Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Our Civil Religion

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 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 from sociologist Robert Bellah’s article titled “Civil Religion in America,” first published in the journal Daedalus in 1967:

    “The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion [of the United States] as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. For one thing, neither Washington nor Adams nor Jefferson mentions Christ in his inaugural address; nor do any of the subsequent presidents, although not one of them fails to mention God. The God of civil religion is not only rather ‘unitarian,’ he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love. Even though he is somewhat deist in cast, he is by no means simply a watchmaker God. He is actively interested and involved in history, with a special concern from America. Here the analogy has much less to do with natural law than with ancient Israel; the equation of America with Israel in the idea of the ‘American Israel’ is not infrequent. What was implicit in the words of Washington [in his inaugural address] becomes explicit in Jefferson’s second inaugural when he said: ‘I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.’ Europe is Egypt; America, the promised land. God has led his people to establish a new sort of social order that shall be a light unto all nations.”

    The second reading is from an interview with the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri, in the recent book Talking God: Philosophers on Belief:

    “Taking Christianity as the exemplar of religion skews philosophical discussion towards attempts to solve, resolve, or dissolve difficult philosophical puzzles inherent in monotheism: problems about God’s powers, goodness, and knowledge; attempts to provide rational arguments for God’s existence; the problem of evil; and so on. Hindu philosophers have traditionally been far more interested in a quite different array of problems, especially questions about the nature of religious knowledge and religious language, initially arising from their concerns with the Veda as a sacred eternal text and as a source of ritual and moral law…. Some of the more important Hindu philosophers are atheists, arguing that no sacred religious text such as the Veda could be the word of God, since authorship, even divine authorship, implies the possibility of error. Whether believed in or not, a personal god does not figure prominently as the source of the divine, and instead nontheistic concepts of the divine prevail.”

    Sermon: Our Civil Religion

    The subject for this morning is civil religion in the United States. Our U.S. civil religion has been explored by scholars going back to 1967 when sociologist Robert N. Bellah published an article on the topic. While talking about our American civil religion is nothing new, at the same time in the current political situation it’s also very much of the moment.

    I do have to admit, however, that not everyone agrees that the United States has a civil religion. Conservative Protestant Christians, for example, are often uncomfortable with the notion that our country has a civil religion, for at least two reasons. First, the U.S. civil religion does not fit into their definition of religion, because our civil religion does not center on belief. On the contrary, U.S. civil religion centers of performance of rituals rather than belief. Second, conservative Protestant Christians are quite certain that a person can only have one religious commitment. For this reason, they deny that a civil religion exists; and then they conflate their performance of the religious rituals of U.S. civil religion with their conservative Protestant Christianity. As a result, conservative American Protestantism sometimes becomes a mash-up of Protestant Christianity and U.S. civil religion; using the technical term, it is a “syncretic religion.”

    By the way, it can be controversial to point out the fact that U.S. civil religion is different from Christianity. Robert Bellah points out that “from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, conservative religious and political group have argued that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion.” (1) Yet even though conservative Christians find this controversial, it’s important for us to see clearly that an American civil religion actually does exist — and further, it’s also critically important to see clearly that the American civil religion is not Christianity

    So that we can see more clearly, let’s admit that (all too often) we Unitarian Universalists default to the conservative Protestant Christian definition of religion. All too often, we just assume that a person can only have one religion at a time; that religion centers on belief in a transcendent deity; that the purpose of religion is salvation; that religion is entirely a personal matter; that every religion must have a single sacred text like the Bible. Of course, by this standard, Unitarian Universalism would not be a religion, because we don’t require belief in a deity, we don’t mind if you follow more than one religious path, we don’t have a founding figure, and we’re pretty loose about what constitutes a sacred text. We should know better: the conservative American Christian definition of religion does not work. To be blunt, it is just plain wrong.

    So let’s put that definition of religion aside. And to better understand our current U.S. civil religion, let’s take a look at ancient Rome. The religions of ancient Rome can teach us a lot about the religions in our society today.

    Ancient Rome was a multicultural society, somewhat similar to the way the United States is a multicultural society. Many different religious sects flourished throughout the Roman Empire, sects like the Eleusinian mystery religion in Greece, the religion centered around Isis in Egypt, Judaism in Judea, and so on. A person could join any of these religions, but that person would also be expected to participate in the rituals of the Roman state cult. The Roman state cult provided a measure of social cohesion across the vast empire, with an elaborate calendar of ritual events. Everyone in society had a part to play in the various ceremonies and festivals and sacrifices. Ancient Rome even had sports events as part of the Roman state cult — the Taurean Games, which helped propitiate the deities of the underworld.

    In ancient Rome, Judaism was notable because it was perhaps the only group whose adherents were not required to participate in the ritual sacrifices of the state cult. Admittedly, a few emperors sometimes forgot that the Jews were exempt; so for example, the mad emperor Caligula, who had gotten the Senate to deify him, threatened to place a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem. When the Christians came along, as an offshoot of Judaism they tried to piggy-back on this exemption from the state cult, but got thrown to the lions instead. Thus, with the occasional exception of the Jews, it didn’t matter what other religion you practiced, you had to participate in the state cult of the Roman Empire, or face the consequences.

