Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Western Religious Traditions

  • Household Gods

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading was from book II of Virgil’s Aeneid:

    [506] “Perhaps, too, you may inquire what was Priam’s fate. When he saw the fall of the captured city, saw the doors of his palace shattered, and the foe in the heart of his home, old as he is, he vainly throws his long-disused armour about his aged trembling shoulders, girds his useless sword, and rushes to his death among his thronging foes. In the middle of the palace and beneath the open arch of heaven was a huge altar, and hard by an ancient laurel, leaning against the altar and clasping the household gods in its shade. Here, round the shrines, vainly crouched Hecuba and her daughters, huddled together like doves swept before a black storm, and clasping the images of the gods. But when she saw even Priam harnessed in the armour of his youth, ‘My poor husband,’ she cries, ‘what dreadful thought has driven you to don these weapons? Where are you rushing to? The hour calls not for such aid or such defenders, not though my own Hector were here himself! Come hither, pray; this altar will guard us all, or you will die with us!’ Thus she spoke, then drew the aged man to her and placed him on the holy seat.”

    The second reading was from the Hebrew scriptures, the Prophets, Zechariah 10-12:

    Ask rain from the Lord
      in the season of the spring rain,
    from the Lord who makes the storm clouds,
      and he will give them showers of rain,
      to everyone the vegetation in the field.
    For the household gods utter nonsense,
      and the diviners see lies;
    they tell false dreams
      and give empty consolation.
    Therefore the people wander like sheep;
      they are afflicted for lack of a shepherd.

    Sermon — “Household Gods”

    Some years ago, I got in trouble in a class I was taking. This class was a creative writing workshop, and it was taught by a fellow who had published quite a few short stories in prestigious magazines. I no longer remember his name, and if you heard his name you probably wouldn’t recognize it — nevertheless, he was an experienced and accomplished writer.

    Each week, we all had to submit short stories to be read over and critiqued by the class. Each week we would have to read a short story by a published writer, and all the stories written by our classmates, and comment intelligently on each of these stories. Now I have never been able to write a short story that was any good; non-fiction I can do, but fiction is beyond me; but there I was taking that class because I needed the credits and it was the only class that would fit into my schedule. Since I like to read and I’m never shy about expressing my opinions, I was always happy to read all of the week’s stories and then talk about them in class; but I wasn’t very good at writing stories.

    One week I submitted yet another boring story, the inconsequential plot of which hinged on one of the characters talking about her household gods. And to make a long story short (as it were), our teacher ridiculed my story because he had never heard of household gods and wanted to know why they were in the story. What, he asked me, his voice dripping with sarcasm, did I mean by household gods, anyway? Well, I knew my mother had talked about household gods, and I more or less knew that household gods were a sort of cultural metaphor for that which is important to one’s household. This did not satisfy him, and we moved on to the next story, and eventually I passed that class.

    In spite of the fact that neither that teacher nor I knew what they were, household gods do indeed exist. The ancient Roman gods and goddesses included not just the major public deities like Juno and Jupiter and Diana; there were also minor deities that lived in each Roman household, and these were the household gods. Sixty years ago, when my mother was in high school, high school kids learned a certain amount of ancient Latin, and a certain amount of ancient Roman culture; and so my mother’s generation has been exposed to Latin writers such as Livy and Virgil.

    These days there aren’t many people who have studied Latin, who would know what a household god might be. My writing teacher had never heard of them at all, and although I had heard my mother mention them I knew nothing more than that. Yet if you look hard enough, you can still find household gods in the nooks and crannies of our culture:– there is a science fiction novel in which Roman household gods sends a modern woman back in time to live in ancient Rome; they do crop up in literature now and then; come to find out, there’s even a folk music group called The Household Gods. I suspect that evenn those of us who never studied Latin continue to have a vague notion that there might be guardian deities within our households.

    And I suspect that many of us, though we may hotly deny it, are still under the influence of some household gods. We may not admit it, but we have let unacknowledged household gods into our homes. And this prompts me to ask: what are household gods, and what function might they still carry out in our homes?

    …

    Let me begin by describing ancient Roman household gods. Not that this is going to be a historically accurate description — ancient Roman history covers hundreds of years, and the form and worship of household gods evolved continually over that time span. But a general description will suit our purposes.

    The first thing to know is the ancient Roman term for household gods: they were called “lares.” An 1894 book called “The Mythology of Greece and Rome” says this about the Lares:

    “The Lares… were the tutelary deities of the house and family…. They were commonly supposed to be the glorified spirits of ancestors, who, as guardian deities, strove to promote the welfare of the family. The seat of their worship was also the family hearth in the atrium, where their images of wood or wax were generally preserved in a separate shrine of their own (Lararium). The Lares received an especial degree of veneration on the first day of every month; but… they took part in all the domestic occurrences, whether of joy or sorrow. …They also received their share at every meal of particular dishes, and were crowned with garlands on the occasion of every family rejoicing. When a son assumed the toga virilis (that is, when he came of age), he dedicated his bulla (a gold or silver ornament, like a medal, which was worn round the neck during childhood) to the Lares, amidst prayers and libations and burning of incense. When the father of the house started on a journey or returned in safety, the Lares were again addressed, and their statues crowned with wreaths, flowers and garlands being their favorite offerings.”

