Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Your Job as a Calling (No, Really)

    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 from “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation,” by the Quaker author Parker Palmer.

    “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about — quite apart from what I would like it to be about — or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

    “That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin word for ‘voice.’ Vocation does not mean a goal I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live — but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”

    Sermon

    Let me tell you a brief story about how someone I know lost their vocation, their purpose in life, and finally found a new purpose.

    My father had a job he absolutely loved, working as an electrical engineer. It was more than a job for him, it was a kind of vocation or calling, and he worked long hours at it, sometimes six days a week. But in his mid-sixties, his energy began to flag a bit, so he asked his employer if he could work part-time. Since that was against company policy, at age sixty-seven, he retired. I still remember the sign he put up over his desk in the basement, which read “Retire — and Die.”

    He moped around for several months, and I think that was the most downbeat I ever saw him. Then two disasters struck which gave him no time for feeling downbeat. The first disaster was a house fire, which meant he had to oversee rebuilding the house. The second disaster was my mother’s terminal diagnosis, giving her a life expectancy of about six years, which meant he had to spend more and more time being a caregiver. Both these disasters provided him with a vocation or calling; maybe not the vocations he would have chosen, but vocations nonetheless.

    After my mother died, my father once again felt himself adrift. The house had been rebuilt long ago, and he was no longer a full-time caregiver. He had to figure out what he was going to do with his life all over again.

    At about this time, he found a book in the local library called “Let Your Life Speak,” written by the Quaker author Parker Palmer (that’s the book this morning’s reading came from). I happened to discover this book at just about this time, and my father and I wound up talking about this book. I was in the middle of my own slow career change right then, a multi-year transition from the residential construction business to working in congregations. As I recall our conversations, there were two things about that book that both of us particularly liked.

    First, Parker Palmer, good Quaker that he is, consistently assumes that a person’s individual vocation has to help wider society in some way. Here a problem arises for many of us: the jobs we have don’t necessarily help wider society. Much of my father’s work as an electrical engineer went towards military applications, and he was entirely not comfortable with that. This is a common problem where many jobs in our society have at least some ethically challenging aspects.

    Yet as we talked it over, my father pointed out that a big part of letting your life speak was how you treat other people in your life. You let your life speak when you treat everyone the way you yourself would like to be treated, especially to people who were lower in social status than you were. As an example, my father talked about the social and class divide that existed in his workplace between the technicians who worked on the shop floor, and the managers and engineers. My father drew a contrast between a manager, known as “Nasty Frank,” on the one hand, and on the other hand an engineer he greatly respected. Nasty Frank was notorious for his obscenity-laden tirades, which he unleashed at anyone subordinate to himself. Nasty Frank was letting his life speak in a way that gave him no credit. By contrast, the engineer who treated the technicians on the shop floor with respect was letting his life speak in ways that reflected a higher moral ideal.

    There was a second aspect of Parker Palmer’s book that we both liked. Parker Palmer did not try to pretend that letting your life speak was going to be easy or straightforward. At one point in the book, Parker Palmer describes a vocational crisis that he was going through, where he felt he needed to change jobs but he had no idea what job he should try to get. There’s a traditional Quaker saying that, in difficult times like that, you should have faith and “way will open.” But Parker Palmer had no sense at all that some kind of way was opening before him. So he turned to an older Quaker friend, and asked her about this notion of “way opening.” She replied, “In sixty-plus years of living, was has never opened in front of me”; then she added with a grin, “but a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.”

    This was true for both my father and for me. Neither one of us had had the experience of “way opening” before us. Neither one of us had ever had some delightful opportunity dropping into our lives just when we needed it. But both of us had had the experience of “way closing” behind us. When my father was forced to retire, way closed behind him. He could no longer do the thing that had given his life meaning and purpose for several decades. Way closed behind him, as Parker Palmer would say, and my father was forced to find a new vocation, a new way to let his life speak. Then again, after my mother died and my father was no longer a caregiver, way closed behind him, and he felt adrift for a time — until he volunteered through the League of Women Voters to monitor the meeting of the town’s municipal plant, which in turn led him being appointed to that board, eventually serving as its chair, and allowing him the opportunity to help move the municipal light plant to buy as much renewal energy as possible. My father’s experiences also make clear that sometimes your life speaks, not through paid employment, but through your family responsibilities or through your volunteer work.

    The Quakers talk about letting your life speak, but this notion that everyone has a vocation in life is widespread throughout Protestantism, and throughout Western societies that have been shaped by Protestant values. It is not just clergy and monks and nuns who have a religious vocation — so said the Western Protestants — everyone has a religious vocation, because every human being is a part of God’s vision for the universe. This Protestant Christian understanding has permeated even secular Western institutions, so that it is commonplace for all of us, theists and atheists, to talk about having a purpose in life; and that purpose is to make the world a better place — not just a better place for me and my family, but a better place for all human beings. And some Christians and some atheists have extended this vision of a better world beyond just human beings. There are Christians who hope to make the world a better place for all living beings, since every being is a creature made by God; and there are atheists who hope to make the world a better place for all living beings, since all living beings are connected through their existence in earth’s ecosystems. This strand of Western culture sets a very high ethical standard for each and every one of us.

