Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Ecospirituality

    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 is an excerpt from Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

    “I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents.

    “Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

    The second reading is from the book Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey:

    “Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — …a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves,… and I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by computers. I promise you this: you will outlive them.”

    Sermon: “Ecospirituality”

    Many years ago the author E. B. White said, “I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” (1)

    To save the world, or to savor the world: this dilemma arises almost immediately when we begin to talk about ecospirituality. We all know we’re in the middle of a major environmental crisis, one that needs immediate attention. We could easily spend all our free time trying to solve Earth’s ecological problems. Of course if we spend all our free time solving those problems, then we don’t have any time to enjoy the environment that we’re trying to save. It can feel as though this the price we have to pay: There’s too much to be done, so there’s no time for enjoyment. On the other hand, it can feel as though our environmental crisis has arisen because we all spend too much time trying to work harder, trying to be more efficient and more useful, trying to do more and more. From a spiritual point of view, maybe we should try to do less. Maybe we should spend less time doing, and more time being. Maybe our drive to do more is much the same thing as the drive to consume more, and the drive to consume more is what’s driving the ecological crisis.

    Do we save or savor the world? I’d like to suggest one way we might thread our way through this ecospiritual dilemma. But first I have to outline the ecological problems facing us. It’s going to be a bit unpleasant, a little bit depressing, but then I can move on and talk about savoring the world.

    Like most big problems, the ecological crisis can be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces. Many years ago, the biologist E. O. Wilson broke down the environmental crisis into five categories: habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, human population, and overharvesting; he used the acronym HIPPO as a way to remember his formulation.(2) But given how much we now talk about climate change, Wilson’s list can feel a bit outdated.

    Three or four years ago, I attended an online talk given by Stuart Weiss, a Stanford-trained biologist who works in environmental remediation. There are five items on Weiss’s more up-to-date list: climate change; land use change (which includes deforestation and “defaunation” or the decline of animal populations); invasive organisms; toxication (which includes pollution from solid waste like plastics); and human overpopulation.

    That’s a rather daunting list, and even though climate change gets the most attention in public conversations some of the other problems can be equally pressing, or even more pressing. For example, communities that suddenly discover their water supply is contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are going to place a higher priority on addressing toxication. Or if you go for a walk in Wompatuck State Park and notice how many the beech trees are dying because they’re infected with invasive Beech Leaf Disease, in that moment you might feel as though invasive species represent a more immediate problem than climate change.

    Each of these five major problems can feel overwhelming. How can we possibly stop climate change? How can we prevent deforestation and defaunation? What can we do to tackle invasive species? And what about toxication and human overpopulation? The overwhelming nature of each of these problems, and the even greater sense of being overwhelmed by considering all these problems at the same time, leads me to the first great principle of ecospirituality: You do not want to feel overwhelmed. Because when you get overwhelmed you can neither save the world nor savor it.

    This in turn leads to the first great principle of ecospiritual practice: You are just one person, so you only have to work one of these five big ecological problems. And you only have to find one narrow, manageable aspect of that problem where you personally can make a difference given your skills and abilities. Or you may not find one specific aspect of an ecological problem, it may have already found you. I’ll give you an example from my own life. I’ve been teaching and supervising comprehensive sexuality education programs to adolescents for a couple of decades now. I’ve developed some skill in this area, and teaching about human sexuality seems to be a good match for my abilities. When I happened to read that education seems to correlate with lower birth rates, it finally dawned on me that teaching comprehensive sexuality programs is how I’ve been using my skills and abilities to address human overpopulation.

    Furthermore — and this seems odd when I put it this way — for me, teaching about human sexuality is actually a kind of ecospiritual practice. It turns out that doing something to save the world can serve as one kind of spiritual practice. We tend to assume that spiritual practices are things like meditating or doing yoga or studying Torah or attending Dharma talks. But if the effect of a spiritual practice is to make us feel more centered, more grounded, more spiritually whole — then for some of us, engaging in concrete action to help save the world is going to be more effective than prayer or sitting zazen. Using my own experience as an example, in my case addressing human overpopulation by teaching human sexuality makes me feel more centered and grounded. I feel like I’m doing something to make the world a better place. That makes me feel good. It also makes me feel less powerless in the face of ecological problems, so I feel more grounded.

