Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Western Religious Traditions

  • Winter Solstice

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

    Readings

    The first reading was an excerpt from the long poem titled “Shapechangers in Winter” by Margaret Atwood (not available online due to copyright restrictions).

    The second reading was a short poem by Unitarian Universalist poet Annie Finch titled “Winter Solstice Chant” (available online here).

    Sermon: “Winter Solstice”

    Beginning about fifty years ago, an unknown number of religious progressives began drifting away from traditions like Christianity, Judaism, and secular humanism to embrace Paganism. Paganism is an umbrella term that includes a variety of traditions, but probably the best known of the Pagan traditions is Wicca. People who follow the Wiccan tradition usually observe eight main seasonal celebrations — I say “usually,” because Wicca is extremely decentralized and people decide on their own how to practice Wicca. But the eight usual Wiccan celebrations include solstices, equinoxes, and the four days roughly equidistant from solstices and equinoxes; and each of these has its own name, so that for example the winter solstice celebration is called Yule, or Yuletide.

    Back in the 1990s, I had a friend who was a Pagan and a Unitarian Universalist minister. In my recollection, she was a feminist who was inspired by Wiccan theologies that placed more emphasis on the divine feminine than on the divine masculine. And my recollection is that she was one of the Pagans who paid great attention to aesthetics, with carefully decorated worship spaces, with special aesthetically pleasing clothing, with compelling music, with incense, and so on — aesthetics that engaged the intellect, the senses, and the emotions in deep and meaningful ways.

    When she finished qualifying as a Unitarian Universalist minister, several of us were curious where she would find a position as a minister. There are many Unitarian Universalist congregations that are definitively humanist, and it was hard to imagine a goddess-worshipping Pagan as their minister. There are even more Unitarian Universalist congregations that engage the head far more than the heart, and it was hard to imagine those congregations valuing the aesthetic skills of our frined.

    We were a bit surprised when she was hired as the assistant minister of King’s Chapel in Boston. How would a Pagan minister fit into a Christian Unitarian Universalist congregation? But she pointed out that King’s Chapel is really good at ritual; they use a poetic prayer book; and they have a beautiful building and music, and aesthetically pleasing rituals. We wondered how her Pagan theology would mesh with King’s Chapel’s Christian theology, but she pointed out they were progressive Christians who were feminist and LGBTQ-friendly and oriented towards making the world a better place.

    I’ve been thinking about this friend of mine this month. Here in the northern hemisphere, late December seems to call out for ritual and for beauty. I think of our Christmas Eve candlelight service here in our Meetinghouse, with lots of candles, lovely music, and the same beautiful readings every year. That kind of beauty and ritual is both comforting and enlivening in the darkest time of the year. What we do here on Christmas Eve is not so different from Pagan winter solstice celebrations. The ritual is different, of course, but there are candles and lovely music and beauty. In the overall feeling, you can see a family resemblance there.

    Part of the reason that there’s a family resemblance there is because both Christianity and Paganism are syncretic religions. From what I can observe, nearly all religions are syncretic. Every religion incorporates elements from the cultures in which they are embedded. Here in this country, we tend to associate Christmas with certain kind of music — Handel’s Hallelujah chorus; the carol “Go Tell It on the Mountains”; songs like “White Christmas.” Handel’s Messiah is European art music based on Western Christian traditions. “Go Tell It on the Mountains” has roots in African American traditions including both Christianity and traditional African beliefs and values. “White Christmas” is a pop song written by a Jewish composer.

    We here in the United States tend to take this for granted, and we assume that everyone who celebrates Christmas sings the same songs. But Christmas is always influenced by the surrounding culture. For example, consider Maori Christmas songs. New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere, and one Maori Christmas song goes out of the way to disavow the connection of winter and Christmas: “Not on a snowy night / By star or candlelight / Nor by an angel band…” (1) In another example, Christmas in Ethiopia is associated with a traditional game that’s a bit like field hockey. A classic Ethiopian Christmas song says: “We are so glad Christmas is here. We can all play the Christmas game. When we do, everyone is equal….” (2) Ethiopia is close to the equator, with little variation in the length of days, with the result that Ethiopian Christmas songs don’t mention cold or snow or evergreens or shortened days.