    This makes the household gods seem rather charming, doesn’t it? You have these little household gods made out of wood or wax or terracotta, which represented your ancestors or your guardians; and they lived in their own little niche next to the fireplace, and they promised to look out for you and your family. If anything happened to your family, whether good or bad, you’d go spend some time with your household gods. When you had a nice meal, you’d give them a little bit of it; if something good happened in your family, you’d put flowers on them. You’d pay attention to them before someone in your family went traveling, and you’d pay attention to them again when that person returned safely home. I particularly like the fact that the household gods liked flowers and garlands best — I’m not so happy with gods and goddesses that demand blood sacrifices (which can be disgusting and messy) or burnt offerings (which is a waste of good food), but it’s always nice to have an excuse to put flowers in your house.

    Those who could afford to do so built a special wall niche into their home, a house altar or lararium, in which the household gods were placed; and some of these house altars are decorated with paintings that might show one of more of the household gods. In one of the houses in Pompei, that ancient Roman city that got buried by a volcano, archaeologists uncovered a house altar on which was painted a representation of a snake with a beard and a crest on top of its head; this was the “lars familiaris,” a sort of protective power associated with the household. So it was that these household gods had their own place within a Roman house.

    And if you were a Roman, you hoped that your household gods offered you some kind of protection. Of course, it didn’t necessarily work out that way. After all, that house altar in Pompei didn’t protect its household from being buried by that volcanic eruption. And when the ancient Greeks conquered Troy and went through the city killing and looting, the household gods of Priam, the king of Troy, could not save him; as the Roman poet Virgil tells us in the Aeneid, his poetic story of the Trojan war:
    “When [Priam] saw the fall of the captured city, saw the doors of his palace shattered, and the foe in the heart of his home, old as he is, he vainly throws his long-disused armour about his aged trembling shoulders, girds his useless sword, and rushes to his death among his thronging foes. In the middle of the palace and beneath the open arch of heaven was a huge altar, and hard by an ancient laurel, leaning against the altar and clasping the household gods in its shade. Here, round the shrines, vainly crouched [his wife] Hecuba and her daughters, huddled together like doves swept before a black storm, and clasping the images of the [household] gods. But when she saw even Priam harnessed in the armour of his youth, ‘My poor husband,’ she cries, ‘what dreadful thought has driven you to don these weapons? Where are you rushing to? The hour calls not for such aid or such defenders, not though my own Hector were here himself! Come hither, pray; this altar will guard us all, or you will die with us!’ Thus she spoke, then drew the aged man to her and placed him on the holy seat.”
    But of course the altar of the household gods did not protect Priam in the least, for the next part of the Aeneid tells how he was slaughtered by the Greeks.

    Even though I don’t believe that Roman household gods offer some sort of magical protection, I like this idea of having household gods. I’m not looking for household gods which can provide a comprehensive insurance policy for my house and family, but I do like the way the ancient Romans used the household gods to create a religious and spiritual center in their households. I do not believe that religion is something we can do for just one hour on those Sunday mornings when we actually get out of the house and get to church; nor do I believe that religion is something that can only be done in a special place called a church. Religion is my way of living humanely, and dealing with setbacks, and appreciating the crazy beauty and mystery of life. I do not want to reinstate the ancient Roman household gods in my house, but it’s not enough for me to do religion an hour a week.

    …

    Our direct spiritual forebears, New England Protestant Christians, did not have household gods; but they did have manage to integrate religion and spirituality into their daily lives. Their religion was not limited to an hour on Sunday mornings.

    These days, we Unitarian Universalists think of ourselves as “post-Christian” — some of us still consider ourselves Christian individuals, and some of us want nothing to do with Christianity. Yet although we are post-Christian, that does not mean that we have to throw out every part of the Christian tradition. We’ve taken the cross out of our church, but we still call it a church; we may not read the Christian scriptures much, but we still follow the Christian rule of meeting once a week on Sundays. So I think it is worth taking a look at the old Christian home religious practices that used to be a part of our New England religious tradition.

    One of those Christian practices, once so common in New England households, was the practice of daily prayers. In our own tradition — we come from the Radical Reformation and the Free Churches — the governing principle for daily prayer is quite simple: each individual is guided by the Spirit, and so we did not require a complicated scheme of specific prayers to memorize and certain words to say. We still value extemporaneous prayer, and we sometimes still teach our children how to pray in this fashion. My favorite example of this is a bedtime prayer that the Rev. Christopher Raible wrote about. He suggested that parents sit with their children each night and use this format for bedtime prayers:

      Tonight I am thankful for… (then you say some of the good things that happened to you today)
      And tonight I am sorry for… (then you talk about the things you feel sorry for doing or saying)
      Tomorrow I hope for… (and you talk about things you hope for and how you think you can make them happen).

