Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Global Problems, Local Actions

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

    Readings

    The first reading is from an essay titled “The Evolution of My Social Concern” by James Luther Adams. Adams was a Unitarian Universalist minister and professor at Harvard. In the 1930s, he studied in Germany where he experienced the rise of Naziism. In a 1977 essay, he reflected on those experiences:

    “The German universities, supposedly independent entities, had been fairly easily Nazified…. Hitler has also liquidated the trade unions…. The Masons were forbidden to hold meetings. Repeatedly, I heard anti-Nazis say, If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler. I noticed the stubborn resistance of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I observed also the lack of religious pluralism in a country that had no significant Nonconformist movement in the Christian churches. Gradually I came to the conviction that a decisive institution of the viable democratic society is the voluntary association as a medium for the assumption of civic responsibility.”

    [Essay dated 1977, reprinted in Voluntary Associations: Socio-cultural Analyses and Theological Interpretation, ed. J. Ronald Engel (Chicago: Exploration Press of the Chicago Theological Seminary, 1986).]

    The second reading is from “You Are Responsible,” in the book Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principle and Practices by Peter Drucker.

    “Self-development is very deeply meshed in with the mission of the nonprofit organization, with commitment and belief that the work done in this church or this school matters. You cannot allow the lack of resources, of money, of people, and of time (always the scarcest) to overwhelm you…. Paying serious attention to self-development — your own and that of everyone in the nonprofit organization — is not a luxury. Most people don’t continue to work for a nonprofit organization if they don’t share, at least in part, the vision of the organization. Volunteers, particularly, who don’t get a great deal out of working for the organization aren’t going to be around very long. They don’t get a check, so they have to get even more out of the organization’s work. In fact, you don’t want people who stay on with the organization just because that’s what they’ve always done but who don’t believe in the organization any more. … You want constructive discontent. That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on respond, ‘But it’s so important!’

    “The key to building an organization with such a spirit is organizing the work so everyone feels essential to a goal they believe in.”

    Sermon: Global Problems, Local Actions

    James Luther Adams, probably the greatest Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century, spent most of his brilliant career studying voluntary associations. A voluntary association is a group of people who have freely joined together, with no profit motive, to pursue a shared goal or interest.

    The stereotype of the theologian is someone who writes unreadable books on how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin. Thus it might seem odd for a theologian to study something practical like voluntary associations. But that’s where James Luther Adams’s brilliance comes in. He realized that here in the United States, the primary location for religion was in local congregations, which were voluntary associations.

    Another of Adams’s great insights was that one of the first things authoritarian governments do is to weaken, destroy, or take over all voluntary associations. Adams came to this realization during the 1930s while he was studying in Nazi Germany. One of the first things the Nazis did when they got into power was to take control of voluntary associations. The Nazis abolished many groups, from the trade unions to the Masons. They got rid of any youth movements such as Scouting that were already in existence, and instead imposed their own Nazi youth movements. They took over the churches, and ran the churches as a part of the Nazi state. Obviously, then, voluntary associations are crucial to a functioning democracy, and a critical bulwark against the authoritarian governments that would abolish them.

    By combining these two insights, Adams helped us understand that here in the United States, religious congregations help support democracy. In fact, religious congregations are more important than some other voluntary associations, because congregations are groups that aspire to make a better society. The local soccer club is a voluntary association, but it has no aspirations beyond providing soccer games for its members. There are many such groups which exist primarily for the pleasure of their members. By contrast, a religious congregation is a voluntary association which exists not just for the pleasure of its members, but which also has higher goals: a vision of the earth made fair and all her people one.

    When Adams returned from studying in Germany, he confronted an unpleasant realization about himself. Everyone in a democracy has a role in supporting that democracy. But after living for a time in an authoritarian state, Adams felt that he wasn’t doing enough to support democracy. In a 1966 essay titled “The Indispensable Discipline of Social Responsibility,” Adams wrote:

    “…I had to confront a rather embarrassing question. I had to ask myself, ‘What in your typical behavior as an American citizen have you done that would help to prevent the rise of authoritarian government in your own country? What disciplines of democracy (except voting) have you habitually undertaken with other people which could serve in any way to directly affect public policy?’ More bluntly stated: I asked myself, ‘What precisely is the difference between you and a political idiot?’”

