Dan Harper | Sermons

  • What Do You Do with Grief?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Reading

    The first reading was the poem “Forty” by Hoang Trinh, trans. Huynh Sanh Trong, from the book An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems: From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries Hardcover, ed. Huynh Sanh Thong (Yale Univ. Press, 1996). (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    The second reading is a short poem by Lew Welch, number 2 from “The Hermit Songs.” (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    The third reading was a short poem by Nanao Sakaki titled “Why climb a mountain?” from the book How To Live on the Planet Earth: Collected Poems. (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    Sermon

    I wanted to talk with you this morning about grief solely because so many of you have spoken to me about your own grief. So this is a topic chosen, as it were, by the congregation.

    When speaking about grief, it’s easy to adopt a solemn and sad demeanor. However, I prefer a different approach. I’ll begin with some strictly pragmatic remarks about grief, and I’ll conclude with some thoughts about spiritual paths for handling grief.

    Here begin the pragmatic remarks.

    To begin with, we should recognize that grief is a normal part of life. Grief may not be fun, or pleasant, but it is not the same as trauma. Grief is normal, trauma is excessive. Grief can be associated with trauma, but trauma is when something happens to you that takes more than ordinary resources to cope with. If you’re dealing with trauma, I hope you’re able to get outside help; but what I’m going to talk about this morning is ordinary everyday grief.

    It sometimes seems that we only think of grief as something that happens when a person you love has died. However, there are many other things that can cause grief. In fact, grief isn’t necessarily sad — during weddings, people often cry from grief, but it’s happy grief, not sad grief. Most often, grief happens when suddenly life isn’t the same any more; or to put it more precisely, we tend to experience grief when we experience loss. Since things are constantly changing, guess what — that makes grief a frequent occurrence, and a normal part of life.

    Let me give you some examples of grief that does not involve someone dying.

    Many people experience grief in midlife, often in the late thirties or early forties. The first reading this morning, the poem titled “Forty,” expresses this kind of grief very well. I remember being in a group of older people and one younger man; the younger man was feeling downhearted because he had just turned thirty-six. Most of the older people dismissed his grief, laughing and saying, “Oh you’re not old yet.” But to himself, he was old compared to someone in their late teens. He was, in fact, experiencing the loss of his youth. It was good he was aware of his grief, and could talk about it; maybe it wasn’t so good that older people laughed at his sense of loss and grief.

    Next, here’s an example of what we might call good grief. When people leave a job they dislike and find a better job, they often experience grief. Even though you hated the old job that you left, there were probably a one or two things you liked about it — perhaps one or two co-workers you liked, or a place you went to lunch. Thus, even if you hated the job, you might experience some grief due to the change in you daily habits. It might be good grief — you now have a better job — but it’s still grief.

    Another example of good grief: I already mentioned people crying at weddings. People experience grief at a happy occasion like a wedding for the simple reason that a wedding represents a moment of huge change; familes change, habits change, social status changes. I have a vivid memory of one wedding at which I officiated. Both people in the couple cried the whole wedding service — not just looking a little weepy, I’m talking about tears streaming down their cheeks. Of course they were happy, but they were also aware enough to know that their wedding meant big changes; changes not just in their relationship, but in the relationship of everyone connected with them. So they cried, because they were aware of the loss. Their grief was good grief, but it was still grief.

    Grief can also arise from what’s going in in wider society. We live in a time in our country when an old order is being dismantled, and a new order is being constructed. The changes include everything from LGBTQIA rights, to the Department of Government Efficiency. As a result of all these changes, we have lost sight of old norms, and everything feels unfamiliar. We may support some of these changes, we may oppose some of these changes, but everyone is feeling grief, because the old order is passing away.

    Now, the funny thing about grief is that it’s additive. For example, if you feel good grief from a recent wedding, and sad grief from the passing of the old order in the United States, and good grief from losing a job that you disliked, and sad grief from the death of a pet — all that grief adds up. If, in addition to all that, someone close to you dies: well, you’ve got a whole lot of grief in your life. You may not be aware of all the grief in your life — you may only be aware of the big moments of grief, such as the death of a loved one — but all that background grief is also there. Thus if you experience a major loss on top of a lot of background grief, you can find yourself immersed in a large amount of grief.