    I’m not saying anything you don’t already know. I’m sure many of you have similar kinds of stories that you could tell about yourself. The only thing I’m saying that might be a little different is I’m claiming that you only have to pick one of the big environmental issues to address; and then you only have to find one aspect of it where you can bring your talents and abilities and skills to bear. You don’t have to do everything; you only have to do one thing. If you get really good at that one thing, then you can add more to what you’re working on. But from an ecospiritual point of view, you don’t want to take on too many things. If you take on too many things, you will dilute your efforts and become ineffective, and you may burn yourself out. But if you do that one thing which you are able to do, if you can use your individual skills and talents to address environmental problems, you can experience personal spiritual growth while you help save the world.

    Now that we’ve talked about saving the world, let’s turn to savoring the world, for that is the other half of ecospirituality.

    In the second reading this morning, Edward Abbey exhorted us to be “half-hearted fanatics” when it comes to saving the world.(3) He is implying that we should spend no more than half our free time saving the world. The rest of our time, he says, we should spend savoring the natural world.

    I agree with Edward Abbey on the necessity of getting out and savoring the world. I don’t find myself in agreement with the list of activities he tells me I should enjoy: “hunt and fish and … ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers,” and so on. That may how Edward Abbey savored the world, but that need not be how you or I savor the world. I’ll give you some examples of other ways to savor the world that are perhaps less infected with machismo.

    First example: this summer I went to a weeklong workshop to learn about bryophytes, that is, mosses and related plants. Our instructor told us that one of the reasons he studied mosses was because of their aesthetic value. And he took obvious pleasure in getting out into the field to collect mosses. He got just as much joy from being in the lab, looking at mosses under the dissecting microscope or looking at slides of parts of mosses under the compound microscope. I would describe the joy he got from looking at mosses under a microscope as a kind of spiritual experience.

    Second example: I know people, and you all probably know people, for whom gardening provides a kind of spiritual experience. Preparing the soil, planting seeds and nurturing young plants, keeping the rabbits and the plant-eating insects from doing too much damage, watering, hoeing, harvesting — the whole process of gardening from start to finish can serve as a kind of spiritual experience. My father was one of those gardeners. In spring, summer, and fall, he seemed to feel a deep need to spend every spare moment working in his garden. One of the last things he did before he was no longer able to walk was go out and check on some pea plants that were still growing in his garden, even though it was November.

    Third example: Henry David Thoreau wrote extensively about going for long walks, and the things he saw on his walks. One of Thoreau’s most famous essays is titled “Walking,” and in that essay he claims the people with a real genius for walking actually engage in “sauntering,” a word he says derives from the “idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages … under the pretext of going à la Saint-terre, to the Holy Land.” “Saint-terre” became “saunter,” and the people walking were saunterers.(4) This was how Thoreau humorously justified his long walks: when his more straitlaced neighbors accused him of being a mere idler who walked in the woods to avoid work, he called himself a saunterer, a person engaged in a religious journey, someone who could find the Holy wherever he walked.

    Thoreau’s conception of walking as a spiritual practice has become an accepted part of our culture. When we think of things that constitute ecospiritual practice, we are most likely to think of something like Thoreauvian walks in the woods. By extension, it’s not too much of a stretch for us to think of activities like climbing mountains and running rapids in a canoe as possible spiritual practices; these, too, are forms of sauntering.

    But I’d like to broaden the understanding of ecospiritual practices. Earlier, I said that teaching a class in comprehensive human sexuality to adolescents was a kind of ecospiritual practice for me. Now let’s broaden the definition of ecospiritual practice even further. I want to broaden the definition of ecospiritual practice enough to include science. For a trained scientist like my moss instructor this summer, looking at moss under a microscope can be a spiritual experience. Doing work in the biological or ecological sciences can lead to spiritual experiences for some people. For these people, science can even become a kind of spiritual practice. Even for people who aren’t trained scientists but who seriously try to learn about biological and ecological sciences, both amateur science and citizen science can become a kind of spiritual experience.

    Including science broadens the definition of ecospiritual practice beyond what our society usually allows. Our society usually assumes that science and religion are completely incompatible. But some of the scientists I’ve known have been very spiritual people; perhaps they wanted nothing to do with traditional religion, but they were spiritual. Anything that brings us into a greater awareness of the wider ecosystem, the wider universe, can result in a spiritual experience.

    I find it difficult to name that wider awareness, to come up with a term for that transcendent feeling. Traditional words for this feeling include God, Dharma, Brahman; but to my ears, in contemporary American idiom none of these words can quite convey exactly what I mean by a transcendent feeling. Ralph Waldo Emerson described the feeling of transcendence by saying: “all mean egotism vanishes; I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.”(5) I like this formulation better, even though the image of a transparent eyeball is grotesque. But Emerson gets at the experience of what can happen when engaging in ecospiritual practices: your sense of self can disappear, leaving you with a simple awareness of oneness with the rest of the ecosystem.