    I think you can begin to see the parallels between the ancient Roman state cult, and today’s U.S. civil religion; although there were also significant differences. Like the ancient Romans, our civil religion has a calendar of events. The high holiday of this calendar is Independence Day, the fourth of July, which is widely celebrated with fireworks, barbeques, and other standardized rituals. Unlike the ancient Romans, you don’t have to go to a barbeque or watch the fireworks, but at some point in our lives most Americans do participate in these rituals. The rest of the yearly calendar is filled with lesser holidays and their associated rituals: Memorial Day parades, commemorations of 9/11, Martin Luther King Day celebrations, and so on.

    Just as the ancient Romans integrated sports into their state cult, so too are sports an integral part of our U.S. civil religion. Every sports event in the U.S. includes an important ritual from our state cult, the playing of the Star Spangled Banner during which everyone is supposed to stand. When we understand this is a religious ritual, we can understand why there was such a strong reaction when Colin Kaepernick (KAP er nik) took a knee during the Star Spangled Banner. By refusing to participate in a ritual of the state cult, Kaepernick was was actually emulating what the ancient Christians did; and while the lions he got thrown to were metaphorical, he was still thrown to the lions. Interestingly, many conservative Christians didn’t understand how his action was somewhat analogous to the ancient Christian martyrs.

    Another feature of our U.S. civil religion is that we deify our presidents. When I say “deify,” there’s a tendency to confuse that with the Christian idea of the relationship between Jesus and God-the-Father. But deification in ancient Rome was something quite different. When Caesar Augustus died, the Roman Senate voted to deify him — that is, human beings could turn another human being into a god through a legislative act. Once Augustus was voted a deity, then he became part of the Roman pantheon, the government built temples to him and staffed those temples, and his name was invoked on a regular basis in political rhetoric. In U.S. civil religion, we have a similar process with some of our past presidents. Consider Abraham Lincoln for example. His birthday was made a holiday through a legislative act; his portrait was placed on coinage; the government built a temple to him which we call the Lincoln Memorial; and Lincoln’s temple is staffed, not with priests, but with uniformed National Park Service members. Once you understand that Lincoln is analogous to those deified emperors of ancient Rome, you can better understand the bitter reaction to two initiatives of the current presidential administration: the proposal to do away with the penny means doing away with the deified Lincoln’s portrait on our coinage; and cutting National Park Service staff means cutting the uniformed priesthood that cares for the Memorial.

    This also helps us understand why the Trump administration was so upset about the flags flying at half staff for Jimmy Carter during the Trump inauguration. In the last hundred years, every president has received some level of deification upon his death; at a minimum, that deification involves U.S. flags being flown at half staff for a month. But Donald Trump and his followers have begun to sound a little too much like the ancient Roman emperor Caligula and his followers; Caligula and his followers decided to deify him before his death, not after. Increasingly over the past two decades, our presidents and their followers have been trying to deify them before they’re dead. As an independent, belonging neither to the Democratic nor the Republican party, I find this concerning. Barack Obama and Donald Trump are well on their respective paths to deification, and I don’t think either one of them deserves it. While they are each human beings with strengths and weaknesses, in my view neither one is worthy of deification — and I make that last statement with a certain amount of trepidation, knowing that statement will anger their respective followers. It’s almost as if our American civil religion has been torn apart into competing subsects.

    In 1976, a decade after he proposed the idea of a U.S. civil religion, Robert Bellah wrote that our civil religion was at that time in disarray. He wrote: “The legitimacy and authority of all our institutions, political, economic, educational, even familial, as well as religious, has never been shakier.” (2) Civil religion was one of those institutions whose legitimacy and authority was called into question. And when the country as a whole drew back from American civil religion, the conservative Christian view — that Christianity is the state religion — won by default.

    Yet, as Bellah pointed out in 2002, a broader civil religion can serves an important unifying function: “Without some degree of ethical and religious consensus [Bellah said], the burden of social coherence must rest entirely on economic, political, and military structures — just the structures that our highly individualist society most abhors. Religious individualism, then, leads to a purely secular society which can be held together only by external coercion. [This is] a contradiction indeed.” (3)

    Bellah wrote that in 2002, and it seems to me that we are still facing that same contradiction nearly a quarter of a century later. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have been able to propose any unifying ethical and religious consensus; nor has our one lone socialist, Bernie Sanders. Increasingly, our social coherence rests on external coercion through economic, political, and military structures.

    It is tempting to point fingers of blame, and say that the other political party is at fault for destroying social cohesion. The Republicans point the finger of blame at the Democrats, accusing them of destroying social cohesion by attacking marriage and the family, killing unborn babies, and the like — and if you think my rhetoric sounds outrageous, I’m actually toning it down from what I’ve heard in public discourse. For their part, the Democrats point the finger of blame at the Republicans, accusing them of destroying social cohesion by wanting to reinstate slavery and subjugate women and go back to the Stone Age — again, for the sake of this sermon, I’m toing down the rhetoric as we actually hear it in the public square.