    Because grief is additive, it’s not a bad idea to become more aware of all grief in your life. This is why I’m giving so many examples of what cause grief, and let me give a few more. The birth of a child can cause grief — it’s usually good grief, but it’s still a major change. Moving out of childhood into your teen years can cause grief; similarly, aging can lead to grief. Leaving home to go to college or the military can result in grief — usually good grief, but grief nonetheless. When children leave home and you become an an empty nester, it may be good grief or sad grief (depending on your relationship with your children), but it’s still a loss, which can cause grief. Retirement often results in major grief. You get the idea, and I’m sure you can think of other examples in your own life.

    Now the question becomes: what are we going to do with all that grief? In our culture, the usual approach is to ignore all the grief and loss in your life. This strategy can be quite effective for quite a long time, maybe for your whole life. But ignoring grief exposes you to the risk that some big grief will come along and put you over the edge, grief-wise. The opposite approach is to wallow in your grief. This seems to be an effective strategy for some people, but I can’t recommend it, because wallowing in grief can be really hard on the people around you. Thus, the best approach is probably to find some middle way between ignoring grief and wallowing in grief.

    As we consider how to find a middle way for managing the grief in our lives, we have to consider the fact that grief may never quite disappear. The most obvious example is when someone close to you dies: you grieve because you love them, and they’re no longer alive; the only way to stop grieving would be to tell yourself that you never loved them. Another obvious example is the grief that can happen when you’re no longer a child: obviously it’s good to grow up, but if you have even a partially happy childhood, growing up means losing a sense of magic, what we might call unicorns and rainbows. To not feel real grief at the end of childhood would be (in a sense) to betray the unicorns and rainbows and anything that was good about childhood. Yet while grief may not ever go away completely, the day usually comes when your feelings are no longer so raw. Or to put it another way, the day usually comes when you’ve gained whatever wisdom and self-knowledge has grown out of that grief. This is why a middle way is so important. If you wallow in your grief, it’s really hard to attain that wisdom and self-knowledge. And if you ignore your grief, again it’s almost impossible to attain that wisdom and knowledge.

    So to be practical for a moment, how can we get to that point of wisdom and self-knowledge, the point where grief is no longer so raw? I’m going to suggest two spiritual paths that may help get you to that point. Mind you, there are a great many paths and techniques that can help deal with grief, including: simply waiting it out; distracting yourself; thinking about others worse off than you; doing psychotherapy; joining grief support groups; and so on. Use whatever paths and techniques that work for you. I’m just going to mention two spiritual paths that may also help.

    The first spiritual path is hinted at in the poem by by Nanao Sakaki, the third reading this morning. Sakaki was a Buddhist, and his poem tells us how the individual self is a kind of illusion.

    This poem describes a classic spiritual path that can be found in different forms in many religious traditions. This is the spiritual path that helps us understand that none of us is an individual self that’s somehow separate from the universe; what I think of as my “self” is nothing more nor less than a tiny but integral part of the entire universe.

    This spiritual path has proved helpful to some people who are grieving: while not diminishing your individual grief, it puts your individual grief into a much wider perspective. A lovely example of this spiritual path from our own religious tradition is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s long poem “Threnody.” Emerson wrote this poem about his eldest child Waldo, who died at just five years old. Not surprisingly, Emerson experienced an enormous sense of grief upon Waldo’s death. In the first half of “Threnody,” Emerson expresses his great grief; but in the second half of the poem, a mysterious voice Emerson calls “the deep Heart” speaks:

    The deep Heart answered, Weepest thou?…
    Taught he not thee, — the man of eld,
    Whose eyes within his eyes beheld
    Heaven’s numerous hierarchy span
    The mystic gulf from God to man?…

    In this second half of the poem, the voice of the Deep Heart makes the poet realize how little he knows, and how little he understands the death of his child. It’s a sort of a Transcendentalist version of the Bible story of Job. In the first half of the Bible story, Job loses all his wealth, loses his family, loses his health, loses almost everything. In the second half of the Bible story, Job encounters God (who is similar to the Deep heart in Emerson’s poem), and God shows Job how much larger the universe is than his tiny human self. Both the book of Job and Emerson’s “Threnody” say much the same thing that the Buddhist Nanao Sakaki says in his poem about the mountain: our individual selves are actually quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things, yet they are also an integral part of the gran scheme of things. Indeed, the Buddhist spiritual practice of meditation can be used to achieve that same understanding. So can the Christian and Jewish practices of prayer, which can make us apprehend something that is far, far greater than our tiny mortal selves.

