Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Western Religious Traditions

  • Gardens, not Walls

    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 the poem “Set the Garden on Fire” by Chen Chen. (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    Homily for the annual Water Ritual

    Every year, when we have this water ritual, we talk about how we are all connected. Or more precisely, how all human beings are connected to each other, and how all human beings are connected with all other living beings and indeed with the non-human world as well. We are literally, physically connected by the water cycle (as Kate and I pointed out during the moment for all ages), and we are also connected by ethical concerns, concerns that may not be physical but are just as literal as the water cycle.

    In the first reading, we heard a poem by Chen Chen, a now-middle-aged poet who was born in China and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. This is a poem about a suburban community. It could be a poem about Newton, or it could equally well be a poem about Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived and worked for the first forty years of my life, or it could just as well be a poem about Cohasset or Scituate or any South Shore suburban community. Here in the suburbs, we are both good at nurturing human community, and we are bad at nurturing human community.

    We are good at nurturing human community when we keep our communities safe so that we don’t have to fear interactions with strangers. We are good at nurturing human community when we support local organizations like parent-teacher groups, and elder affairs councils, and congregations, and scouting groups, and community aid groups like food pantries and the Cohasset Community Assistance Fund, and so on. Indeed, many of us move to the suburbs precisely because we think it will be easier to be part of human community here.

    On the other hand, suburbs can also be places that are actually destructive of human community. I’ll tell you a couple of stories to show what I mean, both taken from my home town of Concord. First story: A friend of mine had a new family move in next door, and when she saw her new neighbor getting his mail at the mailbox, she ventured to go up and say hello. He retrieved his mail from the mailbox, and then said into the air — not looking at her — “One of the things that I like about the suburbs is that you don’t have to talk to people.” Second story: When I was in my thirties, I was talking with an older friend about an affordable housing project that the town proposed building near her house. She was vehemently opposed, because, she said, “Black people might move in.” (She was so vehement I decided not to tell her that it was much more likely that I’d move in, because as a current town resident in the right income bracket, I’d get preference.) From these two stories, you can see that sometimes people in suburban towns do not nurture human connections.

    Of course this is true of people everywhere, not just in the suburbs. In the current political environment, we have two political parties whose primary vision for the future seems to be the eradication of the other political party. I have friends who are Democrats who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate Trump, and I have friends who are Republicans who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate liberals. Neither party are exemplars of nurturing human connection. Similarly, in the current ethical environment, too many of our thought leaders are people like the former CEO of Steward Health Care, who received hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, while at the same time the hospital chain didn’t have enough money to pay for critical supplies, or to pay staff salaries. Again, this man is not an exemplar of nurturing human connection.

    I’m reminded of a story in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath 31a. A man approached the famous Rabbi Hillel. “I would like to convert to Judaism and become a Jew,” he said. “I know I have to learn the Torah, but I’m a busy man. You must teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot.”

    “Certainly,” said Rabbi Hillel. “Stand on one foot.”

    The man balanced on one foot.

    “Repeat after me,” said Rabbi Hillel. “What is hateful to you, don’t do that to someone else.”

    The man repeated after Rabbi Hillel, “What is hateful to me, I won’t do that to someone else.”

    “That is the whole law,” said Rabbi Hillel. “All the rest of the Torah, all the rest of the oral teaching, is there to help explain this simple law. Now, go and learn it so it is a part of you.”

    Of course we all know that we shouldn’t do to someone else what is hateful to ourselves; as another rabbi put it, we all know that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. But notice that Rabbi Hillel adds the instruction: “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” (1) When Rabbi Hillel tells the man to go and study, he’s not talking about some academic kind of study; he’s talking about study as a sacred act; he’s talking about knowing something so well that it becomes a central part of who you are. An implicit part of this kind of study is that it must happen in community. This isn’t the kind of studying where you sit down alone somewhere and memorize a bunch of stuff. This is the kind of study where you engage with the biggest possible moral and ethical questions by talking and arguing with other people. Indeed, I’d argue that serious moral and ethical study can only be done in community, can only be done with other people.

