UU identity – Dan Harper

Early Education and Unitarian Universalism

Readings

(Read by Mary Parker, chair of the Carriage House Nursery School Advisory Board)

The first reading is a draft of the revised mission statement of Carriage House Nursery School, which is operated by First Parish.

Carriage House Nursery School encourages learning and growth, curiosity and enjoyment, self-esteem and respect for others.

Our commitment to children [is] to provide:
Support for families through strong school partnerships;
Child-centered education;
Attention to the health, safety, and responsive care of all children;
Active, individualized, developmentally appropriate learning;
A culture of respect for one another and for all people and the world in which we live;
A culture of respect and awe for the natural environment, of which we are a small part.

The second reading comes from an article by Abigail Adams Eliot, titled “Nursery Schools Fifty Years Ago,” published in the April, 1972, issue of Young Children magazine:

“Day nurseries had been established for the sake of working mothers, mothers who needed somebody to take care of their children safely during the day…. Nursery schools had a new motivation — program. In fact the nursery school movement grew from a conviction that some definite educational plan is necessary before the age of five…. Nursery schools were no babysitting agencies, nor were they dedicated to the business of getting children ready for elementary school. Rather, they were interested in enrichment — in guiding children toward a more rewarding life….

“In addition to providing a rich program for children, nursery schools tried to educate adults. Contact with parents was an important phase of the work, as it is in good nursery schools today…. I myself told an early graduating class [of teachers] at the Ruggles Street Nursery School and Training Center, ‘If the nursery school movement does not result, ultimately, in better families, it will be a failure.”

Sermon: Early Education and Unitarian Universalism

Recently I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Unitarian Universalism and early education recently. I should explain that “early education” is educational jargon for learning that happens before about age 8. Thus, early education includes first and second grades in school, kindergarten, and pre-primary school or nursery school.

If you’ve ever been in our Parish House on weekday mornings, you’ll know why I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Unitarian Universalism and early education. Each weekday our Parish House houses dozens of young children, ranging in age from two to five, who come to the Carriage House Nursery School. Carriage House Nursery School is owned and operated by First Parish; it’s by far the largest program we provide to the wider community.

Unitarian Universalists have been involved in early education for over a century and a half. I believe that our interest in early education springs directly from our religious commitments. And to explain what I mean, I’d like to tell you about two Unitarians who were innovators in early education, and how their work in education grew out of their Unitarian religion. Then I’m going to tell you a little bit about our own Carriage House Nursery School, and how that relates to our Unitarian Universalism.

I’ll begin with one of my heroines, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Elizabeth Peabody was born in Billerica, Massachusetts, in 1804, and was raised in a Unitarian church by a Unitarian mother who was also a school teacher. It is no wonder, then, that Elizabeth Palmer Peabody became an educator who, like a good Unitarian, valued the individuality of each child in her care.

Elizabeth Peabody began her teaching career in and around Boston, and on Sundays she would attend services at the Federal Street Church. The minister there, William Ellery Channing, was the most prominent Unitarian minister of that time. Channing recognized that this young woman had unusual intellectual and spiritual gifts. William Channing so respected Elizabeth Peabody that he formed the habit of taking a walk with this twenty-something school teacher every Saturday so he could discuss that week’s sermon topic with her.

After teaching for a number of years, Elizabeth Peabody opened the West Street Bookstore in Boston. This bookstore became the center for Unitarians and Transcendentalists, and Elizabeth got to know most of the great Unitarians of her day, including: Ralph Waldo Emerson; the early feminist Margaret Fuller; and educational reformer Horace Mann. The bookstore was, in it own way, an educational institution.