    For the right person, this spiritual path can really help deal with grief. However, like any spiritual path, this spiritual path is not for everyone. If it works for you, use it! Speaking personally, it doesn’t work for me.

    A different spiritual path that may help some people deal with grief is hinted at in the second reading this morning, the short poem by Lew Welch. In our own religious tradition, this is the spiritual path followed by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is best known for going to live in a cabin at Walden Pond. Part of the reason Thoreau went to Walden Pond was to write a book commemorating time spent with his brother John; John had died suddenly from lockjaw a couple of years before Thoreau went to Walden. Thoreau experienced great grief at the sudden death of his older brother. At times he managed his grief much the way Emerson did, looking towards some vast reality that transcended his self. But he also paid close attention to what was immediately in front of him. So he did things like measuring the water temperature of various wells and springs in town, comparing them with the water temperature of Walden Pond (the pond water was colder than the wells and springs). He liked to name many of the plants and animals with their scientific names — Lepus americanus, Apios tuberosa, Hirundo bicolor; and where Emerson’s poem refers only to generic sparrows, Thoreau’s book distinguishes between different species, like the song sparrow and the field sparrow.

    This is the spiritual path that Lew Welch describes in his poem. If you step outside and look closely, there might be three hundred things nobody understands, and how many can you find? Unfortunately, this spiritual path is often dismissed as not being spiritual; it is merely science and inquiry. Yet for some people, it is a true spiritual path. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about this spiritual path in her book “Gathering Moss” when she describes spending an entire summer figuring out how one obscure species of moss manages to spread its spores; she discovered that the spores stuck to chipmunk feet, and that’s how they spread. To paraphrase Lew Welch, she managed to understand something that nobody understood before. Or I think about a scientific paper I once read on a small flowering plant called narrowleaf cow wheat (Melampyrum lineare). Botanist Martin Piehl spent three field seasons in the late 1950s carefully excavating the root systems of narrowleaf cow wheat, and, he reported, “after repeated attempts involving careful brushing away of sand, a thread-like rootlet was found attached to a host by a near-microscopic, hemispherical enlargement.” (1)

    Thoreau, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Lew Welch would each fully understand that what they were doing was a kind of spiritual practice. Neither prayer meditation and prayer works for me, but the older I get, the more I find this spiritual path helps me handle grief. Unlike Martin Piehl or Robin Wall Kimmerer, I’ve never found something nobody’s ever seen; but the simple act of looking closely and finding things that I don’t understand helps me learn my place in the universe; and over time, this has helped me to move through grief to a place of greater wisdom and self-awareness.

    I don’t expect many people will want to bother with this last spiritual path, nor am I telling you about it so that you will try to follow it. But there are people who try the major spiritual practices — meditation, prayer, and so on — and when those spiritual paths don’t work, they think they have to either compromise their spiritual selves, or give up on spirituality altogether. If you’re one of those people, I wanted you to know that there are other spiritual paths. Not only that, but you might already be following a spiritual path — some kind of practice or discipline that gives you comfort in hard times, something that helps you understand your place in the universe, something that puts your life into a greater perspective.

    Often — not always, but often — we actually have the spiritual tools we need close to hand. And a major purpose of our free and open religious tradition is to allow people to come together in community to share their experiences of spiritual paths, and to affirm the diversity of spiritual paths that exist in the world.

    Note

    (1) Martin A. Piehl, “The Parasitic Behavior of Melampyrum lineare,” Rhodora Vol. 64, No. 757 (January-March, 1962), p. 17.

    A small woodland flower.
    Melampyrum lineare (photo copyright (c) Dan Harper 2024).

  • What about Assisted Dying?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Sermon

    This is a sermon that grew out of the concerns and interests of people in First Parish. It began with questions a couple of you have asked me about assisted dying. And then after I announced this topic, quite a few of you sent me articles and other material about assisted dying. Thank you to everyone who sent me those materials, and to everyone who talked with me about the topic.

    My goal this morning is not to give you an exhaustive overview of the topic of assisted dying. Instead, what I’d like to do is to consider what it means to make personal choices around assisted dying. As usual, I’m not going to try to give you any final answer; I’m merely going to try to lay out some of the main ethical issues. It will then be up to you to figure out how to address these ethical questions in your own life.