    I may not like the image of the “transparent eyeball” — and even in his own day, people made fun of Emerson for using that image — but I have nothing better to offer. Personally, I prefer to talk about the interdependent web of existence, but that phrase doesn’t really describe that feeling where you lose your self and feel a part of a greater whole. How do you describe it when a scientist loses themself for an hour looking at a specimen of Ulota crispa complex through a microscope? How do you describe it when you’re working in your garden, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been so immersed in the life of plants that you lost track of an hour or more? In that hour, all mean egotism vanished. In that hour, the currents of Universal Being circulated through you. Even when I’m teaching a course in comprehensive human sexuality, I’ve had times when all my mean egotism vanished.

    Maybe there are no words to talk about this. We get to a certain point, and words fail us. We know what the ecological problems are; words are adequate to talk about the ongoing environmental crisis. Words begin to fail when we want to talk about experiences of the interdependent web of life. My moss instructor could tell us that looking at moss was beautiful, but the expression on his face and the posture of his body said that there what was going on inside him was more than simple appreciation of a pretty plant.

    Words may fail, but when we can talk to someone face to face, most of what is communicated happens without words. That’s why we come here on Sunday mornings — you may listen to my inadequate words, but more importantly there is communication that happens just by being together. So it is that the best way to learn about ecospirituality is to have it come up in casual conversation with another person. Look at the eyes of the gardener when they tell you about putting the garden to bed for the season. Listen to the tone of voice of the hiker when they tell you about climbing Mount Garfield in the White Mountains. Observe the body language of the person telling you about their environmental project. Because words are inadequate, this may be the only way to discover what ecospirituality is: being with people who are doing ecospirituality in their day-to-day lives, even if they don’t call it by that name.

    Notes

    (1) Quoted in “E. B. White: Notes and Comment by Author”, Israel Shenker, The New York Times, 11 July 1969.
    (2) See for example his lecture on 18 March 2011 at the Smithsonian Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6-cIBuzjag
    (3) Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire.
    (4) Henry David Thoreau, “Walking.”
    (5) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”

  • Today’s Abortion Debates

    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 corrections.

    Readings

    The first reading was from the poem “Parliament Hill Fields” by Sylvia Plath:

    On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.
    Faceless and pale as china
    The round sky goes on minding its business.
    Your absence is inconspicuous;
    Nobody can tell what I lack.

    Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back
    To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue,
    Settling and stirring like blown paper
    Or the hands of an invalid. The wan
    Sun manages to strike such tin glints

    From the linked ponds that my eyes wince
    And brim; the city melts like sugar….
    Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge
    Swaddles roof and tree.
    It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank.
    I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all.
    Already your doll grip lets go….

    The second reading was by Joy Harjo, from her book Poet Warrior:

    Poet Warrior gave birth to two children
    And acquired more children along the way
    Through association, marriage, and love.
    Those children gave birth to children
    There were more and more story bringers
    In her world.
    They became her fiercest teachers
    Of how there is no end to love
    And of how it plants itself
    Deeper than earth
    Or sky.

    Sermon: Today’s Abortion Debates

    This morning I propose to speak with you about abortion, but don’t worry — I’m not going to tell you what to think. We Unitarian Universalists are somewhat notorious because we insist on thinking for ourselves. You think for yourself, I think for myself, and neither you nor I is going to tell the other what to believe. The result of this, not surprisingly, is that we Unitarian Universalists sometimes have the reputation for wanting to argue all the time.

    We Unitarian Universalists are also somewhat notorious for our skepticism. If someone tells us that something is true, we’re not willing to accept their word for it. We want to know why. We tend towards skepticism because we know that individual humans are prone to make mistakes. Just because one person says something is true doesn’t make it true. That person could be wrong. We want to double check what they say.

    To make matters worse for me personally, I was also trained as a philosopher. While I’m not a very good philosopher, I know enough to know that there are rarely simple answers to anything. Martin Heidegger used the image of the search for truth as being like “Holzwege,” those little paths in the woods where if you follow them, they might lead to a clearing where you can see the sky, or they might peter out and go nowhere. Heidegger was a very problematic philosopher, but this image provides a good way to think about truth.

    I’d add in an insight from the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: it takes a community of inquirers to search for truth. No one person arrives at the truth alone. So when it comes to the topic of this sermon, and the question of what we should do, i t’s going to be up to all of us — argumentative, skeptical Unitarian Universalists that we are — to to try to find provisional answers for the abortion debate.

    If there are any answers. Which there may not be.

