding, and sad grief from the passing of the old order in the United States, and good grief from losing a job that you disliked, and sad grief from the death of a pet — all that grief adds up. If, in addition to all that, someone close to you dies: well, you’ve got a whole lot of grief in your life. You may not be aware of all the grief in your life — you may only be aware of the big moments of grief, such as the death of a loved one — but all that background grief is also there. Thus if you experience a major loss on top of a lot of background grief, you can find yourself immersed in a large amount of grief.
Because grief is additive, it’s not a bad idea to become more aware of all grief in your life. This is why I’m giving so many examples of what cause grief, and let me give a few more. The birth of a child can cause grief — it’s usually good grief, but it’s still a major change. Moving out of childhood into your teen years can cause grief; similarly, aging can lead to grief. Leaving home to go to college or the military can result in grief — usually good grief, but grief nonetheless. When children leave home and you become an an empty nester, it may be good grief or sad grief (depending on your relationship with your children), but it’s still a loss, which can cause grief. Retirement often results in major grief. You get the idea, and I’m sure you can think of other examples in your own life.
Now the question becomes: what are we going to do with all that grief? In our culture, the usual approach is to ignore all the grief and loss in your life. This strategy can be quite effective for quite a long time, maybe for your whole life. But ignoring grief exposes you to the risk that some big grief will come along and put you over the edge, grief-wise. The opposite approach is to wallow in your grief. This seems to be an effective strategy for some people, but I can’t recommend it, because wallowing in grief can be really hard on the people around you. Thus, the best approach is probably to find some middle way between ignoring grief and wallowing in grief.
As we consider how to find a middle way for managing the grief in our lives, we have to consider the fact that grief may never quite disappear. The most obvious example is when someone close to you dies: you grieve because you love them, and they’re no longer alive; the only way to stop grieving would be to tell yourself that you never loved them. Another obvious example is the grief that can happen when you’re no longer a child: obviously it’s good to grow up, but if you have even a partially happy childhood, growing up means losing a sense of magic, what we might call unicorns and rainbows. To not feel real grief at the end of childhood would be (in a sense) to betray the unicorns and rainbows and anything that was good about childhood. Yet while grief may not ever go away completely, the day usually comes when your feelings are no longer so raw. Or to put it another way, the day usually comes when you’ve gained whatever wisdom and self-knowledge has grown out of that grief. This is why a middle way is so important. If you wallow in your grief, it’s really hard to attain that wisdom and self-knowledge. And if you ignore your grief, again it’s almost impossible to attain that wisdom and knowledge.
So to be practical for a moment, how can we get to that point of wisdom and self-knowledge, the point where grief is no longer so raw? I’m going to suggest two spiritual paths that may help get you to that point. Mind you, there are a great many paths and techniques that can help deal with grief, including: simply waiting it out; distracting yourself; thinking about others worse off than you; doing psychotherapy; joining grief support groups; and so on. Use whatever paths and techniques that work for you. I’m just going to mention two spiritual paths that may also help.
The first spiritual path is hinted at in the poem by by Nanao Sakaki, the third reading this morning. Sakaki was a Buddhist, and his poem tells us how the individual self is a kind of illusion.
This poem describes a classic spiritual path that can be found in different forms in many religious traditions. This is the spiritual path that helps us understand that none of us is an individual self that’s somehow separate from the universe; what I think of as my “self” is nothing more nor less than a tiny but integral part of the entire universe.
This spiritual path has proved helpful to some people who are grieving: while not diminishing your individual grief, it puts your individual grief into a much wider perspective. A lovely example of this spiritual path from our own religious tradition is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s long poem “Threnody.” Emerson wrote this poem about his eldest child Waldo, who died at just five years old. Not surprisingly, Emerson experienced an enormous sense of grief upon Waldo’s death. In the first half of “Threnody,” Emerson expresses his great grief; but in the second half of the poem, a mysterious voice Emerson calls “the deep Heart” speaks:
The deep Heart answered, Weepest thou?…
Taught he not thee, — the man of eld,
Whose eyes within his eyes beheld
Heaven’s numerous hierarchy span
The mystic gulf from God to man?…
In this second half of the poem, the voice of the Deep Heart makes the poet realize how little he knows, and how little he understands the death of his child. It’s a sort of a Transcendentalist version of the Bible story of Job. In the first half of the Bible story, Job loses all his wealth, loses his family, loses his health, loses almost everything. In the second half of the Bible story, Job encounters God (who is similar to the Deep heart in Emerson’s poem), and God shows Job how much larger the universe is than his tiny human self. Both the book of Job and Emerson’s “Threnody” say much the same thing that the Buddhist Nanao Sakaki says in his poem about the mountain: our individual selves are actually quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things, yet they are also an integral part of the gran scheme of things. Indeed, the Buddhist spiritual practice of meditation can be used to achieve that same understanding. So can the Christian and Jewish practices of prayer, which can make us apprehend something that is far, far greater than our tiny mortal selves.