    Actually, this is more or less what we do here each week on Sunday morning. Unlike some Christian traditions where the minister’s job is to preach from on high, telling the congregation what is right and what is wrong, our tradition is supposed to engender argument. (At least, that’s what I’d say, though it’s open to argument.) I would say that in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, oftentimes the role of the preacher is merely to articulate a problem or concern currently facing the congregational community, and to propose a preliminary resolution of that problem or concern. Then it is up to the members of the congregation to further think about and discuss the problem or concern, and to decide for themselves how this might affect their own lives.

    And when the preacher is wrong or inaccurate, it’s up to the elders of a Unitarian Universalist congregation to let the preacher know. When I was the minister at the New Bedford Unitarian church, Everett Hoagland, a poet and college professor, used to sit in the back pew in the center, and listen carefully to what I said in the sermon. He would tell me when something I said seemed particularly accurate or true; and when I got something wrong, he’d gently tell me where I went wrong. In that same congregation, Ken Peirce, a retired schoolteacher, sat in the center about a third of the way back. He would take notes during the sermon, and after the service hand me the notes as he greeted me on his way to social hour. His notes would often prompt a follow-up sermon.

    Now, not everyone is a college professor or retired schoolteacher. Most people are not going to take notes during a sermon and correct errors the way Ken and Everett did. I remember the old Universalist in one congregation who worked as the butcher at a local supermarket. What she wanted from a Sunday service, she said, was something to think about while she was at work during the week, something to turn over in her mind, something that might help her to live her life better. Or I think about Gladys, who was dying of cancer when I knew her; she had little interest in intellectual exercises, but she was facing the biggest possible human questions about life and death and mortality, and she came each Sunday to be part of a community where it normal and acceptable to talk about such big issues. Or I think about Nancy, who was in her seventies and homeless when I knew her; she came to Sunday services to have a time when she could think about something more than basic survival.

    To my mind, these people exemplify, each in their own way, what Rabbi Hillel meant when he said, “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” None of these people was Jewish, none of them read the actual Torah; but each of them, in their own way studied what it mean to be part of a community and a tradition that dealt with the highest moral and ethical and religious questions. For some of these people, study took the form of notes and verbal discussions. For others, study too the form of mulling over thoughts and ideas that might help one to lead a better life. Still others were confronting pressing questions of survival and life and death, and they needed a community where they could confront those questions openly and without shame.

    Because of this, I sometimes think the most important part of our Sunday services is social hour. That’s when you get a chance to have conversations with other people about life’s big issues. In our tradition, those conversations might not take the form of formal religious and theological discussion and argument; instead, those conversations are more likely to take the form of conversations about life and job and volunteer commitments and political actions and of course family (which includes both biological family and chosen family). Rabbi Hillel said that studying Torah was important, not for the sake of abstract religious and theological arguments, but rather for the sake of determining how to live by the dictum: “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” For Rabbi Hillel, study was not merely an academic matter, but a matter of the highest ethical values and concerns; study was not something you do in your head, study is something that affects your entire life.

    Socrates said something similar when he was facing the death penalty. According to Plato, Socrates told his accusers, “I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of [humanity], and that the unexamined life is not worth living.” (2) This, too, is what it means to study. To talk about virtue and other big questions is to lead a life that is well worth living.

    And now let me return to the suburbs, and to the poem by Chen Chen. In the poem, a Chinese family buys a house in the suburbs. At this point, the people living in the house next door have a couple of options. On the one hand, they could get to know this new family (and if they felt some resistance to getting to know the new family, they’d engage in a little self-examination to figure out why). On the other hand, they could plant a hedge of rose bushes, and begin to whisper rumors of drub money and illegals and so on. In the poem, the neighbors choose the second option. And in response, the poet says:

    “Friend, let’s really move in, let’s
    plunge our hands into the soil.
    Plant cilantro & strong tomatoes,
    watermelon & honey-hearted cantaloupe,
    good things, sweeter than any rose.
    Let’s build the community garden
    that never was. Let’s call the neighbors
    out, call for an orchard, not a wall.
    Trees with arms free, flaming
    into apple, peach, pear — every imaginable,
    edible fire.” (3)

    While the poet doesn’t talk about Torah study, I think he’s saying much the same thing as Rabbi Hillel. Both of them are teaching us the importance of nurturing human community. Whether you choose to use the metaphor of study, as Rabbi Hillel did; or the metaphor of discourse and conversation, as Socrates did; or the metaphor of planting a community garden, as Chen Chen does — the end result is the same. All these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” At the same time, all these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “that the unexamined life is not worth living.” And finally, all these are ways to call for an orchard, rather than a wall; to nurture human community, and further to nurture human community that is also a part of a community of all living beings.