    His answer, of course, was to increase his participation in voluntary associations. He participated in a number of racial integration movements in the 1940s and 1950s. He was active for many years with the American Civil Liberties Union. He participated in a number of professional associations. And he was always active in his local Unitarian Universalist congregation. He not only studied voluntary associations, he lived voluntary associations.

    Adams died in 1994. Six years later, in the year 2000, the sociologist Robert Putnam published a book titled “Bowling Alone” in which he detailed how Americans were less and less involved in voluntary associations. That trend has continued to the present day: we Americans no longer join bowling leagues, we have stopped attending religious services, we don’t belong to the Masons or the Order of the Eastern Star. Putnam concluded that the two primary reasons for Americans’ decreasing involvement in voluntary associations were electronic entertainment — primarily television in those days — and generational change.

    A quarter of a century later, the decline in voluntary associations seems to be continuing. In 2019, researchers at the University of Maryland wrote a report titled “A Less Charitable Nation” in which they said: “Immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, the volunteer rate surged to a peak level and stayed there for three straight years. After this record high in volunteering, the national rate of American volunteering declined and continued to slide throughout the decade from 2004 to 2015….” (1)

    In my limited observation, this trend may have grown more pronounced during the pandemic, as people stayed safely at home with their electronic entertainment. Nor has the end of lockdown done much to change lure us Americans back into the public sphere. We continue to prefer staying at home with our electronic entertainment.

    Not surprisingly, this trend of staying at home — this trend of becoming disengaged from face-to-face groups and voluntary associations — has been accompanied by a surge in loneliness, depression, and anxiety disorders. The evolutionary development of human beings did not include an adaptation to sit at home in relative isolation while staring at screens. This epidemic of loneliness and depression has become the major spiritual crisis of our time. I’ll say more about this spiritual crisis in a moment.

    Also not surprising: this is combined with an increase in demagoguery across the political spectrum. Civic engagement through voluntary associations remains a critical part of democracy. As we Americans spend more and more time with electronic entertainment, and less and less time in face-to-face groups and voluntary associations, we’re actually weakening our democracy. Indeed, it feels like we’re facing a major crisis in our democracy.

    These two crises — the spiritual crisis of loneliness, and the democratic crisis of demagoguery — both have at least some roots in the American withdrawal from voluntary associations. Robert Putnam called it “electronic entertainment,” and today we might call it “screen time,” but it amounts to the same thing. We all do a lot of staring at screens. And it appears that all that staring at screens isn’t very good for us, and it isn’t very good for democracy.

    I say this as someone who has spent a good part of his life happily staring at screens. Since the days of Usenet, back in the 1990s, I’ve lived way too much of my life online, and enjoyed almost all of it. But this summer I started noticing how much time I spent staring at screens. I didn’t count time at work, since I have to use email and videoconferencing for my job. But I realized I might spend 8 hours a day, outside of work time, staring at a screen. As a spiritual experiment, I decided to reduce my screen time by (say) twenty-five percent, and see what happened.

    Not surprisingly, I found I had more time to do other things, like taking walks, or engaging in face-to-face activities, or practicing the ‘ukulele (and I was pleasantly surprised at how much better my ‘ukulele playing got). But the real surprise was on the spiritual side of things. I felt better. Cutting twenty-five percent of my screen time meant cutting out almost every social media outlet. I stopped reading Facebook and the like. I stopped doomscrolling through the endless clickbait bad-news stories that dominate online news sites. The result was that I felt happier and more hopeful. To put it spiritually, with less screen time, I was no longer bogged down in minutiae and details. This seemed to strengthen my connection with something larger than myself.

    And here’s another thing I noticed: now that I’m not obsessively tracking every last detail of the presidential election, I can pay more attention to local issues. We have quite an array of local issues that need attention paid to them. The local issues on the South Shore include food insecurity, housing insecurity, an epidemic of mental illness, and maybe even a decline in good governance in our local governments.

    These local problems sometimes get put to one side when we spend most of our time worrying about the clash between the two national presidential candidates. This is coupled with a tendency to believe that if only our political candidate wins the presidential election, all our local problems will be solved.