    When talking about ethical issues, it often helps to have a concrete case study to consider. For a case study about assisted dying, I’m going to give you the story of the death of Scott Nearing, as told by his wife Helen Nearing. Soctt Nearing was a well-known figure in the twentieth century, though he is mostly forgotten today. He first came to prominence during the First World War, when he was fired from his position as college professor because of his public support of pacifism during that war. (Pacifism was essentially illegal during the First World War; the First Amendment was ignored, and anyone who spoke publicly in favor of pacifism risked job loss, imprisonment, and officially sanctioned harassment.) After the First World War, Nearing became a Socialist, and then during the Great Depression a Communist. Then he and his wife Helen decided that they wanted to live by the efforts of their own hands, first moving to a farm in Vermont. When a ski resort opened next to their farm, they felt they had to move, but rather than sell their land to the ski resort, which would have made them millions of dollars in profit, they gave it to the town as conservation land. They then moved to Maine, where they wrote a book “Living the Good Life” describing how they lived off the land, and how they followed what we would now call a vegan diet. This book became a sort of Bible for the 1960s “Back to the Land” movement, and the Nearings had many visitors who came to their farm to learn how they, too, might live off the land.

    I tell you all these details of Scott Nearing’s life to help you understand that he was an independent thinker who was not bound by a conventional religious worldview; he was a freethinker. This will become important later. Now I’ll give you the story of his death, as it was told by Helen Nearing:

    “A month or two before Scott died, he was sitting at table with us at a meal. Watching us eat he said, ‘I think I won’t eat anymore.’ ‘All right,’ said I. ‘I understand. I think I would do that too. Animals know when to stop. They go off in a corner and leave off food.’

    “So I put Scott on juices: carrot juice, apple juice, banana juice, pineapple, grape — any kind. I kept him full of liquids as often as he was thirsty. He got weaker, of course, and he was as gaunt and thin as Gandhi.

    “Came a day he said, ‘I think I’ll go on water. Nothing more.’ From then on, for about ten days, he only had water. He was bed-ridden and had little strength but spoke with me daily. In the morning of August 24, 1983, two weeks after his 100th birthday, when it seemed he was slipping away, I sat beside him on his bed.

    “We were quiet together; no interruptions, no doctors or hospitals. I said ‘It’s all right, Scott. Go right along. You’ve lived a good life and are finished with things here. Go on and up — up into the light. We love you and let you go. It’s all right.’

    “In a soft voice, with no quiver or pain or disturbance he said ‘All … right,’ and breathed slower and slower and slower till there was no movement anymore and he was gone out of his body as easily as a leaf drops from the tree in autumn, slowly twisting and falling to the ground.

    “So he returned to his Maker after a long life, well-lived and devoted to the general welfare. He was principled and dedicated all through. He lived at peace with himself and the world because he was in tune: he practiced what he preached. He lived his beliefs. He could die with a good conscience.” (1)

    Thus ends Helen Nearing’s story of how Scott Nearing died. Now let’s consider this story as an ethical case study that might shed some light on assisted dying.

    First, let’s ask: Was Scott Nearing’s death suicide? I would say: yes, it was. He starved himself to death. Think about it this way: if Helen Nearing had called 9-1-1, when the EMTs came they would have given him intravenous feeding; that is, a third party would see that Scott Nearing was dying, and they would have done what they could to stop him from dying.

    Second, let’s ask: Was this assisted dying? Again, in my opinion the answer is fairly clear: yes, it was. Helen Nearing helped Scott Nearing to die. She assisted him in reducing his food intake, first to juices, then to only water. When Scott Nearing was bed-ridden, she had to care for him, but she did not force him to eat, nor did she take him to the hospital. She assisted him in dying.

    This is not the usual way we think about assisted dying, of course. We usually think about assisted dying as a patient asking for the assistance of a doctor or other health care professional in finding a way to end their life. And certainly when a health care professional is involved, that raises other ethical questions for the professional. But assisted dying can also take place at home, without medical supervision or assistance.