    So what happens when American civil religion breaks down? When we can no longer promote social cohesion through the relatively benign means of American civil religion, then people start trying to promote social cohesion through external coercion. Yet for us Americans, external coercion is a form of social cohesion we find abhorrent. When the Republicans talk about “owning the libs,” that’s a mild form of external coercion. When the Democrats talk about how only stupid people could vote for Trump, that’s a mild form of external coercion. Both these forms of social coercion strike at the roots of our cherished ideal of valuing the individual.

    We Unitarian Universalists, as a matter of religious principle, place a high value on the individual. We are still followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spent eight years as a Unitarian minister before transitioning to a full-time career as a writer. In his essay on Self-Reliance, Emerson taught us to value the powers of the individual, and to appreciate both personal responsibility and the right to not conform to societal expectations. Emerson’s protege Henry David Thoreau, a Unitarian for the first two decades of his life, promoted individualism in his famous essay on civil disobedience, in which he taught that individuals must heed the promptings of higher principles. The teachings of both Emerson and Thoreau lie at the core of who we are as Unitarian Universalists: we place the highest value on the worthiness and dignity of individual persons, and we do not like external coercion in any form.

    Because we don’t like coercion — and because we value the individual — I would suggest that we may want to revisit our attitude towards the U.S. civil religion. Over the past few decades, we Unitarian Universalists have been inclined to remove examples of American civil religion from Unitarian Universalism. For example, the last two hymnals published by the Unitarian Universalists Association removed all the patriotic hymns that we used to sing — including the removal of “My Country Tis of Thee,” in the absence of which some of Martin Luther King’s sermons lose their meaning. There have been very good reasons for every action where we’ve removed ourselves from American civil religion. But the effect of all those actions has been that we’ve participated in the erosion of “ethical and religious consensus” in the United States. As a result, we’ve helped to create a climate where some form of external coercion is increasingly required to maintain social cohesion.

    Now because we Unitarian Universalists value individualism so highly, I’m not going to try to tell you what to do. But I’d like to suggest that it would be beneficial for us Unitarian Universalists to re-engage with American civil religion. And in fact, our congregation has been re-engaging with American civil religion over the past few years. We’ve been flying both the United States flag and the Progress Pride flag outside the Meetinghouse (at least, we were flying those two flags alternately until one of this winter’s wind storms broke the flagstaff). Here inside the Meetinghouse, a committee consisting of Bill Baird and Rory Toyoshima recommended moving the U.S. flag down from the gallery to the main floor of the Meetinghouse, and now we display the U.S. flag along with the progress pride flag, the African American national flag, the state flag, and the United Nations flag. Holly Harris and I have started an annual tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence here in the Meetinghouse on the Sunday before Independence Day. In each of these small acts, we as a congregation have re-engaged with the U.S. civil religion, while putting out own interpretation on it.

    I hope that none of these small actions is perceived as being in any way coercive of your rights as an individual. This is part of our interpretation of the U.S. civil religion. No one is going to tell you what to believe. No one is telling you that you have to participate in any ritual that you don’t want to participate in. And if you are sincerely opposed to any of the actions of the U.S. government, we will uphold your right — no, your responsibility — to engage in civil disobedience if your conscience calls upon you to do so.

    But our small actions — things like flying a U.S. flag in front of the Meetinghouse — can signal that we as a religious community are equal participants in American civil religion. And if we can manage our own strong feelings that have been bubbling up because of the current political situation, we are actually well placed to provide powerful spiritual leadership to help this country find common ground. We can present an expansive vision of those famous words from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And we can do this without requiring belief in unbelievable things, without having to deify presidents; and also without having to demonize presidents, for as Unitarian Universalists we know that presidents are neither gods nor demons, but merely fallible human beings.

    Will we convince everyone of our expansive vision of the Declaration of Independence? No, not everyone. But I believe the vast majority of Americans actually do share this vision. And this is a shared vision that could promote social cohesion without external coercion, allowing us to work together as a nation once again.

    Notes

    (1) Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, Winter, 1967, vol. 96 no. 1, Religion in America (Winter, 1967), footnote 1.
    (2) Robert N. Bellah, “The Revolution and Civil Religion,” in Religion and the American Revolution, ed. Jerald C. Brauer (Fortress Press, 1976).
    (3) Robert N. Bellah, “New-time Religion,” The Christian Century, May 22-26, 2002, pp. 20-26.

  • The Experience of Homelessness

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 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 from an essay by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi titled “Two Cheers for Symbolic Capitalists”:

    “Referring to homeless people as ‘unsheltered individuals’… [is a] discursive maneuver that often obscures the brutal realities that others must confront in their day-to-day lives. If the intent of these language shifts is to avoid stigma, the reality is that these populations are still heavily stigmatized….