    Here in the northern hemisphere, however, Christmas does come at the darkest, coldest time of the year. As a result, in both Europe and North America Christmas has come to be associated with the winter solstice — with the longest night; with candlelight and starlight; with rituals to bring back the light and make the days grow long once again. Not surprisingly, we have incorporated a number of non-Christian customs into Christmas. And for us, this has become part of the magic and wonder of Christmas time.

    One of the magical aspects of Christmas time that I especially enjoy is the singing of Christmas carols. Although we think of Christmas carols as being Christian, the reality is more complicated. It appears that Christmas caroling also has roots in the ancient custom of wassailing. Wassail is an alcoholic drink made out of apples. To go wassailing meant to go from door to door singing wassail songs, and at each house where you sang you’d get a glass of wassail to drink, and even gifts of coins. Thus Christmas caroling draws upon both Christianity, and ancient customs relating to the winter solstice.

    We can see this same process at work in other rituals and traditions of this time of year. Santa Claus started out as the Christian Saint Nicholas, went to Holland where he became Sinterklaas, a skinny person whose saint’s day was December 5. Sinterklaas came to North American, put on weight, changed his name to Santa Claus, and became associated with Christmas. (3) Santa was given reindeer by Washington Irving in the early nineteenth century. In 1939, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer appeared in a department store promotional booklet, and then got popularized by a Jewish songwriter. Today Santa leaves presents under an evergreen tree, a symbol of ancient Paganism.

    This mixing of — and invention of — cultural and religious traditions continues in our own day. Some American Jewish households have a Hannukah tree. Some American Hindu households put up a Christmas tree as a way of exposing their children to different cultural traditions. (4) Secular capitalism is another cultural influence: since 2005, for example, the “elf on the shelf” marketing juggernaut has become an integral part of Christmas. (5)

    Today’s Christian fundamentalists and latter-day Puritans tell us that Christmas should be a purely Christan holiday — where they get to decide what “purely Christian” means — and that we should never allow elements of winter solstice celebrations to sully their purified Christmas. And today’s atheist fundamentalists tell us that we should have a perfectly pure secular society, where all religious holidays should only be celebrated behind closed doors.

    These efforts to purify religion, to purify people’s thoughts and feelings, to purify people’s preferred rituals — these efforts mostly fail. Purification might work for a short time but human society keeps on growing and changing. In seventeenth century Massachusetts, the Puritans made Christmas illegal, in part to eradicate the custom of wassailing. But that effort at purification ultimately failed, as new Christmas and Yuletide customs evolved.

    The old Puritans and today’s fundamentalists tend towards religious literalism. But we need not be religious literalists. We can experience religion as cultural production not unlike theatre and literature and music, where deeper meaning is communicated not literally but through metaphor. Thus, those of us who are not religious literalists do not have to believe in the truth or falsity of some Christian Christmas dogma. Instead, we can become alive to a wide range of metaphor and meaning.

    For me, this is part of the attraction of observing the winter solstice. At this time of year, I seem to crave those things that make me feel connected with the cycles of the non-human world. At this darkest time of year, we think about the metaphors that go along with darkness, with the absence of light. In her book Dreaming the Dark, Pagan thealogian Starhawk talks about the many meanings of darkness: There is the darkness that represents “all we are afraid of, all that we don’t want to see — fear, anger, sex, grief, death, the unknown.” But, says Starhawk, there is also the kind of darkness she calls the “turning dark,” representing movement and change. And, says Starhawk, there is also the “velvet dark…[representing] touch, joy, mortality”; and the “birth-giving dark: seeds are planted underground, the womb is dark, and life forms anew in hidden place.” (6) Starhawk finds these many meaning in a metaphorical understanding of darkness.

    And all these images and metaphors are present in the idea of the winter solstice: The dark that goes along with fear and grief and anger. The darkness that is not a color but is the absence of light. The dark that represents the turning of the year, the point at which the days grow longer once again. The dark that gives birth, as the growing sunlight will eventually bring springtime and new life (and perhaps this includes stories like the Christmas story, a story that centers around a new child who is born in the dark of the night). And the velvet darkness, the darkness that soothes and touches and brings joy. All these images can become part of a metaphorical interpretation of this time of year.

    Nor do we need to identify a single simple literal meaning of complex metaphors. We don’t have to fit metaphors into a scientific world view. Sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor; and sometimes we don’t even have to make rational sense out of a metaphor.

