Life Issues – Dan Harper

Inner peace

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

Readings

The first reading was from a commentary on Psalm 23 by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. This is an interpretation of the phrase, “He restores my soul.”

“The root of the Hebrew word yeshovev, translated here as ‘He restores,’ sometimes means ‘to grant rest,’ but its basic meaning is ‘to return.’ When one’s soul is troubled or worried, it is not at peace, as though it is not in its natural place, but distanced and dislocated. When the soul returns to its true place, the result is inner peace.

The second reading was from the Confucian classic, The Great Learning, translated by A. Charles Muller, professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo:

The way of great learning consists in manifesting one’s bright virtue, consists in loving the people, consists in stopping in perfect goodness.
When you know where to stop, you have stability.
When you have stability, you can be tranquil.
When you are tranquil, you can be at ease.
When you are at ease, you can deliberate.
When you can deliberate you can attain your aims.
Things have their roots and branches, affairs have their end and beginning. When you know what comes first and what comes last, then you are near the Way [of the Great Learning].

The third reading was “The Peace of Wild Things,” a poem by Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Sermon: “Inner Peace”

For us Unitarian Universalists, the third reading this morning, the poem “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry, might be one of our most popular visions of how we might achieve inner peace. The poem tells us that when we are overwhelmed by despair and fear, we should go outside, find a pond where wild ducks and heron live, and there we can find peace.

This poem reminds me of the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Walden tells the story of how Thoreau went and spent two years living next to Walden Pond, a small deep pond of clear still water. There’s a back story to Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond. While he lived there, he was writing a book about a boat trip he and his brother had taken some years before. His brother had died of tetanus a couple of years before Thoreau went to live at Walden. I’ve always imagined that part of the purpose behind living right next to a pond “where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water” was to allow Thoreau to regain the inner peace that had been overwhelmed by his brother’s sudden death at a young age.

Nor is this idea of finding peace in wild places limited to Wendell Berry and Henry Thoreau. Many of us in this congregation will say that when we need respite from the cacophony of current events and the stress of day to day life, we take a walk in the woods. We are lucky here on the South Shore that even though we live in an area with a high density of human population, we also have lots of relatively wild places where we can “come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief.”

As much as I personally like going outside to seek the peace of wild things (as Wendell Berry puts it), there are people for whom it doesn’t necessarily work to seek inner peace by being out in Nature. Some people just don’t find it peaceful to spend spend time outdoors. Then there are those who find it difficult to get outdoors, due to health or mobility limitations. There are also those who, because of our work or school schedules, find it difficult to get out into wild places except on weekends or holidays. What Wendell Berry calls “the peace of wild things” is one of my favorite ways to seek inner peace; but there can be times when it’s hard to do, and even though it works for me, it doesn’t work for everyone.

This is going to be a theme for the first part of this sermon: There are many techniques for finding inner peace. But since we are all different, some techniques will work well for some people, but not others. And since we all change over time, a technique that works for you now might not work for you a few years from now; or a technique that didn’t work for you in the past might work for you now; or you might have a technique that you like but you just don’t have the time you need to devote to it right now.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some techniques for finding inner peace. I’d like to start with an ancient Western technique for finding inner peace: prayer. In Western culture we usually think of prayer as a Christian practice, but it’s not that simple. Jews were praying before Christianity existed, and so were the ancient Greeks and Romans. Since both Jewish prayer and ancient pagan prayer predate Christianity, we should think of Christian prayer as just one subset of Western prayer practices and techniques. Today, there are humanists and atheists who pray, not because they believe in God — obviously they don’t — but because the technique of prayer is a part of our Western cultural inheritance.

When we think of prayer more broadly, it tends to subvert the usual conceptions we have about prayer. Pop culture has reduced prayer to asking God for something you want. This is known as petitionary prayer, because you’re petitioning God for something. Scientists have even studied this aspect of prayer — what happens when people pray for someone who is sick, does it improve their health outcome? But petitionary prayer is only a part of the Western prayer tradition, and I’d like to look at two forms of Western prayer that are aimed at improving your inner peace.