But in the 1850s, Elizabeth Peabody returned to teaching school. She became one of the most important figures in the American kindergarten movement. The kindergarten movement was started in Germany by pioneering educator Friedrich Froebel. Elizabeth Peabody brought her own Unitarian beliefs to Froebel’s child-centered education. Here, for example, is how she defined “kindergarten” in her “Lecture No. 1 on Nursery and Kindergarten,” published in 1874:

“A kindergarten means a guarded company of children, who are to be treated as a gardener treats his plants; that is, in the first place, studied to see what they are, and what conditions they require for the fullest and most beautiful growth; in the second place, put into or supplied with these conditions, with as little handling of their individuality as possible, but with unceasing genial and provident care to remove all obstructions, and favor all the circumstances of growth. It is because they are living organisms that they are to be cultivated — not drilled (which is a process only appropriate to insensate stone).”

In Elizabeth Peabody’s day, “drilling” children meant forcing them to memorize and repeat facts and words; it was the main educational technique used in most schools back then. By contrast, Elizabeth Peabody favored a child-centered approach to education. For her, children had to be treated as individual human beings, and this was a direct result of her Unitarian beliefs. Today we might say she affirmed the inherent worth and dignity of every schoolchild.

Elizabeth Peabody also adhered to the Unitarian belief that education is one of the best ways to address social problems. She raised enough money to open a free kindergarten in a poor neighborhood in Boston. When that school proved to be a success, she traveled throughout the United states advocating for free public kindergartens. She also began training kindergarten teachers who could teach in those new schools. While there were others also promoting public kindergartens at this time, Elizabeth Peabody was perhaps the most important advocate, so I think of her as the mother of kindergartens in America.

The next Unitarian educator I’d like to tell you about is Abigail Adams Eliot. Born in Dorchester in 1892, Abby Eliot graduated from Radcliffe College in 1914, and became a social worker. But she quickly learned that social work was not the right career for her. Instead, around 1920 she found herself involved in the then-new nursery school movement. By the 1920s, kindergartens had become fairly widespread. But educators began to see that children under the age of five would also benefit from schooling. Yale professor of education Arnold Gesell put it this way: “The educational ladder of the American public school is a tall one and a stout one, but it does not reach the ground. It does not have a solid footing.” The nursery school movement aimed to bring the ladder of the American public school down to the ground, by providing schooling for children from age two to five.

Abby Eliot went to England to train at one of the first nursery schools, the McMillan Nursery School in London. She learned a great deal in her six months there. Sometimes she learned what not to do. She said: “One of the things I learned very well was never, never to put 32 two-year-olds together in one room. We came close to a panic about 4:30 one Friday afternoon when a think London fog rolled into the open-air shelter we used. The children got to fighting over toys or something, and the fog was so thick that my student helpers and I could not see the children. It was nip and tuck to quiet them before they hurt each other.” This is one of the best arguments I’ve ever heard for small class sizes for young children.

Abby Eliot also quickly discovered the importance of engaging the whole family, and even the wider community. When the school could engage the parents as well as the child, the result — so said Abby Eliot — was to strengthen families. And in one school that Abby Eliot ran, she invited high school students to come learn child development practices, so that when they eventually had children of their own, they would be better parents.

In 1921, Abby Eliot opened the Ruggles Street Nursery School in a disadvantaged neighborhood in Boston. Like Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, she had the same Unitarian-influenced goal of strengthening democracy and addressing social ills through education. Abby Eliot quickly proved to have real talent working with young children, and her school became a center for training nursery school teachers. Eventually, Abby Eliot’s training efforts were incorporated into the Eliot-Pearson Children’s School, part of the Department of Child Study at Tufts University. (A parenthetical note: Tufts is a Universalist college.) The Eliot-Pearson Children’s School remains a training site for teachers working with young children.

I will make one small critique of Abby Eliot, a critique that also applies to Elizabeth Peabody. Like many Unitarians, they saw their mission as helping the poor and disadvantaged. This they understood to mean helping other people, seeing other people as the recipient of their good works. While it is admirable to help others, sometimes Unitarians have forgotten that we have our own problems that need to be addressed. However, after she retired to Concord, Massachusetts, Abby Eliot addressed a social problem within her own family by founding the Community Mental Health Center. She started this clinic based on her experiences of her own relatives who had struggled with mental health issues.