    With that thought in mind, I’ll end with this poem by Mary Oliver:

    Notes

    (1) Translation from the New Zealand Folk*Song website, lyrics for “Te Harinui by Willow Macky, 1957” https://folksong.org.nz/nzchristmas/te_harinui.html accessed 16 Dec 2024.
    (2) Translation from the description to the Youtube video “Munit and z Lovebugs – Asina Genaye (Ethiopian Christmas Song)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoAPXsUaXN8 accessed 21 Dec 2024.
    (3) Ivan Natividad, “For the Dutch, Santa Is Tall and Skinny. What Happened to Him in America?” University of California at Berkeley Research, December 21, 2023 https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/dutch-santa-tall-and-skinny-what-happened-him-america accessed 21 Dec. 2024
    (4) Syama Allard, Religion News Service, “How American Hindus spend Christmas,” December 23, 2022 https://religionnews.com/2022/12/23/how-american-hindus-spend-christmas/ accessed 20 Dec. 2024
    (5) Kelsey McKinney, Vox website, “The Elf on the Shelf is the greatest fraud ever pulled on children,” Dec 15, 2016
    https://www.vox.com/2014/12/10/7361911/elf-on-the-shelf accessed 21 Dec. 2024
    (6) Starhawk, “Prologue,” Dreaming the Dark, 15th anniversary edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982/1997)

  • Why Do We Sing What We Sing?

    Sermon and moment for all ages copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading is from the poem “Darshan Singh and Christian Harmony,” by Coleman Barks, Gourd Seed (Maypop Books, 1983), p. 59.

    The second reading was from John Calvin’s essay “Singing Psalms in Church.”

    “As to public prayers, there are two kinds: the one consists of words alone; the other includes music. And this is no recent invention. For since the very beginning of the church it has been this way, as we may learn from history books. Nor does St. Paul himself speak only of prayer by word of mouth, but also of singing. And in truth, we know from experience that song has a great power and strength to move and inflame the hearts of men to invoke and praise God with a heart more vehement and ardent. One must always watch lest the song be light and frivolous; rather, it should have weight and majesty, as St. Augustine says. And thus there is a great difference between the music that is made to entertain people at home and at table, and the Psalms which are sung in church….”

    The third very short reading was a Vietnamese folk poem titled “The Singer with a Bad Voice,” trans. by John Balaban, Ca Dao Vietnam (Copper Canyon Press, 2003).

    Sermon: “Why Do We Sing What We Sing?”

    [This sermon was interspersed with five hymns from recent Unitarian Universalist hymnals, as noted below.]

    A question that I’ve been asking myself for some years now is this: why do we sing certain songs in our Sunday services, and not other songs? So I propose that we consider five songs that we often sing, then either sing them or listen to them sung, and think about why we do sing them. We can also think about why it might be strange that we sing them at all.

    To begin, a quick explanation of why we sing at all in our services. In Western civilizations before the Protestants split from the Roman Catholics, most religious services did not have anyone singing singing except for some kind of rehearsed choir; if you weren’t in the choir, you didn’t sing. But Protestants like John Calvin, as we heard in the second reading, decided that everyone should sing.

    The Puritans who started our congregation followed Calvin, and sang only psalms from the Bible. In the 18th century, they began singing hymns, that is, songs of praise to God that were not psalms. In the 19th century, the repertoire expanded further to include spiritual songs and gospel music, in which mention of God was less prominent. By the middle twentieth century, this congregation began singing songs that had no mention of God at all. We have come quite far from John Calvin.

    And this brings us to the first song that I’d like us to consider, a song which has no explicit mention of any deity whatsoever. Let’s stay seated, and we’ll sing just the last verse of hymn #1064, “Blue Boat Home.”

    [The congregation sang “Blue Boat Home,” #1064 in Singing the Journey. Recording of the songwriter, Peter Mayer, singing this song. Note that Mayer sings this song a bit differently from the version that appears in the hymnal.]

    “Blue Boat Home” doesn’t mention God or any other deity whatsoever. Nevertheless, I’d call it a spiritual song. The song gives thanks, and it tries to make sense of the wonder of the universe. Expressing gratitude and wonder should be considered in some sense spiritual. “Blue Boat Home” is often considered an ecology song, which is another part of its spiritual attraction for us — we Unitarian Universalists have found the spiritual in Nature since Ralph Waldo Emerson’s day.