    “Critically, however, pointing out unfortunate consequences of [this] approach to language and social justice does not invalidate the idea that language matters. In fact, it powerfully illustrates that how we choose to talk and think about society, alongside the ways we try to influence others’ thoughts and discourse, actually can have important social consequences — for better and for worse.” [https://musaalgharbi.com/2024/09/30/two-cheers-symbolic-capitalists/]

    The second reading is from the recent book “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission To Bring Healing to Homeless People,” by Tracey Kidder:

    “The modern era of homelessness began in the 1980s, when the size and visibility of the problem began to rise dramatically. Driving south on I-93, Jim O’Connell tried to draw me a picture of what had gone wrong in Boston. Coming out of the tunnel in the center of the city, he gestured to a portion of the South End. ‘Just look at this. Look at these new buildings, all along here. All those are apartments and all the ones behind them. There’s got to be, by my calculation, at least four thousand new units there, right next to the Pine Street Inn. But no a single one for homeless people.”… Back in the 1920s, Boston had 35,000 single room occupancy units for rent. They had served as homes for immigrants and low-wage workers, elderly people on fixed incomes, and, more recently, for struggling Vietnam veterans. In 1965, the city and South End residents had overwhelmingly approved a plan to turn the neighborhood into ‘an economically, socially and racially integrated community’ with rental housing for ‘all displaced low-income residents wishing to remain.’ The destruction of the old buildings, with their inexpensive … rooms was widely praised as an act of civic virtue, and it might have been, if anything like that plan had been followed….

    “A severe recession in 1980 had inaugurated the era of rising homelessness. But the problem was driven and sustained by many long-brewing problems: the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans; … the grossly inadequate provisions made for mentally ill people;… the continuation of racist housing policies…. Also the arcana of applying for Social Security disability — a process so complex that anyone who could figure out how to get assistance probably didn’t need it.

    Sermon — “The Experience of Homelessness”

    Today is the date of the annual Winter Walk for the Homeless, sponsored by Boston Health Care for the Homeless. This is a fundraising walk to raise money to help fund healthcare for people who are homeless. First Parish has a history of supporting both this annual walk, and Boston Health Care for the Homeless. We most recently supported Boston Health Care for the Homeless by donating the entire collection from our Christmas Eve candlelight service. And this year, quite a few of us from First Parish planned to go on the walk, though because of the snow it’s not clear how many will be able to make the drive up to Boston.

    Two things are especially notable about the Winter Walk for the Homeless: first, it takes place outdoors, regardless of the weather; and second, it includes both housed and unhoused people walking together. Thus it’s more than just another fundraising walk. It’s also a chance to experience the conditions that people who live on the street have to cope with twenty four hours a day, seven days a week; and to be out in the weather with some folks who live outdoors all the time.

    Now — there are quite a few of us who cannot participate in the Winter Walk for the Homeless, for a wide variety of reasons. But I thought it might be worthwhile to talk with you about the experience of homelessness, as a way for us to participate at a distance (as it were) in the Winter Walk. I’m not going to try to explain the causes of homelessness and housing insecurity. At the end of the sermon I’ll make a couple of ethical observations. But I’m not going to suggest policies to end homelessness, or tell you what we should be doing about homelessness. I’m just going to talk about the experience of being homeless.

    The last two congregations I served had members who were homeless, and both those congregations were in places where there were significant numbers of people who were homeless. As a result, I got to know people who were homeless, and I got to hear some of their stories. Since I’m a minister, I do need to protect people’s confidentiality. So the stories I’m going to tell you will provide no details that can be used to identify individuals; you won’t even know whether they lived on the East Coast or the West Coast. To further protect privacy, I’ll be combining elements from different people’s stories. All this means that the stories I’m going to tell you are, in a sense, fictionalized; at the same time, they’re entirely true.

    I’ll start by telling you about someone who came close to being homeless, though he ultimately managed to avoid it. Harry had started his career as a computer programmer. Then there was one of those sudden changes in technology, and suddenly his skills were no longer in demand. He tried to pivot in the new job market by learning new computer skills. Unfortunately, he guessed wrong: just when he had spent six months becoming proficient in the new skills, all the jobs using those skills dried up. By this time, he had used up all his savings, so he didn’t have the money to start yet another training program. Then too, he was well over fifty, and the high tech industry is notorious for its age discrimination. In order to pay the rent and put food on the table, his only viable option was to take any job that he could. He wound up working at Walmart. It was supposed to be a full-time job, but (as was typical with Walmart jobs) after he’d been there a couple of months, they cut his hours to about twenty-five hours a week, and gave him an irregular schedule so it was impossible for him to pick up another part-time job.

    When I met Harry, he was living in studio apartment in a rough part of town, barely able to make the rent each month. After he paid the rent and bought food and gas, he couldn’t afford things like dental care. But between his siblings, and his friends in our Unitarian Universalist congregation, he just managed to stay in his apartment. What finally saved him was that he turned sixty-two and was able to taken Social Security; and because of his days of earning good salaries as a computer programmer, he received enough money to get by. So, by the skin of his teeth and with a lot of luck, Harry managed to stay housed. But though he was never homeless himself, he experienced the constant threat of homeleness.

    In his recent book called White Poverty, the Rev. William Barber, organizer of the Poor People’s Campaign, argues for an improved definition of what it means to be poor. Barber argues that if you can not find the money to pay an emergency bill of four hundred dollars — that is, you could not borrow against home equity, you could not take it out of savings, you could not put it on a credit card — then you’re poor. By this measure, Harry was poor. Barber says that by this measure, about a quarter of all Americans are poor. And if you’re poor like Harry, it’s much easier to fall into homelessness.