    Based on my own experience, I’d say that it’s incredibly difficult to live up to this very high standard. If you have any humility at all — that is, if you’re not a pathological narcissist — then knowing that you’re supposed to live your life in such a way that you make the world a better place is knowledge that can easily overwhelm you. Yet at the same time, a sense of humility requires us to acknowledge that each of us, as an individual, has very little impact on the world. Because of that, many people give up on trying to attain such a high ethical standard in their lives. But it becomes easier if we understand that that same sense of humility also teaches us that we’re not supposed to save the world all by ourselves. That sense of humility allows us to understand that each individual only has to do their small part of the greater whole. Together, all these little efforts will eventually make the world a better place, but it’s not up to just one person.

    Thus as we think about how to let our lives speak, it’s probably a good idea to recall that we only have to let our lives speak; we don’t have to make our lives shout. You don’t have to amplify your life’s voice so that it’s louder than everyone else’s. In fact, you really only have to live your life so that it speaks to those immediately around you. You may have a job with no morally redeeming features — I’ve had jobs like that — but you can let your life speak in other ways. Any one of us can let our life speak by treating the people immediately around us with respect and dignity. Nor is that an easy task. Many of us men have been caught out by women who drily point out those moments when we men were talking down to women. And when I worked in service-class jobs, I was all too aware of the managerial-professional class people who thought they were treating me with respect, but weren’t. At the same time, we don’t have to like everyone we come into contact with. My father didn’t like Nasty Frank, that obscenity-prone supervisor, but my father did his best to treat him as a human being. Jesus of Nazareth, echoing generations of rabbis, summed it up neatly when he said: Love your neighbor as yourself. If my life speaks in no other way, it is enough that my life speaks through loving my neighbor as I love myself.

    Loving one’s neighbor is something you can do no matter what job you have, where “job” can mean paid employment, or volunteer commitments, or caregiving, or maintaining a household, or simply engaging in essential day-to-day tasks. And it is also possible to have a job where you’re literally helping to save the world, but if you treat the people around you with contempt, you’ve still failed ethically. If you want to let your life speak in the best possible way, it’s probably a good idea to reflect on how you conduct yourself in your job. Personally, I ask myself questions like this: In my job, am I mindful of how what I do affects others? When it comes to my work life, am I mindful of seeking clarity in matters of conscience? Am I mindful of how others around me might be struggling with matters of conscience, and can I perhaps help them seek clarity? Am I mindful of how my actions affect not just the immediate circle of people around me, but wider circles beyond that? These are just some of the questions a person can ask when thinking about whether one actually loves one’s neighbor as oneself.

    These are the kinds of questions anyone can ask of themselves, whatever their work situation. These are the kinds of questions my father confronted during his long work life. He confronted these questions while working as an engineer, knowing his actions had an effect on both his managers and the technicians on the shop floor. After his forced retirement, he confronted these questions as he struggled to figure out how best to care for my mother’s deteriorating health. Then, after her death, he struggled to figure out how to find some volunteer work where he could mindfully affect the people around him, and maybe even the wider circle of his local community.

    You’ll notice I haven’t tried to answer the question of how a person can find work that’s meaningful. That’s because I don’t have an answer to that question. There have been so many years in my own work life when I had to hold onto a meaningless job; including, if I’m honest, some of the church jobs I’ve had. Yet you don’t have to have a job that will put you in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize, you don’t have to have a job where you save the world. If you have a job like that, that’s fabulous, and congratulations! But the thing to remember is that the most important vocation is to let your life speak in the way you live your life. Each of us can strive to do whatever little bit we can to make this a gentler, kinder world where we really do love our neighbors as we ourselves hope to be loved. This is how everyone can let their life speak. This is the true vocation that everyone has.

  • Remembering the American Revolution

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

    Readings

    The first reading was the well-known poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson called “Concord Hymn,” which was written in tribute to fallen Revolutionary War soldiers. This poem was first read in public on July 4, 1837, at the dedication of a monument to those soldiers.

    By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
    Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
    Here once the embattled farmers stood
    And fired the shot heard round the world.

    The foe long since in silence slept;
    Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
    And Time the ruined bridge has swept
    Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

    On this green bank, by this soft stream,
    We set today a votive stone;
    That memory may their deed redeem,
    When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

    Spirit, that made those heroes dare
    To die, and leave their children free,
    Bid Time and Nature gently spare
    The shaft we raise to them and thee.

    The second reading was a poem written by Captain George Bush, an officer in George Washington’s army.