First there’s the technique called contemplative prayer, or as it has been popularized in recent years, centering prayer. The famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton did much to popularize this kind of prayer with his 1971 book titled “Contemplative Prayer.” As a Christian, Merton described centering prayer as a practice where you simply focus your attention on the Christian god. Non-believers use this prayer technique by focusing attention on this present world. So Henry David Thoreau, for example, wrote about sitting outside his cabin at Walden Pond and becoming “rapt in a revery” for hours at a time; I’d say that what Thoreau was doing was a type of centering prayer that focused, not on God, but on the natural world. Centering prayer is specifically designed to achieve inner peace through the contemplation of that which is good in this world.

A second type of prayer that can help achieve inner peace is the practice of remembering others in your prayers. Traditionally, in Western folk practice, during your daily prayers you’d go through a mental list all the people whom you think might need or appreciate prayers. Sometimes this takes the form of petitionary prayer — petitioning God to heal someone from cancer, for example — but often it takes the form of simply thinking of people who are important to you. Humanists and atheists who pray aren’t going to petition God, but they may still devote part of their prayer time thinking of people they know who might appreciate their attention. Prayer lists like this aren’t specifically designed to achieve inner peace, but I’ve seen how people who remember others in their prayers do in fact achieve some degree of inner peace. This makes sense to me, because reminding yourself of how you are connected to other people you can be a calming influence. It’s a way of remembering the ties of love that bind you to other people and give your support. And while praying for people who are ill or facing other troubles may or may not help them, I’ve seen how it can have a calming effect on the person who is praying.

So both centering prayer and old-fashioned prayer lists can help some people achieve inner peace. However, prayer doesn’t work for everyone. I’m one of the people it doesn’t work for. For some years, I tried many kinds of prayer, including centering prayer and prayer lists, and I finally concluded that prayer just doesn’t do much for me. But prayer does help a great many people achieve inner peace, and you can’t know if it works for you until you give it a serious trial.

Next, let’s consider meditation and mindfulness as techniques for achieving inner peace. Meditation and mindfulness became popular in this country in the middle of the last century. Most of these meditation and mindfulness practices came from Hindu or Buddhist traditions. Transcendental Meditation, a hugely popular meditation practice in the 1970s and 1980s, came out of the Hindu tradition. Sitting meditation, which also became hugely popular in the 1970s and 1980s, was popularized in large part by Zen Buddhist practitioners like Alan Watts. People like Dr. Herbert Benson also created secular adaptations of meditation and mindfulness. In his 1975 book “The Relaxation Response,” Benson claimed that all you needed was some mental device to keep your mind from wandering, along with a passive attitude towards the process. According to Benson, you didn’t need the arcane mantras of something like Transcendental Meditation, nor did you need the elaborate religious structure of something like Zen Buddhism. Through such secular adaptations, many humanists and atheists have adopted meditation and mindfulness practices.

Meditation and mindfulness are now a part of mainstream culture. Schools teach meditation to children and teens to help lower stress, and maybe find some inner peace. Some employers offer meditation classes and meditation rooms in the workplace. When you talk about achieving inner peace, many people assume that means meditating or engaging in mindfulness practices. This tends to annoy Christians and Jews who feel that prayer can offer the same benefits as meditation and mindfulness; how come it’s OK to teach Eastern religious techniques in the schools, but not Western religious techniques? I don’t want to get in the middle of that particular religious debate, but I do want to point out that meditation and mindfulness don’t work for everyone. Recent research has shown that a minority of people experience negative effects from meditation and mindfulness. I’m actually one of those people. I meditated for years, and meditation did help me achieve some degree of inner peace, but there were enough times that it didn’t make me feel good that I finally stopped.

Sadly, then, although I gave both meditation and prayer a fair trial, although I had some success with both, eventually I wasn’t able to make them work. This, by the way, makes me feel inadequate as a minister; I’m supposed to be setting an example, yet here I am, a failure at both prayer and meditation, the two most popular techniques for achieving inner peace. Yet just be cause I failed doesn’t mean that you’re going to fail. If you’re searching for techniques to achieve inner peace, it’s worth trying prayer and meditation techniques.

My failures with prayer and meditation have led me to an interesting conclusion that I think might be helpful to others. Part of my problem with both prayer and meditation arose because they are basically solitary activities. Yes, you can go to a meditation group, or you can join a prayer group, but prayer and meditation ultimately take place inside your head. I find this is also true in seeking out the peace of wild things: in Wendell Berry’s poem, he went out by himself to spend time with the wild drake and the heron. All this makes sense, because in order to achieve inner peace, you do need to spend some time in your head.