    This brings me to the next person I’d like you to meet, whom I’ll call Alice. Alice was in her late twenties when I knew her. She began attending our Unitarian Universalist congregation regularly. She was interesting, intelligent, and articulate; and I always enjoyed chatting with her at social hour. At one point I asked her if she wanted to be listed in the congregation’s directory. It became clear that she really didn’t have a home of her own. She was staying with friends and acquaintances for a couple of weeks at a time, with no set address. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was couch-surfing. Thus, even though she wasn’t living on the streets or in her car, she was homeless.

    One of the big drawbacks to being homeless is that it can make it hard to stay connected with other people. The homeless people I’ve known all have had cell phones, but their phone plans have very limited minutes, so if you try to call them it’s likely you won’t get through. The homeless people I’ve known all have email addresses, but because they don’t have regular internet access they may not be able to respond to email right away. Being homeless can be isolating, and if you have a friend who’s homeless, it can be tough to stay in touch with them.

    Alice was able to check email regularly because she had email access through her job. However, she didn’t like to receive personal email at work, and asked not to be listed in the congregation’s directory. She still showed up every week for Sunday services. I finally said to her, “Look, you’re here nearly every week, you’re obviously a Unitarian Universalist, why don’t you become a member of this congregation?” And then she told me her good news. She had managed to navigate the Byzantine application process for Section 8 housing. (From what I’ve heard almost requires a college degree to navigate successfully, and Alice did in fact have a college degree). There is so little Section 8 housing that actually getting into Section 8 housing is almost like hitting the lottery. But Alice hit the lottery, and got Section 8 housing. I congratulated her on her great good fortune, and then she told me the bad news — the Section 8 apartment she had gotten was an hour’s drive from our congregation. In fact that was the last Sunday she was going to be with us. Not surprisingly, we never heard from her again.

    Here I’d like to interject a short description of the different kinds of homelessness.

    First, there’s couch-surfing. Alice was a couch-surfer, doing short-term stays in other people’s homes. Couch surfing can feel relatively stable, if you have hosts who are willing to let you stay for long periods of time. But couch-surfing ranges all the way to very unstable, where you’re staying for short periods of time in homes where you don’t feel safe.

    Next is car dwelling. In Silicon Valley where I was based for thirteen years, car dwellers included people who owned homes in the Central Valley, a three hour’s drive away, but who lived in their RVs during the week while working at Silicon Valley jobs. And all the local state colleges had students who were full-time car dwellers during the school year. At the other end of the car dwelling scale were people who lived full-time in their cars, and barely had enough money to keep the car insured and registered.

    Next are the people who live in shelters. From talking with shelter dwellers, I learned that homeless shelters can be a mixed bag. At the upper end of the scale, there were the shelters like Heart and Home in Palo Alto. This is a women-only winter shelter housing its guests in churches in Palo Alto; volunteers bring meals, and sit with the guests to talk and share dinner together. At the lower end of the scale are the big city shelters, some of which can feel overcrowded and unsafe to the guests. Not everyone feels safe in a shelter, and some people would rather live on the street.

    And that brings me to Anna. When I first met Anna, she was living in a shelter. She had heard about our Unitarian Universalist congregation, and decided to come check out a worship service. After the service, she found me and, like a typical newcomer, asked me a series of questions about Unitarian Universalism. She came back again the next week, and pretty soon she was calling herself a Unitarian Universalist. A couple of months later, she went through the formal process to become a member of the congregation, making an annual financial pledge; and she pledged a greater percentage of her disposable income than most of our middle class members.

    Anna was a regular at Sunday morning services, so we began to worry a bit when she missed two weeks in a row. Anna was in her mid-seventies, and we wondered if she had gotten ill or injured. I tried calling her, but not surprisingly was unable to get through — she paid by the minute on her phone plan, and didn’t pay for any minutes unless she needed to make a call. Fortunately, she showed up the next week, and I asked her if she had been ill. She told me it wasn’t illness, it was that she had decided to leave the shelter because it just didn’t feel safe any more. You have to understand that Anna was clean and sober, and that her mental health was excellent. But not everyone who stays in a shelter is sober or mentally healthy, and the staff in shelters are usually overworked and can’t monitor everyone adequately. What had really gotten to Anna was the drinking and drug use in the shelter where she had been staying; she had 35 years of sobriety, attended Alcoholics Anonymous regularly, and had little tolerance for people who wouldn’t deal with their addictions. She decided she preferred to live on the streets, rather than live with “a bunch of drunks and druggies” (using her words, as best I can remember them).

    From then on, we only saw Anna at Sunday services about once a month. It all depended on where she wound up spending the night, and whether she could catch a bus that would get her to the church in time for services. Of course, the church offered to give her rides; but she didn’t know where she was going to be on any given Saturday night, nor could she afford the phone call to arrange rides. Nor would she accept money from the congregation’s fund for members in need. Anna felt it was her duty as a member to financially support the congregation, not to have the congregation financially support her.