    How luckless the fortune we soldiers endure.
    Uncertain our pleasures, mischances are sure.
    If friendship should bind us, or love’s softer tie
    The drum beats; from friendship and love we must fly.

    Submissive to fate, then adieu to the fair.
    Peace, smile on our friends, and redeem them from care.
    May angels indulgent detach’d from above
    Soon vanquish fell discord with friendship and love.

    The third reading told the story of Persis Tower Lincoln, a Revolutionary War heroine whose husband died in military service in about 1776. This comes from Narrative History of Cohasset by Victor Bigelow.

    “[An act of] blockade running… is credited to a Cohasset heroine, Persis (Tower) Lincoln…. Persis had been married to Allen Lincoln, November 23, 1775…. Allen Lincoln was a seaman, and tradition says that he was taken from a vessel which the British captured and was carried to England, where he was placed in Dartmoor prison, from which he never returned. The wife of this absent seaman knew how to sail a boat and was not afraid of the sea. In that year when Boston was besieged by our soldiers on land and when the harbor was filled with British vessels, it is said that Persis did the work of our absent men by sailing one of our vessels across the bay to Gloucester to get supplies that could not be had in the blockaded port of Boston. This daring deed makes her properly a Revolutionary heroine.”

    Sermon: Remembering the American Revolution

    Originally, Memorial Day was called Decoration Day. It was the day when families would tend to the graves of loved ones who had died in military service. But of course, as long as you were tending to the grave of a dead soldier, you would also tend to the other graves in your family’s plot in the cemetery. Thus by the mid-twentieth century in the New England town I grew up in, Memorial Day had become a day when many families would see the Memorial Day parade in the morning, and then in the afternoon would head to the cemetery to put flowers on all the family graves. Now, of course, many of us — perhaps most of us — live far enough away that we can’t go tend to family graves. Nevertheless, Memorial Day is still a day for us to remember those who died in military service, and additionally all those who have died.

    I’ll take some time tomorrow to remember my parents, grandparents, cousins, and others in my life who have died. But I’m one of the people who can’t actually go and visit any of their graves tomorrow; the closest graves I could visit are more than a day trip away. And given the busy-ness of life, I know it’s going to be hard to carve out any time to just sit and remember. I suspect many of you are in the same boat — you live too far away to go and visit family graves, and your life is so busy that it might be hard to some quiet time to just sit and remember. (If that’s true of you, maybe you could take the next fifteen minutes to remember — just tune out the rest of the sermon and devote the next fifteen minutes to your memories.)

    But what I’d like to talk with you about this morning are the veterans of the American Revolution who died in military service. I’d like to talk about these people for three main reasons. First, as of April 19 this year, the American Revolution began 250 years ago; this significant anniversary is a good time to reflect on the sacrifices that were made by Revolutionary War-era soldiers and sailors. Second, in a time of deep cultural and political division, one thing that nearly all Americans hold in common is a respect for the people who fought in the American Revolution; remembering the soldiers and sailors of the American Revolution could be a way for all of us to begin to reach across some of the divisions that lie between us. Third, it turns out that we don’t know as much as we think we know about the soldiers and sailors of the American Revolution. We don’t have very good records of exactly which soldiers and sailors died during the Revolutionary War; there simply weren’t full and accurate records of military service,(1) and we don’t even have accurate figures for how many military deaths there were in the Revolution.(2) Yet by digging in to the historical record, historians have been able to recover some remarkable stories that had been forgotten or mis-remembered.

    And so I’d like to tell you a couple of stories about people from First Parish who served in the American Revolution, stories that have been partially forgotten then recovered through the efforts of historians..

    First I’d like to tell you the story of Persis Tower Lincoln, a story which some of you may have come across in the book Narrative History of Cohasset by Victor Bigelow (this was the third reading this morning). Persis Tower’s story is dramatic enough by itself. During the occupation of Boston, which lasted from spring of 1775 into 1776, Persis was married to Allen Lincoln, a seaman; Persis was then 16 years old, and Allen was 20; John Browne, minister of First Parish, officiated at their wedding. Allen then left Persis to go off on a voyage. While he was away, Persis sailed a small boat across Massachusetts Bay to Gloucester to get supplies through the British blockade, so we remember her as a heroine of the American Revolution. Meanwhile — so the traditional story goes — Allen’s ship was captured by the British, and according to local tradition he was taken to Dartmoor prison in England where he died.(3)

    Persis’s story appears to be true. Unfortunately, Allen’s story has been remembered incorrectly. Dartmoor Prison wasn’t completed until 1809, so he couldn’t have been imprisoned there during the Revolution. Then too, Allen and Persis had daughter together, who was was born in 1778.(4) Finally, military records show that Allen Lincoln of Cohasset served in the Continental Army after his purported death, in 1776, 1777, and again in 1778.(5)

    A more accurate history of Allen Lincoln appears to be something like this: After serving in the military for several months in both 1776 and 1777, Allen re-enlisted in the Continental Navy with the rank of Seaman. Then on March 17, 1778 he was taken prisoner by the British — this happened about a month after his daughter Sally was born. Allen was initially imprisoned at Rhode Island.(6) Subsequently, he was probably taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he died in 1778.(7) It’s not surprising that he died while he was a prisoner of war; the mortality rate was notoriously high among prisoners of war held by the British, and more Revolutionary War soldiers and sailors died in prison camps than died in battle. Allen died when he was 22 years old, leaving behind an 18 year old wife and an infant daughter whom he probably only saw for the first few weeks of her life.