Now that I’ve told you about Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Abigail Adams Eliot, I’d like to turn to the Carriage House Nursery School, a Unitarian Universalist educational project right here in Cohasset.

When I heard Mary Parker the educational goals of the Carriage House Nursery School in the first reading this morning, I could hear echoes of the Unitarian values of Elizabeth Peabody and Abigail Eliot. Carriage House provides child-centered education — that’s like Elizabeth Peabody studying children to see who they are, and then helping them attain “the fullest and most beautiful growth.” Carriage House provide support for families — just like Abigail Eliot engaged families in her nursery schools. Carriage House fosters a culture of respect for one another, and for all people — just as Elizabeth Peabody treated the children in her care with respect, and fostered a sense of the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. And the mission statement of Carriage House Nursery School — to encourage learning and growth, curiosity and enjoyment, self-esteem and respect for others — sounds exactly like something both Elizabeth Peabody and Abigail Eliot might have said. So you can see that Carriage House Nursery School, even though it is a distinctly non-sectarian school, fosters values that are thoroughly aligned with Unitarian Universalism.

In fact, I’d say that Carriage House Nursery School is our congregation’s largest social justice project. It is clearly the largest community program we run, both in terms of the size of its budget and the number of people it serves. And I would call it a social justice project for several reasons. First, Carriage House aims to strengthen families. We often think that it’s only families in disadvantaged neighborhoods that need to be strengthened, but as a minister I can tell you that there are plenty of families in affluent neighborhoods that need support.

Second, Carriage House nurtures a culture of respect — as it says in the mission statement: “A culture of respect for one another and for all people and the world in which we live; [and] a culture of respect and awe for the natural environment of which we are a small part.” A culture of respect for all people is essential for a civil society essential for democracy. A culture of respect for the natural environment is absolutely critical to helping us address climate change and other ecological disasters.

We tend to forget that education can be a social justice project in itself. Social justice goes beyond providing direct services to those in need. Social justice goes beyond influencing policy makers. Social justice has to include education. When we influence young people, when we instill in them a respect for all human beings and a respect for the interdependent web of life, we are changing the world for the better. And the change that happens in education goes far deeper than providing direct services, or influencing policy makers: we are changing people’s souls.

And do not underestimate the power of early education to change people’s souls. A nursery school like Carriage House can do so much to influence a child’s character, to nurture their growth towards becoming more human, and more humane. Given that democracy is always fragile, we have a constant need to raise more children who are imbued with a respect for all people, and a respect for the web of life. This is why so many Unitarian Universalists over the centuries have gotten involved in education: education is one of the best ways for us to live out our religious values.

And maybe we can think together about how to make this social justice project have even more impact. Can we reduce the amount of money we draw from Carriage House so that we could offer more scholarships? Can we find ways to support the innovative outdoor classroom that was built over the summer? Can we get student teachers to come to Carriage House to experience our educational approach? How can we support the Carriage House Advisory Board, the group of people from First Parish who oversee the work of the school?

And finally — when you think about our First Parish social justice programs, I hope that the first social justice program you think of is Carriage House Nursery School. For Carriage House Nursery School is one of the most powerful ways we live out our values in the wider community: strengthening democracy, and helping children grow in respect for themselves, each other, and the whole world.

Meaning in Our Meeting House

Readings

The first reading this morning is from an 1897 address given by Rev. William Cole, then minister of our congregation, about this history of this Meeting House:

“What was the size and appearance of the meeting-house when finished, about 1755? Its dimensions were the same as those contained within the four walls of the present edifice. It has no tower, no porch. Three doors admitted you to its worship and exercises, one where the tower now stands, one opposite on the south side, and the third faced the pulpit.

“Upon the roof at the north end was placed the belfry, without, at first, a bell—a modest belfry, something like the one on the ‘Old Ship’ in Hingham. The upper windows on either side of the pulpit were not in the original plan….

“Within the church, steps as now led up into the gallery…. The gallery was divided in the front gallery by a partition. The south side was allotted to the women to use.

