Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Life Issues

  • Age Discrimination and the Wisdom of Elders

    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.

    Readings

    The first reading is from a June, 2020, article on the Psychology Today website titled “The Wisdom of Elders,” by Paul Stoller. Dr. Stoller is professor of anthropology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

    “In some parts of the world, elders continue to be highly respected members of their communities. Considered the custodians of wisdom, elders in many societies enjoy considerable degrees of social reverence. If a person of power exercises sound judgment, he or she relies upon the wisdom of elders to reinforce important social values or to maintain a sense of social justice. In this way, elders have long been an elemental source of social well-being….

    “In contemporary American society many, if not most, elders are neither respected nor revered. Consider Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s heartless comment that elders, who are at high risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from the Covid-19 virus, should sacrifice themselves for the common economic good….

    “Such an ageist statement underscores a eugenic worldview in which society purifies itself when its putatively weaker members (the old, the sick, and/or ethnic and religious minorities) are deemed weak and expendable — a drain on economic resources. In a June 12 article in Sapiens, anthropologist Jayur Madhusudan Mehta rejects this eugenic supposition. He writes that ‘…our species would not be where it is today without grandparents to care for younger offspring. Elders are reservoirs of knowledge and experience, critical for preserving history, traditions, and survival skills.’…”

    [Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-path-well-being/202006/the-wisdom-elders]

    The second reading is from No Stone Unturned: The Life and Times of Maggie Kuhn, the 1991 autobiography of Maggie Kuhn. In 1970, when she was 65, Maggie Kuhn found the Gray Panthers organization to fight age discrimination.

    “I believe the intergenerational war over federal benefits, which continues to this day, is a charade to divert attention from the real budgetary issues. We do not need to take from the young to feed the old, or take from the old to feed the young. There will be enough for everyone if the federal government ends its love affair with military defense hardware and extravagant tax breaks to the rich….

    “I can’t understand or sympathize with people who think of government only in terms of what it does for them personally. That includes both the old who vote down school budget increases because they don’t have any children in school and the young who gripe about Social Security because it doesn’t do anything for them now. The elderly lobby has been forceful and effective in preserving benefits for the old. I would like to see it speak out as forcefully on behalf of the nearly 14 million children who now constitute 40 percent of the nation’s poor…. I feel strongly that the old must not simply advocate on their own behalf. We must act as elders of the tribe, looking out for the best interests of the future and preserving the precious compact between the generations.”

    The third very short reading is a contemporary Nigerian proverb:

    “What an elder can see when sitting down, a child cannot see when standing up.”

    Sermon

    A number of people from the congregation have asked me to talk about age discrimination. This morning I’d like to talk with you about some ethical and religious dimensions to age discrimination. And I’d like to begin by telling you a story.

    Some years ago, my cousin went to Kenya for her job, and spent two years living there with her husband and daughter. As a stay-at-home dad, her husband wound up doing a fair amount of driving. It’s important to know that his hair had gone gray early on, and at the time of the story was all gray. Now by his account, it sounded to me as though Kenyan drivers were even worse than Boston drivers. Not only that, but they have rotaries in Kenya, just as in Boston, which sounded to me like rotaries in the bad old days of Boston driving: complete free-for-alls where no one paid any attention to right-of-way rules.

    In any case, the story goes like this: My cousin’s husband was driving on a Kenyan rotary, taking their daughter somewhere or other, when he got into a collision with a truck. Both drivers had gotten out of their vehicles when a police officer drove up. The police officer asked what had happened. The truck driver, who was Kenyan, gave his account of the collision, saying that my cousin’s husband was entirely to blame. My cousin’s husband then gave his account of the collision, but with a sinking feeling that the police officer was going to believe the truck driver. The police officer listened to both stories, then said to the truck driver, “I believe him [pointing to my cousin’s husband’s white hair] because he’s an elder.”

