Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Looking Forward, Looking Back

    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 an excerpt from the long poem “Fasti” by the ancient Roman poet Ovid:

    While I was musing, writing-tablets in hand,
    The house seemed brighter than it was before.
    Then suddenly, sacred and marvelous, Janus,
    In two-headed form, showed his twin faces to my eyes.
    Terrified, I felt my hair grow stiff with fear
    And my heart was frozen with sudden cold.
    Holding his stick in his right hand, his key in the left,
    He spoke these words to me from his forward looking face:

    “Do not fear, but learn what you seek, O poet who labors
    Over the days, and remember what I say.

    “The ancients called me Chaos (since I am of the first world):
    Note the long ages past of which I shall tell.
    The clear air, and the three other elements,
    Fire, water, earth, were heaped together as one.
    When, through the discord of its components,
    The mass dissolved, and scattered to new regions,
    Flame found the heights: air took a lower place,
    While earth and sea sank to the furthest depth.
    Then I, who was a shapeless mass, a ball,
    Took on the appearance, and noble limbs of a god.
    Even now, a small sign of my once confused state,
    My front and back appear just the same….

    “Now learn the reason for my shape:
    Though already you partially understand it.
    Every doorway has two sides, this way and that,
    One facing the crowds, and the other the household gods:
    And like your doorkeeper seated at the threshold,
    Who watches who goes and out and who goes in,
    So I am the doorkeeper of the heavenly court,
    Looking towards both east and west at once:…
    And I, lest I lose time twisting my neck around,
    Am free to look both ways without moving.”

    The second reading is from “Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye:

    Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
    Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
    transparent scarlet paper,
    sizzle like moth wings,
    marry the air.

    So much of any year is flammable,
    lists of vegetables, partial poems.
    Orange swirling flame of days,
    so little is a stone.

    Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
    an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
    I begin again with the smallest numbers….

    Sermon: “Looking Forward, Looking Back”

    The ancient Roman gods and goddesses are part of our shared Western culture. We name planets and dwarf planets after them — Jupiter, Neptune, Ceres, Pluto. And most of us have at least some passing familiarity with these ancient deities: Jupiter, the ruler of the other gods and goddesses; Neptune, the god of the sea; and so on.

    For the most part, the Romans gods and goddesses were said to have appearances that were much like humans. Some of the them, however, had a more bizarre appearance. Janus was one of those odd-looking gods: he had two faces, one which looked forward, and one which looked backwards. In the first reading this morning, we heard Janus’s own explanation for his appearance. “I am the doorkeeper of the heavenly court,” he told the poet Ovid, “Looking towards both east and west at once… [for] lest I lose time twisting my neck around, [I] am free to look both ways without moving.”

    Janus also told the poet that he began as a part of Chaos, the stuff out of which the universe emerged. And Janus says, “as a small sign of my once confused state, my front and back appear just the same.” Because of that, he became the god of doorways, looking both outwards towards the crowds of people outside the door of the house, and inwards towards the household gods that preside over the safety of each household.

    No wonder, then, that the Romans named the first month of their calendar year for Janus. He is the perfect god for the beginning of a new year, because of the way he looks both forward and backwards. So it is that we, at the beginning of a new year, feel an impulse to look both forwards and backwards. So I’m going imitate Janus, and at the beginning of this new year I’m going to take a look backwards at last year, then a look forward into the new year.

    The most difficult task will be looking backwards. This is because looking back at 2024 seems to lead inevitably to conversations about the presidential election, and those conversations can be fraught. Either that, or people start arguing about the war in Gaza and Israel. Either that, or someone will bring up global climate change. When looking back at the past year, it’s all too easy to talk about topics which cause people distress.

    But I decided that for this first sermon of the year, I didn’t want to cause distress to either you or me. In the second reading, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye tells us: “So much of any year is flammable,/ lists of vegetables, partial poems./ Orange swirling flame of days,/ so little is a stone.” That is to say, at the end of any given year there are a great many things that we can let go of. In her poem, she imagines the things you can let go of as being things that are flammable. Then she adds another image: “So little is a stone”; or to put it another way, when you look back over the year there are only a few things that are solid like a stone, things that won’t perish in the flames, things that are worth holding on to. For example, it is worth holding on to the memories of the love of family and friends. It is worth holding on the the memories of people who have died in the past year. It is always worth holding on to that which is true and good.