    But why have we latched onto “Blue Boat Home,” and not some other ecology song? For instance, why don’t we sing another spiritual ecology-oriented song that’s just as good, “Swimming to the Other Side,” written by Pat Humphries at about the same time? I’m glad we do sing “Blue Boat Home,” but I see no particular reason why we sing it and not the Pat Humphries song. Oftentimes, our song choices seem to be based on random chance.

    There’s another one of our favorite songs that I can’t figure out why we sing, and that’s the song “There Is More Love Somewhere.” While “Blue Boat Home” is a composed song that sounds like a folk song, “There Is Move Love Somewhere” is a genuine honest-to-goodness folk song. “There Is More Love Somewhere” probably comes from Bessie Jones, who was recorded singing it for folklorist Alan Lomax in November of 1961. As is true of many American folk songs, it’s hard to say exactly where this song comes from. It probably has roots in Africa (Bessie Jones’s grandfather was born in Africa). Bessie Jones sang a couple of Christian verses that we usually don’t sing: “There is Jesus somewhere,” and “There is heaven somewhere,” so it probably has European Christian roots, too.

    I’ve heard that some Unitarian Universalists have changed the words to this song so it says, “There is more love right here.” Folk songs can change over time, but once you start singing “There is more love right here,” I think you’ve just written a new song with an entirely different meaning; a song that ignore the realities of the African American tradition out of which the song originally arose. When we sing “There is more love “somewhere,” it reminds us that we do not live in a utopia; the moral arc of the universe is still trying to bend towards justice. When I sing “There is more love — somewhere,” that reminds me that we are put here on earth to help one another, and to help one another we have to understand that many of us have plenty of problems. This is a song of longing and striving for a better world. With that in mind, let’s sing the song, and see if you agree with me. No need to open your hymnal. We’ll sing two verses, “There is more love somewhere, I’m going to keep on till I find it”; and then “There is more hope somewhere….”

    [The congregation sang “There Is More Love Somewhere,” #95 in Singing the Living Tradition. Recording of Bessie Jones singing this song — Bernice Johnson Reagon’s recording.]

    One of the most popular of all hymns and spiritual songs here in the U.S., across a wide range of religious traditions, is the song “Amazing Grace.” This song was not especially popular until after the Second World War, when professional musicians began making recordings of it. We think we know exactly how “Amazing Grace” sounds, but often what we actually know is the 1970 hit recording by Judy Collins, or the 1946 recording by Mahalia Jackson. Those professionally recorded versions don’t sound like older versions of the song. So the choir is going to sing for us an old version of “Amazing Grace” from 1835, the year the words were paired with the tune we now know best.

    [The choir sang the original arrangement of “Amazing Grace.” Recording of this arrangement.]

    “Amazing Grace” has taken on many different guises since that old 1835 version. Originally, the words were sung to a different tune. Even after the words were paired with the present tune, in 1835, the words continued to be sung to a wide variety of tunes, right up into the 1920s.

    By the 1930s, the editors of songbooks and hymnals somehow settled on the present tune. Once professional musicians like Mahalia Jackson made recordings of it, I guess no one could imagine singing the words to any other tune.

    During the 1950s and 1960s, “Amazing Grace” became one of the most powerful songs for African Americans involved in the Civil Rights Movement, providing strength and courage and vision. “Amazing Grace” had been written by a former slave-holder who saw the evil of his ways and reformed; in that story, African Americans fighting for Civil Rights saw hope for the future.

    Sometimes White people heard a similar message in “Amazing Grace.” In the 1970s, country singer Johnny Cash began singing the song in his prison concerts. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Cash said, “For the three minutes that song is going on, everybody is free. It just frees the spirit and frees the person.”

    Since the 1970s, “Amazing Grace” is often played by bagpipers in cemeteries when someone is buried. Then it provides comfort to people who are in grief. (And it keeps evolving — wait till you hear the offertory Mary Beth is going to play, in which the tune to Amazing Grace goes places you won’t expect.)