    This story shows that other cultures have other attitudes towards elders; our current American attitudes towards elders are not the only possible attitudes. Had my cousin’s husband gotten into a traffic accident in one of the rotaries around Boston, he would not have been given the benefit of the doubt because of his age. In American culture, rather than treating elders with respect, we are more likely patronize or condescend to elders. This can serve as a very basic definition of age discrimination in our society today: age discrimination is the widely-held belief that elders are always less able, and less capable, than middle aged and young adults, and more prone to error.

    It is not clear to me where this strange belief comes from. Judaism and Christianity, the root sources of many of the ethical values in our society, both teach respect for elders. In the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 16:31 tells us “Grey hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.” One of the commandments that God gives to Israel, as told in Leviticus 19:32, says this: “You shall rise before the aged, and defer to the old.” Yet our American culture tends to pass lightly over the commandments given by God from the book of Leviticus, instead focusing on God’s commandments as stated in chapter 20 of the book of Exodus, where it only says, “Honor thy father and mother.” Thus as is true of most cultures around the world, American culture picks and choose which aspects of its religious heritage that it prefers to follow. And on the whole, American culture chooses to emphasize two different interpretations of our religious heritage. On the one hand, there is the strand of American culture that teaches submission to authority — where children submit to parents, wives submit to husbands, and the populace submits to the rulers. On the other hand, there is the strand of American culture that teaches equality between all people, as epitomized in Leviticus 19:18, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” words later repeated by Jesus of Nazareth. Yet neither of these strands of American culture teaches respect for elders; you are not going to find anyone saying that we should post Proverbs 16:31 in all school classrooms.

    From this, you can see that American culture tends to ignore its core religious teachings about respect for elders. Are there then any widely-held ethical principles in our American culture which can offer us guidance regarding age discrimination?

    Many Americans no longer rely on religion, but instead turn to science to provide justification for their ethical judgements. And beginning in the late nineteenth, Social Darwinism purported to offer ethical guidance, based on science, on how to structure society and social relations. Social Darwinists took Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest and applied it to human society.

    This held true across the political spectrum; Peter Dobkin Hall of the School of Public Affairs at City College of New York writes that Social Darwinism “served the purposes of both liberals and conservatives.” Political conservatives argued that giving aid to poor people only served to destroy their work ethic; Peter Hall quotes an 1874 report on pauperism in New York City which argued “The public example of alms induce many to be paupers who were never so before.” Political liberals also became Social Darwinists, though with a different emphasis. Peter Hall writes that while “conservatives emphasized the role of nature — competition, natural selection, and heredity — in shaping evolution, liberals stressed the role of nurture — humanity’s ability to manipulate the environment to foster evolutionary progress.”(1) Thus, Social Darwinism prompted Americans across the political spectrum to appeal to scientific data to justify their proposed solutions to social and economic problems, including how to treat elders.

    These Social Darwinist arguments remain powerful in the twenty-first century. In the first reading, we heard an example of the Social Darwinist thinking as applied by a political conservative to the COVID-19 pandemic. In late March of 2020, a week or so into the COVID pandemic, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, then age 69, argued that elders like himself should be willing to take a risk with their health in order to keep businesses open and the economy going. Faced with mandatory shut-downs, Patrick said, “Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.” He went on to add, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that America loves for its children and grandchildren?’ [But] if that is the exchange, I’m all in.” This is classic Social Darwinist thinking, which begins with economic data, then applies a survival of the fittest theory to social policy, with the ultimate goal of making a stronger society.

    The second reading exemplifies the way political liberals have used Social Darwinism. Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, argued that there could be plenty of money to fund benefits for elders — this could be accomplished by changing social policy to prioritize elder benefits over military hardware, such as expensive warships and airplanes. More to the point, Kuhn believed that society would be stronger if we adopted policies to eliminate poverty among elders. This again is classic Social Darwinist thinking, which begins with sociological data, then argues that humanity can manipulate the environment to create evolutionary progress in our society.