Yet I began to realize what worked best for me were practices where I had to interact with other people. I think I first became aware of this through making music with other people. I’ve never found much inner peace in practicing music on my own, but I realized that doing music with other people was a fairly reliable way for me to achieve a degree of inner peace. Maybe in part this was because I’m not an especially good musician, and it was much more satisfactory to do music with people who are good musicians. Regardless of my own failings as a musician, I consistently found that when I did music with other people, I felt an increase in inner peace.

Then I realized that the same thing was true of congregational life. When I was cooperating with other people in the congregation to make something happen, I could feel myself growing more peaceful. Although I didn’t have much success with individual spiritual practices like prayer or mindfulness or meditation, the experience of being part of a religious community did help me achieve inner peace. As more and more people began to say they were “spiritual but not religious,” I began to call myself “religious but not spiritual.” That is, although I was kind of a failure at individual spiritual practices, the communal and social aspects of communal religion did lead me to inner peace.

I’ll give you some specific examples of communal religious activities that have helped me achieve at least some inner peace. And while you may skeptical about some of my examples, hold on to your doubts for a bit and I’ll try to explain.

One obvious example of a communal religious practice that has provided me with some inner peace is being part of a congregation’s choir. I’ve sung in traditional choirs, once or twice with a gospel choir, with a folk music group, and now I play in this congregation’s bell choir. As I said before, I’m not an especially good musician, and I often find participating in choirs is difficult and frustrating — at the end of bell choir rehearsal, I often feel like my head is going to explode. Yet despite the frustrations, the sense of coming together with other people to do something I couldn’t do alone makes me feel less anxious and less alone, and ultimately moves me towards a feeling of inner peace.

I also love being part of a team teaching in religious education programs. Last year, I taught in our OWL comprehensive sexuality education program with Mark and Holly; this year I’m teaching in the Coming of Age program with Tracey; and in the summer I help Ngoc run the ecology camp. Just like participating in a choir, teaching is often difficult and frustrating. Yet here again, despite the frustrations, I find I benefit the social aspects, both working with other adults and working with the kids. Teaching always takes me out of my own little personal concerns so that I feel a part of something larger than myself; that in turn lowers my levels of stress and anxiety; and that ultimately leads to a sense of inner peace.

Another communal religious practice is committee work. I am not very good at committee work; I’m too impatient, and sometimes I find it hard to take the long view. But working with other people towards a common goal turns out to be good for me. If I can get past my impatience, if I can work through my frustrations, I eventually find I feel more peaceful when I’m a part a group working on a project together.

I could go on, but you get the idea: working with other people to make a religious community function can lower stress and anxiety, reduce loneliness and isolation, and ultimately help us achieve a greater degree of inner peace. There may be a simple reason why this is so — perhaps it is merely because we humans are tribal animals, and we are meant to be working with others — and there may also be a deeper spiritual reason — we humans need to strive towards something greater than our individual selves.

Whatever the case may be, I would argue that these days in-person contact and cooperation has become perhaps the most important benefits of religious communities. This is because we have so few opportunities to work together selflessly with others. We are increasingly isolated in today’s society. We increasingly buy everything we need online, so we don’t even have to go to the store any more. As a result, we’re in the midst of a well-documented epidemic of loneliness epidemic. Loneliness and isolation reduce your sense of inner peace, and yet there are fewer and fewer places where we can join with other people to work together on values-based projects. Because of this, while solitary spiritual practices like taking walks in the woods or meditating or praying still offer spiritual benefits, today the most important spiritual benefits come from being part of a religious community.

We live in a strange world these days, where people on both sides of the political divide are convinced that they no longer have anything in common with the other side. We’ve gotten to this point in part because we spend so little time working together in face-to-face communities like First Parish. And with the diminishment of community life has come loneliness and isolation. We try to repair the damage through social media, but it turns out social media only makes things worse. It becomes a downwards spiral. The unsurprising result is a steep increase in anxiety and depression, political conflict, and a general feeling of malaise. Our lack of community involvement has greatly decreased our inner peace.

So it is that I’ve come to believe that in this historical moment, the most effective technique for seeking inner peace is through community. It’s fine to seek the peace of wild things through solitary walks in the woods, but remember that Henry Thoreau actively participated in anti-slavery meetings while lived at Walden Pond. Prayer and meditation are well worth your while, but then you need a community to make sense out of the prayers and meditation. It is through being in community that we may transcend our troubles and worries, and return to the sense of inner peace.