    The funny thing is that prior to being recorded by professional musicians, “Amazing Grace” belonged to White and Black Southerners living at the cultural peripheries. That poem by Coleman Barks we heard in the first reading describes how the song sounded when the country folk sang it: “The whinge and whang of a loudness I know….” Whinge and whang mean the song did not have the prettiness of a Judy Collins recording, nor the professionalism of a Mahalia Jackson recording. It would have sounded loud, and nasal, and unrestrained, and ecstatic, and — well, that old country singing sounded like bad singing to the educated city folks. To the city folks, it sounded like the kind of singing we heard about in the third reading, singing that causes dogs to bark and bulls to bellow.

    So why did the educated city folk, after ignoring the song for over a century, suddenly decide “Amazing Grace” was worth singing? Perhaps it’s because we are slowly, over time, becoming more tolerant of the different subcultures in our country. So instead of being dismissive of uneducated whinge and whang, we can open ourselves to the strangenesses of other people’s musics. We are coming to realize, as Peter Schickele used to say, “all musics are created equal.” We are slowly broadening our perspectives.

    The next song I’d like to consider with you seems very comforting and familiar, but it’s actually very strange: “’Tis a Gift To Be Simple.” Let’s sing that right now. Don’t bother opening your hymnals, sing from memory.

    [The congregation sang “’Tis a gift to be simple” #16 in Singing the Living Tradition. Recording of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, Shakers singing this song.]

    “’Tis a gift to be simple” — that sounds like a the familiar call for simple living. But in reality the Shaker tradition from which this song came was deeply strange.

    Susan M. Setta, professor of religion at Northeastern, has written that the Shakers “proclaimed the Motherhood and Fatherhood of God, asserted that the second coming of Christ had occurred in the woman Ann Lee, fostered a social and political structure of both male and female leadership, and prohibited both marriage an private ownership of property.” (1) When the song says “’tis a gift to come down where we ought to be,” the Shakers weren’t talking about some sort of personal growth or self-fulfillment in simple living (which is how we might interpret it today). They meant that after giving up all your private property and ending your marriage and fully believing that Ann Lee was the second coming of Christ, you settled into your place in a Shaker community.

    And Shaker worship practices were deeply strange from our point of view. Their worship halls were set up for dancing. In 1961, Sister Lilian Phelps of the Canterbury, N.H., Shakers, described what this was like: “It was the belief of the Shakers that every faculty should be used in the worship of God, and so, various forms of physical exercise were introduced, particularly the March. A group of eight or ten singers, occupied the center of the room, around which the members marched in perfect formation. It was with a graceful, rhythmic motion of the hands as the members marched to the slow or quick tempo of the music.” (2) While this sounds interesting and attractive, it is very different from our worship services.

    Yet even though Shakerism is basically alien to our own religious outlook, we still like the song “’Tis a Gift To Be Simple.” There is spiritual truth to be found in this song — both in the words and in the music — that transcends the narrow denominational boundaries in which we are supposed to live.

    One of the functions of spiritual music should be to help us transcend the narrow religious boundaries that often restrict our understanding of other people. One of the biggest challenges facing our society today is how to deal with multiculturalism. Due to innovations in communications and transportation, our contact with people who are very different from ourselves continues to increase rapidly. Unfortunately, the increase in diversity in the United States has driven the spread of White supremacist movements, people who think their White racial and cultural identity is so fragile that it can’t survive an encounter with other races unless they are in a position of authority. Since we are not a White supremacists, we have a different experience. Our encounters with other races, ethnic groups, and cultures can actually lead us to deeper self-knowledge and a greater appreciation for our own racial and ethnic roots. When we sing songs from other races and other cultures and other religious traditions, we hope to be brought into greater contact with the wisdom of all of humanity. If we allow ourselves to appreciate the otherness of the songs we sing, our souls will be enlarged; we will become wiser and better people.

    This brings me to the final song I’d like to consider: “We Shall Overcome.” Let’s sing that song together. We’ll sing two verses: “We shall overcome some day,” and then “All races together.”

    [The congregation sang “We Shall Overcome,” #169 in Singing the Living Tradition. A recording of this song from the Civil Rights Movement.]

    It’s hard to know exactly where this song came from. It probably comes from an old gospel song. During a strike by Black tobacco workers in North Carolina in 1946, Lucille Simmons started singing “We will overcome.” Then the Civil Rights Movement picked it up, and it became “We shall overcome” in the 1950s and 1960s.