    In the old days in New England, prayers were something everyone said on a daily basis. There were many other daily prayers that people used, the most common one being the practice of saying grace before meals.

    The other common household practice from the Free Church tradition is the practice of keeping the Sabbath day. I don’t know anyone who keeps the Sabbath day any more, although a Hundred years ago, Unitarian and Universalist families did keep the Sabbath. Ellen Tucker Emerson, one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughters, wrote a description of how the Emerson family kept the Sabbath day together as a family:

    “Sunday was then kept rigidly the children of these days would say, but Father and Mother considered it kept easily, while Grandma thought it not strictly enough observed…. Every Sunday I was to learn a hymn. Most of them had five verses of four lines, sometimes they had six….”

    Ellen Emerson goes in some detail, so I will skip ahead:

    “I am trying to show what was Mother’s method in the religious education of her children, to have them made familiar with many hymns, and with all the interesting Bible stories. To accustom them to hearing some serious writing read aloud to them regularly, to make it a habit to omit play on Sunday and have it a day devoted to church and religious study at home. When Eddy got to be perhaps three or even earlier she began to read aloud to us when we were all in bed Mrs Barbauld’s Prose Hymns and often a story-book of a religious character…. This was not always done, for I remember as if it continued a long time the practice of singing before we went upstairs… we used to sit on our three stools round Mother and sing it with her…. She had a little blue book of morning and evening prayers, and I think she read aloud one of those prayers.”

    This all sounds rather charming — if we lived a hundred and fifty years ago. But which of us today would like to devote all day Sunday to memorizing hymns, and listening to serious writing read aloud, and hearing Bible stories, and reading prayers aloud, and singing a few hymns before bedtime? Which of us would like to tear children and grand children away from video games and MySpace to participate in such things? And how many of our children or grandchildren would easily consent to such things all day every Sunday? The children I know would sooner have a wall-niche constructed next to the fireplace, and pour out libations to little statues of household gods — and they would only do that, I suspect, until they got bored with it.

    …

    Most of the households I know no longer include much religious practice at home. Some households are quite good at saying bedtime prayers with young children; I know a few households that actually eat dinner together every night and even say grace before they eat; I know a few households where families sing hymns or hymn-like songs together. But I don’t know of any households where someone regularly reads aloud from “serious writing.”

    If anything, I think the pagans among us do the best job of including religion in daily life within the household. I know quite a few pagan households that regularly say grace or in some way bless food before eating it. I know quite a few pagan households that incorporate regular religious rituals in their home life; and in the best Free Church tradition, they often make up these rituals themselves, as the Spirit moves them. I know of pagan households that have some kind of house altar, not unlike the house altars of the ancient Romans. And I even know some pagan households where children are taught religious songs and chants, and where people actually read aloud to each other from religious writings.

    What about my own household? Traditionally — back in the days when Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children were young — clergy were supposed to be exemplars for living a good religious life. My friend Rabbi Michael is still such an exemplar — he keeps the Sabbath, and his three children keep the Sabbath. But I am not such a good role model: my life partner is pretty much unchurched, and I’m not going to impose my religious practices on her, so we don’t do any of the things I’ve talked about. Yes, I do keep a Sabbath day each week — my Sabbath day is Friday, because that’s what fits into my busy schedule, and every Friday I don’t do any unnecessary work, and I make an effort to read serious writing, and good Transcendentalist that I am I try to engage in my spiritual practices of writing and reading. But these are things I do on my own, not things I do with the rest of my household.

    Many of us are no longer able to fit the old Free Church religious rituals into our home lives; and perhaps we no longer want to do so. But wouldn’t it be nice to do something at meal times besides turning on the television set? Wouldn’t it be nice to devote some time each week to a consideration of the most important things in life, rather than spending all our leisure time playing video games and sending inconsequential email messages? And if we can’t observe the old Free Church religious rituals, still less will we return to the ancient Roman rituals surrounding the household gods. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a reason to bring fresh flowers into your house? Wouldn’t it be nice to have little rituals to observe when someone in your household was goind away on a trip, or returning home? or rituals to observe when your children or grandchildren came of age?

    Of course these days most of use lead lives that no longer give us any time to observe such rituals outside of an hour-long worship service on Sunday mornings. And I want to emphasize that many of us are not going to be able to impose our religion on our households. Those are the facts of life for many of us.

    But pay attention to those facts of life. A little while ago, I said that I do not believe that religion is something we can do for just one hour on those Sunday mornings when we actually get out of the house and get to church; nor do I believe that religion is something that can only be done in a special place called a church. I will go further than that — like it or not, we are religious beings; doing religion is one of the ways we make sense out of the world. You can choose to get rid of conscious religion in your life — you don’t have to say grace before meals or force your children to say bedtime prayers nor do you have to go to church on Sunday mornings. You can choose that you’re not going to do those things. But you will have to find some way to make sense out of the world, and if you don’t do that consciously, you will do it unconsciously.