    With that in mind, I’d like to suggest that we might also think about some of the good things that happened in the past year. Perhaps we can’t avoid thinking about what went wrong in 2024; but let’s take a moment to think about what went right.

    First: a sign of hope in the seemingly intractable problem of housing insecurity and homelessness. As we all know, the rate of homelessness is rising both nationwide and here in Massachusetts; our state is now in the top five states with the greatest numbers of people who are homeless. Yet in spite of these increases, last year the city of Los Angeles bucked the trend with a 2.2% decline the total number of people who were homeless in their city, while unsheltered homelessness declined by 10.4%. They accomplished this through a combination of policies and programs to get people into housing. (1) Thus we can see that homelessness is not an insoluble problem. There are viable solutions out there, and we can learn from places like Los Angeles.

    A second piece of positive news: three more countries legalized same sex marriage. Two of those were countries we might not have expected: both Thailand and Greece legalized same sex marriage last year. Thailand is the first Southeast Asian country, and the third country in all of Asia, to legalize same-sex marriage. Greece is the first majority-Orthodox Christian country to legalize same-sex marriage. (2) Estonia was the third country that legalized same-sex marriage last year, so there are now 38 countries around the world where same-sex marriage is legal. Same-sex marriage is now legal somewhere on all six permanently inhabited continents. This is not something I ever expected to see in my lifetime.

    Third: there was actually quite a bit of good news in the environment. In just one example, as of last year the United Kingdom no longer produces any of its energy from coal; the last coal power generation station closed in October. Since England was the site of the first coal power generation plant, this is both a symbolic milestone and a practical milestone. (3) In other positive environmental news from last year, the sail cargo ship Anemos completed its maiden voyage from the Netherlands to New York carrying one thousand tons of cargo. The ship Anemos has, and I quote, a “projected carbon intensity per unit transport [that is] less than a tenth of that of a sub-Panamax container ship.” Anemos will soon have seven sister ships, and regular cargo routes are already planned. (4) Electric vehicle sales continued to increase around the world in 2024. We’re still waiting for accurate data, but it looks like the price of renewable energy continued to drop significantly in the past year. All this is good news.

    Fourth: there was good news, perhaps unexpectedly, in the area of peace and nonviolence. Homicide rates in the United States dropped sixteen percent last year. That’s the third straight year homicides have declined in our country. (5) This is true locally, too — my recollection is that the Boston Globe ran a front page story a couple of days ago reporting that homicide rates in Boston for 2024 were the lowest since 1957.

    And one last bit of good news from the past year: This past summer, the United Nations reported that as of 2024, “population size had peaked in 63 countries…including China, Germany, Japan, and the Russian Federation.” The United Nations report went on to say that “in more than half of all countries…the average number of live births per woman is below 2.1 — the level required for a population to maintain a constant size.” Admittedly, because of so-called “population momentum,” the overall human population is still growing and will peak around the year 2080. Nevertheless, the projection for total human population is now projected to stabilize at three quarters of a billion people lower than was expected a decade ago. (6) Since human overpopulation contributes to just about every major world problem, from the environmental crisis to the worldwide refugee crisis, this final piece of news is very good news indeed.

    Now if you only read social media, these news items are unlikely to rise to the top of what your social media outlet is feeding to you. The people who design the algorithms that drive social media know you spend more time on their sites when you’re doomscrolling. As for traditional news outlets, they too are more likely to emphasize the bad news over the good news. On the Freakonomics podcast a couple of years ago, young adult author John Green pointed out: “a lot of times good news happens slowly and bad news happens all at once, and so we tend to focus on the bad news that’s crashing over us in waves and not on the slow long-term work that people are doing together to try to make a better world for us to share.” (6.5)

    Yes, there are many bad things going on in the world right now. But if you focus only on the bad things in the world, you’re presenting yourself with a distorted view of the world. Not only that, but when you’re thinking about good news you have to consider long-term stories that might not be newsworthy. And with that in mind, let’s look forward into the new year.