“It is impossible to be sure about the arrangement of the different kinds of pews, though one would surmise that, when they spoke of pews, they meant the square box-pews, and by seats and seatlets [they meant] narrow pews. There appear to have been both kinds [of pews] in the church….

“No carpet, no oil lamps, no cushions, and no stoves lent comfort to the people or beauty to the interior. No bell as yet called to worship or struck the hours of the day….”

The second reading is a poem by Roscoe Trueblood, minister of this congregation who died in 1969. Had Roscoe Trueblood lived long enough, he would doubtless have been part of the feminist movement in Unitarian Universalism, and would have revised this poem with gender inclusive language.

The Meeting House

Here stands this house and we, for what it stands
Are gathered in these calm beloved walls
We called it church and now in turn it calls
Us members, and it speaks some clear commands:
We built the spire and raised it with our hands
Now it points us to high dreams and enthralls
Us with its beauty. And when grief appalls
There is a spirit here which understands.

So may this house be both effect and cause
Both voice and echo, then voice again
Antiphonal of man to God — to man:
So may our values couched in truth and laws
Find home and symbol safe from storm and flood,
So may we surely call it, House of God.

This poem was first published by First Parish in Cohasset, and is used with their permission.

Choir anthem

The choir performed “Chester,” a patriotic song by William Billings. This song could well have been sung in the Cohasset Meeting House during the Revolutionary War period. The text and scores are available on the Choral Public Domain Library website.

Sermon: “Meaning in Our Meeting House”

This year represents the 275th anniversary of the raising of this Meeting House. Many of you present here, or watching online, know far more about the history of this Meeting House than I do. But I’d like to talk with you about the meaning that can be found in this Meeting House, and how that meaning has changed over the years. I’ll start in 1750, when our Meeting House was built. From there I’ll fast forward to 1855, after a number of important changes had been made to this Meeting House. Then I’ll fast forward to 1980, when some of the most radical changes were happening here in our Meeting House. And finally, I’ll talk about some surprising changes that are happening right now, in 2022.

Let’s begin by traveling back in time to 1750. In that year, our Meeting House embodied the social structures of the what was then called the Second Precinct of Hingham — we were not yet an independent town.

In 1750, where you sat within the Meeting House, what you sat on, who you sat next to — all these things were dictated by your social status. If you were part of a well-to-do family, you sat with your family, and you most likely sat in the center of the Meeting House. Half the money needed to construct this Meeting House came from taxes, but the other half came from auctioning off the space in the Meeting House where you could have a pew. The old documents referred to this as owning “ground” in the Meeting House.

If your family had a lot of money, you could afford to purchase ground in the center of the Meeting House. Then you could afford to build your family pew. You had to build the pew according to standards set by the proprietors of the Meeting House. But then, if your family was wealthy, the male head of your family would probably be one of the proprietors of the Meeting House, and so your family was one of the group that got to set the standards for pews.

If your family had less money, you’d be able to afford ground in a less desirable part of the Meeting House — under the galleries, off to the sides, or maybe even in the front of the galleries. Quite a few of the less wealthy families could not afford to build a pew for themselves right away, so the old records talk about “seats” and “seatlets.” These would have been less expensive to build — quite literally, the cheap seats.

And then there were the people who were not part of one of the land-owning families. This would have included itinerant laborers, enslaved persons, and free people of color, including both people of African descent and people of Native descent. It seems likely that the proprietors would not have allowed people in these categories to own ground within the Meeting House. But benches in the backs of the galleries were reserved for them.

Our Meeting House also embodied the strict gender divisions of mid-18th century Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1750, the Meeting House had three doors, and some of the histories suggest that women entered by the south door, men by the north door, and the minister came in the west door. Women who were not part of a land-owning family — that is, servants, enslaved women, perhaps indentured servants, and so on — had seats reserved for them in the south gallery. A partition carefully separated the women’s section from the rest of the gallery.