    So those are the kinds of things that arise for me when I consider the imagery of the annual water ritual; that’s what arises for me when I ask myself how it is that all of us human beings are interconnected, and how it is that all human beings are connected with the rest of the universe. This is not to say that what comes up for me is any better than what comes up for you; you and I are both fallible beings, and it is only by talking together that we have a hope of coming closer to the ultimate truth.

    Notes

    (1) The William Davidson Talmud (Koren-Steinsaltz), www.sefaria.org/Shabbat.31a
    (2) Plato, The Apology, 38a; trans. Benjamin Jowett.
    (3) Chen Chen, “Set the Garden on Fire,” Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, ed. Melissa Tuckey (Univ of Georgia Press, 2018).

  • Another View of Easter

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

    Easter is one of those holidays that has spread out beyond its original religious setting. For Christians, Easter is the culmination of Holy Week, a week of religious observance. Holy week begins with Palm Sunday, which commemorates the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth into Jerusalem to celebrate Pesach, or Passover (remember they were all observant Jews). Then there’s Maundy Thursday, which according to tradition was when Jesus and his followers had a Seder. Good Friday is a solemn observance of when the Romans executed Jesus. Then Easter Sunday is the joyous celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.

    Now all this was confusing to me as a Unitarian Universalist child. By the rigid religious divisions that existed in Massachusetts back then, Unitarians were called Protestants. But — just like here in Cohasset — the Unitarian congregation I grew up in started out as a Puritan church. For those who inherited the Puritan tradition, there was only one holy day, and that was Sunday; any other holiday was considered to be mere superstition. As a result, when I was a child I didn’t understand Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and all the rest. Even today, I have to admit I still default to the Puritan tradition that says Sunday is the only holy day.

    Some years ago, I was the Director of Religious Education at First Parish in Lexington, which like our congregation started out as a Puritan church. One year, just like this year, Easter happened to fall on the Sunday closest to April 19 or Patriots Day. Most of you probably think of Patriots Day — if you think of it at all — as that three day weekend in April when they run the Boston Marathon. But if you live in Lexington or Concord, you quickly learn that Patriots Day is when all good Americans celebrate the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

    Now as the oldest church in Lexington, First Parish in Lexington was the church of the Minutemen. On the Sunday closest to Patriots Day, there would always be men dressed up in Minuteman costumes, and women wearing 18th century dresses. In my recollection, the Sunday nearest Patriots Day was also the only Sunday during the year when they celebrated communion. In the Unitarian tradition, communion typically is a simple commemoration of the Last Supper. But in First Parish in Lexington, it became more than a commemoration of the Last Supper; with the men and women in 18th century garb, and with the congregation’s 18th century communion silver making its annual appearance, communion also become a sort of historical reenactment of 18th century communion services. Then when Patriots Day fell close to Easter, there would also be an Easter celebration layered on top of all that.

    While this may sound weird and confusing, this is actually the way most religions operate. Pop culture, local history, and religious traditions get all mushed together, making a glorious celebratory mash-up. The fundamentalist Christians and the hard-core atheists are both highly critical of this kind of cultural mash-up, because (as they rightly point out) it does not make rational sense. This is why atheists and conservative Christians criticize Easter eggs, and the Easter Bunny, and Minutemen at Easter services in Lexington. But for the rest of us, cultural mash-ups are loads of fun. We eat our chocolate eggs, we don’t worry about the contradictions, and we welcome the Minutemen on Easter.

    One reason I happen to be thinking about all this is because yesterday was the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and today is Easter. I went to the celebration in Concord yesterday, and there is something inside me fully expecting someone to walk through the door of our 18th century meetinghouse, all dressed up in 18th century garb.