    OK, now that we know that I can’t provide firm answers, let’s think through some terminology. When we speak of abortions here in the United States, we often hear the phrase “a woman’s right to control her own body.” This simple phrase carries a couple of assumptions that may tend to obscure a little of the complexity of the real world.

    First, although the great majority of persons who have abortions are women, that is not entirely true. Human biology is more complex than a simple binary between male and female. There are intersex people who can get pregnant, yet who were assigned a male gender at birth, people whom everyone thinks of as male. There are transgender people who have transitioned to male, but who can still get pregnant. What I’m saying tends to be controversial, and I don’t recommend bringing these points up in ordinary political discussions with friends and neighbors. But when you hear “a woman’s right to control her own body,” you might want to add a mental footnote to yourself, where you include the possibility of intersex and transgender people getting pregnant.

    The other problematic word in this phrase is the word “right.” This is problematic here in the United States because of our peculiar understanding of rights. First, we understand “rights” as a zero-sum game. For example, if there is a right to carry firearms, that right is cancels out any hypothetical rights that might limit it. To put this another way: in the United States, we have either/or rights: if I have a right, it cancels out any contradictory rights, regardless of the actual complexities of real life. Second, our U.S. legal system provides a fairly narrow range of rights. Although the Declaration of Independence talks about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we do not have the right to several things that are usually considered essential to life. For example, we do not have the right to shelter; nor do we have the right to food. We Americans are used to this state of affairs — we’re used to rights being a zero-sum game, we’re used to having a narrow range of rights — but it’s a good idea for us to remember that there are other ways to have rights.

    It’s fine for us to keep on using the terms and phrasing with which we’re all familiar. But being good Unitarian Universalists, it’s also good for us to remain skeptical of the very terms of the abortion debate here in the United States.

    This brings me to a question that we Americans tend to either avoid, or over-sensationalize. And that’s the question of the emotional side of abortion. The pro-life folks tend to over-sensationalize the emotional question, while the pro-choice folks tend to skirt around the issue. So let’s take the middle ground, and neither over-sensationalize, nor skirt this question. When we do so, we discover there is no one single emotional response to abortion. Let me be more specific.

    Most of us probably know at least one person who has had an abortion. The older you get, the more of these stories you’re likely to hear. I’m not going to give any of the specifics of the stories I personally have heard — those stories were told to me in confidence, and I’m going to keep those confidences — but I can anonymize what I’ve heard and talk in generalities.

    For some people, having an abortion results in complex feelings of sadness. Unfortunately, the pro-choice folks make these feelings of sadness sound one-dimensional, like something from a cheap greeting card. The people I’ve listened to have quite complicated feelings. That’s why I included the first reading, the poem by Sylvia Plath about a miscarriage, to serve as a stand-in for some of those very complicated feelings of sadness that some women experience after an abortion. One line of the poem says, “Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell what I lack….” Some women experience this feeling of absence, a feeling that’s difficult or impossible to communicate to others. This, by the way, is why I get so annoyed when the pro-choice folks over-sensationalize those feelings. But I’m not going to tell you what those feelings are. I just know those feelings are there, and we should neither ignore them, nor trivialize them, nor over-emphasize them.

    For other people, having an abortion does not result in feelings of sadness, or in much feeling at all. I’ve listened to some people who have had abortions, who are very matter-of-fact about the whole thing: they once had an abortion, it wasn’t a big deal, now they are going to move on with life. Nor should we assume this is a better or worse reaction to having an abortion. Each person’s individual situation is going to be unique, and in any case each person will react a little differently.

    Emotional reactions to abortion can be complicated by another factor. Some non-white women, and some poor and working class women, do not feel very trusting towards the medical establishment. These people may have a great relation with individual health care workers. But the medical establishment as a whole does not have a great track record in the United States for providing fair and equitable health care for non-white or poor women — or for transgender people, for that matter. (Or for homeless people of any gender; even I, with my limited contact with unhoused people, can tell you that from personal experience.) Thus, while the pro-choice folks may talk about abortion access as something that’s absolutely good, this may not be a convincing argument to people who have little trust in the medical establishment as a whole.

    And abortions can bring up other emotions as well. I haven’t mentioned the emotions that come up when someone realizes they may need or want an abortion. Nor have I mentioned the emotions that may arise in partners, parents, or other family members, emotions which can swirl around the person having the abortion. Without going into all these details, remember that abortion may give rise to a wide range of emotions, or it may give rise to little or no emotion. I’ll say it again: real life is more complex than our usual political debates allow for.

    Now that we’ve thought a bit about the emotional side of things, I’d like to consider the somewhat strange legal environment around abortion in the United States.