    While this song was originally sung for a very specific purpose — for nonviolent actions during the Civil Rights Movement — it taken on a wider meaning. When the song first became popular, we needed to overcome Jim Crow laws. Today, we still need to overcome racism, but in addition to that we all have personal and communal problems that we need to overcome. “We Shall Overcome” can encompass both our personal troubles, and the wider societal troubles that are all around us. We are encouraged when we sing that someday, we shall overcome. No wonder, then, that we sing this song in our Sunday services.

    “We Shall Overcome” helps us see why we sing spiritual songs. We sing these songs to give us strength to face our many troubles. We sing these songs to give us courage, to help us get through the day without giving up. And somehow, it works better when we sing them ourselves. Yes, it is pleasant to listen to a recording of Judy Collins singing her sweetly polished version of “Amazing Grace.” But when we sing a spiritual song ourselves — even if we sing with a whinge and a whang — we get more out of it.

    When we actually sing one of these songs ourselves, we sing to gain courage and strength. We will find more love somewhere — if we sing it ourselves. We will find amazing grace — when we sing it ourselves. We shall overcome — but we have to sing it ourselves. We don’t have to have perfect voices, or even good voices. We just have to sing with real feeling deep in our hearts.

    Notes

    (1) “When Christ Was a Woman: Theology and Practice in the Shaker Tradition,” in Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives, ed. Nancy Auer Falk and Rita M. Gross, Wadsworth, 2001, p. 264.

    (2) Sister Lillian Phelps, “Shaker Dances and Marches,” https://shakermuseum.org/learn/shaker-studies/who-are-the-shakers/shaker-dancing-and-marching/ (accessed 2 May 2024)

  • Another Alternative: Religious Naturalism

    Sermon and moment for all ages copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading was from the essay “What Is Religious Naturalism?” by Jerome A. Stone:

    “Religious naturalism is a type of naturalism. Hence we start with naturalism. This is a set of beliefs and attitudes that focuses on this world. On the negative side it involves the assertion that there seems to be no ontologically distinct and superior realm (such as God, soul or heaven) to ground, explain, or give meaning to this world. On the positive side it affirms that attention should be focused on the events and processes of this world to provide what degree of explanation and meaning are possible to this life. While this world is not self-sufficient in the sense of providing by itself all of the meaning that we would like, it is sufficient in the sense of providing enough meaning for us to cope.”

    The second reading was the poem “In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, Thinking of Rachel Carson,” by Anthony Walton.

    Sermon: Another Alternative: Religious Naturalism

    Probably most of us here this morning are firm believers in science. We believe that science is firmly grounded in the natural world. Science doesn’t need any supernatural elements — there’s no need of an afterlife, for example; no need for angels or demons or genies; no need for gods, goddesses, or other deities guiding our lives. As a result, many people give up on religions, because religions always seem to be full of supernatural elements.

    This is a social trend that has been going on since at least the seventeenth century in Europe, when Baruch Spinoza rejected the idea that the Bible was divinely inspired, and raised questions about the nature of God. By the eighteenth century, a growing number of freethinkers, people who rejected many of the fundamental doctrines of Western religion, began to emerge. One such freethinker was Thomas Paine, who wrote the pamphlet Common Sense which did so much to further the cause of independence from Great Britain. Paine also wrote a treatise titled “The Age of Reason” which called the supernatural elements of the Bible:

    “If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such a miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is,– Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.” (Pt. I, Ch. 17, The Age of Reason)

    Paine said that while he liked the teachings of Jesus, many of the stories about Jesus found in the Bible are lies. It’s worth knowing about Paine because in today’s political debates we hear arguments that America was founded on the tenets of orthodox conservative Christianity; yet here is one of America’s founders arguing quite forcefully against orthodox Christianity.

    The debate about miracles and supernaturalism continued in nineteenth century New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who served as a Unitarian minister for eight years before becoming a full-time writer, infuriated the religious establishment when he said that the miracles of the Bible have been grossly misunderstood. Here’s Emerson from his Divinity School Address:

    “Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul…. The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. [Jesus] spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle… and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”

    Emerson’s younger colleague Henry David Thoreau found miracles in his close observations of the natural world. Thoreau said we need to face up to reality as it actually is. This is what he wrote in his book Walden:

    “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

    Thoreau was telling us that this life has miracles enough in it, and we don’t need to add any miracles to it. Thoreau remained open to the insights of traditional religious and spiritual wisdom — not just Christian wisdom, but the wisdom that can be found in all spiritual and religious traditions — but he kept his focus firmly on this world. This present life is sufficient, said Thoreau: “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” So he did not reject religion. He simply wanted his religion to remain focused on this world, the world he could directly experience.