In other words, your socio-economic status and your gender and your race determined where you sat inside the Meeting House. Yet there was another strict division that was present but not visible in the building of the Meeting House. This was the division between those who “owned the covenant,” that is, had formally joined the church, and those who were not church members. You could own a pew and be one of the proprietors of the physical Meeting House, and yet not be a member of the church proper. When you became a member of the church, you had a special spiritual status, and you had more direct access to the minister. Joining the church was a way for women and people of color to gain in status, to gain prestige that would otherwise be denied them.

When I hear about these 18th century social divisions, our Meeting House begins to feel strange. While in many ways it still looks the same as it did back in 1750, the meaning we find in our Meeting House today differs substantially from the meaning they found.

Now let’s jump forward in time to 1855. We’ll skip over the exciting events of the American Revolution, with the choir anthem this morning to remind us of those dramatic events — the closet in the Meeting House where ammunition was hidden, the reading of the Declaration of Indpenedence from the pulpit, and so on.

By 1855, the Meeting House had been changed in a number of ways. The porch had been added to the front of the Meeting House in 1767; the tower and steeple in 1799. Stoves supplied heat to the Meeting House for the first time in 1822. Second Congregational Church had been organized in 1824, so town taxes no longer supported our congregation. The years from 1837 to 1855 saw the addition of the present pews, carpets on the floors, oil lamps, draperies blocking the windows behind the pulpit, and finally an organ in the west gallery. The north and south doors were long gone, and everyone came in together through the west door.

These substantial changes in the appearance of the Meeting House were accompanied by substantial changes in the social structure of the congregation. The congregation was now separate from the town; we had become a so-called “voluntary association,” that is, participation in the congregation was a voluntary act. I think it is no accident that the old box pews were replaced by the present pews a dozen years after church and town were separated. The new pews, our present pews, embody a different way of thinking about who is part of the congregation. The old box pews, with their high walls, would have carefully separated families from one another. The new pews allow us to see and hear one another better, they show that we are all part of one congregation. Families still owned their own pew, and the wealthier people still got to sit in the best locations. But the new pews give more of a sense of being one people worshipping together.

Interestingly, the congregation kept the old orientation of the pulpit. In the 19th century, some old meeting houses were converted into churches, by moving the pulpit from the long wall to the short wall of the building. That could easily have been done here when the new pews were installed. The pulpit could have been moved to the south wall, for example, with the main entrance through the tower, as in a conventional church. And in fact, the present stairs to the pulpit were probably added in 1838 — one architectural consultant thought that the door to the space under the pulpit on the south side is actually the door to one of the old pews.

So the pulpit was indeed modified in the mid-19th century. But our congregation chose to leave the pulpit on the long wall, maintaining this building as a meeting house. The floor plan of a meeting house has the effect of keeping the preacher closer to the rest of the congregation. This seems to me to correspond with a growing sense of egalitarianism within our congregation. Cohasset, along with Hingham, became a hotbed of abolitionism, and in 1842 the congregation called as its new minister Joseph Osgood, an abolitionist. I like to think that the egalitarian impulses of abolitionism are the same egalitarian impulses that maintained this as a meeting house.

By 1855, the interior of our Meeting House was much the same as we see it today. We’ve changed the carpet several times, there are not electric lights instead of oil lamps, and we get our heat from an oil-burning furnace instead of stoves. We also removed the heavy dark Victorian drapery that provided a backdrop to our pulpit, and in 1892 a new larger organ was built in the north gallery, replacing the old organ. Women gained the right to vote on parish affairs in the 1880s, and pew ownership ended about 1900, continuing the congregation’s trend of increasing egalitarianism. We changed the color of the walls more than once — in the 1960s, these walls were a pleasant blue color. But these are mostly minor changes, and if Joseph Osgood came back to preach here in the 1960s, I think he would have felt right at home. He would have felt comfortable in the building, and he would have felt comfortable with the social structures revealed in the appearance of our Meeting House.

But in the 1970s, a series of radical changes swept through our Meeting House. These radical changes didn’t cause too many architectural changes, but these social changes drastically changed the way we used the Meeting House.