The Experience of Homelessness

Readings

The first reading is from an essay by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi titled “Two Cheers for Symbolic Capitalists”:

“Referring to homeless people as ‘unsheltered individuals’… [is a] discursive maneuver that often obscures the brutal realities that others must confront in their day-to-day lives. If the intent of these language shifts is to avoid stigma, the reality is that these populations are still heavily stigmatized….

“Critically, however, pointing out unfortunate consequences of [this] approach to language and social justice does not invalidate the idea that language matters. In fact, it powerfully illustrates that how we choose to talk and think about society, alongside the ways we try to influence others’ thoughts and discourse, actually can have important social consequences — for better and for worse.” [https://musaalgharbi.com/2024/09/30/two-cheers-symbolic-capitalists/]

The second reading is from the recent book “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission To Bring Healing to Homeless People,” by Tracey Kidder:

“The modern era of homelessness began in the 1980s, when the size and visibility of the problem began to rise dramatically. Driving south on I-93, Jim O’Connell tried to draw me a picture of what had gone wrong in Boston. Coming out of the tunnel in the center of the city, he gestured to a portion of the South End. ‘Just look at this. Look at these new buildings, all along here. All those are apartments and all the ones behind them. There’s got to be, by my calculation, at least four thousand new units there, right next to the Pine Street Inn. But no a single one for homeless people.”… Back in the 1920s, Boston had 35,000 single room occupancy units for rent. They had served as homes for immigrants and low-wage workers, elderly people on fixed incomes, and, more recently, for struggling Vietnam veterans. In 1965, the city and South End residents had overwhelmingly approved a plan to turn the neighborhood into ‘an economically, socially and racially integrated community’ with rental housing for ‘all displaced low-income residents wishing to remain.’ The destruction of the old buildings, with their inexpensive … rooms was widely praised as an act of civic virtue, and it might have been, if anything like that plan had been followed….

“A severe recession in 1980 had inaugurated the era of rising homelessness. But the problem was driven and sustained by many long-brewing problems: the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans; … the grossly inadequate provisions made for mentally ill people;… the continuation of racist housing policies…. Also the arcana of applying for Social Security disability — a process so complex that anyone who could figure out how to get assistance probably didn’t need it.

Sermon — “The Experience of Homelessness”

Today is the date of the annual Winter Walk for the Homeless, sponsored by Boston Health Care for the Homeless. This is a fundraising walk to raise money to help fund healthcare for people who are homeless. First Parish has a history of supporting both this annual walk, and Boston Health Care for the Homeless. We most recently supported Boston Health Care for the Homeless by donating the entire collection from our Christmas Eve candlelight service. And this year, quite a few of us from First Parish planned to go on the walk, though because of the snow it’s not clear how many will be able to make the drive up to Boston.

Two things are especially notable about the Winter Walk for the Homeless: first, it takes place outdoors, regardless of the weather; and second, it includes both housed and unhoused people walking together. Thus it’s more than just another fundraising walk. It’s also a chance to experience the conditions that people who live on the street have to cope with twenty four hours a day, seven days a week; and to be out in the weather with some folks who live outdoors all the time.

Now — there are quite a few of us who cannot participate in the Winter Walk for the Homeless, for a wide variety of reasons. But I thought it might be worthwhile to talk with you about the experience of homelessness, as a way for us to participate at a distance (as it were) in the Winter Walk. I’m not going to try to explain the causes of homelessness and housing insecurity. At the end of the sermon I’ll make a couple of ethical observations. But I’m not going to suggest policies to end homelessness, or tell you what we should be doing about homelessness. I’m just going to talk about the experience of being homeless.

The last two congregations I served had members who were homeless, and both those congregations were in places where there were significant numbers of people who were homeless. As a result, I got to know people who were homeless, and I got to hear some of their stories. Since I’m a minister, I do need to protect people’s confidentiality. So the stories I’m going to tell you will provide no details that can be used to identify individuals; you won’t even know whether they lived on the East Coast or the West Coast. To further protect privacy, I’ll be combining elements from different people’s stories. All this means that the stories I’m going to tell you are, in a sense, fictionalized; at the same time, they’re entirely true.