    Our culture is constantly telling us to make sense out of the world by having more stuff — we get that new video game, or that new iPhone, or that new Toyota Prius, or that new house, and suddenly our world makes sense — for a time, it makes sense. But all religious rituals have to be repeated over and over again, and so we go out and buy more stuff; and we work longer hours so we can buy more stuff; and we make our children study hard and send them to lots of afterschool activities so that they can succeed and get the best jobs with a high salary — and buy more stuff.

    Religion is my way of living humanely, and dealing with setbacks, and appreciating the crazy beauty and mystery of life. I do not wish to reinstate the ancient Roman household gods in my house; I do not wish to reinstate the home religious practices of Ellen Emerson’s family. But I need something more than an hour a week to feed my soul. I know that household gods still exist, and even if we don’t acknowledge them or know what they are they are still a powerful force, and they are living in our households right now. In our Free Church tradition, we don’t have to follow certain procedures and formulas; but we do have to give ourselves space to be moved by the spirit. We should pay attention to the household gods we are willing to admit into our households.

    What will our household gods be? Will we worship consumer goods? Or can we find a way to update some of the old religious practices? Can we devote some time each day to meditation and prayer? Can we set aside time each day to reflect on what we have done, and what we hope to do? Even if we do nothing more than bring fresh flowers into our households, if we do it with the intention of focusing ourselves on the highest things, if we do it as an expression of our wonder and joy and awe before the mysteries of life,– I think that will be enough.

  • The Weary Blues

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading was the poem “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

    The second reading was the poem by Langston Hughes, titled “The Ballad Of The Landlord” This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

    Sermon — “The Weary Blues”

    This is Black History Month, and in three sermons this month I proposed to speak to you about three different Black poets; more specifically, about three American poets of African descent. Last week, I spoke about James Weldon Johnson; and this week I would like to speak about Langston Hughes.

    If you were here last week, you heard me say that poets make the world; and I meant that in a broad sense of poetry, where poets make language and language makes our world. This is not some supernatural magic trick; rather it is a statement about the basic being of the universe. There is a fundamental connection between language — between what we speak and hear and write and read — a connection between language, and the very core of That Which Is.

    I want to be careful to tell you exactly what I mean by a poem. A poem is not just something that sits there on the page, and you read it, or your high school English teacher makes you read it, and that’s the end of it. A poem is language that is meant to change you, and maybe change the world around you. A few poems are meant to be looked at, like paintings, but mostly you have to say poems aloud for them to change you, or change the world around you; and if you can chant them or intone them or sing them, sometimes that increases their power.

    I’d even say that poetry and music are much the same thing; — two points on a continuum that stretches from ordinary conversation to the most abstract music. It is not always clear to me where the spoken word ends, and music begins. What is clear to me is the power of poetry, and music, to change us; more specifically, the power of poetry and music to heal us, to heal our souls, to heal our selves.

    But how does this happen? How is it that poetry heals and changes us? This is why I want to speak with you this morning about the poems of Langston Hughes. More than most poets, his poetry is musical. More than most poets, his poetry has the power to heal and change and transform. And his poetry has helped me to understand a little bit of how it is that music transforms and heals us.

    …

    Just before the sermon, I read one of Langston Hughes’s best-known poems, “The Ballad of the Landlord.” This is a poem that tells a story, which goes something like this:

    Here’s a man (or is it a woman?) who lives in a run-down old house. This house is some place in the United States, and it’s sixty or seventy years ago, and the landlord appears to me to be white. At least he acts like a white person of sixty or seventy years ago; because he has an African American tenant, he doesn’t bother fixing the roof, or fixing the broken-down steps that lead up to the front door of the old run-down house.

    The landlord has stopped by to collect the rent. The tenant reminds him about all that’s wrong with the house. The landlord doesn’t pay any attention. The tenant gets increasingly frustrated, and finally says, I’m not going to pay you any rent, and if you keep talking so high and mighty, why I’ll sock you one. But the landlord is white, and doesn’t stand for being threatened by black folk. The landlord calls the cops, who arrest the tenant. The tenant is charged and convicted of assault, and sent to jail.

    Through this whole poem, we know the landlord is in the wrong. We know that the tenant’s anger is justified, and we’re rooting for the tenant. When we get to the end of the poem, when the full force of the law is used to perpetuate injustice, we share in the anger of that tenant, and we know we have to work to correct that kind of injustice in the world. Even though this is just a made-up story, we hear the ring of truth in it — for all good poems are true; truth is what makes them good poems. We hear the ring of truth, and we hear as well a call to heal and change a world in which such injustice can exist.

    When we address injustice in the world, we are healing the world. That’s what this poem does; and that reveals to us a connection between poetry and religion, since religion is also supposed to heal the world. This is a significant point for us religious liberals, because we tend to dismiss the fact that healing is a central part of religion. Too much of religion is obsessed with faith healing, miraculous cures where some father God makes it all better without much effort on our part. We are right to dismiss such kinds of religious healing. Yet we cannot dismiss the fact that healing is central to religion. Part of the purpose of religion is to heal the world; part of the purpose of religion is to heal our souls when we are damaged by the injustice of the world.