    Allen Lincoln’s story is worth remembering on its own merits. But it’s also a reminder of how much has been forgotten or mis-remembered about the sailors and soldiers who died during military service in the Revolution. Indeed, historians aren’t even sure how many prisoners of war died while being held captive by the British; it may have been as many 19,000 men.(8) At a local level, it seems that we’re not even sure of how many people from First Parish served in the Revolution. It should be simple to generate such an honor roll of military service — First Parish was the only church in Cohasset, everyone in town belonged to the church, so all we’d need is a list of Cohasset residents who served. However, the only such list I found lists almost certainly includes men from other towns who were recruited by Cohasset to help fill the town’s quota.(9) Given the incomplete records that remain, we may never know exactly how many people from Cohasset served in American Revolution — nor how many of those soldiers and sailors never returned from their military service.

    Yet even though the historical record has gotten a bit muddled over the past two and a half centuries, what’s remarkable is how much we still remember. We still remember Allen Lincoln and Persis Tower, and we still tell their stories when we talk about the history of First Parish. Even if some of the details of the story have been confused or forgotten, we still remember this young couple from First Parish who can be counted among the heroes and heroines of the American Revolution. Memories are passed down in communities like this one, and through such communal memories individuals can achieve a kind of immortality.

    For my second and final story, I’d like to tell you about another veteran of the American Revolution, a man who because he lived in Cohasset belonged to First Parish. I find this story especially interesting because of the way historians have been able to connect separated facts in the historical record, and then tell a fuller story of a Revolutionary War soldier.

    In the historical record, you can find a list dating from July 19, 1780, giving the names of nine men from Cohasset who began six month’s military service on that day.(10) One name on that list, the name of Briton Nichols, stands out for two reasons. First, he had a very unusual name; the written record shows no other man in Massachusetts with the first name of Briton. Second, Briton Nichols is identified as being Black, the only person on that list whose race is given, and (as near as I can tell) the only Black man from Cohasset who served in the American Revolution.

    Because Briton Nichols had such an unusual first name, and because his race is given, historians have been able to trace his life in more detail.(11) Historians discovered that in 1760, he published a book in which he told of thirteen years worth of adventures.(12) As a boy, he was enslaved by the Winslow family of Marshfield. At that time, he called himself Briton Hammond. On December 25, 1747, with the permission of his master, Briton left Marshfield to go on a sea voyage; perhaps his master hired him out as a sailor, taking a cut of his salary, a common practice in those days. Briton doesn’t say how old he was when he sailed, but later sources give his birth year as roughly 1740, so he may have been a boy or a young teen. The ship Briton was on sailed for Jamaica, took on a cargo of wood, and sailed north. Having struck a reef off Florida, the ship was attacked by Native Americans who killed everyone except Briton, and then set the ship on fire. After being held captive by the Native Americans for five week, he was able to make his escape on a Spanish schooner, whose captain recognized him, and took him to Havana, Cuba. The Native Americans followed and demanded the Governor of Havana return Briton to them, but the Governor paid ten dollars for him and kept him. A year later, Briton was caught by a press gang, but he refused to serve in the Spanish navy and was thrown in a dungeon.

    Briton was finally released from the dungeon four years later, though he was still trapped in Havana. Then a year after his release from the dungeon, he managed to escape from Havana aboard a ship of the British Navy. It appears Brition served in the British Navy for some time thereafter, aboard several different ships, until 1759 when he was wounded in the head by small shot during a fight with a French ship. Briton was put in Greenwich Hospital, where he recovered from his wounds. After additional service on British Navy ships, this time as a cook, he managed to find a berth on a ship bound for New England. By coincidence, his old master, one General Nichols, was on the same ship. Through that chance meeting, Briton was finally able to return to his home in Marshfield after a thirteen year absence.

    Soon after his return from Marshfield, Briton’s account of his adventures was published in Boston, perhaps the earliest published memoir written by an African American. Two years later, in 1762, Briton married Hannah, a Black woman who was a member of First Church in Plymouth (today this a Unitarian Universalist congregation). In the late 1770s, Briton left the Winslow family, possibly upon the death of his master, and moved to Cohasset to join the Nichols family; at this time he changed his last name from Hammond to Nichols.

