Dan Harper | Sermons

  • The Importance of Democracy

    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 was the poem “Democracy,” written in 1949 by Langston Hughes (not available online due to copyright restrictions).

    The second reading was a transcript of a 1989 interview with novelist, poet, and jazz musician Gil Scott-Heron. The interviewer was documentary filmmaker Skip Blumberg.

    “I think that the Black Americans have been the only real die-hard Americans here, because we’re the only who have carried the process through…. Everyone else has sort of skipped stages. We’re the ones who marched, we’re the ones who carried the Bible, we’re the ones who carried the flag, we’re the ones who tried to go through the courts — and being born American didn’t seem to matter. Because we were born American but we still had to fight for what we were looking for.”

    The third reading is from “Haitian Migrants Who Found Safety at UUA Headquarters in Boston Share Their Stories,” a story in the most recent UU World magazine. In this story, the author interviews two refugees from Haiti.

    “In Chile Rodrick met Angela, who was studying to be a nurse in Haiti but, like he, left in search of a better life…. Rodrick found work, and they were able to afford a car. But someone tried to steal their car, and in the process of stopping the crime Rodrick was stabbed twice. At that point, they decided to head to the United States…. Asked why they chose the United States, Rodrick answered, ‘The reason we chose America is to get stability that’s missing in other countries.’”

    Sermon: “The Importance of Democracy”

    If you come here regularly on Sunday mornings, you may have noticed that for the past couple of months I’ve been mentioning democracy nearly every week. For us Unitarian Universalists, democracy has become an important religious principle.

    Placing religious importance on democracy may sound strange. Our society tends to assume that all religions are like Christianity, and because several branches of Christianity are hierarchical, our society tends to assume that all religions are hierarchical and non-democratic.

    We Unitarian Universalists, on the other hand, are devoted to democracy. Democracy is a core spiritual value for us Unitarian Universalists. We don’t have a hierarchy, and instead connect with other Unitarian Universalist congregations in the United States through a democratically-run association, the Unitarian Universalist Association. Similarly, we connect with other Unitarians and Universalists throughout the world through a democratically-run organization called the International Unitarian/Universalist Collaboration.

    Operating under democratic principles helps our leaders to stay in close communication with those they are leading. And while we may trust our leaders, we are constantly evaluating them in our minds to make sure they are adhering to our shared goals and values. We want leaders to remain accountable to the people they’re leading, and we want leaders to be accountable to our highest values.

    This springs from our deeply held beliefs about the nature of human beings. We know that individual human beings are limited beings. Any human being is capable of making mistakes. That is to say, all human beings are fallible — I’m fallible, you’re fallible, our leaders are fallible. But when we come together in democratically-run groups and hold each other accountable for our actions and beliefs, we can help correct each other. Our dream is that if come together in community, together we can move toward a world of truth and goodness.

    That’s the basic theory of democracy: no one person has all the answers, but if we work together maybe we can move towards truth and goodness. In practice, democracy does not chart a direct path towards truth and goodness. The history of Black Americans provides an excellent case study of how American democracy has not followed a direct path straight to truth and goodness.

    This is what Langston Hughes was expressing in the first reading this morning, the poem titled “Democracy.” Hughes wrote that poem in 1949, at a difficult time for Black Americans. During the Second World War — which was ostensibly a war for democracy, and against fascism — Black American soldiers served with honor and distinction in both the European and the Pacific theatres. Here at home, Black women took jobs in war-related industries to help further the war effort. Yet once the Second World War was over, Black Americans continued to experience the same discrimination they had been subjected to prior to the war. When Black Americans pointed out this contradiction, some White Americans acknowledged this was true, but counseled Black Americans to wait a little longer and eventually they would gain the equality they felt they deserved in a democracy. When Hughes heard White Americans suggest that he wait for true equality, he wrote:

    I tire so of hearing people say,
    Let things take their course.
    Tomorrow is another day.
    I do not need my freedom when I’m dead….