Perhaps the most radical of these changes — I’d argue this was the most radical of all the changes to our Meeting House in its 275 year existence — was when the minister came out of the high pulpit and began preaching from the main floor. That minister was Edward Atkinson, who served this congregation from 1969 until his death in 1995. There’s a fabulous photograph of Ed Atkinson in our archives dating from the mid-1970s: he has a beard, he’s playing a guitar, and he’s sitting on a stool in front of the high pulpit. That one photograph encapsulates all kinds of stereotypes of the 1970s. [See a digitized copy of the photo below.]

But we shouldn’t let the stereotypes obscure the truly radical act of a straight white cis-gender male minister stepping out of a symbolical position of great power, and coming down to the same level as the rest of the congregation. I’m inclined to understand this act as an embodiment of the feminist revolution that swept through Unitarian Universalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Male ministers, and men in general, began to understand the power they got just from being male. This helps explain why Ed Atkinson decided to step out of the high pulpit, out of the literal position of power.

Second wave feminism brought other radical changes. We started lighting a flaming chalice in our worship services. This new religious ritual appears to have come from religious educators, ninety percent of whom were women. Lighting a chalice was an embodied ritual; it was something physical we did; it got us out of our heads and into our bodies. We adopted other new rituals that also got us out of our heads and into our whole selves including most notably lighting candles of joy and sorrow, and what we now call “Water Communion” that was originally called the “Water Ritual.”

By the 1990s, we were no longer content to sit still for most of an hour and listen to the minister — the male minister — preach to us. We began to worship with more than just our heads; we began to worship with our hands and our bodies and our whole selves. This was a radical revolution in Unitarian Universalist worship. It is still continuing. We still spend a lot of time sitting and listening. But at least now we listen to as much music as the spoken word.

Now let’s fast forward to the present day. Once again, we’re in the middle of a radical change in the way we use our Meeting House. That radical change is embodied in the livestreaming camera up in the gallery. You no longer have to be physically present in the Meeting House to participate in worship services. You can be in new Mexico, or in Wisconsin, or in Texas, or in Colorado, or Florida. Our Meeting House now exists online as well as in person.

Our online presence is so new we don’t even know how it’s going to affect us. As one example of what I mean, I’ve been hearing from our members and friends at a distance that they would like to be able to participate in some way in the candles of joy and concern. Currently we mute the microphone during the candles of joy and concern, to preserve people’s privacy. But this seems to me to move us away from egalitarianism; we have unwittingly created a class of worshippers who cannot fully participate in our services. This at a time when our society is being polarized; this in a time when we need to embrace community and egalitarianism.

And this leads me to the final point I’d like to make. It is we, the congregation, who create the meaning in this Meeting House. Yes, we are influenced by outside events — by abolitionism, by the second wave of feminism, by the online revolution. But we have a great deal of freedom in how we decide to respond to those outside events. We left behind the strict social divisions of 1750, while keeping the egalitarianism implicit in having our pulpit on the long wall. We embraced abolitionism in the mid-19th century. We embraced the feminist revolution in the 20th century.

In the 275th year of this Meeting House, we find ourselves in another time of great change. What creative ways will we find to embrace online worshippers? The moral arc of our congregation has always bent towards greater inclusiveness, towards greater egalitarianism, towards greater justice. May we find ways to keep that moral arc bending in that direction.

Man with beard sitting on a stool in front of the pulpit of First Parish in Cohasset. He is playing a guitar and wearing a three piece suit. — Rev. Edward T. Atkinson circa 1974. Photo courtesy First Parish archives.

Ecological Spirituality and Our Congregation

This sermon is one in an occasional series where I attempt to relate one of the seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association to current events, and to our congregation.

This week I thought I’d speak to you about the looming environmental disaster. The second reading this morning serves as an adequate reminder of the challenges we face, and I don’t think we need to rehearse the details of environmental disaster. I am sure most of us here this morning are all too aware of the problems we face. Nor do I want this to turn into one of those doom-and-gloom sermons. Instead, I’d like to reflect on what we might do as a religious community.