    In 1777, Briton joined the Continental Army.(13) He must have been around forty years old when he enlisted. We can only speculate as to why he decided to enlist at that age. Most likely, enlisting in the military was a way for him to free himself from slavery. Ambrose Bates, who was one of Briton’s messmates, left a diary that tells a little about their military service.(14) Briton Nichols, Bates, and the rest of their contingent left Cohasset on August 27, 1777, and finally reached Saratoga, New York, in early September. There they joined the conflict between the Continental forces and General Burgoyne’s forces. Much of their military service was filled with boredom. Several days were filled with monotonous marching back and forth from one place to another. On other days, Bates simply records, “Nothing new today.” Those days of boredom were interspersed with days where they had more than enough excitement. To give just one example, on October 7, Bates recorded: “today we had a fight we were alarmed about noon and the fight begun, the sun two hours high at night and we drove them and took field pieces and took sum prisners.” The tide of battle was with the Continental forces, and Burgoyne finally surrendered on October 16. Soon thereafter, Bates and the other Cohasset men marched down to Tarrytown. Their service in Tarrytown was less exciting. Finally, on November 30 their term of military service ended, and they began marching home. They finally arrived back in Cohasset on December 7. So ended Briton Nichol’s first term of military service.

    Briton Nichols enlisted again in 1780, giving his age at the time as forty years old.(15) I suspect he lied about his age, presenting himself as younger than he was. I could find no details of his 1780 military service. The next time I found him in the historical record was in the 1790 federal census. At that time, he was living in Hingham as a free Black man, along with his second wife Experience and one other household member, probably their child.

    The story of Briton Nichols shows how we can recover some of the lost knowledge of Revolutionary War veterans. Briton Nichols was little more than a name on a list of soldiers, until historians were able to deduce that he was almost certainly the same person as Briton Hammond who had had such amazing adventures from 1747 to 1760.

    Of special interest to us here at First Parish, Briton Nichols would have attended Sunday services right here in this very building. We know his wife Hannah was a member of the Plymouth church before they were married. When they moved here to Cohasset, we can imagine them sitting upstairs in the balcony, where people of color and White indentured servants had to sit. We can imagine Briton sitting here on Sunday, August 24, 1777, a few days before he marched off to Saratoga. We can imagine the prayers of the entire congregation centering on the hope that all the Cohasset men marching off as soldiers that week would return home safe and sound.

    We today think of all those from this congregation who have served in the military. We think of all those veterans who are now members and friends of First Parish. We also think of those who grew up in this congregation and went off to join the armed services. And we think of those people from First Parish who died in military service. It is good for us to keep alive the memories of all those who served in our armed forces.

    And because Memorial Day has become a day when we remember not just military personnel, we think of all those who have died — parents and grandparents, siblings and cousins, friends and mentors, everyone whom we remember with love. It is good to keep those memories alive, because it reminds us of the bonds of love which transcend even death.