    This brings me to the famous saying, “Think globally and act locally.” This saying is often attributed to the biologist René Dubos, but people were saying similar things long before Dubos said it in 1977. I’d argue that Jesus of Nazareth lived out that saying in everything he did: he always considered the big picture, up to and including God; but at the same time he was always focused on the needs and concerns of the individual people immediately in front of him. We could say the same of the Buddha and other great spiritual thinkers.

    I’d also argue that this is exactly what our congregation has been doing for the past three centuries. We consider the big picture, up to and including whatever each of us call the universal. But we also focus on the needs and concerns of the people in this congregation, and the people in our immediate community. We continue to do that today. We take care of each other, as best we can. We address food insecurity in the wider community by maintaining a drop box for the Cohasset Food Pantry. We’re in the process of addressing housing insecurity here in Cohasset, as some of us work to establish a community fund that can help people with short term needs, such as meeting a sudden rent increase. We address the epidemic of mental illness in children and teens by supporting the families who come here, and by providing religious education programs that nurture our children and teens and build their social-emotional skills.

    We also serve as a crucial training ground for democracy, and the skills associated with democracy. Democracy — especially local democracy — needs people who can speak in public, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy requires an understanding of how to work with others towards common goals, even when you disagree, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy needs people who see the big picture but who can focus on the immediate needs of the people right in front of them, and we all practice that skill here in our congregation.

    I also believe that a functioning democracy needs people who are spiritually grounded. By “spiritually grounded,” I mean people who think deeply about the human condition, people who consider who they are in relation to the universe and to universal values, people who ponder how to make the world a better place. Spiritually grounded people are also people who have a community where they can feel grounded, such that they don’t sink into despair or disperse their energies in unwonted optimism.

    This turns out to be one of the key functions of a good congregation. The brilliant management theorist Peter Drucker said that nonprofits can make everyone feel in the organization feel essential to a shared goal they all believe in. Drucker gives a perfect example of how that can play out, which we heard in the second reading: “That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on, respond, ‘But it’s so important!’” The strength of a shared vision carries us through the inevitable frustrations of working together with fallible human beings who have come together in an imperfect community.

    We tend to feel most spiritually grounded when we find ourselves working together with others towards a shared vision for a better world. This is the greatest of spiritual practices: to come together in community to shape a better world. May we each contribute to this great spiritual project in whatever way we can; and in so doing may we each find ourselves spiritually grounded.

    Note:

    (1) “A Less Charitable Nation: The Decline of Volunteering and Giving in the United States,” Nathan Dietz, Senior Researcher, Do Good Institute, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Robert T. Grimm, Jr., Levenson Family Chair in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland

  • Freddie Green and Spiritual Leadership

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

    For the reading this morning, we heard a poem [“Inward Music” by Everett Hoagland, 2014] that retold a story that happened to a fellow named Tom Stites. Tom Stites is a journalist, now retired, who served on the editorial staffs of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Kansas City Times. At the end of his career, Stites served as the president of The Banyan Project, a nonprofit devoted to starting new news outlets in so-called news deserts. Stites has described himself as a journalist who has “a passion for strengthening journalism, democracy and justice.”

    Stites started his career editing a small magazine called “Jazz” that was (not surprisingly) devoted to coverage of jazz. So Tom Stites’s career path led from jazz, to strengthening democracy. You might keep that in mind while I talk with you about what Stites thought about Freddie Green, about the leadership style of jazz guitarist Freddie Green, and how Freddie Green might serve as a model for leadership in our currently polarized democracy.

    Freddie Green played in Count Basie’s big band for fifty years, from 1937 until Green’s death in 1987. Count Basie’s big band was one of the most important jazz ensembles in the world through the mid-twentieth century. To better tell you about Freddie Green’s leadership style, let me describe what Count Basie’s big band looked like.

    Let’s take for a representative example an online video of Basie’s big band performing the tune “Corner Pocket” in Stockholm in 1962. At stage right, Basie himself sat behind his concert grand piano, which was about eight feet long. The bassist, playing an upright bass, stood in curve of the piano, and the drummer sat on an elevated platform behind the bassist and to his left. Then to the drummer’s left sat the horn players: four trumpets in the back, another trumpet and two trombones in the middle rank, and then five saxophones — alto, tenor, and baritone — along the front. When a horn player took a solo, he would step out front and center and stand in the spotlight while he played.