    Today, in the twenty-first century, Social Darwinism continues to dominate American thinking on social questions like about how to treat elders. We never see appeals to religious texts like Proverbs 16:31. Both political conservatives and political liberals, good Social Darwinists as they are, argue that our policies regarding elders should be guided by the data collected by social scientists — economists, sociologists, and so on. The problem is that the liberals and the conservatives use scientific data to come up with opposing solutions to the same problem.

    So traditional American religion fails to give adequate guidance on how to treat elders, and appeals to scientific data wind up giving us contradictory advice. Perhaps there are other sources of ethical or religious guidance that would be more helpful. Since this is a Unitarian Universalist congregation, let’s take a look at how our Unitarian Universalist worldview might offer us more secure guidance on how we should treat elders.

    First of all, as Unitarian Universalists, we place a great emphasis on individual human beings. The old Universalists spoke of the supreme worth of every human personality. Among the Unitarians, people like Emerson and Thoreau found infinite universes within each human personality. In the late twentieth century, Unitarian Universalists encapsulated both these old teaching in the phrase “respect for the inherent worthiness and dignity of each person.” (As a parenthetical note, many other religious groups say similar things. Some liberal Quakers, for example, like to say that there is that of God in each person; we might argue with them about what they mean by God, and whether the God they talk about is something we can believe in; but we can see that they are saying much the same thing that the old Universalists said, and that Emerson and Thoreau said: each one of us has something of supreme worth within us.)

    If we truly affirm the supreme worth of every human personality, then this gives us a starting point to understand why age discrimination is bad. Let’s return for a moment to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. If he makes the personal choice that he’s willing to die of COVID for the sake of the younger generation, then we can respect his individual choice, and we can even celebrate his willingness to put his personal duty to humanity over his own individual survival. However, if he makes this statement as a public official in such a way that it can be understood to encourage others to make the same sacrifice, and further it he seems to encourage public policies that may force other elders to make the same choice he wants to make, then we can challenge him on ethical grounds. Because we value the supreme worth of every human personality, we recognize that each person is going to have slightly different priorities. Some people in Dan Patrick’s age cohort might have been be pleased to follow his example, but others might have had ethically sound reasons for preferring social policies giving them a better chance of surviving COVID. Think, for example, of a 69 year old grandparent who had sole custody of their eight-year old grandchild: in our view, that grandparent would have had a valid reason to want government policies that would help them survive COVID, so they could continue to care for their grandchild. Or, for a more Emersonian example, think of a 69 year old novelist who is the midst of writing a great novel; perhaps they should not be forced to follow Dan Patrick’s example, and risk their life before their novel is complete. If I truly believe in the supreme worth of every human personality, then I’m going to be cautious about public policies that put large groups of individual human personalities at risk of extinction, just because they happen to be part of some group or other.

    By now you can see that this principle can be easily applied to the issue of age discrimination. Once we affirm the supreme worth of every human personality, it becomes obvious that this is true regardless of age. A newborn baby’s personality is supremely worthy, as is that of a teenager — and we hold the personality of a middle-aged adult to be equally worthy as that of an elder. It doesn’t matter what age a person is; no matter what their age, we find an inherent worthiness in every human personality. From this basic principle we can generate a more pragmatic ethical statement to help guide our actions. The book of Leviticus phrased offers just such a pragmatic ethical statement: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

    Admittedly, this is still a fairly general statement. But how might this general statement be applied to the specific situation of society’s treatment of elders? A partial answer to that question can be found in the Gray Panther organization. Maggie Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers specifically to combat age discrimination. So let’s take a look at what the Gray Panthers do.