    I’ve already mentioned that here in the United States, rights are a zero-sum game. If I have a right that conflicts with your right, only one of those rights will be recognized in the U.S. legal system. In 2021, professor Jamal Greene, a renowned legal scholar at Columbia Law School, wrote a book that on this topic; his book is aptly titled “How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart.” Greene devoted a chapter of the book to the question of abortion rights. In a fascinating comparison, he looked at the legal status of abortion in the United States, and the legal status of abortion in Germany. (Note that Greene wrote his book before the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ruled there is no right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution.) Greene pointed out that while abortion in Germany was technically illegal, practically speaking people could get an abortion without being prosecuted. More importantly, when there were legal challenges to abortion, the courts decided each case based on the facts of the case; that is, the German courts did not try to hand down an abstract ruling establishing a universal right to something, but instead ruled on the specifics of the case at hand. They based their rulings on real life, not on abstract rights. Greene contrasted that with the American system, where the courts tend to focus on the abstractions while ignoring what’s going on in real life.

    In Germany, according to Jamal Greene, neither side “won” the battle over abortion. Abortion remains illegal, which makes the pro-choice folks unhappy. Abortions are practically available to those who need and want them, so the pro-life folks remain unhappy. Under German law, abortion is not a zero-sum game. Greene found that the German approach allowed the two sides in the abortion debate to actually talk with one another, identify common goals, and work towards them. Instead of causing polarization, in Germany both sides have been able to cooperate in supporting prenatal care, and in providing benefits to new mothers (such as extended maternal leave and child care) that support the health of children. By contrast, here in the United States, our emphasis on abstract rights is tearing us apart.

    Once again, we can see how the American debates about abortion tend to oversimplify matters, and tend to push us towards polarization. With that in mind, I’d like to consider briefly three more issues relating to abortion.

    Number one: perceptions around abortion have changed over time. Back in the 1970s, many Evangelical Protestant Christians in the United States supported the legal right to abortion. The Roman Catholic Church did not decree that abortion was wrong until the 19th century. Nor have all political liberals always supported the legal right to abortion. Attitudes towards abortion have changed over time, and continue to change. Thus if anyone, pro-life or pro-choice, tries to argue that their position on abortion is somehow timeless, has always been “true,” we should be exceedingly skeptical.

    Number two: medical science and technology continue to raise questions that bear on abortion. One obvious example: we are now able to determine if a fetus is severely disabled and won’t survive long after birth; how does that scientific advance affect decisions about abortion? Less obviously: how has the so-called medicalization of pregnancy and birth changed how medical professionals influence decisions around abortion? (1) That is, the medicalization of pregnancy and birth can sometimes take away the agency of the person who is pregnant, with implications for abortion. In another example, when we apply the insights of statistics and epidemiology to pregnancy and birth, we find that Black women are four times as likely to die in childbirth than White women, and poor women are three times as likely to die in childbirth. (2) This raises challenging questions about the relative value of human life.

    Number three: as religious people ourselves, we should consider the wide range of religious views on abortion. There are Christians who hold that life begins at conception, and there are Christians who hold that life begins only when the fetus is viable outside the womb. There are Buddhists who believe that having an abortion makes one guilty of murder, and there are Buddhists who believe that abortion is allowable. From what I can find out, every religious group has people with diverse views on abortion. In our increasingly multicultural society, we cannot ignore the diversity of views people hold on abortion. And we must remember that regardless of what some people try to tell us, there is no final religious answer.

    By now I hope I’ve shown that the abortion question, like all ethical questions, is complex. We human beings would prefer it if ethical questions were easy to answer, but they never are.

    This reminds me of a course I took in college called “Ethics and the Professions.” I hoped to get firm answers to ethical issues. I wanted to be able to quote philosophical authorities that would either prove or disprove a point. Instead, the professor presented us with real-life ethical questions; we had to argue several different positions for each ethical question. I remember one case study he presented. At that time, there were more people needing kidney dialysis than there were kidney dialysis machines. If we were on the ethics board of a hospital, the professor asked, how would we decide which people got to use a kidney dialysis machine? That is, how would we decide which people got to live, and which people got to die? Although I hated this class, I finally came to realize that the professor was trying to teach us that in real life, ethical questions should be answered, not as abstract philosophical questions, but on a case-by-case basis.

    This approach coincides neatly with the Unitarian Universalist approach. We Unitarian Universalists do not have a creed or a dogma; we do not have ready-made abstract rules we have to follow. Instead, we try to acknowledge the complexity of real life. We know that all human beings are fallible (even we ourselves are fallible), and that the way to get to the truth is by an extended and concerted group effort. All this means we are skeptical of anyone who claims to have the one true answer.