    When I say “healing,” I don’t necessarily mean sitting there passively and waiting for some healing energy to do its work. The story of the tenant and the landlord force us to confront an ethical problem: the full power of the law and the police can be used to cause injustice. Once you start chewing over that ethical problem, it’s hard to simply sit there and enjoy the beauty of the poem. We find that the poem calls us to do something. How does this poem heal and change the world? — the poem calls us to rouse ourselves and heal the world by correcting injustice.

    …

    It is very good that poetry heals and changes the world, and I know that will help heal me in the long run, but sometimes I need some more personal healing. It’s fine and noble to say that I’m going to go out and heal the world, but sometimes life has got me down so that I don’t have the energy to do that. What then? Forget the world for a moment — how is poetry going to heal me?

    To answer that, I’d like to speak about the blues. “The Ballad of the Landlord” makes us want to heal the world, but another poem by Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues,” describes to us how to heal our own souls.

    And what are the blues? The African American humanist theologian Anthony Pinn is one of those who has pointed out that the blues are a form of musical expression through which “enslaved Africans wrestled with existential questions forced by the absurdity of slavery.” Pinn tells us: “Through this music, they sought to make sense of the world and provide a framework for life. Within the spirituals, the manner in which traditional religious doctrine dominated this rationale for life is apparent. However,… there were other forms of musical expression that did not embrace the basic doctrine of the Christian church, or other traditional forms of religious expression.”

    Now Anthony Pinn is a theologian, which means that he is somewhat caught up in the theory. What I have found is that when you put his theory in practice, you find that the blues can be a legitimate form of religious expression; some blues songs are a kind of humanist hymn. They provide serious answers to religious and existential questions. When you’re singing the blues, if you have trouble in mind, you don’t call on God to solve all your troubles — you laugh to keep from crying; you go down by the riverside and rock those blues away; and you know that somehow the sun’s gonna shine on you someday — these are humanist hymns because you don’t call on God to fix your problems for you. In the poem “The Weary Blues,” there is no God who comes down to solve the problems of the unnamed musician who is singing and playing the piano; there is no God to come and take away the pain of living. The musician plays and sings, and that heals him, a little. He is not completely healed; but at least he can sleep that night. So it is that the blues have a healing power.

    None of this rules out traditional religious music as healing music. Traditional religious music that calls on God can heal the soul, too. But sometimes religious music pretends to heal, when it really doesn’t heal. Religious music, and religion itself, pretends to heal when it merely distracts us with God and deadens us to the pain and anguish we experience in the here and now; and by deadening us, the pain appears to go away, but we don’t actually heal. The same is sometimes true of the blues: sometimes the blues pretend to heal us, but instead distract us with a catchy melody and a danceable beat, serving merely to deaden us to the pain we’re in.

    When the pain we feel is deadened, but nothing else happens, that is false healing. Rather than deadening pain, the blues give us enough distance so that we can feel the pain without becoming overwhelmed by it; herein lies the power of the blues. The music and the poetry of the words channel the pain into something constructive rather than destructive. True healing allows us to regain strength and wholeness. The poetry of the blues allows us to regain strength and wholeness: it is musical poetry that has the power to heal us and change us.

    Of course that is also the purpose of these Sunday morning worship services. We come here to be healed, we come here to feel we can be made whole. And how do we do this? We do this with words and with poetry and with musical poetry. We have conversations together; we listen to the spoken word; we listen to poetry and scripture that is read aloud; we sing songs together. You may have a conversation on a Sunday morning after church where someone says something to you that somehow changes you for the better; just a small thing, just a small change for the better; but that small change may do more to heal you than all the sermon and poetry and songs during the worship service; and in that sense, that conversation is a kind of poetry (for you, at that time). I have never heard a sermon that is poetry the way Langston Hughes writes poetry, but I have heard sermons that in a specific time and place healed my soul, and for that moment there were better poetry than anything Hughes ever wrote.

    Poetry has power in it; it has the power to heal us. What we try to do here on Sunday morning is kind of poetry. We create a time and a place where words and poetry and music can heal and change us. We get through the pain of living, we get through the anger at injustice, and in doing so we aim to hold onto our dreams.

    …

    We aim to hold on to our dreams. It’s not a good idea to defer dreams for too long, because deferred dreams can turn into anger — and once you get mired in anger and pain, you wind up deferring your dreams. There’s an awful lot of pain and anger that comes with living. When you think of all the injustice that exists in the world, how can we possibly get rid of all the anger? When sadness enters our souls, how can we possibly get rid of all the pain? I don’t think it’s possible to get rid of all the anger and pain — the world is too full of anger and pain — but we can be sure the anger and pain doesn’t hold us down.