    Another reason I happen to be thinking about all this is because over the last century or so, liberal Christians have been thinking about Easter and Holy Week in new ways. The Christian tradition makes it clear that Jesus and his followers went into Jerusalem to celebrate Pesach, or Passover. Pesach celebrates the Exodus, when the ancient Israelites escaped from the bondage and political oppression they experienced in Egypt. In the time of Jesus, Jews no longer lived in Egypt, but they were once again oppressed, this time by the Roman Empire. In an essay published last week in the New York Times, Episcopal priest Andrew Thayer wrote that Palm Sunday celebrations “often miss an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’ procession: At the time, it was a deliberate act of theological and political confrontation. It wasn’t just pageantry; it was protest.”(1)

    In this interpretation of the Easter story, Jesus came, not just to save souls for heaven, but also to push back against the economic policies of the Roman Empire that kept so many Jews living in poverty. Jesus may have wanted to get people into heaven after they died, but he was also seriously concerned about the well-being of people here and now, while they were still alive.

    If we think about Palm Sunday in this way, we might think about Easter differently, too. Instead of making a theological point about the salvation of individuals, we could also think of Easter as a holiday that celebrates the resilience of an entire community. Although it sometimes gets obscured, the central purpose of Christianity is to be a community with the goal to take care of all who are poor and downtrodden. The Romans could kill Jesus, but they could not kill an entire movement devoted to taking care of those who are less fortunate.

    When we think about the Easter story in this way, then it doesn’t seem quite so odd that First Parish in Lexington sometimes had men in Minuteman suits show up on Easter Sunday. Even thought the political situation at the time of the American Revolution was very different from the political situation in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus — even though the underlying philosophies of the Jesus movement and the American Revolution had important differences — nevertheless, both Jesus’s followers, and the architects of the American republic, had a sense that each and every human personality was something to be cherished. When the founders of the United States said that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,” they were drawing on an ethical tradition that goes back to Jesus; that tradition goes even further back, to the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible, where it says: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (2). This is the ethical tradition of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do to you; and this same idea is not exclusive to Judaism and Christianity, but appears in somewhat different forms in nearly every human culture throughout history.

    We live in a time when there are deep divisions in our country. I think most Americans still profess devotion to the Golden Rule — whether we use the words of Leviticus, or one of the other great ethical and religious traditions where the same principle is articulated. But we are deeply divided about how to apply this principle in real life. Does the Golden Rule apply to LGBTQ people? Does the Golden Rule apply to people who are poor? Does the Golden Rule apply to immigrants? Does the Golden Rule apply to both Republicans and Democrats?

    While most Americans seem to agree that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we currently have bitter disagreements on how this might play out politically. And in our bitter disagreements, some of us have been descending into outright hatred. Sometimes we seem to forget that the Golden Rule applies not just to people who share our religion and our politics, but also to the people of other religions, and to people from other countries, and even to people who belong to a different political party.

    This country experienced similar deep divisions back in the 1960s and 1970s. I was a child and teenager in those decades, and I remember listening to the news on television and hearing about the assassinations, the bombings, and the people throwing rocks at school buses right here in eastern Massachusetts.

    Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., captured the feeling of that era in his 1968 speech at Grosse Point High School, when he retold the story of the Good Samaritan. This is the story, as you may remember, of the man who was going over the dangerous mountain road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This man was attacked by robbers, severely beaten, and left to die by the side of the road. A priest and a Levite — both solid upstanding citizens — walked by, saw the man lying there, and hurried away; King says that no doubt they both worried that this was a trap set by robbers to lure them in so that they would be robbed. Then a Samaritan — a member of a despised religious minority — came by, but he stopped to help. King concluded the story by saying: “…the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”(3)

    By telling this story, Dr. King revealed an essential problem of human ethics. We know from the Golden Rule that we are called upon to help others; but over and over again, we think only of what will happen to us. Considering just our own country, we have seen this happen again and again in American history: over and over again, we have forgotten this high ideals of the American Revolution, and we have reverted back to a primitive selfishness. In a sermon he gave in 1967, Dr. King said that over and over again Jesus tried to show human beings how to follow the Golden Rule, but that over and over again we turn away from the truth — just as the priest and the Levite turned away from the man who had been beaten and left lying by the side of the road — just as the Roman Empire turned away from the truth of the golden Rule when they executed Jesus on trumped-up political charges. But although too often we turn away from the Golden Rule, we also feel that there is another way. Dr. King put it this way: “[People] love darkness rather than the light, and they crucified [Jesus], and there on Good Friday [when Jesus died] it was still dark, but the Easter came, and Easter is an eternal reminder of the fact that the truth crushed [to] earth will rise again.”(4)

    And that is my Easter hope for you. Even though the deep divisions in our country are crushing the truth of the Golden Rule at the moment — even though the hatred that exists in our country is crushing the truth of this ancient teaching from the Hebrew Bible that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves — despite everything that’s going on around us, Easter is an eternal reminder that the truth crushed to earth will rise again.