I’ll start by telling you about someone who came close to being homeless, though he ultimately managed to avoid it. Harry had started his career as a computer programmer. Then there was one of those sudden changes in technology, and suddenly his skills were no longer in demand. He tried to pivot in the new job market by learning new computer skills. Unfortunately, he guessed wrong: just when he had spent six months becoming proficient in the new skills, all the jobs using those skills dried up. By this time, he had used up all his savings, so he didn’t have the money to start yet another training program. Then too, he was well over fifty, and the high tech industry is notorious for its age discrimination. In order to pay the rent and put food on the table, his only viable option was to take any job that he could. He wound up working at Walmart. It was supposed to be a full-time job, but (as was typical with Walmart jobs) after he’d been there a couple of months, they cut his hours to about twenty-five hours a week, and gave him an irregular schedule so it was impossible for him to pick up another part-time job.

When I met Harry, he was living in studio apartment in a rough part of town, barely able to make the rent each month. After he paid the rent and bought food and gas, he couldn’t afford things like dental care. But between his siblings, and his friends in our Unitarian Universalist congregation, he just managed to stay in his apartment. What finally saved him was that he turned sixty-two and was able to taken Social Security; and because of his days of earning good salaries as a computer programmer, he received enough money to get by. So, by the skin of his teeth and with a lot of luck, Harry managed to stay housed. But though he was never homeless himself, he experienced the constant threat of homeleness.

In his recent book called White Poverty, the Rev. William Barber, organizer of the Poor People’s Campaign, argues for an improved definition of what it means to be poor. Barber argues that if you can not find the money to pay an emergency bill of four hundred dollars — that is, you could not borrow against home equity, you could not take it out of savings, you could not put it on a credit card — then you’re poor. By this measure, Harry was poor. Barber says that by this measure, about a quarter of all Americans are poor. And if you’re poor like Harry, it’s much easier to fall into homelessness.

This brings me to the next person I’d like you to meet, whom I’ll call Alice. Alice was in her late twenties when I knew her. She began attending our Unitarian Universalist congregation regularly. She was interesting, intelligent, and articulate; and I always enjoyed chatting with her at social hour. At one point I asked her if she wanted to be listed in the congregation’s directory. It became clear that she really didn’t have a home of her own. She was staying with friends and acquaintances for a couple of weeks at a time, with no set address. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was couch-surfing. Thus, even though she wasn’t living on the streets or in her car, she was homeless.

One of the big drawbacks to being homeless is that it can make it hard to stay connected with other people. The homeless people I’ve known all have had cell phones, but their phone plans have very limited minutes, so if you try to call them it’s likely you won’t get through. The homeless people I’ve known all have email addresses, but because they don’t have regular internet access they may not be able to respond to email right away. Being homeless can be isolating, and if you have a friend who’s homeless, it can be tough to stay in touch with them.

Alice was able to check email regularly because she had email access through her job. However, she didn’t like to receive personal email at work, and asked not to be listed in the congregation’s directory. She still showed up every week for Sunday services. I finally said to her, “Look, you’re here nearly every week, you’re obviously a Unitarian Universalist, why don’t you become a member of this congregation?” And then she told me her good news. She had managed to navigate the Byzantine application process for Section 8 housing. (From what I’ve heard almost requires a college degree to navigate successfully, and Alice did in fact have a college degree). There is so little Section 8 housing that actually getting into Section 8 housing is almost like hitting the lottery. But Alice hit the lottery, and got Section 8 housing. I congratulated her on her great good fortune, and then she told me the bad news — the Section 8 apartment she had gotten was an hour’s drive from our congregation. In fact that was the last Sunday she was going to be with us. Not surprisingly, we never heard from her again.

Here I’d like to interject a short description of the different kinds of homelessness.

First, there’s couch-surfing. Alice was a couch-surfer, doing short-term stays in other people’s homes. Couch surfing can feel relatively stable, if you have hosts who are willing to let you stay for long periods of time. But couch-surfing ranges all the way to very unstable, where you’re staying for short periods of time in homes where you don’t feel safe.

Next is car dwelling. In Silicon Valley where I was based for thirteen years, car dwellers included people who owned homes in the Central Valley, a three hour’s drive away, but who lived in their RVs during the week while working at Silicon Valley jobs. And all the local state colleges had students who were full-time car dwellers during the school year. At the other end of the car dwelling scale were people who lived full-time in their cars, and barely had enough money to keep the car insured and registered.