    So it is that healing from pain and anger requires us to hold onto our dreams. We have to get through the pain that life can bring; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of pain, we just have to get through it. We have to get through the anger; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of it, we just have to get through it.

    Langston Hughes wrote a poem called “Dream-Dust” that goes like this:
      Gather out of star-dust
        Earth-dust,
        Cloud-dust,
        Storm-dust,
      And splinters of hail
      One handful of dream-dust
        Not for sale.

    Poetry collects from life the earth-dust, the cloud-dust, the storm-dust, the splinters of hail, and distills these elements of life into dream-dust. In this way, poetry helps us hold onto our dreams.

    If you come to church regularly, you have heard me say that religious scriptures are a kind of poetry; religious scriptures at their best distill the elements of life and make dreams out of them. Holding on to dreams is one of the things we do in our religious communities; it’s one of the things we try to do here each Sunday. We collect the elements of life — the joys and sorrows, the pain and the joy — and we take an hour or so each week to distill dreams out of our lives. Some of the dreams are personal — your dreams, my dreams. Some of the dreams belong to us all, like the dream of an earth made fair and all her people one. Our religious community is based on poetry, both the poetry of ancient religious scriptures and contemporary poetry like that of Langston Hughes. We come here to hold onto dreams, keeping them safe until they can become reality.

    All too often our dreams get deferred. For African Americans, the dream of true equality has been deferred too long; indeed, for too many racial and ethnic minorities, the dream of equality has been deferred for too long. Sometimes the world around us seems to conspire to keep our dreams from becoming a reality. When that happens, we have to do something that allows us to hold on to our dreams. Like that old dream of earth made fair and all her people one — we have been dreaming that dream from more than two thousand years, and while sometimes we seem to make some progress towards it, that dream has not yet become our reality. Yet we keep that dream bright and untarnished. So it is that poetry, and communities founded on poetry, helps us to hold on to our dreams.

    …

    How is it that poetry heals and changes us? Poetry heals us and changes us by calling to rouse ourselves and go out and heal the world by correcting injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by allowing us to get through the pain of living, to get through the anger at injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by helping us to hold onto our dreams, and keep them bright and untarnished. Communities that are founded on poetry, like our church community, do the same thing: in communities like this one, we are healed and changed by healing the world; we are healed by having a place to deal with personal pain and heartache; we are healed and changed by the dreams that we hold together.

    And when we are healed and changed, we might just find that we have renewed strength to go out and help to heal the world.

  • Lift Every Voice and Sing

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading was poem by James Weldon Johnson, the poem “O Black and Unknown Bards.” It is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

    The second reading is from James Weldon Johnson’s autobiography Along This Way.

    “I admit that through my adult life I have lacked religiosity. But I make no boast of it; understanding, as I do, how essential religion is to many, many people. For that reason, I have little patience with the zealot who is forever trying to prove to others that they do not need religion; that they would be better off without it. Such a one is no less a zealot than the religionist who contends that all who “do not believe” will be consigned to eternal hell fires. It is simply that I have not felt the need of religion in the commonplace sense of the term. I have derived spiritual values in life from other sources than worship and prayer. I think that the teachings of Jesus Christ embody the loftiest ethical and spiritual concepts the human mind has yet borne. I do not know if there is a personal God; I do not see how I can know; and I do not see how my knowing can matter. What does matter, I believe, is how I deal with myself and how I deal with my fellows. I feel that I can practice a conduct toward myself and toward my fellows that will constitute the basis for an adequate religion, a religion that may comprehend spirituality and beauty and serene happiness….

    The human mind racks itself over the never-to-be-known answer to the great riddle, and all that is clearly revealed is the fate that man must continue to hope and struggle on; that each day, if he would not be lost, he must with renewed courage take a fresh hold on life and face with fortitude the turns of circumstances. To do this, he needs to be able at times to touch God; let the idea of God mean to him what it may.”

    Sermon — “Lift Every Voice”

    This year, during Black History Month, I wanted to speak with you about Black poets; more specifically, about American poets of African descent.

    I want to speak to you about poets out of a deep theological concern. Poets make the world; taking poetry in its broadest sense. When I say that poets make the world, I don’t mean that they wave a magic wand, or wave their hand and say magic words, and — Poof! — they create some object, like a stage magician. But I do mean to say that there is a basic connection between language — between what we speak and hear and write and read — a connection between language, and the very core of our beings.

    Thus it is that poets make the world: their poems are not expressions of feelings so much as they are manifestations of our existence. This is why religious scriptures are so powerful to us: they are a form of poetry, and like all great poems religious scriptures make the world anew. There was nothing like it in the world before, when some ancient poet captured the essence of Moses in his words to Pharaoh: Let my people go. There was nothing like it in the world before, when some ancient poet captured the essence of Gotama Buddha in the words: There is a middle path that leads to peace of mind. There was nothing like it in the world before, when some ancient poet captured the essence of Jesus in the words: Love your neighbor as yourself. When I say that poets make the world, I don’t necessarily mean people who who write things in a form which your high school English teacher would tell you is a poem. What I mean by poets are those masters of language who, through their language, change our beings; poets are those who transform us and the world.