    Today, the most active Gray Panthers chapter is the New York City chapter. The New York City Gray Panthers engage in a wide range of actions to help end age discrimination. At one extreme, they carry out very simple, hands-on, one-to-one actions, such as their nursing home card project, called “Caring by Card.” The New York City Gray Panther website describes this project as follows: “Nursing homes are sad and lonely places to live, with very little personal freedom for residents. People living in nursing homes all too often feel forgotten. Will you join us in lifting up our elderly friends by reminding them that they deeply matter and are loved? Will you join us in sending handmade cards to a nursing home…?” To put it in larger context, the “Caring by Card” project addresses the social situation which forces us to put some elders into bleak nursing homes — not through data-driven social science interventions — not through appeals to religious scripture — but through the one-on-one human action of sending a handmade card to someone living in a nursing home.

    At the other end of their range of actions, the New York Gray City Panthers work on wide-ranging global policy initiatives. They have “consultative status” with the United Nations, and have consulted on policy issues ranging from the international rights of older persons, to the status of older women.

    And then, somewhere in the middle of their range of actions, the New York Gray City Panthers host monthly educational webinar series. At these, they invite scholars and policy makers to speak on emerging topics of concern. In October, they had a speaker on the future of health care at the Veteran’s Administration; in September they hosted a panel discussion titled “The Power of Age-Diversity in Dismantling Ageism.”

    For me, the signature initiative of the Gray Panthers is the way they have consistently taught that elders must work with youth to combat ageism. Maggie Kuhn called this “youth and age in action.” When I was eighteen years old, I heard Maggie Kuhn talk about this principle. I had become a committed pacifist under the influence of my Unitarian Universalist minister, and I was at a rally in support of stronger nuclear weapons treaties. Maggie Kuhn spoke at that rally, and made the point that young people and elders are natural allies to work together on things like limiting nuclear weapons — youth and elders have more time and a greater willingness to tackle difficult issues like world peace. She was making another related point at the same time — the best way for elders to tackle age discrimination was to build working alliances with younger people, and to work with them on problems of mutual concern. In the second reading this morning, she clearly articulated this principle: “I feel strongly that the old must not simply advocate on their own behalf. We must act as elders of the tribe, looking out for the best interests of the future and preserving the precious compact between the generations.”

    This is perhaps the best solution to the age discrimination problem. Those of us who are elders (which includes me, as I’m now officially classed as an elder) — we can follow Maggie Kuhn’s advice and reach out to younger people, we can work together with youth on projects of mutual concern. By acting as elders of the tribe, we can become more open to the possibility of working with younger people.

    Indeed, many of us in this congregation are already doing this kind of collaborative work across the generations. I know of elders from our congregation who work with younger people on a wide range of topics: empowering women; supporting food banks such as End Hunger New England; advocating for world peace; supporting the arts; and so on. And within our own congregation, we model how intergenerational collaboration can work in the way we govern ourselves: our Religious Education committee includes a teenager, middle-aged adults, and an elder; the same is true of our governing board.

    Obviously, none of this will magically end age discrimination. But it shows us a good way to begin to end age discrimination. And by working together across the generations, we can live out one of our core ethical and religious teachings — that we value the supreme worth of every human personality. Or, more succinctly, to paraphrase the Hebrew Bible, we aim to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

    Note

    (1) Peter Dobkin Hall, “Social Darwinism and the poor,” Social Welfare History Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/issues/social-darwinism-poor/ accessed 8 Nov. 2025.

  • What Do We Tell Children about God, Death, etc.?

    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 reading was from an essay titled “Home-grown Unitarian Universalism” by William J. Doherty. Dr. Doherty recently retired as professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota and has worked with couples and families as a therapist since 1977. This essay was published in UU World magazine in 2008.

    “It was 1980. I had been a Unitarian Universalist for about two years when my seven-year-old son Eric said to me, ‘Dad, what happens to us after we die? Is there a heaven?’

    “‘Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven where we live forever,’ I replied, ‘and other people believe that when we die, our life is over and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.’

    “‘What do you believe?’ said Eric.

    “‘Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven, and other people believe….’

    “‘But what do you believe?’

    “‘OK,’ I said. ‘I believe that when we die we live on through other people but not in a heaven.’

    “Eric took this in and responded with words I will never forget: ‘I’ll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up I’ll make up my own mind.’