    Notes

    (1) Historian mark Edward Lender states that “…most combat was local and took place without major British or Continental forces on the scene”; in other words, many soldiers served in militia units. Lender, Citizen Soldiers or Regulars? The Revolutionary Militia Reconsidered,” in Jim Piecuch, ed., Seven Myths of American Revolution (Hackett Publishing, 2003) p. 59. Militia units did not necessarily keep accurate records, and even where good records were kept they may not have survived or may be hidden in local archives.
    (2) According to historian Howard Peckham, who carefully reviewed military records kept by the original thirteen colonies, 5,992 soldiers were killed in military engagements, and 832 sailors were killed in naval engagements, for a total of 6,824 battle casualties. In addition, Peckham estimated that 10,00 soldiers died in camp from diseases such as dysentery, and 8,500 soldier and sailors died in British prisoner-of-war camps. Thus, Peckham estimated the total number of probable deaths in service at over 25,000. Source: Howard Peckham, The Toll of Independence : Engagements & Battle Casualties of the American Revolution (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), “Summations and Implications.” However, other historians feel that Peckham underestimated the number of deaths among prisoners of war, see e.g., Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War (Basic Books, 2008), p. 317 n. 12; Burrows places the total number of prisoners of war who died at 19,000, giving a total death toll that is closer to 35,000. (Burrows cites the total number of Americans who took up arms during the war as 200,000.)
    (3) Victor Bigelow, Narrative History of Cohasset (1898), p. 290. The marriage record showing that John Browne officiated at the wedding may be found here: Entry for Allen Lincoln and Persis Tower, 23 Nov 1775, “Massachusetts, State Vital Records, 1638-1927,” archived on FamilySearch website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FHQY-G2B accessed 23 May 2025.
    (4) According to the Massachusetts State Census of 1855, Sally was born in 1778; so this was not a matter of a christening that was delayed for three years. According to Cohasset Vital records, she was christened on 18 Oct. 1778.
    (5) A search for military records for Allen Lincoln on genealogy website FamilySearch.org turned up two records for military service of Allen or Allyn Lincoln from Cohasset: First, as one of the soldiers who mustered at Hull on June 14, 1776, to serve in the military: Entry for Allyn Lincoln, 14 Jun 1776, “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775-1783″, FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2RC-LHBT accessed 22 May 2025. Second, as serving in “the Northern Dept.” in 1777: Entry for Allen Lincoln, 24 Aug 1777, “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775-1783,” FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2RC-9CH6 accessed 22 May 2025.
    (6) Entry for Allyn Lyncoln, 17 Mar 1778, “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775-1783,” FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2RC-2NLM accessed 22 May 2025.
    (7) The FamilySearch.org entry for Allen Lincoln lists his date of death as 1778, and place of death as Halifax, Nova Scotia, unfortunately with no documentation. See person entry for “Allen Lincoln” FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/details/LCZP-2JH accessed 22 May 2025.
    (8) See e.g. Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War (Basic Books, 2008), p. 317 n. 12.
    (9) See “The American Revolutionary War Honor Roll,” Cohasset Veteran’s Memorial Committee website https://cohassetveteransmemorial.org/the-american-revolutionary-war-honor-roll/? accessed 22 May 2025. I counted 179 names on this honor roll. However, according to Victor Bigelow, it was something more than 120 men from Cohasset out of a total population of 165 adult males who served during the Revolution (p. 309). If there were only 165 total men in Cohasset, we couldn’t have sent 179 men into military service. This should not be taken as a criticism of the efforts of the Cohasset Veteran’s Memorial Committee. I estimate it would take dozens or even hundreds of hours of research among tax rolls and genealogical material to determine which men actually lived in Cohasset, and even then we might not have a final answer. Thus the Cohasset Veteran’s Memorial Committee’s “American Revolutionary War Honor Roll” remains the best list of Revolutionary War veterans.
    (10) Victor Bigelow, Narrative History of Cohasset (1898), p. 308.
    (11) An introduction to a narrative by Briton Nichols, who earlier in life was called Briton Hammond, gives an overview of what historians conclude about his life: “It is accepted that in 1762 Hammon married Hannah, an African American woman and member of Plymouth’s First Church, with whom he had one child. For many years this was all that was known of Hammon’s life after his return to New England. More recent research, however, has revealed that Hammon probably changed his name to Nichols some time in the late 1770s, after the family with whom he and his master were living when Winslow died in 1774. Briton Nichols is listed as having fought for the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War, as did many members of the white Nichols family…. In later census records, Briton Nichols is described as a free husband and father.” Derrick R. Spires, editor, Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives (Broadview Press, 2023), p. 54.
    (12) In this paragraph, the details of the earlier life of Briton Nichols/Hammond are taken from his book, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (Boston: Green & Russell, 1760); as reprinted on the Pennsylvanian State Univ. website https://psu.pb.unizin.org/opentransatlanticlit/chapter/__unknown__-9/ accessed 22 May 2025.
    (13) Victor Bigelow, p. 208.
    (14) Victor Bigelow reprints the text of this brief diary, pp. 299-303.
    (15) Entry for Briton Nichols, 19 July 1780, “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775-1783,” FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QLLS-BBT3 accessed 22 May 2025.

  • Changing Views of Motherhood

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

    Readings

    The first reading was the poem “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats,” by the Unitarian poet Sylvia Plath.

    The second reading was a poem titled “Mother’s Day” by Bruce Lansky, from his book If Pigs Could Fly and Other Deep Thoughts: A Collection of Funny Poems.

    Sermon

    The past decade or so in the United States has been an interesting time for those of us who consider ourselves to be feminists. Feminism has become a bad word, a pejorative term, so much so that now when I use the word I have to define what I mean. It actually has a very simple definition. A feminist is someone who believes that all genders are equally worthy as human beings. A feminist is someone who does not believe that there is one gender that is stronger, smarter, more authoritative than other genders. Or, as we used to say back in the 1990s, a feminist is someone who believes that women and girls are just as good as men and boys.

    For us Unitarian Universalists, feminism also has a religious dimension. We are the inheritors of the Universalist tradition. The old-time Universalists decided that if God really was good, then God would extend God’s love to all persons everywhere. These days, not all Unitarian Universalists believe in God; but regardless of our belief or lack of belief in God, we still remain convinced that all persons are equally worthy as human beings. Because of this, Unitarian Universalists almost have to be feminists — because of our religious worldview, we will affirm your inherent worthiness and dignity no matter what your gender is.