    As religious liberals we are always open to new sources of inspiration. This is what we mean when we say that we are not orthodox: we do not have one correct source for religion, one book or text that is frozen for all time. We remain open to new sources of inspiration; revelation is not sealed for us, revelation continues to emerge around and through us. And today, revelation continues to emerge most clearly, I believe, in poetry, or in works of prose that function as poetry.

    Now you know why I want to talk with you about poets, and their poetry. And why talk specifically about Black poets? Well, there are many things in our society that I would like to transform, but one of the great moral problems facing us in the United States today is the problem of systemic racism — and when I say “systemic racism,” I am not concerned with individual prejudice but rather with that impersonal system of racial inequality that continues to permeate American society. White, black, no matter what color our skin, none of us likes systemic racism. So how can we transform this reality or systemic racism? I’m afraid that too many of our white poets have ignored this compelling moral question; and so I find myself turning to certain African American poets.

    …

    In this first sermon in this series on Black poets, I thought I’d begin with the most influential Black poet. No, I’m not going to talk about Alice Walker, or Gwendolyn Brooks, or Langston Hughes, or — name the famous African American poet you might think I should preach on. I’m going to begin with James Weldon Johnson, in the full knowledge that his may be an unfamiliar name.

    Yet I will say without doubt (without doubt in my mind, anyway) and without equivocation that James Weldon Johnson is our most influential Black poet. I am aware that there are some English professors in our congregation, and I would be foolish to make a judgment about literary quality; so I will not claim that James Weldon Johnson is our best African American poet. So Johnson is not our best poet, nor our most famous poet, but I still claim him as our most influential poet. And I make that claim on the basis of one poem he wrote, a poem which was written as a hymn.

    Here’s the story of that hymn. The year was 1900; the place, Jacksonville, Florida. James Johnson and his brother Rosamond had been in New York City writing popular songs for Broadway; at the time of this story, they were back in their hometown and James was working as a school principal. Here is how James tells the story:

    “A group of young men decided to hold on February 12 a celebration of Lincoln’s birthday…. My thoughts began buzzing around a central idea of writing a poem on Lincoln, but I couldn’t net them. So I gave up the project as beyond me…. My central idea, however, took on another form. I talked over with my brother the thought I had in mind, and we planned to write a song to be sung as part of the exercises. We planned, better still, to have it sung by school children — a chorus of five hundred voices.

    “I got my first line:– Lift ev’ry voice and sing. Not a startling line, but I worked along grinding out the next five. When, near the end of the first stanza, there came to me the lines:

        Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
        Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us

    the spirit of the poem had taken hold of me. I finished the stanza and turned it over to Rosamond.

    “In composing the two other stanzas I did not use pen and paper. While my brother worked at his musical setting I paced back and forth on the front porch, repeating the lines over and over to myself…. As I worked through the opening and middle lines of the last stanza… I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so. I was experiencing the transports of the poet’s ecstasy. Feverish ecstasy was followed by that contentment — that sense of serene joy — which makes artistic creation the most complete of human experiences.”

    That’s how James Weldon Johnson describes writing the poem which became the hymn “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” I wanted to read that aloud because it helps explain why sometime when I sing “Life Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” tears come to my eyes. There is something in that poem that worked on Johnson while he was writing the poem, and which still works on me today.

    Johnson finished the poem, his brother set it to music, and they sent it to their music publisher in New York, and got enough mimeographed copies to distribute to their children’s chorus; they taught it to the children; the new song was a great success; and James and Rosamond went back to writing songs for Broadway. But the song took on a life of its own. Within a few decades, it had spread throughout much of the United States, and had been adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. James Johnson said that his song got its widest distribution, not through copies obtained from his music publisher, but through “printed or typewritten copies of the words pasted in the backs of hymnals and the songbooks used in Sunday schools, Y.M.C.A’s, and similar institutions.” In other words, the song took on a life of its own; it spread because it touched something deep within people’s hearts; and it spread beyond Black America to White America as well.

    So why did this poem — not a great poem, perhaps — why did it become such an influential poem? I can think of a number of reasons why this poem is so influential. It is influential because Johnson’s words rang true; even if his words aren’t great poetry, his words have the ring of truth. It is influential because we sing this poem: we embody this poem with our breath and our voices, and then it blends together with the other voices singing it around us, and takes on a peculiar power in this way. It is influential because it is easy to memorize: I have a poor memory, and even I can remember most of the first verse.

    For all these reasons, we still sing this song more than a century after it was written; it is still considered the African American national hymn; and I continue to be impressed how, when you start singing this hymn with a group of Americans, how many of them (even us white Americans) know at least some of the first verse. And if a poem — I mean “poem” in the broader sense of the word — if a poem is going to transform us, one way that happens best is if we know that poem by heart, and if we say it (or sing it) aloud; and the power of that poem to transform us increases even more if it is a poem that we say or sing together.