    This turns out to be our religious position on abortion. We do our best not to oversimplify a complex ethical question. We don’t limit ourselves to abstract discussions. We do not have the one true final answer. We consider the actual lived experience of real people. We listen to the real stories of real people and do our best to make wise choices and wise decisions.

    And when we stop to think about it, our religious position is actually based on love. The poet Joy Harjo says love “plants itself / Deeper than earth / Or sky.” Love takes our ethical questions beyond cold abstractions to the warmth of actual human beings. In that spirit, we hope that love will guide all our ethical deliberations.

    Notes

    Story sources: Daoist teachings translated from the Book of Liehzi, Book II “The Yellow Emperor,” trans. Lionel Giles, 1912. Supporting source: Alchemists, Mediums, and Magicians: Stories of Taoist Mystics, trans. and ed. Thomas Cleary, p. 8 n. 29.

    (1) For a broad summary of medicalization, see: Wieteke van Dijk, Marjan J. Meinders, Marit A.C. Tanke, Gert P. Westert, and Patrick P.T. Jeurissen, “Medicalization Defined in Empirical Contexts – A Scoping Review,” International Journal of Health Policy Management, 2020 Aug; 9(8): 327–334; pub. online 2019 Dec 21. doi: 10.15171/ijhpm.2019.101 ; accessed via https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7500387/

    (2) In the United Kingdom, according to Sheikh, Jameela, John Allotey, Tania Kew, Borja M Fernández-Félix, Javier Zamora, Asma Khalil, Shakila Thangaratinam, et al, 2022, “Effects of Race and Ethnicity on Perinatal Outcomes in High-Income and Upper-Middle-Income Countries: An Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis of 2 198 655 Pregnancies”, The Lancet, 400(10368): 2049–62 — quoted in Quill R Kukla, Teresa Baron, Katherine Wayne, “Pregnancy, Birth, and Medicine,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revision dated 17 May 2024 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-pregnancy/, accessed 12 October 2024.

  • A Religious Liberal Looks at the Economy

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

    Opening words

    from “To His Newborn Great-Grandson,” by W. E. B. DuBois

    The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work. With this satisfaction, and this need, life is heaven or as near heaven as you can get. Without this — with work which you despise, which bores you, — with work which the world does not need — this life is hell.

    Readings

    The first reading comes from the New Revised Standard Version of the Christian scriptures, the Book of Mark, chapter 10, verses 17-26:

    “As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and ”’ He said to him, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’ Jesus, looking at him … and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When he heard this, the man was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

    “Then Jesus looked around and said to his followers, ‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ And his followers were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ They were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’”

    The second reading comes from Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, from the first chapter, titled “Economy”:

    “For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus [add MAY tose]. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.”

    Sermon — “A Religious Liberal Looks at the Economy”

    Back in 1992, Jim Carville was a strategist working in the presidential campaign for the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. To help his campaign workers promote a uniform message, Jim Carville posted a sign in the Clinton campaign headquarters with the three main points he wanted to convey to voters. Using Carville’s exact wording, those three points were as follows: Don’t forget healthcare; Change versus more of the same; The economy, stupid.

    Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Thirty-two years later, these points could still be used by either of the major presidential campaigns. The last two points — Change versus more of the same; The economy, stupid — remain especially relevant. Indeed, I’d argue that the last point — “The economy, stupid” — probably motivates more voters than anything else.

    Because the economy continues to be so important in our democracy, I thought it made sense for me to devote a sermon to the economy. However, I’m not an economist. Nor am I adept at talking about American politics. So this won’t be a political sermon. Instead I’m going to try to talk, from my point of view as a religious liberal, about some of the moral implications of economics.

    To begin with, let’s consider the New England approach to doing business, as I experienced it growing up in a New England town during the late twentieth century. In those days, before the big box stores and multinational conglomerates took over, and before people bought everything online, many businesses were still local or regional. The most reputable of those businesses had a guiding philosophy of doing well by doing good. So, for example, during the 1980s I spent seven years working for a family-owned lumber yard. The family which owned the lumber yard went into the lumber business to make money. At the same time, they knew they had to provide goods and services that were needed in the community. They also felt it was their duty to provide stable middle class jobs that allowed their employees to buy a house and raise a family.

    I don’t mean to romanticize those New England businesses from another day. The lumberyard where I worked, for example, was pretty sexist, and worker safety wasn’t always at the top of their list of priorities. But the best of those businesses did their best to follow the ideal of doing well by doing good; and there are still some businesses today that still follow that ideal.