    Those of us who are feminists have a perspective on motherhood that differs in some respects from non-feminists. If you’re a feminist, you tend to see each woman or girl as an individual, as a separate and unique human being with distinctive talents and abilities. Traditionally, there was a tendency to equate motherhood and womanhood — if you’re a woman, then you have to be a mother. But those of us who are feminists recognize that the universe is more complicated than that. Some women want to be mothers, some women don’t want to become mothers, some women are ambivalent about motherhood, some women cannot become mothers regardless of their wishes. Just because a person is a woman, it does not mean they must be a mother. Our feminist worldview has changed our understanding of motherhood.

    I became very aware that I’m a feminist during last year’s presidential election cycle. This awareness hit me especially hard during the childless cat lady kerfluffle. If you’ve forgotten the childless cat lady kerfluffle, let me remind you of how it played out. Back in 2021, J. D. Vance claimed that the United States is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”(1) That is a direct quote taken from a video clip. The video clip of Vance saying this was posted on Twitter, and caused a bit of a buzz across various social media outlets. Perhaps the most notable social media buzz occurred when Taylor Swift posted a reply on social media in which she openly proclaimed herself a childless cat lady.

    Now it turns out that the cat-lady trope is not a new invention. According to Dr. Corey Wrenn, lecturer in sociology at the University of Kent, Great Britain, there is a long history of stereotyping feminists as cat ladies. Over a hundred years ago, women were seeking the right to vote were portrayed as cats in anti-suffragette propaganda. According to Corey Wrenn, “anti-suffrage postcards often used [cats] to reference female activists. The intent was to portray suffragettes as silly, infantile, incompetent, and ill-suited to political engagement.”(2)

    Knowing this helps give us some more insight into the cat lady we heard about in the first reading this morning, in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats.” Before I talk about that poem, I have to tell you a little something about Sylvia Plath. First, of particular interest to us, Plath was a Unitarian: she grew up in Unitarian churches; in college, she described herself an “agnostic humanist”; and in her twenties, she called herself “a pagan Unitarian at best.”(3) Second, Plath was born in 1932, and based on what I’ve seen of that generation of Unitarian women (which includes what I saw of my Unitarian mother), I’d say many of those women were strong-minded feminists, even if they didn’t describe themselves using the term “feminist.” In short, Plath was both a Unitarian and a feminist; that is to say, in terms of her worldview, she was one of us.

    Plath’s short life — she died at age 30 — was not an easy life. While still a girl, she showed promise as a writer. But after a summer internship in college, she had a major depressive episode which culminated in a six month hospitalization. After recovering her health, she went to study in England on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met the poet Ted Hughes. They married, but Hughes turned out to be an abuser who physically assaulted her; he also conducted affairs with other women. After the birth of her second child, Plath separated from Hughes, only to die by suicide less than a year later.

    I know, this is a pretty grim story for a Mother’s Day sermon. I apologize.

    So on a more positive note, let’s consider Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ella Mason and her Eleven Cats.” This is a poem that’s both funny and serious. When the unnamed narrator of the poem was a girl, she and her friends used to go to spy on Ella Mason. They would peer into Ella Mason’s house, where they could see her eleven cats purring around her — this is the funny bit, with little girls peering in to Ella’s house to stare at all the happy cats. The little girls giggled when they saw the cats purring on antimacassars. The girls had heard that when Ella Mason was young, she had been a fashionable beauty, and so they make fun of her because by conventional standards Ella had thrown away her opportunity to get married. Now Ella is old, and she has to settle for the love and admiration of eleven cats. But in the final stanza of the poem, the girls have grown up, and as they begin to marry they look upon Ella Masson more kindly. They realize that they had misunderstood Ella Mason. Ella did not suffer from vanity, as the girls had assumed, but instead Ella possessed a sense of self-respect which allowed her to realize that in her case, her happiness did not require marriage.(4)

    The point of the poem is not that every woman should become a cat lady. Nor is the point of the poem that every woman should get married and have children. The point — as I see it — is that each of us has choices about how we’re going to live our lives. Many people make their life choices based on the expectations of society, while others among us make our choices based on knowing our deepest selves. Sometimes someone winds up making a choice that society disapproves of — when, for example, a woman chooses not to get married, causing little girls peer in her front door and giggle at her — but when they make that choice based on a deep knowledge of self, they are able to ignore the the disapproval of other people. In fact, given the diversity of opinion in human communities, no matter what choice you make, you can be fairly sure that someone is going to disapprove of it. Thus it is always best to make your choices based on a deep knowledge of who you really are.