    I have some thoughts on how this song transforms us. For many of us who live in the United States, “freedom” and “liberty” seem to have become tired words. “Freedom” — that old stuff, we don’t need to hear about that, that all got taken care of in 1776. “Liberty” — well, the Liberty Bell is cracked, and that should tell you about the state of liberty in this country. What James Johnson manages to do in “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is to remind us that freedom and liberty were not won in 1776; nor were they won on January 1, 1863; nor were they won when the Civil rights Act was signed; nor, most probably, will they ever be completely won for any of us, black or white or whatever our skin color. When I sing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” I am reminded that human beings have a hard time living up to their ideals; and I am reminded that freedom and liberty are a process, not an end-state.

    …

    Johnson was in his twenties when he wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” He went on to write other, better-regarded poems and novels and books. Perhaps his best-known book of poems is a small volume called God’s Trombones, beloved of religious liberals. But I’d like to skip past all that, skip ahead to a book he put together with his brother Rosamond in 1925 when he was in his mid-fifties.

    This was their Book of American Negro Spirituals. It is but one of many collections of African American songs and spirituals, but it is important, I think, in large part because Johnson placed one of his best poems at the beginning of the book, the poem we heard in the first reading this morning, “O Black and Unknown Bards.” This poem tells us why we should pay attention to a book of African American spirituals. Johnson elaborates on the thoughts in the poem in his prose introduction to the book, in which he says:

    “To supply [the slave] trade Africa was raped of millions of men, women, and children. As many as survived the passage were immediately thrown into slavery. These people came from various localities in Africa. They did not all speak the same language. here they were, suddenly cut off from the moorings of their native culture, scattered without regard to their old tribal affiliations, having to adjust themselves to a completely alien civilization, having to learn a strange language, and, moreover, held under an increasingly harsh system of slavery; yet it was from these people this mass of noble music sprang; this music which is America’s only folk music and, up to this time, the finest distinctive artistic contribution she has to offer the world…. Take, for example, ‘Go Down, Moses’: there is not a nobler theme in the whole musical literature of the world….”

    Johnson is telling us about the power of poetry to transform the world. Now we could argue the relative merits of African American spirituals, and whether they are indeed the only American folk music, and so on, and so on. There is a place for such scholarly arguments, but Johnson is making a poetic argument here. He is telling us this: Faced with an impossible situation — an alien civilization, the degradations of slavery, a strange new language — faced with these harsh conditions, African Americans made poetry; and with their poetry, they transformed their souls with nobility, and so transformed the world around them.

    These songs continue to transform us, transform all of us here in America. Yes, these old spirituals have a special place in the cultural lives of African Americans, but their poetry can transform all of us. When we sing or listen to these songs, we get connected to those early people of African descent who were forced to come live in America; and we understand the nobility of their souls, a nobility that allowed them to retain their humanity in the face inhuman conditions.

    So it is that all of us — African Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans — we all are made a little more noble, and that nobility becomes a part of who we are as a people. This nobility breaks down systemic racism, just a little. By allowing us to share in that nobility of soul, we find our own souls becoming a little more noble, and such nobility can serve as a sort of vaccine against impersonal, infectious systemic racism taking hold in our souls.

    …

    I wanted to close with brief word about James Weldon Johnson’s understanding of religion. We heard some of his ideas on religion in the second reading this morning. Given the ideas on religion he expresses, I like imagine that Johnson would have felt quite at home in our Unitarian Universalist church. He would even have felt at home in this church back when he wrote those words in 1933, back when the minister here was a staunch humanist named Stanton Hodgin — well, he would have felt welcome here except for the fact that he was black, and in 1933 this church was very definitely a white church. Those were different times back then, racially speaking.

    Be that as it may, I still like to imagine what Johnson would have felt if he could show up in our church today. I like to imagine saying to him: You know, what you said back in 1933 — that’s pretty much what I preach from the pulpit; and what you say is pretty much what we do in our church: we don’t have religion in the commonplace sense of the term (which is these parts means orthodox Christianity); we try to practice conduct towards ourselves and our neighbors that constitutes our basis for religion; we feel Jesus is a great spiritual and ethical thinker who inspires us; and each day, if we would not be lost, we take a fresh hold of life, and we renew our courage to do this by touching the face of God, whatever God may mean to each one of us individually.

    These religious ideas permeate all of Johnson’s poetry. He is not one of our best known American poets. But he is a deeply human poet, and a humane poet. Even if the critics don’t place him into the first ranks of American poetry, his humanity counts for a great deal. No, he didn’t write anything that is considered as great as T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”; but far more people know and have memorized and have been transformed by “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

    By singing “Life Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” or any of the songs in The Book of American Negro Spirituals, we become for that moment poets ourselves. We bring that written poetry to life by singing, or even just saying the words aloud. In so doing, we transform ourselves, we transform the world, we create new understandings of what it is to be human in America, we make ourselves just a little bit more noble.