    Notes

    (1) Andrew Thayer, “Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession,” New York Times, 13 April 2025.
    (2) Leviticus 19:18.
    (3) Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Other America,” speech at Grosse Point (Mich.) High School, 14 March 1968. In the opening sentence of this speech, King recognized the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Grosse Point, Rev. Harry Meserve; Meserve had served as the minister of First Parish in Cohasset in the late 1930s. Text from the Grosse Point Historical Society website: https://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/index.htm accessed 19 April 2025.
    (4) Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon,” Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, 24 December 1967.

  • Math and Religion

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

    Readings

    The first reading was an excerpt from the essay “A Mindful Beauty” by the mathematician Joel E. Cohen, from the September, 2009, issue of American Scholar.

    “My grade-school education in mathematics included a strict prohibition against mixing apples and oranges. As an adult buying fruit, I often find it convenient to mix the two. If the price of each is the same, the arithmetic works out well. The added thrill of doing something forbidden, like eating dessert first, comes free. In any case, the prohibition against combining apples and oranges falls away as soon as we care about what two subjects, different in some respects, have in common.

    “I want to mix apples and oranges by insisting on the important features shared by poetry and applied mathematics. Poetry and applied mathematics both mix apples and oranges by aspiring to combine multiple meanings and beauty using symbols. These symbols point to things outside themselves, and create internal structures that aim for beauty. In addition to meanings conveyed by patterned symbols, poetry and applied mathematics have in common both economy and mystery. A few symbols convey a great deal. The symbols’ full meanings and their effectiveness in creating meanings and beauty remain inexhaustible….

    “The differences between poetry and applied mathematics coexist with shared strategies for symbolizing experiences. Understanding those commonalities makes poetry a point of entry into understanding the heart of applied mathematics, and makes applied mathematics a point of entry into understanding the heart of poetry. With this understanding, both poetry and applied mathematics become points of entry into understanding others and ourselves as animals who make and use symbols.”

    The second reading was from the poem “Equation” by Caroline Caddy:

    …working through difficult equations
    was like walking
    in a pure and beautiful landscape —
    the numbers glowing
    like works of art….

    The third reading was from a letter written by Albert Einstein, as printed in Albert Einstein, the Human Side: New Glimpses from His Archives (Princeton Univ. Press, 1979):

    “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

    Sermon: “Math and Religion”

    In honor of Pi Day, which was yesterday, I’d like to talk this morning about the connection of mathematics and religion. The right-wing Christians who make so much noise these days keep trying to tell us that religion has nothing to do with either math or science. But the connection between mathematics and religion in Western culture predates Christianity, and goes back to the ancient Greeks.

    The first great mathematician in Western culture was Pythagoras. Pythagoras is best known today for the theorem known as the Pythagorean theorem: in a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the squares of the two other sides. But Pythagoras was not just a mathematician. He also founded a religious community, which was remarkable for combining serious mathematical and scientific inquiry with some fairly strange religious beliefs.

    Pythagoras was born in Greece, on the island of Samos. As a young man, he traveled around the Mediterranean Sea seeking learning and wisdom. He supposedly learned arithmetic from the Phoenicians, geometry from the Egyptians, and astronomy from the Chaldeans. He also learned some interesting religious rituals. Tradition tells us that the Egyptians didn’t want to teach him about geometry, so to dissuade him they made him follow strict religious rituals. But Pythagoras wanted to learn the secrets of geometry, and followed all the rituals carefully. So Pythagoras learned his math and science along with religious ritual.(1) Mind you, religion was not the same as it is today.(2) Rather than being focused on personal belief in a transcendent god, religion primarily consisted of ritual, most of promoted social cohesion.

    In addition, much of what passed for scientific investigation in that time took place in what we would call religious communities. This actually makes a lot of sense. If you want to gather enough data to be able to predict eclipses — one of the major scientific achievements in Pythagoras’s day, and one which he was directly involved in — then you need a stable community that can support people who spend their time observing the night sky; a community that can collect and safely store data over fairly long periods of time; and a community that brings together people who learn from one another and strive together for the truth. In fact, this kind of community still lies at the root of scientific and mathematical progress. If you’re doing math or science, you have to be in a community of peers that can review your work; that’s how scientific progress happens. Pythagoras not only learned in such communities, he brought the concept back to Greece, and founded his own religious community.