    I anticipate that some of the more interesting good news in the coming year will occur in the realm of public health. As one example of what I mean, consider the efforts to develop a vaccine for malaria. Beginning in 2021, a WHO-approved malaria vaccine has been made available to children in many high malaria transmission areas. In 2024, Cameroon was the first country to require childhood vaccination for malaria. We are in the middle of a long slow process to eradicate one of the more debilitating diseases on Earth. Some scientists are now predicting that malaria could be wiped out in another two decades. Because this is a long, slow process, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see it covered in social media or in traditional news outlets. But this represents a huge advance in public health, and a huge reduction in suffering world-wide.

    In the coming year, I’m going to be watching another interesting development in public health, one that directly affects us here on the South Shore. Public health experts are beginning to work with an emerging concept known as “social health.” A group at Stanford University called “Stanford Lifestyle Medicine” defines social health this way: “Social health refers to the quality of our relationships and how often we interact with others. Since social connection is in our nature as humans, when we are isolated and feel a lack of connection, research shows that our mental health can be affected…. Research also shows that our social health profoundly impacts our physical health.” (7)

    You may say this is just another case of university researchers catching up with good old common sense: we already know we’re going to have better physical and mental health when we have a good social network. But thinking about social health as an aspect of public health does represent an advance, because this allows us to think about how we might improve social health through communal effort. Two years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report about the health impacts of the loneliness epidemic in this country. (8) Treating loneliness as a public health issue means not blaming individuals for being lonely, but instead working on solutions that may include public policy, local community efforts, and so on.

    So, for example, if we address social health from a public health perspective, we might develop public policies and public education campaigns that can deal effectively with the loneliness epidemic and the wider mental health crisis. This would be analogous to the way we used a public health perspective to develop public policies and public education campaigns that targeted the addictiveness of tobacco. Those public policies and those education campaigns led to a dramatic reduction in tobacco use, with a concomitant drop in the cancers associated with tobacco use. So I’m going to be watching what the public health community does to develop public policies and public education campaigns to improve social health, thereby addressing the loneliness epidemic and the mental health crisis.

    And I feel we don’t have to wait for the public health community to do all the work. I believe we here at First Parish can contribute to this effort, because we’re already contributing to this effort through what we do here every Sunday morning. It is clear that one way to improve social health is by building local communities. That is something we actually do quite well here at First Parish: we’re actually quite good at creating a welcoming community. We’re not perfect, and of course there’s always room for improvement in every human endeavor. But I’ve noticed that during social hour following the weekly service, we are actually quite good at talking with one another, and reaching out to people we may not know well. Having spent the last thirty years working in nine different congregations, I’d say that our First Parish community is well above average in providing community and positive social interaction.

    Now let’s put that into the context of the loneliness epidemic in the United States. When we think in terms of social health, what we offer as a community may be one of the most important things we do at First Parish. Simply by doing what we ordinarily do, we actually implement several of the U.S. Surgeon General’s recommendations for mitigating the loneliness epidemic: we “create opportunities and spaces for inclusive social connection”; we “embed social connection in … practices [and] programs”; and we “foster a culture of connection in the broader community by… leading by example.” (9) Just by doing what we would be doing anyway, we’re helping address a major public health crisis.

    When I think about our First Parish community as a part of a larger public health effort to address the loneliness epidemic, two things occur to me. First, I believe we should recognize that we are in fact participating in this public health effort; I could reframe this slightly and say that this is yet another one of our unrecognized social justice projects. Second, we could also be a little more public about talking about how we are contributing to social health.

    This would not require us to add any programs; we don’t have to do anything more, because we’re already promoting social health and fighting the loneliness epidemic. But the U.S. Surgeon General suggests that community-based organizations have a key role to play in advancing “public education and awareness.” And advancing public education and awareness could turn out to be quite simple. So, for example, if someone finds out that I’m part of First Parish, and if they express the least bit of interest, I make sure that the first thing I tell them is that First Parish is a good community. I make it clear being a community is one of most important things we do. Yes, I mention that we talk about moral and ethical issues; yes, I mention that we have good music programs; yes, I mention our beautiful historic Meetinghouse. But I always make sure to mention our sense of community first. I make sure to mention that it’s a good place to connect with other people.