    “My seven-year-old was teaching me something. He was being a developmentally appropriate UU child, but I was not being a developmentally appropriate UU parent. He knew he needed answers, for now, to an important religious question, and he also knew that he could seek his own answers when he was ready. For my part, being a former Roman Catholic still fleeing dogmatism, I was afraid of imposing my beliefs on my child. So I responded to him as if he were a 20-year-old taking a course on world religions. I had a better sense of what not to do as a UU parent — don’t impose my beliefs — than of what to do, namely, give him religious guidance.”

    Sermon

    Here’s the question I’d like to consider with you: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious and existential questions? In many religious traditions, I’d answer that question by giving you scripted answers to all the most important religious questions. But Unitarian Universalism has no dogma — no scripted answers to life’s big questions. This complicates matters somewhat. If we don’t tell other people what to believe, then what are we supposed to say to children when they ask these big questions?

    Yet as we heard in the first reading, sometimes Unitarian Universalist kids want a firm and definite answer. When professor William J. Doherty’s seven year old child Eric asked, “Dad, what happens to us after we die? Is there a heaven?” Doherty reacted as a good Unitarian Universalist. Doherty gave his son a college professor’s lecture: “Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven where we live forever … and other people believe that when we die, our life is over and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.” This was not the reply Eric wanted, and he demanded to know what his father believed. And when Doherty finally told him, Eric said: “I’ll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up I’ll make up my own mind.”

    So if you’re a parent, and like Bill Doherty you have a child who has not yet reached puberty, often there will be a fairly simple answer to the question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious and existential questions? You tell your child what your answers to those questions are, assuming they will accept your answers for now. Sometimes you may find it challenging to provide ready answers to questions of what you believe, but for the most part children will be more or less content with the answers given by their parents.

    However, if a child asks you one of those questions, and you are not their parent, then you have to give a different kind of answer. If the child is not your own child, you cannot simply say, “What we believe is this.” If you did that, you’d be stepping into the role of their parent; not even grandparents can get away with that. That leaves you with three options. First, you can give an answer that sounds like the first answer Bill Doherty gave to his son Eric, something to the effect of: “Well, some people think, thus and so, while other people think something else.” Second, you could tell the child what your personal answer to that question might be. And the third option is to combine those two — so if, for example, a child asks you, “What happens after we die?” you can reply something like this: “Different people have different answers to that question; some people believe that you go to a place called heaven after you die; some people believe that you are reborn as another person or animal after you die; some people believe that you when die you can live on in other people’s memories; and what I believe is….” Thus in the third option, you first tell the child some of the answers that other people give, and you conclude by stating what you believe.

    These strategies work fairly well for children. Once a child hits puberty, though, everything changes. Developmental psychologist tell us that in the middle school years, young people begin for the first time to have the ability to reason abstractly; developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called this the formal operational stage of cognitive development. When young people achieve the ability to reason abstractly, this new stage of cognitive development gives them the ability to question everything. While this can be exhausting for their parents, for the young people themselves it can be an incredibly exciting time. When you’re in your middle school years, your cognitive horizons begin to expand rapidly: all of a sudden, you can understand things that you couldn’t understand before; entire new worlds open up before you. And while this can be an exhausting developmental stage for their parents, those of us who teach or mentor young adolescents can also find this an incredibly exciting time. Personally, I love talking with young adolescents as they use their new ability to reason abstractly to tackle big existential questions; I love their fearlessness and excitement as they begin to think hard about life’s biggest questions for the first time.

    Once people get to the age where they can reason abstractly, you can’t respond in the same way you respond to children. When a young adolescent asks, “What happens after we die?” they don’t want the same kind of response that a child wants. In fact, if a young adolescent asks you a question like that, the best way to answer is to respond in exactly the same way you’d respond if one of your age peers asked you that same question. Most especially, it’s important not to be condescending or patronizing — no more than you would condescend or patronize someone your own age who asked a serious question. This is true no matter what age you are; I’ve actually seen older teens condescend to younger teens, and not surprisingly, it didn’t go well. I’ve also seen middle aged adults patronize their elders — once again, it didn’t go well.