    By 1949, Langston Hughes and many other Black Americans had grown tired of waiting for the equality promised by the Declaration of Independence. Nor did they take comfort in suggestions that they help vote in candidates who were sympathetic to their cause; especially since a great many Black Americans effectively weren’t able to vote at that time.

    However, Black Americans had long used other democratic methods to affect public policy. Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, used the democratic right of freedom of the press. Elected political leaders were not addressing the epidemic of lynchings of Black Americans, so the NAACP sent journalists to investigate. We think disinformation is a new phenomenon, but disinformation about lynchings was incredibly widespread a hundred years ago. To counter disinformation, the NAACP published verifiable facts in their own periodicals, and presented those facts to elected leaders. It took decades, but gradually they were able to reduce the number of lynchings. And the NAACP was able to run their own news outlet because of another democratic right, the right of free association. By banding together and growing a large organization, Black Americans and their White allies were able fund their own journalists, and to make their views heard in the cacophony of a mass democracy.

    In the two decades after Langston Hughes wrote that poem, Black Americans continued to use a variety of democratic methods to make their views known. During the Civil Rights struggle of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, Black Americans used the right of free association to rally together to demand the rights that were legally due them. They used the free press to get the truth out the discrimination they faced, not just in the South, but here in the North as well. They used the courts to seek judicial redress, and while they lost many court battles, they also prevailed in such landmark cases as Brown vs. Board of Education.

    It is worth noting that all of this democratic activity was supported by voluntary associations like the NAACP. These were not lone individuals taking their individual case to the courts, but rather groups of people working together in concert. So, for example, there’s this myth that Rosa Parks acted on her own when she refused to give up her seat for a White woman on an Alabama bus. But she was not working alone. She was part of a much larger movement. She was helping the NAACP with a larger strategy when she refused to give up her seat. Because she was part of a local movement that, Black Americans were able to band together to boycott the Montgomery city buses for the year after her arrest, and this year-long organized boycott forced political leaders to end segregation on city buses.

    Democratic change does not come about though heroic individualism. Democratic change comes about as a result of people coming together, and working together. We are constantly told that the most important thing in a democracy is to vote, but this is false. Voting represents the absolute minimum effort an individual can make in a democracy. This is not to say the right to vote is unimportant — it is important, and everyone should have the right to vote. But if your only democratic effort is to spend fifteen minutes twice a year casting your vote, and maybe another couple of hours a year attending town meeting, you as an individual shouldn’t expect to have much of an impact.

    Yes, your vote matters — but it only matters when you exercise your other democratic rights and responsibilities. This is what Gil Scott-Heron was getting at in the second reading. I’m going to read that second reading for you again, in its entirety, because I think it’s so important. Gil Scott-Heron said: “I think that the Black Americans have been the only real die-hard Americans here, because we’re the only who have carried the process through…. Everyone else has sort of skipped stages. We’re the ones who marched, we’re the ones who carried the Bible, we’re the ones who carried the flag, we’re the ones who tried to go through the courts — and being born American didn’t seem to matter. Because we were born American but we still had to fight for what we were looking for.”

    People say we’re facing a crisis in democracy. I feel that crisis has come about because too many people have reduced their participation in democracy to the absolute minimum of voting, and nothing more. Too many Americans like their comfort more than they like democracy. We Americans have kind of abandoned democracy. We are comfortable sitting at home, so we stay at home. Fewer and fewer Americans belong to groups where cooperate with other people.

    Now if you’re here in the Meetinghouse this morning, you get to pat yourself on the back because you made the effort to get out of the house, and schlep down here, and attend this service. But honestly, the service itself isn’t all that important; what’s actually important is that we came down here to meet with like-minded people and work on projects together. We’re here participating in a democratically run organization. We’re actually doing democracy, in a small way, just by being here.