    While this may seem like a very minor point, it’s not. Most people here on the South Shore still think that religion is primarily about religious belief. Many people still think the only reason to do religion is to shore up your belief system. However, in the context of the loneliness epidemic, I’d argue that the most important thing we do here at First Parish is provide social connection. By pointing this out, we can contribute to public education and awareness; we can help others in our community to understand that any organization they join is going to reduce their social disconnection and improve their social health. We can help them understand that this is true for all the community groups we participate in — whether it’s Rotary, or the sailing club, or the town elder affairs group — any membership-based organization, civic group, or arts and education group.

    We can all be a part of this low-key campaign of public education and awareness, and it doesn’t take much effort. All we have to do is just be a little more willing to talk with others about the community-based organizations we belong to, and to mention that belonging to such community based groups helps support social health.

    As I look forward into the coming year — as I look for positive trends that I think may continue in the coming year –I’ve spent most of my time talking about social health. The way we can contribute to social health is just one among many long-term projects that people are doing together to make this a better world. I know many of you are participating in other long-term projects that are making this a better world; long-term projects that don’t make it into the news. The only reason that I’ve focused on social health is that it’s something that we do together here in our First Parish community; improving social health is a project that we all share.

    Just by showing up here at First Parish, we help create a place where people who are lonely can come and find safe, healthy, supportive social interaction. Just by showing up here, we are helping improve our community’s social health, and thereby making the world a better place.

    As we look back over the past year, as we look forward into the new year, it’s easy to be negative. It’s easy to think about everything that’s wrong with the world. But I think it’s more productive to think about how we are contributing to making the world a better place; and in the year to come, may we all think more about our positive efforts in this world.

    Notes

    (1) “Unsheltered Homelessness Drops and Sheltered Homelessness Rises in City and County of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority website, 28 June, 2024, https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=977-unsheltered-homelessness-drops-and-sheltered-homelessness-rises-in-la accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
    (2) “Thailand’s king signs landmark same-sex marriage bill into law,” Associated Press, 24 Sept. 2024 https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/asia/thailand-same-sex-marriage-intl-hnk/index.html accessed 4 Jan. 2025. — James Gregory, “Greece legalises same-sex marriage,” BBC News, 15 Feb. 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68310126 accessed 4 Jan. 2025
    (3) Mark Poynting and Esme Stallard, “UK to finish with coal power after 142 years,” BBC News, 30 September 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
    (4) The Maritime Executive, “High-Tech Sailing Ship Starts Maiden Voyage With 1,000 Tonnes of Cargo,” 18 Aug. 2024 https://maritime-executive.com/article/high-tech-sailing-ship-starts-maiden-voyage-with-1-000-tonnes-of-cargo accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
    (5) Bill Hutchinson, “US poised to see dramatic drop in homicides for 3rd straight year: More than 5,000 fewer homicides have been recorded this year compared to 2023,” ABC News, 31 Dec. 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/US/united-states-drop-homicides-2024/story?id=116902123 accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
    (6) “Growing or shrinking? What the latest trends tell us about the world’s population,” United Nations News, Global perspective Human stories, 11 July 2024 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/07/1151971 accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
    (6.5) Freakonomics podcast, Episode 92, “John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride,” 11 Nov. 2022, transcript at: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/john-greens-reluctant-rocket-ship-ride/ accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
    (7) Sharon Brock, What is Social Health and How Does it Impact Longevity? Stanford Lifestyle Medicine website, 14 Nov. 2024 https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2024/11/14/what-is-social-health-and-how-does-it-impact-longevity/ accessed 4 Jan. 2025. Robert D. Russell of Southern Illinois University is usually credited with originating the concept of social health back in the 1970s: “With an interest in the holistic and ecological aspects of health and spirituality as components of personal health, he often gets credit from colleagues for creating the ecological model of health education.” Southern Illinois University News, https://news.siu.edu/2012/03/032812cjm12090.php accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
    (8) See: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (Washington, DC: Office of the Surgeon General, 2023), https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
    (9) Ibid., p. 62.