    And right in the middle of everything sat Freddie Green — right in front of the drummer and next to the middle rank of horns. He sat there playing his big acoustic archtop guitar, occasionally glancing at Count Basie at the piano. It’s hard to hear Green’s playing on this video, but given where he sat, every other band member would have been able to hear him.

    As I sat there watching this online video, I asked myself, who kept this ensemble together? Who kept the rhythm going? Who transmitted the subtle harmonic shifts to everyone else? Count Basie, the ostensible band leader, sat at his piano at stage right. But the speed of sound is relatively slow, so if you’re way over on stage right, the musicians playing way over on stage left would have sounded as though they’re playing about a quarter of a beat behind you; which makes it hard to keep everyone in time. Nor did Basie do what many band leaders do, and conduct with his hands or a baton — his hands were busy on the piano.

    Here’s what I think happened: Count Basie was playing the piano, setting the tempo, and sketching out the basic harmony. The drummer echoed Basie’s rhythm, mostly on his high hats (those little double cymbals that drummers operate with a foot pedal). The bass player rooted the most important notes of the harmony. But it was Freddie Green, sitting right there in the middle, who really picked up both the rhythm and harmony from Count Basie and communicates it to the dozen or so horn players. Count Basie was the band leader, but Freddie Green, sitting in the center, was the one who everyone together, was the one whom they called the heartbeat of the band.

    Jazz is one of the most democratic of all musical forms. Theoretically, anyone in a jazz band can take a solo; thus there is equal opportunity for everyone in the band, depending solely on their individual abilities and talents. But unlike other guitarists of the swing era — Charlie Christian, for example — Freddie Green almost never took a solo. He found a different role for himself, the musically satisfying role of ensuring that all the other players stayed together. This is the other way in which jazz is one of the most democratic of musical forms — anyone can take a solo, yet at the same time musicians can choose to devote themselves solely to supporting the whole ensemble. Jazz balances individual achievement with the needs of the whole, coming down neither on the side of hyper-individualism nor faceless collectivism. This balance is exactly what we hope for in a democracy.

    So far, I’ve mostly been talking about the mechanics of jazz, and by analogy about the mechanics of democracy. Now let me speak with you about the spiritual dimension to all of this.

    In this morning’s reading, the poet has his fictional narrator ask himself, “What [or] who guides my riffs on the / arrangements life plays out for me? How do I harmonize with / my own Higher Power?” Part of the poet’s answer lies in the title to the poem, “Inward Music.” You can think of this inward music as a literal phenomenon, or as a metaphor for something else. But it is this inward music, which we may not consciously hear, but which keeps us in time and in tune with a greater purpose. It is this inward music that connects us with something larger and better than our individual selves.

    The Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau famously wrote: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Thoreau wrote this passage in 1854, a decade before the Civil War, at a time when our democracy was facing perhaps the greatest threat to democracy we have yet faced, when we as a country faced up to the immorality of race-based chattel slavery. Although Thoreau’s image of the different drummer is often interpreted today to support a philosophy of hyper-individualism, in fact Thoreau was saying that in his time too many people did not listen to the inward music that comes from something larger than ourselves. Too many people in Thoreau’s day allowed chattel slavery to continue. By so doing they ignored the call of humanity, of ethics, of a love greater than individual gain. That is, the supporters of slavery listened to their own desire for personal gain, rather than an inward music which demanded an end to slavery.

    This brings us back to the problem of leadership. It is dangerous to allow leadership to remain solely in the hands of the soloists who stand in the spotlight. If the only leaders are those soloists, we can get into trouble if they stop listening to the inward music, and instead start playing solely out of a desire for personal achievement, for personal recognition. The soloists may be the most prominent leaders in a big band, but it’s the musicians like Freddie Green who keep the band going through the changes in the soloists.