    The Pythagorean community was governed by a set of rules, such as the rule prohibiting the consumption of beans.(3) Pythagoras was convinced of the transmigration of souls, and he thought the movement of souls took place through bean plants. There mix of “semi-scientific observation” with superstition sounds alien to us today, but as one scholar puts it, “a network of cleverly designed reasons, with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls at its center, held the whole system together….”(4) Today we would not call this science, but it does represent the beginnings of science.

    And the Pythagorean community managed to come up with some pretty interesting discoveries in math and science. The Pythagorean community discovered the connection between numbers and music; predicted eclipses; developed the idea of numbers as shapes, as in the square of a number or the cube of a number; and with the Pythagorean theorem helped lay the foundations for geometrical proof later perfected by Euclid. Finally, Pythagoras is supposed to have said that “all things are numbers,” which in a generous interpretation resembles the way science today uses mathematics to model reality.(5)

    Also noteworthy is that the Pythagorean community admitted women as members.(6) By today’s standards we would doubtless consider the Pythagorean community to be hopelessly sexist, but by the standards of their day they were unbelievably progressive. Women in the Pythagorean community contributed to the theoretical work of the community, and wrote their own treatises. This may be the earliest recognition that women have just as much to contribute to math and science as men; a fact that certain elements in today’s scientific and mathematical communities are still trying to accommodate themselves to.(7)

    We also get our word “theory” from the ancient Greek word “theoria.” For the Pythagorean community, “theoria” meant a kind of “passionate sympathetic contemplation” that came out of mathematical knowledge; it represented a kind of “ecstatic revelation.”(8) While I am not especially adept at mathematics, this does describe the feeling I’ve gotten at times when I’ve finally managed to follow a proof of a challenging theory — a very satisfying feeling that comes upon perceiving something that’s really true and good and beautiful and unchanging. Right-wing Christians would be horrified to hear me say this, but this is indeed a kind of religious experience.

    This brings me to Kurt Godel, the next mathematician I’d like to talk about. You may have heard of Godel from the bestselling book Godel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, written in 1979 by Douglas Hofstader. However, I first encountered Godel in 1981 when I took an introductory course in mathematical logic. This class was designed to give us enough background so that we could follow the proof of Kurt Godel’s famous incompleteness theorems.

    I remember being blown away by the implications of Godel’s incompleteness theorems. The first incompleteness theorem can be summarized like this: “Any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete; i.e., there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F.”(9) What I took from Godel was this: that within a logically consistent system like arithmetic, you have to accept some statements that cannot be proven within that system. And even though you might be able to construct another logically consistent theorem that would allow you to prove those unproved axioms, there would be other axioms that you couldn’t prove within that second system.

    Godel’s theorems obviously have implications for mathematics, but Godel himself believed that they had also implications for all human thought. John W. Dawson, a mathematician and biographer of Godel, put it this way, quoting in part from one of Godel’s lectures:

    “[Godel] believed [there was] a disjunction of philosophical alternatives. Either ‘the working of the human mind cannot be reduced to the working of the brain, which to all appearances is a finite machine,’ or else ‘mathematical objects and facts … exist objectively and independently of our mental acts and decisions.’ Those alternatives were not … mutually exclusive. Indeed, Godel was firmly convinced of the truth of both.”(10)

    If Godel was correct, this becomes very interesting. First, if the human mind is indeed something more than the workings of the brain, what is that something more? Perhaps this is no unlike what the ancient Pythagoreans called “soul.” We Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worthiness and dignity of every personality. In this sense, we agree with Godel that human beings, and other sentient beings, are something more than mere machines.

    Second, if mathematical objects exist objectively and independently of our mental acts, what does that mean for science? Most of us these days believe that mathematics is useful because it creates models to help us understand the physical world. We typically believe that the greatness of the mathematics in Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, is that the mathematics helps us understand observations made in real world scientific experiments. But Godel understood mathematical objects to have an independent existence. Since they are not bound to things in the real world, these pure mathematical objects are not perceived through the usual senses. We intuit them directly, through our minds. Compare this to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, a Unitarian who remains the biggest single influence on , was a Transcendentalist who said that we could directly apprehend truth and beauty. Thus, we Unitarian Universalists are like Godel in that we have a tendency to think that we can apprehend truth directly with our minds.