    Now that we’ve determined that this was assisted dying, let’s consider some of the ethical issues that arise in this case study. And the first issue that has to be considered when considering any form of assisted dying is whether the person dying has given their full consent. When it comes to assisted dying, this is perhaps the trickiest of all ethical considerations. Often, we try to dodge this question, as when we say that assisted dying is acceptable if a doctor determines that the person who wishes to die has only a few months left to live. In such a situation, more people are inclined to say that assisted dying is acceptable; even if someone is unable to give their full consent, perhaps we don’t worry so much about consent because after all the person is going to die soon anyway; and in such cases perhaps assisted dying allows the person to die in dignity, without unbearable suffering and pain.

    But Scott Nearing did not have a terminal diagnosis, so in this case study we cannot dodge the issue of consent. I would say in Scott Nearing’s case that yes, he was able to give full consent. Not only that, but he gave consent repeatedly over a period of time: he gave consent every time he chose not to eat. Furthermore, by putting him on a juice diet at first, Helen Nearing gave him the option to revise his decision; he got terribly thin on that juice diet, but he could still have changed his mind and begun eating once again. So in this case, by choosing this method of dying, Scott Nearing gave the fullest possible consent.

    Consent is very important for at least two reasons. First, obviously we should be concerned about the possibility of family members pushing someone to commit suicide for reasons of their own — they want the person’s money or property, or whatever less-than-savory motivation that might exist. Second, it turns out that many people change their minds during or after a suicide attempt. Back in 1981, Art Kleiner wrote an article titled “How Not To Commit Suicide.” In that article, he documented how when suicide attempts fail (and they often fail), those who attempted suicide decide afterwards that they really wanted to live. (2) Thus consent cannot arise from a momentary impulse; consent can only arise from a carefully considered decision.

    It’s both critically important and quite difficult to determine whether consent has been freely given. Was the person forced into the decision by others? Would the person change their mind if you gave them time to think about it? These are two key questions. In the Scott Nearing case study, we can be about as certain as it’s possible to be that consent was freely given.

    Next we have to consider how a decision to die affects all those around the person who is dying. I assume that we are isolated individuals, but rather that each one of us is a part of the interdependent web of existence, and what we do with our lives will have distinct and definite effects on other people. We especially have an effect on those who are closest to us, but when a person dies by suicide they also have an effect on the wider society, especially those who are required by law and custom to investigate such deaths.

    In the story of Scott Nearing’s death, he did take into account those around him. In particular, he had to take into account his spouse, Helen Nearing. What would Helen think if Scott decided to die? Helen Nearing tells us that several years before he died, Scott Nearing told an interviewer: “‘I look forward to the possibility of living until I’m 99.’ His blue eyes twinkled. ‘It is a precarious outlook, I assure you. … I have almost nothing left but time. But if I can be of service, I would like to go on living.’” Helen then said that Scott “did more than his share of mental and physical work up to his last years.” Helen implies that it was only when Scott felt unable to contribute as much as he felt he should to their partnership that he decided to die; and that, while she may not have fully agreed with him, she understood and supported his decision; supported it to the point that she was willing to care for him in his last couple of weeks when he was bed-ridden. When we consider how a person’s death affects those around them, this helps us understand the difference between assisted dying and other types of suicide. Assisted dying is a decision made in partnership with others, with full awareness of the emotional toll on others, full awareness of the help that will be needed from others, and full awareness of all the impacts on others.

    One should also consider carefully how the means of death will affect others. One brief example: I was on a train once that someone used to die by suicide. When that happens, the train becomes a crime scene, and all of had to stay in the train for a couple of hours. I have a vivid memory of watching the train crew as they walked down the train to talk with the police, of seeing their expressions of pain and shock. You simply do not want to do that to anyone. Then too, there is the impact on the first responders, and all those who will have to investigate. By contrast, Scott Nearing chose a means of assisted dying that was not going to traumatize other people.

    In addition, there are other impacts beyond the emotional impacts. For example, there may be financial impacts. Consider the way assisted dying happens in Switzerland. The legal situation around assisted dying in Switzerland is complex — I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs — but from a practical standpoint, while assisted dying is allowed, every unnatural death has to be fully investigated. Those organizations that provide assisted dying in Switzerland charge their clients a fee that covers not only the assisted death, but also the investigation that has to happen afterwards. That way, Swiss taxpayers don’t have to pay every time an assisted death is investigated.