    You can see where I’m going with this. Think about American democracy today as being a little like Count Basie’s big band. American democracy does in fact need the kind of leaders who can serve as soloists, using their unique talents to inspire and move the rest of us. But American democracy also need many more leaders who keep us working in harmony with each other. That is, we need leaders who help remind us of the inward music that holds everything together. Right now, American democracy has plenty of people who want to be soloists. There are many in our current crop of politicians who want to be soloists. They want to be the person who gets out in front of the rest of the band, with the spotlight shining on them, while they show off their chops. It’s not just politicians, it’s also a great many ordinary people who want to be the one who has the spotlight shining on them. We have plenty of soloists; now e need the leaders who will keep us all together.

    Freddie Green’s leadership role in Count Basie’s band can serve as an analogy for other human institutions. Groups of humans do seem to need a few people as visible leaders, the people out in the spotlight. Just as important are those people who keep everything going without stepping out into the spotlight. Just so, Freddie Green connected the members of Count Basie’s band together, first by listening to those around him. The first step is always listening. Then based on what he heard, Green helped everyone else stay together by spinning out rhythms and harmonies the others could easily follow. The soloists are important, but it’s the rhythm section that really keeps the band together.

    Why is it that in today’s American society we have so many soloists, and so few people in the rhythm section? Perhaps we of the American public are at fault. We, the American public, pay most attention to the handful of leaders, especially the most prominent elected leaders — the U.S. president, Supreme Court justices, congresspeople, and so on. But the president is only person, and as such can only do so much; far more important than the person of the president are cabinet members, aides, researchers, advisors, diplomats, civil servants, bureaucrats, and others who serve in the executive branch. Many of these people continue from one administration to the next, which is actually a good thing. Not only would it be too disruptive to bring in hundreds of new civil servants every four to eight years, but if we did so the rule of law and the stability of the country would be at risk.

    Celebrity culture and social media have trained us to see the few people who live in the spotlight. We admire Taylor Swift, but ignore the other musicians she plays with, ignore the fashion designers and producers and technicians who make her performances possible. We forget that the person in the spotlight is merely one miniscule part of a vast interconnected web of humanity.

    Yet it seems to have always been like this. The medieval Persian poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi took notice of this same phenomenon. In ghazal 1195, Rumi wrote about how we humans forget to listen to the inward music. A popular translation of this ghazal puts it this way: “We rarely hear the inward music, / but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless” [Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, p. 106] But I prefer a more literal translation, which goes like this: “In every heart there is a different note and rhythm, all stamping feet outwardly, the musicians hidden like a secret.” [trans. A.J. Arberry, Mystical Poems of Rumi, p. 168] We are all individuals, yes. We all have our own notes and rhythms. And it is the “musicians hidden like a secret” who keep us connected. They may be hidden in plain sight, but it is those hidden musicians who tie us all together, we maintain our essential interconnection. Those hidden musicians — whatever Rumi means by that — they are the cosmic version of Freddie Green. Just as Freddie Green was the heartbeat of Count Basie’s band, those cosmic musicians are the heartbeat of humanity. From that musical heartbeat arises the concert of all being.

    We have to listen to that which transcends our individual selves; listen to that music which is larger than our limited individual beings. We can hear this universal music inwardly, not through our ears, but through our souls, whatever we might mean by the words “souls.” And whatever we might mean by “universal music.” Perhaps it would be better to say that we hear this vast connective power, not as music, not through our physical ears, but as something we sense with our intuition. We can somehow feel it when we are moving in rhythm with that which is larger than our selves. And then when we are not moving in that cosmic rhythm, life feels discordant and unpleasant.

    Like the young Tom Stites in the reading, maybe we could criticize the cosmic band leader for failing to sufficiently amplify the cosmic rhythm guitarist. Because it is actually quite difficult to listen to the cosmic musicians who are supposed to keep us in harmony and in rhythm. We are constantly distracted by the demands of daily life. This is the struggle our leaders face. They are supposed to stay in harmony with the universe, but how can you listen for that inward music when you are distracted by all the day-to-day tasks that simply must get done? This is true of all of us. How can we stay in harmony with the universe, when we are constantly distracted by the demands of our jobs, our families, our volunteer responsibilities, all the endless tasks that somehow seem to fill our days, leaving little time to listen?

    Yet we must try. We must remind ourselves constantly that there is something larger than our individual lives. We can remain part of the universal wholeness, if we would but listen: listen to the heartbeat of humanity; listen to one another.