    I actually have a couple of theories that explain why some people are condescending or patronizing when asked one of life’s biggest questions like what happens after we die, or is there a deity, or is there any meaning to life. First theory: If someone asks you a big question like that, and you haven’t really thought it through, you may try to avoid answering the question by being condescending or patronizing. Second theory: Some people turn condescending or patronizing because they don’t want to have to talk about that subject to that person. So, for example, when your aging parent who’s in poor health asks you, “What happens after we die?” — and you know they’re asking that question because they’re thinking about their own imminent death — you might try to dodge the whole subject by saying something like, “Now let’s not talk about such things right now. Let’s make sure we feel all comfy and cosy” — which while well-meaning sounds a bit patronizing or condescending.

    Let’s dwell for a moment on that particular situation of someone who’s in ill health and who is probably already thinking about their own death. If someone in that situation asks you “What happens when we die?” — you may find it emotionally difficult to give your own answer. If so, you can simply turn the question back to them, and say: “Well, I’d have to think about it. But what do YOU think happens after we die?” And then all you have to do is listen carefully to what they say.

    Indeed, it’s always a good idea to be prepared to listen carefully to the other person whenever someone brings up one of life’s biggest questions. Even when you’re talking to your own child, you can give them your answer to whatever big question they raised, then check to make sure what you said makes sense to them — did you use words they could understand, and did they follow what you said? If you’re talking with a child, it’s also important to remember that children can have profound spiritual experiences at a very young age, experiences that they might not be able to articulate well. The author Dan Wakefield, in his 1985 memoir “Returning,” described a profound spiritual experience he had when he was a child:

    “On an ordinary school night I went to bed, turned out the light, said the Lord’s prayer as I always did, and prepared to go to sleep. I lay there for only a few moments, not long enough to go to sleep (I was clearly and vividly awake during this whole experience) when I had the sensation that my whole body was filled with light. It was a white light of such brightness and intensity that it seemed almost alive. It was neither hot nor cold, neither burning nor soothing, it was simply there, filling every part of my body from my head to my feet.”

    Dan Wakefield’s parents were nominally Christian, and so of course he understood this experience in Christian terms, as the light of Christ. Now Wakefield wrote that he didn’t tell anyone about his experience for some years. But when finally he did tell an adult about this experience, I hope that adult would not be dismissive of something that felt like a very real experience to him. Sometimes when children ask a parent one of life’s big questions, they not only want to know what they parent thinks; sometimes they also want the parent to listen to something they have to say.

    Whether it’s an aging parent confronting their own mortality, or a child who’s had a profound spiritual experience, sometimes when people ask one of life’s big questions, they’re using that question as an opening to tell you about something they’ve experienced, or something they’ve thought hard about. So when one of these big questions arises, you have to be prepared both to give an answer, and to listen carefully.

    It’s even more important to be prepared to listen carefully if you’re talking to someone who has reached the age where they can reason abstractly, whether that person is a teen or an adult. I’ll give a couple of examples of what I mean. When someone asks, “What happens after we die?” — it might be that they’re simply curious to know, it might mean that one of their friends brought the subject up, or the question might be prompted by a health scare they have had. Or when someone asks, “is there a God?” — it might be they have a straightforward intellectual interest in the question, it might be they’ve heard something in popular culture the piqued their interest, or it might be that they’ve had some kind of transcendent experience (like the one Dan Wakefield had) which they’re trying to make sense of. In other words, sometimes what seems to be a simple question has other layers of meaning — and of course at other times, what seems to be a simple question actually is a simple question.