Next are the people who live in shelters. From talking with shelter dwellers, I learned that homeless shelters can be a mixed bag. At the upper end of the scale, there were the shelters like Heart and Home in Palo Alto. This is a women-only winter shelter housing its guests in churches in Palo Alto; volunteers bring meals, and sit with the guests to talk and share dinner together. At the lower end of the scale are the big city shelters, some of which can feel overcrowded and unsafe to the guests. Not everyone feels safe in a shelter, and some people would rather live on the street.

And that brings me to Anna. When I first met Anna, she was living in a shelter. She had heard about our Unitarian Universalist congregation, and decided to come check out a worship service. After the service, she found me and, like a typical newcomer, asked me a series of questions about Unitarian Universalism. She came back again the next week, and pretty soon she was calling herself a Unitarian Universalist. A couple of months later, she went through the formal process to become a member of the congregation, making an annual financial pledge; and she pledged a greater percentage of her disposable income than most of our middle class members.

Anna was a regular at Sunday morning services, so we began to worry a bit when she missed two weeks in a row. Anna was in her mid-seventies, and we wondered if she had gotten ill or injured. I tried calling her, but not surprisingly was unable to get through — she paid by the minute on her phone plan, and didn’t pay for any minutes unless she needed to make a call. Fortunately, she showed up the next week, and I asked her if she had been ill. She told me it wasn’t illness, it was that she had decided to leave the shelter because it just didn’t feel safe any more. You have to understand that Anna was clean and sober, and that her mental health was excellent. But not everyone who stays in a shelter is sober or mentally healthy, and the staff in shelters are usually overworked and can’t monitor everyone adequately. What had really gotten to Anna was the drinking and drug use in the shelter where she had been staying; she had 35 years of sobriety, attended Alcoholics Anonymous regularly, and had little tolerance for people who wouldn’t deal with their addictions. She decided she preferred to live on the streets, rather than live with “a bunch of drunks and druggies” (using her words, as best I can remember them).

From then on, we only saw Anna at Sunday services about once a month. It all depended on where she wound up spending the night, and whether she could catch a bus that would get her to the church in time for services. Of course, the church offered to give her rides; but she didn’t know where she was going to be on any given Saturday night, nor could she afford the phone call to arrange rides. Nor would she accept money from the congregation’s fund for members in need. Anna felt it was her duty as a member to financially support the congregation, not to have the congregation financially support her.

When I talked with Anna at social hour, she was mostly interested in talking about the sermon, or about Unitarian Universalism. She kept saying that here she was in her mid-seventies, never knew about Unitarian Universalism before, but she realized now that she’d actually been a Unitarian Universalist all her life. So that’s mostly what we talked about. But sometimes she told me a little bit about her strategies for living on the street safely. Since her methods were so idiosyncratic and creative, I feel like talking about them would betray confidentiality; suffice it to say that she developed creative ways of navigating life on the streets.

As I was leaving that congregation, I heard that Anna had been finally put on the waiting list for permanent housing — not in a shelter this time, but in an actual apartment. I don’t know if that worked out. All too often, such permanent housing deals fall through for homeless people at the last minute. But I hope that she did get housing. I’d grown fond of Anna — a good conversationalist, an incisive observer of other people, smart and funny and independent — and like to think that she wound up living some place safe. I don’t like to think of her living on the streets into her eighties.

So there you have some suitably anonymized stories of a few people’s experiences of housing insecurity and homelessness. I’m reluctant to make generalizations based on these experiences. I told you about Harry, who was housing insecure and just missed being homeless. His experience was very different from Alice, the couch-surfer — not just because of their different situations, but because of their different ages, and their different personalities. And Anna had yet another completely different experience. Therefore, I’m not going to make any generalizations about the experience of homelessness.

But I would like to make a couple of ethical observations. First of all, despite what many politicians try to tell us, homelessness cannot always be blamed on the person who winds up being homeless. That is to say, homelessness and housing insecurity do not always result from some individual moral failing. The people I have told you about were all upright and moral people; they were all intelligent, none of them was mentally ill, none of them was an addict or an alcoholic. Based on the homeless people I’ve known, homelessness is just as likely to result from bad luck as from personal failings. I still remember the thirty-something man who arrived at a homeless shelter in Palo Alto who said he had grown up in Palo Alto, graduated from Palo Alto High School, returned to Palo Alto after college, and wound up homeless due to medical bills he couldn’t pay. He did everything right, and ended up homeless through bad luck. Unfortunately, one of the legacies of the Christian tradition that lies at the root of so much of American political culture is a strong tendency to say we are each individually responsible for our sins. Even though Jesus taught us to help those who are poor, Americans have a strong tendency to blame those who are poor. This is a theological position that we Unitarian Universalists categorically reject.