    Screen grab from a video showing musicians performing.
    Screen grab from a 1965 BBC television show, “Show of the Week,” featuring Count Basie and his orchestra. Freddie Green is seated at left, playing his big archtop guitar.

  • Mother’s Day, Teachers, and Mothering

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

    Readings

    The first reading is an excerpt from “A Practical Mom” by Amy Uyematsu.

    The second reading this morning is from a short story by Grace Paley, titled “Mother”:

    One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: “Oh, I Long To See My Mother in the Doorway.” By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. As a matter of fact, she did stand frequently in various doorways looking at me. She stood one day, just so, at the front door, the darkness of the hallway behind her. It was New Year’s Day. She said sadly, If you come home at 4 a.m. when you’re seventeen, what time will you come home when you’re twenty? She asked this question without humor or meanness. She had begun her worried preparations for death. She would not be present, she thought, when I was twenty. So she wondered.

    Another time she stood in the doorway of my room. I had just issued a political manifesto attacking the family’s position on the Soviet Union. She said, Go to sleep for godsakes, you damn fool, you and your Communist ideas. We saw them already, Papa and me, in 1905. We guessed it all.

    At the door of the kitchen she said, You never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you?

    Then she died.

    Naturally for the rest of my life I longed to see her, not only in doorways, in a great number of places — in the dining room with my aunts, at the window looking up and down the block… in the living room with my father….

    Sermon: Mother’s Day and Teaching and Mothering

    Today would have been my mother’s one hundredth birthday. For twelve years before she married, my mother taught grades K through 2 in public schools in New York, Delaware, and Massachusetts. As soon as her own children got old enough, she went back to teaching, and ended her career in a local preschool. Not surprisingly, my personal perception of motherhood was shaped by my experience of my own mother. My mother used the skills she had honed as a teacher with her own children. Thus it is no surprise that I learned to associate mothers with teaching, and that I still associate mothers with teaching. Of course all parents are teachers no matter what their gender. But on this Mothers Day, I’d like to talk about mothers as teachers. I’d also like to talk about how all of us can teach the way mothers teach.

    To begin with, let’s consider what it is that mothers teach. From the beginning of a new life, mothers teach what it means to be cared for, what it means to be connected. This may seem too obvious, and too easy. But think about what happens to infants whose mothers neglect them (and before you rush into judgement against mothers who neglect their children, remember that a mother may be battling serious mental or physical illness, or having to deal with any number of other unavoidable problems): infants who are neglected can miss important learning about how to connect with, and how to trust in, other people. So it is that mothers begin teaching the moment they touch and hold a newborn. Those first lessons are lessons in love and human connection.

    We tend to think of mothers as the ones who the primary teachers of love and connection, but of course a father or any parent who holds a newborn, who rocks a baby to sleep, who changes diapers and feeds an infant is also teaching important lessons of love and human connection. This is true of anyone who cares for an infant, including grandparents and other caring adults, and even older siblings.

    Child psychoanalyst Erik Erikson said that infants in this first stage of life are not only learning about trust, they are also learning about hope. Trust and hope do seem to go together. If we have trust in the people around us, it does seem that we are more likely to have hope. If we trust in the stability of human connections, of human community, that allows us to trust in the future, which in turn brings to us hope.

    Nor is this something that we learn only in infancy. Those people who don’t learn all they need to know about trust as infants will still have opportunities to finish learning this key lesson later in life. Indeed, trust may be one of the first lessons we must learn, but pretty much every one of us has to keep re-learning it over and over again. It is one of those lesson that we keep on learning throughout the course of our lives, including long after our biological mothers have died. And this leads to an interesting conclusion. While trust and hope are lessons that we associate with mothers and mothering, but if trust and hope have to be continually relearned over the course of our lives, even after our biological mothers have died, then clearly this is one aspect of mothering that we must all do for one another. In this sense, each of us, all of human society, is responsible for mothering each other.