    When I talked with Anna at social hour, she was mostly interested in talking about the sermon, or about Unitarian Universalism. She kept saying that here she was in her mid-seventies, never knew about Unitarian Universalism before, but she realized now that she’d actually been a Unitarian Universalist all her life. So that’s mostly what we talked about. But sometimes she told me a little bit about her strategies for living on the street safely. Since her methods were so idiosyncratic and creative, I feel like talking about them would betray confidentiality; suffice it to say that she developed creative ways of navigating life on the streets.

    As I was leaving that congregation, I heard that Anna had been finally put on the waiting list for permanent housing — not in a shelter this time, but in an actual apartment. I don’t know if that worked out. All too often, such permanent housing deals fall through for homeless people at the last minute. But I hope that she did get housing. I’d grown fond of Anna — a good conversationalist, an incisive observer of other people, smart and funny and independent — and like to think that she wound up living some place safe. I don’t like to think of her living on the streets into her eighties.

    So there you have some suitably anonymized stories of a few people’s experiences of housing insecurity and homelessness. I’m reluctant to make generalizations based on these experiences. I told you about Harry, who was housing insecure and just missed being homeless. His experience was very different from Alice, the couch-surfer — not just because of their different situations, but because of their different ages, and their different personalities. And Anna had yet another completely different experience. Therefore, I’m not going to make any generalizations about the experience of homelessness.

    But I would like to make a couple of ethical observations. First of all, despite what many politicians try to tell us, homelessness cannot always be blamed on the person who winds up being homeless. That is to say, homelessness and housing insecurity do not always result from some individual moral failing. The people I have told you about were all upright and moral people; they were all intelligent, none of them was mentally ill, none of them was an addict or an alcoholic. Based on the homeless people I’ve known, homelessness is just as likely to result from bad luck as from personal failings. I still remember the thirty-something man who arrived at a homeless shelter in Palo Alto who said he had grown up in Palo Alto, graduated from Palo Alto High School, returned to Palo Alto after college, and wound up homeless due to medical bills he couldn’t pay. He did everything right, and ended up homeless through bad luck. Unfortunately, one of the legacies of the Christian tradition that lies at the root of so much of American political culture is a strong tendency to say we are each individually responsible for our sins. Even though Jesus taught us to help those who are poor, Americans have a strong tendency to blame those who are poor. This is a theological position that we Unitarian Universalists categorically reject.

    The second ethical observation about homelessness I’d like to make is related to the first. If we can’t blame the homeless person for being homeless, then that means that society is to blame. And society actually includes all of us. This, I believe, is why so many politicians prefer to blame homeless people for being homeless — because if homeless people are not to blame, then it’s within our power to do something about homelessness. This, by the way, helps explain why the American tradition tries to put the blame for being poor on those who are poor — because otherwise, the blame falls on the rest of us for allowing homelessness to occur. And that’s a very uncomfortable feeling.

    So end my brief ethical observations. I hope we can get past our feeling of discomfort about all being responsible for homelessness. I would like it society changed so that a responsible sober women in her seventies no longer had to worry about living on the streets.

    Person with luggage getting on a city bus at night.
    Screen grab from the video “Hotel 22” by Elizabeth Lo. This 8 minute video gives insight into what it’s like for a homeless person who seeks refuge on a city bus at night. Click on the image above to watch the video.

  • Spiritual Muscle

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 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 from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay titled “Greatness”:

    I do not pretend to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some plan, propose a journey or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very well, — I let it lie, thinking it may pass away, but if it do not pass away I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and which the consent of all mankind could not confirm.

    The second reading is from Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker by John Wiess. Parker was a Unitarian minister of the 1840s whose sermons attracted over two thousand people a week.

    When a little boy … in my fourth year, one fine day in spring, my father led me by the hand to a distant part of the farm, but soon sent me home alone. On the way I had to pass a little pond-hole… [A] rhodora in full bloom… attracted my attention and drew me to the spot. I saw a little spotted tortoise sunning himself in the shallow water at the root of the flaming shrub. I lifted the stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless reptile; for, though I had never killed any creature, yet I had seen other boys out of sport destroy birds, squirrels, and the like, and I felt a disposition to follow their wicked example. But all at once something checked my little arm, and a voice within me said, clear and loud, “It is wrong!” I held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion — the consciousness of an involuntary but inward check upon my actions, till the tortoise and the rhodora both vanished from my sight. I hastened home and told the tale to my mother, and asked what was it that told me it was wrong? She … taking me in her arms, said, “Some men call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little voice.”… I am sure no event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impression on me.

    Sermon: “Spiritual Muscle”

    Rev. Danielle DiBona preached here on December 1. After the service was over, I went up to her to thank her for coming to First Parish. I always enjoy talking with Danielle, in part because she grew up in Weymouth and has that no-nonsense New England manner of speaking. So when she said something about Unitarian Universalist congregations needing to develop their spiritual muscle, I paid more attention that I might otherwise have done. If another person used the phrase “spiritual muscle” it might have sounded like just another spirituality catch-phrase that sounds good yet doesn’t mean all that much. But when Danielle said “spiritual muscle” in her no-nonsense South Shore accent, it sounded real. And maybe important.