    Keeping that ideal in mind, let’s consider the story told about Jesus of Nazareth that we heard in the first reading.

    The story opens by telling us that Jesus was about to set out on one of his travels through the countryside around Jerusalem. A young man approaches him, and asks this famous spiritual teacher what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus lists some of Moses’s teachings from the Torah: don’t murder anyone; don’t have sex with someone who is someone else’s spouse; don’t steal, lie, or cheat; take care of your parents. Upon hearing this, the young man feels complacent, for he has in fact done all these things. To puncture his complacency, Jesus tells this wealthy young man that there’s one more thing he must do: he must sell everything he owns, give it to the poor, and join Jesus on those travels through the countryside to bring teaching of spirituality and justice to all people. Upon hearing this one last requirement, the rich young man walks away grieving. As he walks away, Jesus turns to his followers, and tells them how difficult it will be for wealthy people to enter the kingdom of God.

    Let me pause for just a moment to consider what Jesus meant when he spoke of the “kingdom of God.” Today’s mainstream Christians are sure they know exactly what the kingdom of God is. They assure us that the kingdom of God is some kind of afterlife where human beings get to go if they are good Christians. By “good Christian,” they mean people who belong to their Christian denomination, and profess belief in the orthodox dogma of their denomination. However, theirs is an anachronistic understanding of Jesus’s words. Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. Nor did Jesus profess belief in any kind of Christian orthodoxy; there was no Christian orthodoxy until a couple of centuries after Jesus had died.

    If you read the Book of Mark with an open mind — that is, if you do not cloak Jesus in anachronistic religiosity, but consider him as a spiritual thinker of depth and insight — you can see that when Jesus says “the kingdom of God,” he was not referring to an afterlife. Jesus felt that the kingdom of God is happening here and now, all around us. Nor is the kingdom of God limited to human beings, for Jesus tells us that not a sparrow falls but that God is aware of it. The Kingdom of God is, to use the words of theologian Bernard Loomer, nothing less than the “world conceived of as an indefinitely extended complex of interrelated, interdependent units of reality” — those of us who are not theologians call this the Web of Life, and it includes both the human and the non-human worlds. When even a tiny bird like a sparrow dies, that death affects the whole kingdom, because each being is connected to every other being.

    To return to the story: When the rich young man approached Jesus, he faced a dilemma. Jesus and his followers hung out with people from a wide range of social classes, ranging from well-to-do merchants, to destitute beggars. Jesus saw that all persons were equally a part of the kingdom of God, and so Jesus maintained equality of relationships with all persons. The rich young man, on the other hand, liked his wealth, and he liked the high status his wealth gave to him. He followed all the teachings of the Torah to the letter, but his wealth prevented him from completely following the spirit of the Torah; or to put in contemporary terms, his love of his wealth prevented him from participating fully in the interdependent web of life. Seeing this, Jesus challenged him: Would the rich young man sell all his possessions and come follow Jesus? How attached was he to his wealth and possessions? Was he more attached to his wealth than he was to the interdependent web of life?

    The followers of Jesus somehow manage to miss all these undercurrents. They are baffled by what Jesus says. If a rich person who has followed all the teachings of the Torah can’t enter the kingdom of God, then who can? Jesus tries to explain to them using a vivid metaphor to describe an almost impossible task. He says it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to become part of the kingdom of God.

    Henry David Thoreau took up exactly this question in his book Walden. In this book, Thoreau describes how built himself a cabin a mile from the nearest house, and lived off the land. Walden is full of passages like the one we heard in the second reading, which ends: “I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.”

    Because of passages like this, many people believe that Thoreau was telling us that we should all go off into the woods, plant a field of beans like he did, and stay out of the money economy. These same people then take great delight in pointing out that Thoreau did not in fact live completely on his own. They love to tell us that his mother did his laundry, and that he would often eat dinner with his family. Because of this, these people dismiss Thoreau. But these critics of Thoreau gloss over some key facts showing us that Thoreau’s actual message was more complex. Thoreau’s cabin was a station on the Underground Railroad, and one reason he went home to dinner was to attend gathering of anti-slavery activists. And Thoreau was also an important part of the family business of manufacturing pencils; he had to go home regularly because his work made an essential contribution to the family income.