    While this may seem obvious, it’s equally obvious that our contemporary world culture does not center around mothering. To give one obvious example, I’m willing to bet that Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia, thinks mothering is something that is only done by young women when they’re out of sight of the big strong men of the world. If I suggested to him that we all need to mother one another, he would scoff at the idea. A big strong man like himself? He doesn’t need any mothering. Besides, Vladimir Putin has no interest in building trust in others. He dominates others through fear; the lesson he teaches is mistrust. And because he generates mistrust through nearly every action he takes, he destroys hope for millions of people. Hope disappears, and all that is left is violent resistance, or acquiescence and resignation to brutal domination. Vladimir Putin is admired by others who want to be like him — not because they trust him, but because they too have lost a sense of trust and so they hope to emulate Putin.

    Those who admire Putin seem to me to have given up hope in humankind. They have decided the only way to live in a dog-eat-dog world is to brutally dominate others. They have forgotten the lessons of trust and hope they had once learned from whomever it was who mothered them when they were young. It is easy to forget what our mothers taught us about trust and hope; we all need to learn and relearn those lessons of trust and hope over and over again as we grow older.

    And given what’s going on in the world right now, contemporary society does not give us much reason to believe in trust and hope. Wars and violence, sexism and sexual assault, racism and hatred — the news is full of things that erode our trust and hope.

    I happened to be making a long drive yesterday, and while I was fiddling with the radio I tuned in to an interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin, a writer who taught history and government at Harvard for many years. The interviewer asked her if she, as a historian, thought that ours was an especially challenging historical moment. Without minimizing the challenges we face, Doris Kearns Goodwin pointed out several moments in American history which she judged to be more challenging — the Great Depression, the early part of the Second World War when it seemed the Nazis were unstoppable, and above all the Civil War and the years leading up to it. I’m not a particular fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s work, but as I listened to her on the radio, I felt a sense of hope. She did not minimize the dangers facing the United States today, but she offered hope that we can find a way through our current troubles, hope that we can learn to trust one another once again.

    In this moment on the radio, Doris Kearns Goodwin was teaching the radio audience the way we hope a mother would teach. It brought back memories of listening to my own mother, even though Doris Kearns Goodwin and my mother were polar opposites in many ways. As a young adult in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was especially worried about the prospect of global nuclear war. Without minimizing the danger of such a war, my mother, in her no-nonsense way, talked me out of fear, and talked me into feeling trust and hope. She was continuing the lessons she had begun teaching me as an infant, although in a different way now that I was an adult.

    These lessons that my mother taught me in adulthood were not like some soft-focus heart-warming TV show. The lessons my mother taught me were much closer to what we heard in the second reading this morning, as in this short excerpt from Grace Paley’s story titled “Mother”: “At the door of the kitchen [my mother] said, You never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you?” Grace Paley’s mother was saying: take care of yourself. Telling someone to take care of themselves means telling them to have hope in the future. And to have hope in the future means that you have to learn to trust. And the way you teach trust is to show someone you love them — by, for example, telling them to stop running around senselessly so they can take the time to finish their lunch.

    Now, not everyone has a biological mother who can teach us trust and hope. And even if you have a biological mother like Grace Paley’s mother, who does teach you these things well into your adult years, at some point — just like Grace Paley — you’re going to lose your mother. So it is that we all need other people in our lives who can provide those lessons in trust and hope — we all need what I might call “alternate mothers.” The gender of these people is not especially important, nor is the age of these people, nor do they need to be our biological relatives. They don’t even have to be someone we have met in person. Let me give you an example, from my own life, of how someone you haven’t even met could teach these lessons of trust and hope.

    My own mother died twenty-five years ago. As I look back on the years immediately following her death, I now realize that quite a few alternate mothers entered my life in that time. One of those people was Hans Georg Gadamer, the philosopher, whom I never actually met. In 2001, when he was 101 years old, an interviewer asked Gadamer if he had hope for the world. Now, Gadamer lived in Germany throughout the tumultuous twentieth century: through the First World War, through the rise of Hitler and Naziism, through the Second World War, and finally through the Soviet takeover of East Germany (Gadamer left East Germany to go live in West Germany) and the building of the Berlin Wall, through the Cold War and the ongoing threat of nuclear war. The interviewer knew all this, and asked Gadamer this question not long after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Did he, Gadamer, have hope for the world? Gadamer, being a philosopher, gave a suitably nuanced reply. But I will strip his reply of all nuance, and summarize it like this: In spite of everything, we still have grounds for hope; not much hope, perhaps, maybe about this much hope — hold your finger and thumb about in inch apart — but there is still hope for the world.