And it seems to me that we need a spiritual response to environmental disaster. Technological fixes will be necessary. Changes to our neoliberal capitalist economic system may be in order. Yet it seems to me technological and political and economic fixes are necessary, but not sufficient, for addressing environmental disaster.

This is not an original argument on my part. Back in 1966, historian Lynn White, Jr., presented an influential paper titled “The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” White contended that our current ecological crisis began in the Western world when our culture made the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. During the Enlightenment, the Western world began to draw a firm boundary between human beings on the one hand, and on the other hand all non-human organisms and rocks and soil and air and everything else. Furthermore, the Western worldview began to believe that we human beings are more important than anything else. And Westerners justified this new worldview with religion. For example, there’s a passage in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 1:28, which reads: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” [KJV] This was interpreted by many Westerners to mean that we humans were separate from the rest of Nature, and we could do whatever we want with everything else on earth. Even now, in our allegedly secular age, this religious worldview still dominates our thinking.

We may not quote the Bible any more in our secularized world, but it is an unquestioned axiom for most Westerners that we human beings have dominion over the non-human world. We humans get to make all the decisions. We humans don’t really need to consider any non-human viewpoints. If we do consider non-human viewpoints, we do so at our sole discretion.

This new Western worldview set up categories of binary opposites. We Westerners like to believe that there is humanity on the one hand, and Nature on the other hand. Nature is waiting to be tamed or subdued by humanity. Similarly, we tend to believe that mind and body are separate, with body waiting to be tamed by mind. And again, we Westerners believed for many centuries that man and woman were binary opposites, with women waiting to be tamed or subdued by men. Many people here in the United States still believe this about women. And we Westerners have believed for many centuries in a binary distinction between Civilization and Savagery, with Savages waiting to be tamed or subdued by civilized men (and I do mean men; in this worldview, it’s the men who do the subduing). So Westerners gave themselves permission to kill off the indigenous peoples of the United States, and to develop the brutal system of chattel slavery for people of African descent.

Our post-medieval Western worldview tends to categorize everything into binary opposites: mind – body; man – woman; civilized – savage; humanity – everything else. For each of these binary opposites, one of the opposites is more powerful and has dominion over the other binary opposite. This worldview helps justify colonialism, sexism slavery, and so on. This worldview gives license to the more powerful of the binary opposites to dominate the Other.

This remains the dominant worldview in the United States, and has real-world effects. Many people in our country still believe in the binary opposite of men and women, with the result that transgender people are discriminated against, women are no longer allowed to have abortions in many states, and women still earn less than men for the same work. Many people in our country still believe in the binary opposite of white-skinned people and non-white people, with the result that we can document significant differences in health and wealth among people simply on the basis of their skin color, and we also have a loud minority of white people who say that people of color should be ruled by white people. Many people in the United States still believe in the binary opposite of humanity versus the non-human world, with the result that it is considered perfectly acceptable to exploit the non-human world, as long as it benefits at least a few human beings.

I suggest that this is a religious or spiritual problem. We Westerners think of religion in terms of belief, but religion and spirituality are really about worldviews. Thus it becomes a spiritual exercise to stop thinking that one binary opposite should subdue or dominate the other binary opposite. We need to figure out a different worldview. And we Unitarian Universalists are especially well placed to do this work. We’re already heretics. We already know how to reinterpret Western religion so that it becomes less destructive.

Let’s return to that passage from the Hebrew Bible: “God blessed [the human beings], and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” As Unitarian Universalists, we have already come up with alternative ways to interpret this passage from the Hebrew Bible.

Our first reinterpretation of this Bible passage comes from feminism. As the second wave of feminism took hold within Unitarian Universalism, way back in the 1960s, we began to understand that “to have dominion” and “to subdue” are not the same thing as “to completely destroy.” As feminists, we would agree with Rosemary Radford Reuther, who in her book “Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing,” pointed out that the role of humans in this Bible passage is not that of “an owner who can do with it what he wills,” but rather that of a steward who is caring for the earth. We have not been given permission to cause some of God’s creations to go extinct.