    This brings me to the third and last mathematician I’d like to talk about: Karen Uhlenbeck, a Unitarian Universalist who also happens to be one of the greatest of living mathematicians. Uhlenbeck received a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1982, and in 2019 became the first woman to win the Abel Prize, the most prestigious prize in mathematics. The Abel award cited Uhlenbeck for “her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.”(12)

    Sadly, I don’t have the background to understand Uhlenbeck’s mathematical achievements.(13) I did discover, however, that she has spoken about the connection between mathematics and introspection, and between mathematics and community. Both introspection and community are characteristic of Unitarian Universalist notions of religion, and I wondered if this might represent a connection between mathematics and religion.

    Not long after she was announced as the winner of the Abel Prize, Uhlenbeck was asked if she though success in mathematics is partly due to concentration. She replied, “I think you can’t do mathematics without the ability to concentrate. But also, that’s where the fun is, the rest of the world fades away and it’s you and the mathematics.” In that same interview, Uhlenbeck said: “You struggle with a problem, it can be over a period of years, and you suddenly get some insight. You’re suddenly seeing it from a different point of view and you say: ‘My goodness, it has to be like that.’ You may think all along that it has to be like that, but you don’t see why, and then suddenly at some moment you see why it is true….”(14)

    To me, the way Uhlenbeck describes what it feels like to solve mathematical problems sounds similar to how people who have meditation or mindfulness practices describe their epxeriences. The process goes something like this: you concentrate, and the world fades away, and it’s just you and something beyond yourself. Then, if you concentrate long enough, you may have an “aha” experience that really feels out of the ordinary, where you feel like you’ve seen something new and (dare I say it) beautiful. So I emailed Uhlenbeck to ask if she thought there was a similarity between doing math and doing meditation. She replied, in part: “When I try to meditate, I usually end up thinking about math. They are very similar.”(15)

    Indeed, this experience occurs in many different pursuits. In the first two readings, mathematician Joel E. Cohen and poet Caroline Caddy both find a deep connection between poetry and mathematics, because both “create internal structures that aim for beauty.”(16) In these kinds of experiences, we use symbols to help us perceive the beauty and order of the universe. The poets and mathematicians have the original insights, and then we ordinary folks can experience some of the same wonder by following the mathematical proof, or reading the poem, or reading one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Although right-wing Christians would disagree, I would call these religious experiences.

    Mathematics and religion are also connected in that human community is central to both. Most obviously for mathematics, when a mathematician thinks they have done some original work in mathematics, they have to write it up and publish it so that their work can be reviewed by other mathematicians. Individual mathematicians may work alone, but overall mathematical progress happens in community, as mathematicians check each other’s work, and then build upon the work of others.

    Religion also requires human community, for much the same reasons. Take Ralph Waldo Emerson as an example. Emerson had one or two insights on religious matters, and wrote them up in an essay he titled “Nature.” When he first published the essay, some people thought it was brilliant and others thought it was garbage. Over time and after much discussion, a consensus arose that Emerson really had come up with some genuine insights into religion. Still others came along and extended Emerson’s insights, including people like Henry David Thoreau.(17) Emerson’s new ideas first had to be carefully considered by a human community, and then extended by other people.

    Karen Uhlenbeck refers aspect of human community in an interview. When Uhlenbeck was doing postdoctoral work at the University of California in Berkeley in the 1960s, she found herself in the midst of tumultuous political activity concerning the Vietnam War, women’s rights, and so on. Uhlenbeck had always thought of mathematics as somehow separate from politics. But, she told an interviewer, “I was startled to see the politics appear in the math department. It was eye-opening to me… up until that time I had seen mathematics as a very bookish thing and that what went on in the mathematical community had nothing to do with the life out there on the streets, and this is not true.” In other words, Uhlenbeck realized that mathematics is a human activity that’s done by humans. This means that “all of what goes on between humans appears in the mathematics community, perhaps toned down quite a bit, but it’s not a world of pure brains, people behaving rationally and unemotionally.” (18)

    One of the very human problems in the mathematics community that Uhlenbeck became aware of was that nearly all mathematicians were men. She told one interviewer, “if I had been five years older, I could not have become a mathematician because disapproval would be so strong.”(19) Thus while human community is necessary, human community also has problems that must be addressed. If you’re a mathematician, you can’t just take the human community for granted, you have to be willing to confront the faults and problems of that human community. Obviously, the same is true for any human community, including religious communities.