    It might seem that you’ll have the easiest time when someone asks you a simple question that really is nothing more than a simple question. But a simple question that is nothing more than a simple question might actually be the hardest one to answer, because then you have to give an answer that is honest and genuine. If your aging parent starts talking about what happens after you die, and you figure out that what they really want to talk about is their own feelings about their own approaching death (which once happened to me), then all you have to do is listen to their their feelings and concerns; you don’t have to try to articulate your own half-formed answer to the question. If, on the other hand, another adult asks you what happens after we die and you realize they sincerely want to know, I feel we have a duty to do the best we can to answer that question; and this is true whether the person asking the question is a child, a teen, or an adult. We have a duty to take other people seriously.

    This implies that we should spend some time thinking through some of life’s biggest questions, so that when we are asked one of those questions, we can give a more or less coherent answer. Because of my job, I actually have these conversations fairly often, and I’ve come up with five basic questions that cover most — not all, but most — of life’s big questions. I’ve found it helpful to think through these questions on my own, so that when someone springs a big life question, I won’t be completely at a loss. I offer these questions hoping they might be useful to you in the same way.

    Here’s the first big question: What should I do with my life? — or you might ask: What’s the purpose of my life? For most Unitarian Universalists, this question is the most important of all religious questions. We are a pragmatic people, and this question forces us to think about our own ethics and morality, to think about what we want to prioritize in our lives.

    Second big question: Who am I? — which goes with several related questions, including: What am I capable of? What kind of being am I? This question often comes up after you’ve tried to think through the first question. Because if you want to figure out what you should do with your life, maybe first you have to figure out who you are.

    Third big question: What’s the nature of goodness? — and there are other questions related to this, like: Where does goodness come from? Where do suffering and evil come from? The question of goodness is also a major concern for most Unitarian Universalists. As a pragmatic people, we want to make the world a better place. And if you want to make the world a better place, then it’s probably a good idea to figure out what you man by “better.”

    Fourth big question: What can I know? — which goes along with related questions like: How do I know what I know? How do I know what is true? For many Unitarian Universalists, questions about truth encompass many of the traditional religious questions like: Is there a God? and: What happens after death? Thus if a Unitarian Universalist says that they do not believe in God, their Unitarian Universalist friends may treat this as a question of how we know what is true, saying: How do you know that God does not exist? Or if a Unitarian Universalist says that they do believe in God, their Unitarian Universalist friends are going to ask the same question: How do you know? There’s a reason why we tend to lump these traditional religious questions together and treat them as questions about truth. Most of us know people who hold a vast range of beliefs. Thinking just of the people I happen to know, my acquaintances include people who are atheists, agnostics, New Age-ers, Pagans, many different varieties of Christian, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, even a Zoroastrian. Each of these people has a worldview that claims to be true, yet they disagree in fundamental ways. So how can I know which of them is right; how can I know what is true?

    Fifth, and finally: Does my life have any meaning? (And if so, where does that meaning come from?) For many Unitarian Universalists, the question about what happens after death often resolves to the deeper question of whether an individual human life has any meaning or not. And many of us are existentialist who believe that there is no pre-existing meaning but that we create meaning through our actions; so to ask if my life has meaning is to inquire into the meaning I’m already making through the way I’m living right now.

    Now let’s circle back to my opening question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious questions? One partial answer I’ve given is that we parents are going to provides answers those questions for their own children, at least until their children develop the ability to reason abstractly. Another partial answer: when someone asks one of those questions, we should listen carefully, because sometimes when people ask you those big questions they’re really saying something else. Another partial answer: because we are part of the human community, we have the responsibility to take such questions seriously, and not try to dodge them or dismiss them. So those are some partial answers to the opening question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious questions?

    And the ultimate answer is this: The only way to provide answers to the big questions about life, the universe, and everything — is to spend time thinking about those questions yourself. That’s actually why I keep coming here every week, to keep myself in practice at answering these big questions — because this congregation is a place where people do ask those big questions, where people do think seriously about them.

  • What Do You Do with Grief?

    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.

    A small woodland flower.
    Melampyrum lineare (photo copyright (c) Dan Harper 2024).