Henry David Thoreau came up with another way to rethink that old passage from the Hebrew Bible. In 1862, in his essay “Walking,” he said, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” It should be remembered that Thoreau was raised as a Unitarian. However, he became an ardent abolitionist, and he left Unitarianism in part because the minister of the Unitarian church in Concord, where he lived, was at best a lukewarm supporter of abolitionism. So you can see that Thoreau rejected the binary opposition of white people over black people, of free people over enslaved people. Similarly, he rejected the binary opposition between humanity and the non-human world. He acknowledged that human beings could indeed “fill the earth and subdue it.” But he felt that our preservation depended upon reserving parts of the world for wildness.

Still a third interpretation of that old passage from the Hebrew Bible comes from theologian Bernard Loomer, a Presbyterian who joined the Berkeley, California, Unitarian Universalist church late in life. Loomer said that we misinterpret Jesus. Jesus was not God, but rather proclaimed the Kingdom of God. What Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God was precisely what Loomer termed the interdependent web of life. (Loomer, by the way, was the one who introduced Unitarian Universalists to the phrase “the interdependent Web of Life.”) In the Kingdom of God, not a sparrow falls but God knows about it; in the interdependent web of existence, all living beings are intimately connected, and not a one dies but that all are affected. We humans have dominion, but not in the sense of having power over other living beings. Instead, God told us humans that we have dominion, God was telling us that we power with, not power over, the non-human world.

More recently, we Unitarian Universalists have been exploring yet another spiritual worldview. We have been listening carefully to other spiritual worldviews. In fact, we’re experiencing this in the musical selections that Mary Beth has chosen for us this morning. I would especially draw your attention to the offertory music, a piece by Navajo composer Connor Chee titled “Hózhó” (and I’m afraid I’m mutilating the pronunciation of this Navajo word). In the composer’s notes, printed in your order of service, Chee explains the concept of hózhó, or balance. By listening carefully and respectfully to his music and his explanation — by listening to his spiritual worldview — we can experience another understanding of how human beings could relate to the non-human world. We don’t want to be condescending or impose Western standards onto the Navajo worldview, nor do we want to try to coopt Chee’s spiritual worldview and try to take it over for ourselves. We remain who we are, but through this cross-cultural encounter we can learn and grow.

So these are just some of the ways we Unitarian Universalists have already become aware of emerging worldviews, emerging spiritual outlooks. We need to shift our spiritual worldview, because the old Western religious worldview is what got us into this environmental mess. That old Western religious worldview showed us how to have absolute power over other humans and non-human beings. In these days of ecological crisis, we need to shift our focus slightly. An ecological worldview allows us to see, not how to have power over other beings, but how all beings are interconnected. The science of ecology expresses this in terms of systems theory, and interlocking feedback loops, and non-linear systems. Since all beings are connected, the harm we do to the least of those beings is harm done to the entire ecological system.

And actually, ecospiritualities aren’t really all that new. There is an ecospirituality in what Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God, about loving one’s neighbor as oneself. There is an ecospirituality when the Dao de Jing says, “…in giving birth you do not possess it, in doing it you do not retain it, in leading it you employ no authority…” [10b, trans. Robert Eno]. There is an ecospirituality in the traditional Navajo concept of hozho, balance.

That narrow old Western worldview is still dominant in our society. I find myself slipping into that old way of thinking. That’s one reason why we bring our children here, to nurture them with a different worldview. That’s one reason why we come here each week: to remind ourselves of other ways of being in the world, so we need not slip back into that old dominionist worldview. It might look like we’re just sitting in these pews, here in this two hundred and seventy five year old meeting house. Yet what we’re really doing here, week after week, is reminding each other of another way of being in the world. And when we leave here and go out into the world each week, we begin to reshape the worldview of rest of our society. What we do here affects the rest of the world, because we are all part of the interdependent web of life.