    In today’s world, we have a strong tendency to separate religion from mathematics and science. Yet by so doing, I think we place unwarranted restrictions on religion. The right-wing Christians are wrong — religion, religious experience and activity, can not be restricted to the very narrow sphere of personal belief in a transcendent god. Religion includes the introspection that occurs not only in meditation and centering prayer and mindfulness practice, but also introspection of doing math and science. Religion and mathematics can both result in ecstatic experiences that come when you gain insight into truth. Both religion and mathematics are rooted in human community. And while you, personally, may not have ecstatic experiences or pursue introspective practices, yet as a part of a human community we accept the differences between us, and try to lrean from those differences.

    Notes

    (1) Christopher Riedwig, Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence, p. 8.
    (2) See, e.g., Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of Modern Concept, Yale Univ. Press, 2013.
    (3) Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosopy, p. 32.
    (4) Riedwig, p. 71.
    (5) Russell, p. 35.
    (6) Much of what follows is taken from Sarah B. Pomeroy, Pythagorean Women: Their History and Writings, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2013.
    (7) See, for example, the 2005 remarks of Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University. According to the Harvard Crimson, “Summers’ Comments of Women and Science Draw Ire” (14 Jan. 2005, article by Daniel J. Hemel), Summer said “the under-representation of female scientists at elite universities may stem in part from ‘innate’ differences between men and women….” Admittedly, this is not precisely what Summers said, but for a good discussion of the implications of Summers’s remarks, see “What Larry Summers Said — and Didn’t Say,” Swarthmore College Bulletin, Jan. 2009, article signed “D.M.,” available online: https://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/archive/wp/january-2009_what-larry-summers-said-and-didnt-say.html
    (8) Russell, p. 33. The OED says that “theoria” refers to contemplation, including the contemplation of beauty.
    (9) Panu Raatikainen, “Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/goedel-incompleteness/ accessed 15 March 2025. For an explanation of both Godel’s proof, and its implications, designed for the intelligent layperson, see: Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel’s Proof, New York Univ. Press, 1958; this book is available to read online at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/gdelsproof00nage/page/n5/mode/2up
    (10) John W. Dawson Jr., Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Godel, p. 198.
    (12) Isaac Chotiner, “A Groundbreaking Mathematician on the Gender Politics of Her Field,” New Yorker, 28 March 2019.
    (13) For those who do have the background to understand Uhlenbeck’s work, a discussion of her achievements in variational problems in differential geometry is freely available online in Simon Donaldson, “Karen Uhlenbeck and the Calculus of Variations,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March 2019, pp. 303-313 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/noti1806. There may well be other such technical summaries available online and not hidden behind paywalls.
    (14) Bjørn Ian Dundas and Christian Skau, “Interview with Abel Laureate Karen Uhlenbeck,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March 2020 [reprint of an interview originally published in Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society, September 2019], p. 400.
    (15) Karen Uhlenbeck, personal communication, 11 Feb. 2025.
    (16) Joel E. Cohen, “A Mindful Beauty,” American Scholar, September 2009.
    (17) As an aside on Emerson: In his book The American Evasion of Philosophy (Univ. of Wisconsin, 1989), Cornell West argues that Emerson also lies at the root of the American philosophical tradition: “The fundamental argument of this book is that the evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy — from Emerson to Rorty — results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises.” (p. 5) Our Unitarian Universalist religious tradition is directly influenced by this philosophical tradition.
    (18) Isaac Chotiner, “A Groundbreaking Mathematician on the Gender Politics of Her Field,” New Yorker, 28 March 2019.
    (19) Ibid. A side note: To help inspire more young women to go into mathematics, Uhlenbeck wrote an essay for the book Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering: No Universal Constants, ed. Susan A. Ambrose, Temple Univ. Press, 1997, pp. 395 ff.; this essay is freely available on her website here: https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/uhlen/vita/pers.html.

    Visual of text and mathematical formulae.
    An excerpt from Simon Donaldson’s article mentioned in the Notes.