    And then there are the legal implications of assisted dying. But I don’t have time to go into the complicated question of the subtle differences in assisted dying laws in different jurisdictions. Here in the United States, assisted dying is legal in California, Colorado, Hawai’i, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia; yet each jurisdiction has slightly different laws. In other ocuntries, assisted dying is available in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland; in all Australian states except the Northern Territory; and in the United Kingdom in England, Wales, and Scotland. (3) Each of these jurisdictions has significantly different laws for assisted dying, and each set of laws results in different ethical issues, and I don’t have the time or the expertise to talk about these differences. Beyond the legal questions of assisted dying, there are many other ethical issue that arise. We don’t have the time to cover them all, so I’m going to stick to my purpose: trying to consider the personal choices around assisted dying.

    Thinking about personal choices raises one last question, and that’s the question of religious ethics. In our case study, Scott Nearing did not have a conventional religious perspective, which may have allowed him to perceive options that would not have been apparent to a more conventional religious worldview. So what religious stand do Unitarian Universalists take on assisted dying? There is no simple answer. Ours is a religion that does not have a creed or dogma to which we all must assent. Instead, we leave ethical matters to a person’s individual conscience, while also acknowledging that a person’s individual conscience only exists as a part of a larger community.

    By contrast, many Christians are able to fall back on a simple and straightforward dogma or belief system regarding assisted dying — they would say assisted dying is a sin. Many Buddhists would also feel that assisted dying is unacceptable, since it could affect a person’s next birth. Many Hindus and Jains feel that assisted dying is wrong because it can be seen as a form of violence directed against the self, which goes against the principle of ahimsa, or non-violence. In other words, some religious traditions have firm teachings on assisted dying that are easy to understand and follow.

    In some ways, it would be easier if we Unitarian Universalists had a simple and straightforward perspective on assisted dying. But we don’t. From our religious perspective, we can imagine situations in which assisted dying is quite acceptable — when someone is suffering too much, when life has become a burden, and so on. We can also imagine situations in which assisted dying gets ugly — when it looks too much like eugenics, or when it looks too much like an excuse to get rid of people who are old or disabled, and so on.

    I would say that most of us Unitarian Universalists feel that some kind of assisted dying should be available to those who want it. And most of us probably agree that there should be some limitations to assisted dying and some protections — and I suspect many of us have known someone who died by suicide when that was probably the wrong thing to do. So we want the possibility of assisted suicide, with appropriate protections in place — protections like ensuring consent, and considering the impact on other people.

    Thus we Unitarian Universalists do not have a single straightforward teaching or doctrine that covers assisted dying. Our religious worldview doesn’t force us to find one simple, final answer to every question. Instead, we try to think carefully about difficult ethical questions, to understand our feelings about those difficult questions, and to understand the feelings of those around us. Then we do our best to live out our beliefs, living lives that are in tune with our highest principles, at one with the interdependent web of all existence.

    Notes

    (1) Helen Nearing, “At the End of a Good Life,” In Context, summer, 1990, p. 20. https://www.context.org/iclib/ic26/nearing/
    (2) Art Kleiner, “How Not To Commit Suicide,” CoEvolution Quarterly, summer 1981, pp. 88-109. https://archive.org/details/coevolutionquart00unse_26/page/88/mode/2up
    (3) See, e.g., Fergus Walsh, “How assisted dying has spread across the world and how laws differ,” BBC News website, 29 November 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dpwg1lq9yo — N.B.: since this article was written, assisted dying has been legalized in England, Scotland, and Wales.

  • Gardens, not Walls

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Reading

    The reading was the poem “Set the Garden on Fire” by Chen Chen. (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    Homily for the annual Water Ritual

    Every year, when we have this water ritual, we talk about how we are all connected. Or more precisely, how all human beings are connected to each other, and how all human beings are connected with all other living beings and indeed with the non-human world as well. We are literally, physically connected by the water cycle (as Kate and I pointed out during the moment for all ages), and we are also connected by ethical concerns, concerns that may not be physical but are just as literal as the water cycle.

    In the first reading, we heard a poem by Chen Chen, a now-middle-aged poet who was born in China and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. This is a poem about a suburban community. It could be a poem about Newton, or it could equally well be a poem about Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived and worked for the first forty years of my life, or it could just as well be a poem about Cohasset or Scituate or any South Shore suburban community. Here in the suburbs, we are both good at nurturing human community, and we are bad at nurturing human community.