    I meant to ask Danielle what, exactly, she meant by “spiritual muscle,” but we got interrupted. I thought about emailing her and asking her exactly. But I was pretty sure I knew what she meant. I was also pretty sure that a good way to develop my own spiritual muscles would be to put my thoughts in order and speak to you about the topic, which is what I’m doing right now.

    If we use the phrase “spiritual muscle,” obviously we’re making a comparison with physical muscle. It’s equally obvious how we develop our physical muscles: we exercise. Last fall, I noticed my physical fitness level going down, and I knew I needed to exercise. Since I hate going to the gym, I bought a compact rowing machine that fits in our apartment. For the past few months I’ve been doing at least twenty minutes five times a week on that rowing machine (that’s in addition to daily walks, and daily exercises). Using that rowing machine is sometimes painful, sometimes boring, but I really notice the improvement in my fitness level.

    All this is obvious. If you want to build up your physical muscles, you have to use them; you have to do more than just use them, you have to push yourself. Similarly with spiritual muscles: obviously we have to use our spirituality regularly in order to retain our spiritual muscle tone. But what does that even mean?

    The readings this morning offered two very simple examples of what I think of as using one’s spiritual muscles. In the second reading, the great nineteenth century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker told a story about his moral development. When he was four years old, he saw a turtle. He picked up a stick to kill it. But suddenly he heard a voice telling him “No.”

    Even though Parker clothes the story in mid-nineteenth century sentimentality, it sounds like a true story. Four year olds do have these kinds of experiences: sometimes they do hear a voice that they can’t explain telling them to do the right thing. And Theodore Parker’s mother gives him just the kind of advice that a Unitarian mother would give to their four year old. She tells him that whether you call it Conscience, or the voice of God (or whatever other name a Unitarian Universalist might come up with), you should listen to that voice. This is one way we begin teaching young children how to exercise their spiritual muscles. We want to help them to become their best selves, and we do our best to help them grow into their best selves.

    While this may seem hopelessly elementary, while it may seem trite and sentimental, it’s really not. Back in 1986, a Unitarian Universalist minister named Robert Fulghum wrote a bestselling book titled “All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Fulghum’s book used the basic lessons taught in kindergarten as a way to remind adults what they needed to do to exercise their spiritual muscles.

    For example, Fulghum said we should learn to share everything. That’s how you word it when you’re teaching a four- or five year old, but all the great spiritual traditions of the world have some similar teaching aimed at adults. Muslims teach that zakat, or almsgiving, is one of the five pillars of Islam; Jesus taught his followers that whatever they did for “the least of these” they did for God; for Hindus, the Rig Veda teaches, “Bounteous is he who gives unto the beggar who comes to him in want of food” [Rig Veda 10.117]; and our latest wording of the Unitarian Universalist principles names generosity as a core value. When teaching a five year old, you may word it differently, but the principle remains the same: share everything.

    Many of Robert Fulghum’s kindergarten lessons pertain to morals and ethics. We learn how to play fair. We learn that we shouldn’t hit people. We learn to put things back where we found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone. These are all pretty straightforward moral and ethical lessons, relatively easy to translate from the kindergartener’s perspective to an adult perspective.

    But Fulghum also includes lessons that are are not about morality and ethics, and more about having a proper attitude towards life. Fulghum says that kindergarten (or, at least, a well-run kindergarten) teaches children how to live a balanced life. In good kindergartens, each day the children engage in a little learning, a little painting, a little singing, a little dancing, a little bit of playing, and a little bit of working. Translated into an adult perspective, we might talk about work-life balance and making time for our families. But it’s still the same spiritual lesson: how to lead a balanced life.

    Fulghum also mentions that kindergarteners learn how to take naps. Now this may not sound like a spiritual matter at all. But several years ago, a divinity school graduate named Tricia Hersey started leading workshops in the spiritual importance of napping. While in graduate school, Hersey found herself working two jobs, going to school full-time, raising a six year old, and working an internship. She was living the American Dream, moving up in the world. But as a Black woman learning about the history of Black theology, Hersey also realized that the same kind of engine that drove slavery was driving her to work herself to a state of exhaustion. After receiving her divinity degree, Hersey started what she called Nap Ministry, in which she teaches people how to take spiritual care of themselves. But this is not some kind of pop culture self-care. In an interview, Hersey said, “That’s one thing I dislike about our work blowing up on social media…. [That] doesn’t allow for people to go deep…. They think it’s some cute wellness thing. [But] it really is held together by deeply liberating ideas and theories that come out of Black thought and scholarship.” For Hersey, taking time out to rest can serve as a spiritual force allowing us to honor our inherent divinity. (1)

    I’d suggest this kind of spiritual rest may have deep roots in the ancient idea of Sabbath, where you deliberately take one day a week where you do no work. Of course, in our culture today, it’s difficult to take a true sabbath. I know very few people who actually take one whole day every week as a day of rest. Even when we take a day off, we feel we have to do something — we have to travel, or pursue hobbies. Thus not even retirement guarantees spiritual rest; many of my retired friends say they’re busier now than when they were working full time.