  • New Year’s Wishes

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

    Readings

    The first reading was an excerpt from the poem “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” by Margaret Atwood (available online here).

    The second reading was a poem by W. S. Merwin titled “To the New Year” (available online here).

    Sermon: “New Year Wishes”

    Even though the end of the calendar is a somewhat arbitrary moment, nevertheless for many of us the end of the year prompts us to reflect on what we’ve done in the past year, and what we might do in the year to come.

    Admittedly, I’ve never been a fan of reflecting on the past year. If I start reflecting on the past year, I tend to focus on the things that have gone wrong, and the things I’ve done wrong, all of which always makes a long list. Maybe you’re one of those people who can reflect productively on the past year, and if that’s the case, this would be a worthwhile activity. Since I’m not that kind of person, in this sermon I’m going to avoid any reflection on the past year’s events.

    But I do find it helpful to think ahead to the new year; to reflect on what the new year might hold for me. I’m not talking about the stereotypical New Year’s resolutions. I have a poor track record with New Year’s resolutions: I make them, and within a week I forget them. Instead, I’m talking about something that is perhaps less mundane. Rather than coming up with resolutions that I know I’ll forget, what I’d like to reflect on with you are these two questions:

    — What might we hope for in the new year?

    — What wishes and dreams might inspire us?

    You do have to be careful with these questions. It’s easy to become hopelessly impractical. For example, as I reflect on the coming year, I might wish to be a better person than I actually am. I frequently wish that I were smarter, and more talented, and richer. But the reality is that I’m not going to get any smarter; it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to discover any previously unknown talents; and I have no rich uncle who is going to die and leave me billions of dollars. (That’s billions and not millions; if I’m going to have a fantasy about getting rich, I want to be really rich.)

    These sorts of fantasies don’t make for good wishes, nor for good dreams. I am who I am, and you are who you are. We don’t have to wish that we’re different people than we are. The real point is to make better use of what wisdom, talents, and wealth we actually have. That is, it makes more sense to wish that we could make better use of what we actually have. Such an attitude might lead to more modest, and therefore more achievable wishes. I might wish that I could use what wisdom and talents I have to be a better friend and family member. Or, in another example, looking farther afield, I might wish that I could use what talents and skills I have to be a better citizen.

    Even then it’s important to remain pragmatic. So, one of the things I really wish for, given the current state of the world, is peace; I wish for peace everywhere in the world. But that’s a really big wish, and honestly it’s pretty unrealistic. Probably everyone here has similar big wishes that you’re really passionate about: slowing global climate change; ending poverty and homelessness; finally establishing equality for all genders and all racial groups; and solutions for other major worldwide problems. These kinds of New Year’s wishes are so huge that I prefer to call them dreams. It is helpful to distinguish between what I’m calling dreams and wishes. A wish is more modest, something that can be achieved by one person, something that pertains mostly to a single person or family. A dream is much grander in scope, and might pertain to all of humankind, or even to all living beings on Earth. So it is that I might wish for enough money that my spouse and I can retire someday; but I dream of a world where no one has to worry about poverty.

    I would add that a dream is something worth pursuing no matter how unrealistic it might sound at first. Thus, Martin Luther King, Jr., famously had a dream that there would be full racial equality in the United States. Although we have made progress towards racial equality in this country since King’s death, we still have a long way to go. Yet even though it remains difficult to achieve the dream of full racial equality, it continues to be a dream well worth pursuing.

    King’s example brings up an important point. Dreams are usually so vast that one single individual can’t make them come true. But this doesn’t imply that one individual can’t help turn the dream into reality. Martin Luther King, though he was just one individual, was able to do something to make his dream of racial equality come true. King had the talents and the abilities of leadership; he was able to motivate and to mobilize other people. But he did not work on his own. He used his talents and abilities to work with many other people; he was merely one person in a mass movement working for racial justice.