The second ethical observation about homelessness I’d like to make is related to the first. If we can’t blame the homeless person for being homeless, then that means that society is to blame. And society actually includes all of us. This, I believe, is why so many politicians prefer to blame homeless people for being homeless — because if homeless people are not to blame, then it’s within our power to do something about homelessness. This, by the way, helps explain why the American tradition tries to put the blame for being poor on those who are poor — because otherwise, the blame falls on the rest of us for allowing homelessness to occur. And that’s a very uncomfortable feeling.

So end my brief ethical observations. I hope we can get past our feeling of discomfort about all being responsible for homelessness. I would like it society changed so that a responsible sober women in her seventies no longer had to worry about living on the streets.

New Year’s Wishes

Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

Readings

The first reading was an excerpt from the poem “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” by Margaret Atwood (available online here).

The second reading was a poem by W. S. Merwin titled “To the New Year” (available online here).

Sermon: “New Year Wishes”

Even though the end of the calendar is a somewhat arbitrary moment, nevertheless for many of us the end of the year prompts us to reflect on what we’ve done in the past year, and what we might do in the year to come.

Admittedly, I’ve never been a fan of reflecting on the past year. If I start reflecting on the past year, I tend to focus on the things that have gone wrong, and the things I’ve done wrong, all of which always makes a long list. Maybe you’re one of those people who can reflect productively on the past year, and if that’s the case, this would be a worthwhile activity. Since I’m not that kind of person, in this sermon I’m going to avoid any reflection on the past year’s events.

But I do find it helpful to think ahead to the new year; to reflect on what the new year might hold for me. I’m not talking about the stereotypical New Year’s resolutions. I have a poor track record with New Year’s resolutions: I make them, and within a week I forget them. Instead, I’m talking about something that is perhaps less mundane. Rather than coming up with resolutions that I know I’ll forget, what I’d like to reflect on with you are these two questions:

— What might we hope for in the new year?

— What wishes and dreams might inspire us?

You do have to be careful with these questions. It’s easy to become hopelessly impractical. For example, as I reflect on the coming year, I might wish to be a better person than I actually am. I frequently wish that I were smarter, and more talented, and richer. But the reality is that I’m not going to get any smarter; it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to discover any previously unknown talents; and I have no rich uncle who is going to die and leave me billions of dollars. (That’s billions and not millions; if I’m going to have a fantasy about getting rich, I want to be really rich.)

These sorts of fantasies don’t make for good wishes, nor for good dreams. I am who I am, and you are who you are. We don’t have to wish that we’re different people than we are. The real point is to make better use of what wisdom, talents, and wealth we actually have. That is, it makes more sense to wish that we could make better use of what we actually have. Such an attitude might lead to more modest, and therefore more achievable wishes. I might wish that I could use what wisdom and talents I have to be a better friend and family member. Or, in another example, looking farther afield, I might wish that I could use what talents and skills I have to be a better citizen.

Even then it’s important to remain pragmatic. So, one of the things I really wish for, given the current state of the world, is peace; I wish for peace everywhere in the world. But that’s a really big wish, and honestly it’s pretty unrealistic. Probably everyone here has similar big wishes that you’re really passionate about: slowing global climate change; ending poverty and homelessness; finally establishing equality for all genders and all racial groups; and solutions for other major worldwide problems. These kinds of New Year’s wishes are so huge that I prefer to call them dreams. It is helpful to distinguish between what I’m calling dreams and wishes. A wish is more modest, something that can be achieved by one person, something that pertains mostly to a single person or family. A dream is much grander in scope, and might pertain to all of humankind, or even to all living beings on Earth. So it is that I might wish for enough money that my spouse and I can retire someday; but I dream of a world where no one has to worry about poverty.

I would add that a dream is something worth pursuing no matter how unrealistic it might sound at first. Thus, Martin Luther King, Jr., famously had a dream that there would be full racial equality in the United States. Although we have made progress towards racial equality in this country since King’s death, we still have a long way to go. Yet even though it remains difficult to achieve the dream of full racial equality, it continues to be a dream well worth pursuing.