    And those of you who are watching the livestream, you also get to pat yourself on the back. You made the effort to stay off social media for an hour, to not play video games for an hour, and participate in this community. That might not seem like it’s important, but it is. We count the number of people who log on to our livestream each week, and it makes a difference for First Parish to be able to say you’re another person who’s part of this democratically-run organization. Just as the NAACP relied on support from members at a distance, so do we.

    The NAACP offers a good example for us to follow in this crisis in democracy. The NAACP is a voluntary association; it consists of people who freely associate together in a democratically-run organization to support each other and to affect public policy. The NAACP is a specific type of voluntary association: it has a national coordinating body, and it has local face-to-face groups that meet regularly. That’s actually the same organizational structure we Unitarian Universalists have. This is an especially powerful way for individuals to join together to affect public policy. Other examples of federated voluntary membership associations include the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Rifle Association, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and so on. You might not agree with the politics of these example organizations, but you have to admit that each of them has been effective in its own unique way. And each of these organizations actually serves to strengthen democracy, by amplifying the voice of individuals in a mass democracy where they might otherwise be lost in the noise.

    (Obviously, there are also ways to participate more directly in government. Some of us have the necessary skills to serve on town boards, run for elected office, and so on. But not everyone can fill these roles, which is why I’m emphasizing participating in voluntary associations.)

    Two days from now, we’re facing an especially divisive presidential election. (Our congregation is divided, by the way; we have both Republicans and Democrats.) The way the polls are running, no matter who wins, roughly half the electorate will be unhappy with the results of the election.

    So what should you do if your side loses on Tuesday?

    Well, I’ve heard people say all kinds of things. But I suggest we listen to the opinion of a recent Haitian immigrant, as we heard it in the third reading this morning:

    “Asked why they chose the United States, Rodrick [the recent immigrant] answered, ‘The reason we chose America is to get stability that’s missing in other countries.’”

    Remember, this is a Black man speaking, someone who knows full well that there continues to be racial discrimination against Black men here in the United States. But Rodrick also understands that there is a stability here in the United States. Our democracy that may be in crisis, but our democracy remains surprisingly robust. Much of that robustness comes from our freedom to associate, from our ability to create vibrant organizations that help affect public policy.

    If your preferred candidate loses in the coming week, rather than ranting and raving on social media (or in person), I suggest that you exercise your democratic right to participate in a voluntary association. Instead of ranting and raving, go join the local branch of the League of Women Voters — there’s a branch in Hingham, and a branch in Plymouth. Go join the Brockton branch of the NAACP. Or if you already belong to some group that influences politics locally and nationally, rededicate yourself to that group, and then go join another group. Mourning the loss is a waste of time; get organized instead.

    If your preferred candidate wins in the coming week, once again, please stay off social media. Beyond that, even if your candidate wins, you still need to exercise your democratic right to participate in a voluntary association that influences politics locally and nationally. Our problems are not going to go away just because your one presidential candidate wins this one election. Celebrating victory is a waste of time; get organized instead.

    Gil Scott-Heron said of his fellow Black Americans, “we were born American but we still had to fight for what we were looking for.” That has actually been true of all Americans. Democracy is never a finished product. We have always had to fight to keep our democracy. Human beings have always been fallible beings, and because we constantly make mistakes, we constantly have to fight for our ideals. Democracy is hard work, and it is never-ending work. The outcome of the upcoming election isn’t going to change that, no matter who wins.

    I hope you can hold on to that thought during this anxious time. Don’t let the anxiety get you down. Hold on to the thought that you can freely associate with others, and you can continue to work for accountability and democratic change no matter what the outcome of the election. Remember Rodrick who came here because it’s so much better here than in his country. Hold on to our highest democratic ideals. Continue to work for those high democratic ideals.

  • Ecospirituality

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

    Readings

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

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

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

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

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

    Sermon: “Ecospirituality”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Notes

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

  • Today’s Abortion Debates

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

    Readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sermon: Today’s Abortion Debates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Notes

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

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

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