    We are good at nurturing human community when we keep our communities safe so that we don’t have to fear interactions with strangers. We are good at nurturing human community when we support local organizations like parent-teacher groups, and elder affairs councils, and congregations, and scouting groups, and community aid groups like food pantries and the Cohasset Community Assistance Fund, and so on. Indeed, many of us move to the suburbs precisely because we think it will be easier to be part of human community here.

    On the other hand, suburbs can also be places that are actually destructive of human community. I’ll tell you a couple of stories to show what I mean, both taken from my home town of Concord. First story: A friend of mine had a new family move in next door, and when she saw her new neighbor getting his mail at the mailbox, she ventured to go up and say hello. He retrieved his mail from the mailbox, and then said into the air — not looking at her — “One of the things that I like about the suburbs is that you don’t have to talk to people.” Second story: When I was in my thirties, I was talking with an older friend about an affordable housing project that the town proposed building near her house. She was vehemently opposed, because, she said, “Black people might move in.” (She was so vehement I decided not to tell her that it was much more likely that I’d move in, because as a current town resident in the right income bracket, I’d get preference.) From these two stories, you can see that sometimes people in suburban towns do not nurture human connections.

    Of course this is true of people everywhere, not just in the suburbs. In the current political environment, we have two political parties whose primary vision for the future seems to be the eradication of the other political party. I have friends who are Democrats who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate Trump, and I have friends who are Republicans who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate liberals. Neither party are exemplars of nurturing human connection. Similarly, in the current ethical environment, too many of our thought leaders are people like the former CEO of Steward Health Care, who received hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, while at the same time the hospital chain didn’t have enough money to pay for critical supplies, or to pay staff salaries. Again, this man is not an exemplar of nurturing human connection.

    I’m reminded of a story in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath 31a. A man approached the famous Rabbi Hillel. “I would like to convert to Judaism and become a Jew,” he said. “I know I have to learn the Torah, but I’m a busy man. You must teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot.”

    “Certainly,” said Rabbi Hillel. “Stand on one foot.”

    The man balanced on one foot.

    “Repeat after me,” said Rabbi Hillel. “What is hateful to you, don’t do that to someone else.”

    The man repeated after Rabbi Hillel, “What is hateful to me, I won’t do that to someone else.”

    “That is the whole law,” said Rabbi Hillel. “All the rest of the Torah, all the rest of the oral teaching, is there to help explain this simple law. Now, go and learn it so it is a part of you.”

    Of course we all know that we shouldn’t do to someone else what is hateful to ourselves; as another rabbi put it, we all know that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. But notice that Rabbi Hillel adds the instruction: “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” (1) When Rabbi Hillel tells the man to go and study, he’s not talking about some academic kind of study; he’s talking about study as a sacred act; he’s talking about knowing something so well that it becomes a central part of who you are. An implicit part of this kind of study is that it must happen in community. This isn’t the kind of studying where you sit down alone somewhere and memorize a bunch of stuff. This is the kind of study where you engage with the biggest possible moral and ethical questions by talking and arguing with other people. Indeed, I’d argue that serious moral and ethical study can only be done in community, can only be done with other people.

    Actually, this is more or less what we do here each week on Sunday morning. Unlike some Christian traditions where the minister’s job is to preach from on high, telling the congregation what is right and what is wrong, our tradition is supposed to engender argument. (At least, that’s what I’d say, though it’s open to argument.) I would say that in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, oftentimes the role of the preacher is merely to articulate a problem or concern currently facing the congregational community, and to propose a preliminary resolution of that problem or concern. Then it is up to the members of the congregation to further think about and discuss the problem or concern, and to decide for themselves how this might affect their own lives.

    And when the preacher is wrong or inaccurate, it’s up to the elders of a Unitarian Universalist congregation to let the preacher know. When I was the minister at the New Bedford Unitarian church, Everett Hoagland, a poet and college professor, used to sit in the back pew in the center, and listen carefully to what I said in the sermon. He would tell me when something I said seemed particularly accurate or true; and when I got something wrong, he’d gently tell me where I went wrong. In that same congregation, Ken Peirce, a retired schoolteacher, sat in the center about a third of the way back. He would take notes during the sermon, and after the service hand me the notes as he greeted me on his way to social hour. His notes would often prompt a follow-up sermon.