    Nor did Thoreau say that everyone should go build a cabin in the woods. He used his two year sojourn in the cabin at Walden Pond as an experiment. He wanted to that we could detach ourselves from our possessions; for when we allow ourselves to be governed by our money and our possessions, we lose sight of what Thoreau called “higher laws.” He was especially sensitive to the way that slavery in the United States warped the morality of the national economy. New Englanders liked to pretend they had nothing to do with slavery, but the Mexican American War showed him how northerners were happily complicit with southern slaveholders. Thoreau put it this way: “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” Jesus used the image of a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle to illustrate how attachment to wealth could disconnect people from the interdependent web of existence. Thoreau used a different metaphor, a metaphor of enslavement, and he talked of “higher laws” rather than the “kingdom of God.” But he was making the same point: too much wealth can disconnect us from the web of life.

    This brings us to the present day, and to the present election cycle. When we listen to politicians talking about the economy — when we ourselves talk about the economy as it relates to the election — what exactly do we talk about? Are we talking about what Thoreau called “higher laws,” what Jesus called the “kingdom of God,” what we might call the interdependent web of existence? Or do our political conversations somehow fall short?

    One area where the political conversations of our own day usually fall short is that we reduce the economy to jobs. If everyone has a job — so goes this rhetorical turn — then the voters will be happy with the politicians. But it is not just jobs that we human beings want and need. This has been true since ancient times. The Torah tells us, “one does not live by bread alone” [Duet. 8:3, NRSV]. Yes, we want work that allows us to put bread on the table. But we humans need more than that; we need to know how we are connected to the rest of humanity, and to the entire interdependent web of existence.

    Furthermore, not every job brings us that sense of connection to something larger than our selves. In my seven years working in the lumberyard, and five years working for a carpenter, I was lucky enough to have decent jobs that allowed me to bread on the table. But those jobs didn’t provide much opportunity for attending to “higher laws.” So I was grateful for the hour each week when I could attend a Unitarian Universalist worship service. Maybe I didn’t always pay much attention to the sermon, but the service as a whole gave me a time and place to reconnect with something greater than myself. The social hour following the service was equally valuable as a time when I could talk with others about something besides my job. This may sound trivial, but spending a couple of hours once a week thinking about something other than carpentry helped me to stay connected to what Thoreau called the “higher laws.” We all have a spiritual need to feel connected to a greater whole.

    The political conversations of our own day also fall short if they fail to make a strong connection between the economy and justice. This was true in Thoreau’s day, too, as some politicians chose to ignore the fact that at that time the economy of the entire United States depended upon race-based chattel slavery. While many free White northerners may have found slavery to be reprehensible, they too were held in thrall by an economic system which was rooted in slavery. Their comfort and their relative wealth kept them from ending slavery — kept them from paying attention to the demands of the higher laws, kept them from a full awareness of the interdependence of all human beings.

    This helps us better understand what Jesus was trying to tell the rich young man who wanted access to the kingdom of God. That rich young man was not in control of his wealth and possessions; he was controlled by them. His highest duty was to his wealth, not to his higher self. Because of this, even though he lived a seemingly moral and blameless life, divinity was not easily able to stir within him.

    Or perhaps Thoreau and Jesus both set higher standards than most of us can live up to. Selling all our possessions and following an itinerant preacher is not possible for most of us. Building a cabin a mile from the nearest neighbor and growing all our own food is not possible for most of us. This is especially true if we are responsible for other people — children, elders, spouses. But we should not get caught up in the specifics of these stories. Both Jesus and Thoreau stated their case in extreme terms to grab our attention. Each of them, in their own way, wanted us to fully understand the truth of that old saying from the Torah: human beings need more than food to live; we need a higher life as well. They wanted us to reflect on how we are disconnected from the higher laws. What is keeping us from realizing our essential connection with the interdependent web of existence?

    Somehow we all need to find ways to remember that we are connected to all other people; that we are connected to something greater than ourselves; and that we have it in ourselves to make this world a better place. Thus when we say that it’s only about “the economy, stupid” — when we make it sound like the economy is a matter of selfish gain for each individual — we are doing a disservice to ourselves and to our whole society. The economy is more than just a job for you and a job for me. The economy should also be a means for helping all persons to lead better lives. We do not live by jobs alone. The economy should be a means for making this a better world. We should realize that our economic policies need to be governed by “higher laws,” that is, by high moral standards and by the ideals of justice.

    Not that we’ll always agree among ourselves. Nor will we agree with every politician’s moral standards, or their notions of justice. But we can demand that whenever we as a people consider economic policy, we must always consider morality and justice. We must always consider higher laws. We must always understand that economics means we are connected to the vast web of all existence.

    Photo of a whiteboard hanging in an office.
    A photo allegedly taken of a white board in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters in May, 1992, showing Jim Carville’s now-famous saying, “The economy, stupid.” Good campaign strategy, maybe, but there’s more to the world than “the economy, stupid.”