    Many other religious naturalists emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Walt Whitman, whose poetry dealt with the here and now, could be called a religious naturalist. Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois has been called a religious naturalist. Religious naturalists often felt uncomfortable in organized religion. So for example the poet James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the words to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,” felt he lacked religiosity, but to me it seems like he was forced into that feeling because the only definition of religiosity that he knew involved supernatural religion.

    In the late twentieth century, the philosopher Jerome Stone began researching the various people who could be classified as religious naturalists. One of Jerome Stone’s most interesting discoveries was that religious naturalists cannot simply be lumped in with religious atheists. Some religious naturalists choose to use the word “God,” while others feel “God” is not a useful concept. So the biologist Ursula Goodenough, who calls herself a religious naturalist, and who feels that the natural miracles investigated by the science of biology are sufficiently miraculous, sees no need to use the word “God.” By contrast, Bernard Loomer — he’s the person who gave us the phrase “the interdependent web of existence” — is a religious naturalist who feels that God is a useful and important philosophical concept.

    Thus religious naturalists interpret “God” in a variety of ways. Some religious naturalists interpret “God” as the natural laws of the universe, or as a human social construct, and so on. Other religious naturalists get along fine without God. So if you’re a religious naturalist, you can decide whether to use the word “God” or not. Yet all religious naturalists find common ground in their rejection of the supernatural and their embrace of this world. I like this aspect of religious naturalism, because it can facilitate communication across divisions. The search for truth is always communal, and anything that helps us talk across our divisions helps the search for truth.

    As I’ve said before, I’m a devoted follower of Haven’t-figured-it-out-yet-ism — in other words, I don’t want to put a name to my ill-formed thoughts and feelings. But I guess I’d call myself “religious naturalism-adjacent.” I like the religious naturalists I’ve met in person; I took a class with Jerry Stone twenty years ago, and admired his humane and unpretentious attitude towards life.

    And I appreciate the way religious naturalists have dealt with arguments about the existence of God. I grew up as a Unitarian Universalist, and the old battle between humanists and the theists doesn’t seem to have progressed much since I was a child. Instead of arguing about the existence of God, the religious naturalists want you to define what it is that you mean when you say the word “God,” and that has deepened my own spiritual life.

    I also appreciate that religious naturalists focus on this world. And if we don’t have to worry about some supernatural afterlife, this releases our energies to deal with the problems we face here and now. This also releases us to appreciate the beauties of the here and now. If there’s a heaven, or an afterlife, or reincarnation, it will come in its own good time; in the mean time, here we are with reality all around us waiting to be experienced. Even when beauties exist side by side with horrors, it is better to face up to the horrors and do what we can to end them, than to wait for some heaven which may never arrive.

    Our contemporary society does not encourage us to face both beauty and horror. Instead, our contemporary society encourages passivity and quietism. Religious quietism pervades our society, as when we say: “It’s in God’s hands,” or “It was meant to be,” or “Whatever happens, happens for the best.” Belief in the supernatural need not deteriorate into quietism, and I am firmly allied with those who believe in a God of justice and truth and love. But we live in a world where some religious people use quietism to prevent necessary change, religions that teach that women are meant to be subordinate to men, that White Christians are meant to rule everyone else, that rich people are rich because they are favored by God. Quietism is also encouraged by secular society, by a secular culture that teaches us to remain passive consumers of media. This is a form of anesthesia no different from the numbing effects of religious quietism; both forms of quietism want to convince us that we cannot change the world.

    Instead of anesthetizing us, religious naturalism encourages the kind of spiritual practices that keep us engaged with reality, with the here and now. Think of Henry Thoreau next to his cabin at Walden Pond, kneeling down in the woods in order to the closest attention to the natural world, then writing about what he observed in his journal. Remember, too, that his cabin was a station on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau was not escaping from the world through supernatural beliefs, nor was he escaping from the world by ignoring the realities of injustice. Obviously, religious naturalism is not the only kind of religion that engages fully with this world — but it does set a high standard for other religious attitudes to match.