For the right person, this spiritual path can really help deal with grief. However, like any spiritual path, this spiritual path is not for everyone. If it works for you, use it! Speaking personally, it doesn’t work for me.
A different spiritual path that may help some people deal with grief is hinted at in the second reading this morning, the short poem by Lew Welch. In our own religious tradition, this is the spiritual path followed by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is best known for going to live in a cabin at Walden Pond. Part of the reason Thoreau went to Walden Pond was to write a book commemorating time spent with his brother John; John had died suddenly from lockjaw a couple of years before Thoreau went to Walden. Thoreau experienced great grief at the sudden death of his older brother. At times he managed his grief much the way Emerson did, looking towards some vast reality that transcended his self. But he also paid close attention to what was immediately in front of him. So he did things like measuring the water temperature of various wells and springs in town, comparing them with the water temperature of Walden Pond (the pond water was colder than the wells and springs). He liked to name many of the plants and animals with their scientific names — Lepus americanus, Apios tuberosa, Hirundo bicolor; and where Emerson’s poem refers only to generic sparrows, Thoreau’s book distinguishes between different species, like the song sparrow and the field sparrow.
This is the spiritual path that Lew Welch describes in his poem. If you step outside and look closely, there might be three hundred things nobody understands, and how many can you find? Unfortunately, this spiritual path is often dismissed as not being spiritual; it is merely science and inquiry. Yet for some people, it is a true spiritual path. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about this spiritual path in her book “Gathering Moss” when she describes spending an entire summer figuring out how one obscure species of moss manages to spread its spores; she discovered that the spores stuck to chipmunk feet, and that’s how they spread. To paraphrase Lew Welch, she managed to understand something that nobody understood before. Or I think about a scientific paper I once read on a small flowering plant called narrowleaf cow wheat (Melampyrum lineare). Botanist Martin Piehl spent three field seasons in the late 1950s carefully excavating the root systems of narrowleaf cow wheat, and, he reported, “after repeated attempts involving careful brushing away of sand, a thread-like rootlet was found attached to a host by a near-microscopic, hemispherical enlargement.” (1)
Thoreau, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Lew Welch would each fully understand that what they were doing was a kind of spiritual practice. Neither prayer meditation and prayer works for me, but the older I get, the more I find this spiritual path helps me handle grief. Unlike Martin Piehl or Robin Wall Kimmerer, I’ve never found something nobody’s ever seen; but the simple act of looking closely and finding things that I don’t understand helps me learn my place in the universe; and over time, this has helped me to move through grief to a place of greater wisdom and self-awareness.
I don’t expect many people will want to bother with this last spiritual path, nor am I telling you about it so that you will try to follow it. But there are people who try the major spiritual practices — meditation, prayer, and so on — and when those spiritual paths don’t work, they think they have to either compromise their spiritual selves, or give up on spirituality altogether. If you’re one of those people, I wanted you to know that there are other spiritual paths. Not only that, but you might already be following a spiritual path — some kind of practice or discipline that gives you comfort in hard times, something that helps you understand your place in the universe, something that puts your life into a greater perspective.
Often — not always, but often — we actually have the spiritual tools we need close to hand. And a major purpose of our free and open religious tradition is to allow people to come together in community to share their experiences of spiritual paths, and to affirm the diversity of spiritual paths that exist in the world.
Note
(1) Martin A. Piehl, “The Parasitic Behavior of Melampyrum lineare,” Rhodora Vol. 64, No. 757 (January-March, 1962), p. 17.