    This was an adult-level lesson in trust and hope. Gadamer did not minimize the danger the world faced, but he made the case based on his long experience of life that there is still reason to hope; which means there is still reason to trust in humanity. Now, you may not have the same response to Gadamer that I did; philosophy is an acquired taste. But the point is that Gadamer became a sort of literary mother for me — someone I never met, but who gave me a message of hope through what he wrote and said publicly. I was convinced by his message of hope, and from that message I was able to relearn the lesson of trusting in other human beings.

    Mothering from public figures like Hans Georg Gadamer is convenient. You pick up a book or listen to a podcast, and there they are. Plus, they never stand in your doorway and say, “You never finish your lunch.” For this, we still need real-life mothers. Which can pose a problem for those us of who don’t have real-life biological mothers in our lives, or whose real-life biological mothers don’t fill this role for whatever reason.

    But we can find other people who help us re-learn the lessons of trust and hope throughout our lives. If I think about my own life, I can think of several people who have filled that role for me. These people have generally been older than me, but not all of them; perhaps half of them have been women; and to each of them I felt a strong enough bond of affection that I’d want to call it love. As I say this, maybe you’re making a mental list of the people who might fill this role in your life. This list might include your own biological mother (or it might not). But this list could include a number of people who are family, chosen family, or older friends. This list might include people who aren’t even aware that you feel as though you’ve received some mothering from them. My own mental list includes at least one person who would probably be appalled if I told him that I felt like he mothered me — that he gave me love, and helped me re-learn lessons of trust and hope. (Of course this can also be true of biological mothers who don’t want to engage in mothering once their child is past infancy.)

    And as you make your mental list of people who have mothered you, perhaps you’ll become aware of people who might consider you to be giving them some mothering. If you’re an actual biological mother who still has your biological children in your life, obviously you’re mothering them. But I think almost anyone can do some mothering, starting as early as your late teens and continuing for the rest of your life. Again, this need not look like the kind of mothering you find on Hallmark greeting cards, all unicorns and rainbows. It can look like the mothering Grace Paley describes her own mother doing: “Another time [my mother] stood in the doorway of my room. I had just issued a political manifesto attacking the family’s position on the Soviet Union. She said, Go to sleep for godsakes, you damn fool, you and your Communist ideas. We saw them already, Papa and me, in 1905.” This may not sound like mothering, but along with criticism of her actions, her mother expresses trust in Grace Paley’s abilities. You can hear the deep affection and love. Finally, you can hear concern for Grace Paley’s future (“Go to sleep for godsakes”), a loving concern which engenders hope.

    There are billions of ways to be a mother. You can be a cranky critical mom like Grace Paley’s mother (or like my mother). You can be a practical mom, as we heard described in the first reading, the poem by Amy Uyematsu. Personally, I don’t want to think of myself as a mother at all; I’d rather think of myself as a sort of eccentric uncle; but even then, I can still acknowledge that I as an eccentric uncle can sometimes help young people re-learn lessons of trust and hope. There are as many ways to be a good mother — someone who teaches love and hope and trust — as there are people in the world.

    On Mother’s Day we do especially honor those who served the more traditional role of mother within a nuclear family. And to all of you who fill that role, we honor you and thank you. But right now, the world needs more mothering than can fit into that traditional role. The world needs as many mothers as we can find. We need mothering to help us re-establish trust and and hope for the future; we need mothering to remind us that love is the most important force in the universe. We need people who can do public mothering — people on the radio, in books, on podcasts. But more than that, we need people who are willing to extend mothering to those in their immediate social circles — people who can help us re-learn what it means to trust one another. There are many of us who are already doing this mothering in our work lives — teachers and doctors and social workers and therapists and anyone in the helping professions. There are many of us who are already teaching trust and hope in our volunteer work, or in our day-to-day living. And if it seems too much to be a mother to people who are not your biological children, you can join me in becoming and eccentric aunt or uncle. The point is that maybe we all can think about the ways in which each one of us might actually be acting as mothers in the sense of helping people we love to re-learn basic lessons of trust and hope; for the world needs us to do this.