    Sometimes it seems that it’s far more difficult to exercise our spiritual muscles as we get older. The spiritual task of resting is a perfect example of what I mean. When you’re five years old, your parents tell you to take a nap, and you can whine and complain all you want, but you have to take your nap. Then you become a teenager, and you have no time to rest because every spare moment is filled with school, sports or extracurricular activities, and a part-time job, to say nothing of figuring out what to do after high school graduation. When do you ever have time to rest? Then you become an adult, and you have even more to do, and even less time to rest. Even if you’re one of the rare people who is able to do nothing in retirement, doing nothing isn’t the same thing spiritual rest.

    To get some genuine spiritual rest, most of us require outside structure. When I was in my twenties, I regularly worked fifty-five hours a week, plus I was taking classes at night to try to get ahead. I discovered that going to Sunday services at my local Unitarian Universalist church provided the structure I needed to actually take the time for spiritual rest. Actually, I was often bored by the worship services. I watched the older Unitarians who had been going to that church for decades. They sat through all the services, listening when the sermons were interesting, calmly staring out the windows when the sermons were boring. In a sense, taking time for sabbath rest is the adult equivalent of taking a nap.

    Sabbath rest provides one example of how hard it can be to develop your spiritual muscles. We live in a society that teaches us that our highest purpose is to be constantly busy, constantly entertained. We have to have our constant doses of dopamine from scrolling through social media, or we have to feed our adrenaline addiction by working or studying too many hours. And if we no longer many responsibilities, then we can feel undervalued or even useless. Yet busy-ness and uselessness prove to be a false dichotomy. All the great spiritual traditions teach us to spend time in contemplation. While this may be interpreted in terms of contemplating God or trying to reach Nirvana, you can also think about contemplation in terms of the motto inscribed above the temple to Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. That motto said quite simply: “Know thyself.”

    Knowing oneself — true and deep self-knowledge — requires exercise of one’s spiritual muscle. It’s easy to look in the mirror and see everything that’s good about ourselves. It’s even easier to look in the mirror and see what our own failings are. But it’s quite difficult to see ourselves as we truly are. And since human beings are constantly growing and changing, right up to the moment of death, to truly know yourself means you are constantly learning new things. I would even go so far as to say that all development of spiritual muscle begins with self-knowledge — or, more precisely, all development of spiritual muscle begins with the effort to attain self knowledge, for no one ever achieves final self-knowledge.

    I’d like to take a brief look at three other things that Robert Fulghum says he learned in kindergarten: When you go outside, watch for traffic and hold hands and stick together. Everything dies. Be aware of wonder.

    The first one — hold hands and stick together — can be surprisingly difficult. Often, we have the impulse to act like kindergartners, and go whichever way we personally want to go. We adults often say what kindergartners say: But I don’t wanna hold hands with them, I wanna go over there! That is in fact precisely what is going on in the United States right now. Instead of sticking together, we all want to do what we want to do; we don’t want to hold hands with the other children in the class. When it comes to holding hands and working together, we Americans have let our spiritual muscles become flabby. Nor is this a new problem, for this is what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was telling us in his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he said:

    “I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification’ — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

    We Americans did exercise our spiritual spiritual muscle to the point where little Black children and little White children can sometimes now join hands with each other. But when it comes to racial harmony, or world peace, or environmental balance, or any other big problem that requires us to hold hands and stick together, we are still struggling. We have no kindergarten teacher to tell us what to do or how to do it; we have to develop our own spiritual muscles to enable us to work together.

    Compared to that, the next kindergarten-level task sounds so simple: Be aware of wonder. But sometimes I believe we struggle more with this than with holding hands and sticking together. At least with holding hands and sticking together, there’s something we have to do. But to be aware of wonder, we just have to be. Being aware of wonder is closely related to sabbath rest, and it takes as much spiritual muscle. Being aware of wonder is also closely related to knowing oneself; you have to know who you are in order to know who it is that is aware of wonder. This gets us into deep spiritual waters, and we’d need another whole sermon to talk about it.

    Similarly with the last of the kindergarten tasks I’d like to mention, which sounds so simple: Everything dies. Everything dies, including us. It sounds simple, but it takes a great deal of spiritual muscle to wrap your head around this simple thing. This, too, gets us into the advanced development of our spiritual muscles. This could be the subject of a whole series of sermons. Although I’m not sure I’m qualified to speak on the topic; I’m not sure I’ve developed enough spiritual muscle yet.

    If you asked me to sum up the topic of spiritual muscle, I’d say this: It’s not easy being human. It’s not easy being part of the human community. It takes strength; it takes endurance; it takes flexibility. Just as we have to work on our physical muscles to build strength, endurance, and flexibility, so to we have to work on our spiritual muscles.

    Note:

    (1) Kathryn Post, “The ‘Nap Bishop’ offers rest as a tool of resistance,” Religion News Service, 25 March 2022 https://religionnews.com/2022/03/25/nap-bishop-offers-rest-as-a-tool-of-resistance/ accessed 24 Jan 2025