King’s example brings up an important point. Dreams are usually so vast that one single individual can’t make them come true. But this doesn’t imply that one individual can’t help turn the dream into reality. Martin Luther King, though he was just one individual, was able to do something to make his dream of racial equality come true. King had the talents and the abilities of leadership; he was able to motivate and to mobilize other people. But he did not work on his own. He used his talents and abilities to work with many other people; he was merely one person in a mass movement working for racial justice.

Admittedly, we have to think honestly about the talents we each have. We have to be honest with ourselves about how we each can best use our talents to make some big dream come true. I dream of a world where ecological collapse isn’t going to be as dire as some say. Stated like that, this dream doesn’t sound especially realistic. It just sounds huge and amorphous. But huge and amorphous dreams aren’t very helpful; I want to be able to do something to make dreams come true.

Henry Thoreau gave some good advice on this subject: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” When we have big dreams, we have to figure out how to put foundations under them. Consider case of impending ecological disaster. How might we put foundations under this castle in the air? First, we can begin by breaking down the problem of ecological disaster into some component parts: there’s global climate change, there’s deforestation and land use change, there’s toxication and pollution, there are invasive species, there’s human overpopulation, and so on. Knowing that there are many people who share our dream of mitigating ecological disaster, we know that we don’t have to do everything; we can pick one of these component parts to focus our efforts on. Then we can further focus our efforts by choosing tasks where we have the talents and abilities to make a difference. To help identify those tasks where we can make a difference, we have to be honest about what talents and abilities we actually have. I’ll give you an example relating to the dream of stopping ecological disaster.

I have friends who are very committed to stopping global climate change, and who are also good at engaging in civil disobedience. These are people who focus their efforts on developing and participating in innovative protest efforts to catch the attention of policy makers, and to convince those policy makers to come up with strategies to end global climate change. These friends of mine tell me about the protest efforts they have participated in; they compare notes about the times they got arrested; and they tally up the slow but steady progress they’ve made towards influencing key policy makers. But if I’m honest with myself, the things they are doing are not in my skill set. I would have no idea how to judge which protest efforts were going to be effective. I have no talent, and little ability, to participate in this kind of effort.

If I look at myself honestly, I have a quarter of a century of experience as an educator — not a classroom educator, but a non-traditional educator. While I have no skill at planning demonstrations that influence policy makers, I do have a reasonably large skillset for doing education with small groups. My modest talents and abilities aren’t as interesting and charismatic as those of my friends who demonstrate against global climate change. But if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that if I’m going to work towards the dream of stopping ecological disaster, it should be in the realm of education, not demonstration. So rather than demonstrating against climate change, I focus my efforts on addressing human overpopulation by providing high quality comprehensive sexuality education classes to early and middle adolescents.

That kind of low-profile effort does not have the cachet of going to demonstrations, but it is nonetheless effective and worthwhile. I know many of you in this congregation are engaged in those kinds of low-profile (yet critically important) efforts. People in this congregation support the local food pantry; raise money to purchase medical supplies for Ukraine’s defense efforts; sponsor a Guatemalan child’s education; and so on. Our efforts may not be news-worthy, but they are important and effective.

I also have to say that there are times in everyone’s life when we don’t have the the energy to do much of anything to make those big dreams come true. This happened to me seven or eight years ago, when I had one of those health crises in which I could just about get through a day at work, but I had no energy for doing anything else except sleep. I simply wasn’t able to do anything to make any of the big dreams come true. Nevertheless, I could still do something. I didn’t have any energy to do anything myself, but I could be supportive and encouraging to people who were working on those big dreams. Providing encouragement and support helps keep dreams alive in others. It may not seem like much, but it is actually quite important.

So as we think about New Year’s dreams, let’s go ahead and build castles in the air. If we’re going to dream, let’s dream big. And then we can put foundations under those castles in the air — by being honest with ourselves, being honest with what we can actually do, honest about our individual skills and abilities; that is, by being honest about both our strengths, and our limitations. No matter what our limitations, though, we can still dream the big dreams. We can all dream together about ending poverty, instituting full racial or gender justice, stopping ecological disaster.

We just need to remember that dreams of truth and goodness are never out of reach. Emily Dickinson wrote:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

All it takes is one clover, one bee, and a dream of a prairie. In the absence of bees, dreaming alone will do. It may take less than we think to make dreams come true. It is a semi-magical process. Sometimes revery alone will do, though mostly it requires others who share our dream. But share your dreams for a better world, and they may come true.