    Now, not everyone is a college professor or retired schoolteacher. Most people are not going to take notes during a sermon and correct errors the way Ken and Everett did. I remember the old Universalist in one congregation who worked as the butcher at a local supermarket. What she wanted from a Sunday service, she said, was something to think about while she was at work during the week, something to turn over in her mind, something that might help her to live her life better. Or I think about Gladys, who was dying of cancer when I knew her; she had little interest in intellectual exercises, but she was facing the biggest possible human questions about life and death and mortality, and she came each Sunday to be part of a community where it normal and acceptable to talk about such big issues. Or I think about Nancy, who was in her seventies and homeless when I knew her; she came to Sunday services to have a time when she could think about something more than basic survival.

    To my mind, these people exemplify, each in their own way, what Rabbi Hillel meant when he said, “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” None of these people was Jewish, none of them read the actual Torah; but each of them, in their own way studied what it mean to be part of a community and a tradition that dealt with the highest moral and ethical and religious questions. For some of these people, study took the form of notes and verbal discussions. For others, study too the form of mulling over thoughts and ideas that might help one to lead a better life. Still others were confronting pressing questions of survival and life and death, and they needed a community where they could confront those questions openly and without shame.

    Because of this, I sometimes think the most important part of our Sunday services is social hour. That’s when you get a chance to have conversations with other people about life’s big issues. In our tradition, those conversations might not take the form of formal religious and theological discussion and argument; instead, those conversations are more likely to take the form of conversations about life and job and volunteer commitments and political actions and of course family (which includes both biological family and chosen family). Rabbi Hillel said that studying Torah was important, not for the sake of abstract religious and theological arguments, but rather for the sake of determining how to live by the dictum: “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” For Rabbi Hillel, study was not merely an academic matter, but a matter of the highest ethical values and concerns; study was not something you do in your head, study is something that affects your entire life.

    Socrates said something similar when he was facing the death penalty. According to Plato, Socrates told his accusers, “I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of [humanity], and that the unexamined life is not worth living.” (2) This, too, is what it means to study. To talk about virtue and other big questions is to lead a life that is well worth living.

    And now let me return to the suburbs, and to the poem by Chen Chen. In the poem, a Chinese family buys a house in the suburbs. At this point, the people living in the house next door have a couple of options. On the one hand, they could get to know this new family (and if they felt some resistance to getting to know the new family, they’d engage in a little self-examination to figure out why). On the other hand, they could plant a hedge of rose bushes, and begin to whisper rumors of drub money and illegals and so on. In the poem, the neighbors choose the second option. And in response, the poet says:

    “Friend, let’s really move in, let’s
    plunge our hands into the soil.
    Plant cilantro & strong tomatoes,
    watermelon & honey-hearted cantaloupe,
    good things, sweeter than any rose.
    Let’s build the community garden
    that never was. Let’s call the neighbors
    out, call for an orchard, not a wall.
    Trees with arms free, flaming
    into apple, peach, pear — every imaginable,
    edible fire.” (3)

    While the poet doesn’t talk about Torah study, I think he’s saying much the same thing as Rabbi Hillel. Both of them are teaching us the importance of nurturing human community. Whether you choose to use the metaphor of study, as Rabbi Hillel did; or the metaphor of discourse and conversation, as Socrates did; or the metaphor of planting a community garden, as Chen Chen does — the end result is the same. All these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” At the same time, all these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “that the unexamined life is not worth living.” And finally, all these are ways to call for an orchard, rather than a wall; to nurture human community, and further to nurture human community that is also a part of a community of all living beings.

    So those are the kinds of things that arise for me when I consider the imagery of the annual water ritual; that’s what arises for me when I ask myself how it is that all of us human beings are interconnected, and how it is that all human beings are connected with the rest of the universe. This is not to say that what comes up for me is any better than what comes up for you; you and I are both fallible beings, and it is only by talking together that we have a hope of coming closer to the ultimate truth.

    Notes

    (1) The William Davidson Talmud (Koren-Steinsaltz), www.sefaria.org/Shabbat.31a
    (2) Plato, The Apology, 38a; trans. Benjamin Jowett.
    (3) Chen Chen, “Set the Garden on Fire,” Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, ed. Melissa Tuckey (Univ of Georgia Press, 2018).