    Admittedly, we have to think honestly about the talents we each have. We have to be honest with ourselves about how we each can best use our talents to make some big dream come true. I dream of a world where ecological collapse isn’t going to be as dire as some say. Stated like that, this dream doesn’t sound especially realistic. It just sounds huge and amorphous. But huge and amorphous dreams aren’t very helpful; I want to be able to do something to make dreams come true.

    Henry Thoreau gave some good advice on this subject: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” When we have big dreams, we have to figure out how to put foundations under them. Consider case of impending ecological disaster. How might we put foundations under this castle in the air? First, we can begin by breaking down the problem of ecological disaster into some component parts: there’s global climate change, there’s deforestation and land use change, there’s toxication and pollution, there are invasive species, there’s human overpopulation, and so on. Knowing that there are many people who share our dream of mitigating ecological disaster, we know that we don’t have to do everything; we can pick one of these component parts to focus our efforts on. Then we can further focus our efforts by choosing tasks where we have the talents and abilities to make a difference. To help identify those tasks where we can make a difference, we have to be honest about what talents and abilities we actually have. I’ll give you an example relating to the dream of stopping ecological disaster.

    I have friends who are very committed to stopping global climate change, and who are also good at engaging in civil disobedience. These are people who focus their efforts on developing and participating in innovative protest efforts to catch the attention of policy makers, and to convince those policy makers to come up with strategies to end global climate change. These friends of mine tell me about the protest efforts they have participated in; they compare notes about the times they got arrested; and they tally up the slow but steady progress they’ve made towards influencing key policy makers. But if I’m honest with myself, the things they are doing are not in my skill set. I would have no idea how to judge which protest efforts were going to be effective. I have no talent, and little ability, to participate in this kind of effort.

    If I look at myself honestly, I have a quarter of a century of experience as an educator — not a classroom educator, but a non-traditional educator. While I have no skill at planning demonstrations that influence policy makers, I do have a reasonably large skillset for doing education with small groups. My modest talents and abilities aren’t as interesting and charismatic as those of my friends who demonstrate against global climate change. But if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that if I’m going to work towards the dream of stopping ecological disaster, it should be in the realm of education, not demonstration. So rather than demonstrating against climate change, I focus my efforts on addressing human overpopulation by providing high quality comprehensive sexuality education classes to early and middle adolescents.

    That kind of low-profile effort does not have the cachet of going to demonstrations, but it is nonetheless effective and worthwhile. I know many of you in this congregation are engaged in those kinds of low-profile (yet critically important) efforts. People in this congregation support the local food pantry; raise money to purchase medical supplies for Ukraine’s defense efforts; sponsor a Guatemalan child’s education; and so on. Our efforts may not be news-worthy, but they are important and effective.

    I also have to say that there are times in everyone’s life when we don’t have the the energy to do much of anything to make those big dreams come true. This happened to me seven or eight years ago, when I had one of those health crises in which I could just about get through a day at work, but I had no energy for doing anything else except sleep. I simply wasn’t able to do anything to make any of the big dreams come true. Nevertheless, I could still do something. I didn’t have any energy to do anything myself, but I could be supportive and encouraging to people who were working on those big dreams. Providing encouragement and support helps keep dreams alive in others. It may not seem like much, but it is actually quite important.

    So as we think about New Year’s dreams, let’s go ahead and build castles in the air. If we’re going to dream, let’s dream big. And then we can put foundations under those castles in the air — by being honest with ourselves, being honest with what we can actually do, honest about our individual skills and abilities; that is, by being honest about both our strengths, and our limitations. No matter what our limitations, though, we can still dream the big dreams. We can all dream together about ending poverty, instituting full racial or gender justice, stopping ecological disaster.

    We just need to remember that dreams of truth and goodness are never out of reach. Emily Dickinson wrote:

    To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
    One clover, and a bee.
    And revery.
    The revery alone will do,
    If bees are few.

    All it takes is one clover, one bee, and a dream of a prairie. In the absence of bees, dreaming alone will do. It may take less than we think to make dreams come true. It is a semi-magical process. Sometimes revery alone will do, though mostly it requires others who share our dream. But share your dreams for a better world, and they may come true.

  • Winter Solstice

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

    Readings

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

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

    Sermon: “Winter Solstice”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Notes

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