    I see something of a parallel between Ella Mason and Taylor Swift. Swift, who is now 36 years old, has thus far chosen to focus on her career instead of marrying and/or having children. She knows that there are people who disapprove of her for not following a conventional path and putting aside her music to become a mother; but she also knows herself well enough to know that she is being true to her self. When Swift saw J. D. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” because she knew who she was and why she had made the choices she had made, she was able to post a very measured response on Instagram (in which she urged her followers to register to vote). And she was secure enough in her own self that she could sign her post “Taylor Swift / Childless Cat lady.”(5)

    So why am I talking so much about childless cat ladies on Mother’s Day? The point I’m trying to make is that there are quite a few people in our country who feel that the single most important role for all women is to bear children and be mothers. People with this viewpoint seem to find it quite threatening when some women — like Taylor Swift — prioritize their careers, putting off motherhood, or maybe choosing not to become mothers at all. They say they have a good reason to feel threatened: they see that the birthrate is falling in the United States, and they worry that the future of the human race is threatened by women who don’t have children. But I suspect that they are really worried because the old gender norms to which they have grown accustomed seem to be fading out — those old gender norms that say the primary purpose of women is to bear children and be mothers. And so they grow anxious when they see women who prioritize something other than motherhood.

    By contrast, we Unitarian Universalists do not assume that just because someone is a woman, their primary duty is to bear children and become a mother. We are also quite aware that some women who might want to become mothers cannot do so, for a wide variety of reasons. We are also aware that there are many different ways to become a mother: there are mothers who give birth to a child, there are mothers who adopt a child, there a mothers who become a mother by marrying someone who already has children.

    And finally, we even understand that there can be many kinds of mothers. For example, there are people who serve as mothers to children who are not their biological children, adopted children, or step-children. Sylvia Plath had a biological mother, but she also had a literary mother. The Unitarian novelist Olive Higgins Prouty adopted Plath as a kind of literary child, paying for Plath’s college education and paying for Plath’s medical expenses during her first hospitalization for mental illness.(6) Or in another example, some decades ago I knew a teenaged girl who had a difficult home life and got her mothering from a woman in her church community who was not her biological mother; this girl spent as much time as she could in this other woman’s household (and sadly, this teenager’s biological mother was actually glad that the girl spent so many of her waking hours away from their home; not everyone enjoys motherhood).

    As feminists, we understand that men can also be mothers. I remember a gay couple I once knew who had adopted children, and both men in that couple served as both mothers and fathers to their children. But I also think of a co-worker of mine back in the 1980s whose mother had died when he was an infant; from the way he talked about his upbringing, it was clear that his father had been both a father and mother to him. Most non-feminists probably wouldn’t admit that men can be mothers; but the evidence of my own experience shows that men can indeed serve as mothers.

    Once you adopt a feminist viewpoint, the category of “mother” becomes a little bit broader than just a biological woman who has biological offspring. Mind you, we who are feminists acknowledge the great importance of those women who physically give birth to infants. Giving birth is crucially important, it can put a huge strain on a woman’s body, and we are grateful for women who choose to give birth. But we also understand that motherhood, broadly construed, means more than physically giving birth. Motherhood encompasses all of the intensive nurturing that a human being needs to grow from infancy into adulthood; and this includes both physical, emotional, and spiritual nurture.

    It is actually quite astonishing how much nurture human beings need to get from infancy to adulthood. In contemporary Western culture, we like to pretend that all that nurture can be provided by a nuclear family with one mother and one father, but that really isn’t true. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that it takes a much bigger community than that to provide the nurture that children and teens require. Lawrence Mbogoni, a retired professor from William Paterson University who was raised rural Tanzania, put it this way:

    “[The proverb] ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child’ reflects a social reality some of us who grew up in rural areas of Africa can easily relate to. As a child, my conduct was a concern of everybody, not just my parents, especially if it involved misconduct. Any adult had the right to rebuke and discipline me and would make my mischief known to my parents…. The concern of course was the moral well-being of the community.”(7)

    While Lawrence Mbogoni was speaking specifically of rural Africa, the same principle applies more generally to all human beings and all human communities. It does in fact take a whole village to raise a child. In rural Tanzania, that community was the village in which the Mbogoni family lived. In the industrialized West, where villages no longer exist except in fantasy, it is more difficult to find a community of adults who will help raise children and teens, who can help provide all the nurture that a child or teenager needs.

    But such communities do exist, and our First Parish congregation is one such intergenerational community. As a community, we know that a central part of our identity is to be the whole village that raises a child. We do not want to supplant a child’s own parents, but we are here to support and help parents. We see this happening at social hour, where there are many adults, not just parents, who know the names of First Parish children and who talk with the children. We see this in our Religious Education Committee, which includes two people who do not have children in the Sunday school, a grandparent-age person, and a high school student. We see this in programs like the current pen-pal program, where kids and adults get to know one another through exchanging weekly pen-pal letters. We are doing our best to be the kind of village that it takes to raise a child.

    This is how we help support motherhood. And our support of motherhood is firmly rooted in our feminist worldview. Our feminist worldview helps us understand that the rest of us can help take a little bit of pressure off the biological and adoptive mothers who are part of our community. Those biological and adoptive mothers know that they can come here to First Parish and for a couple of hours each week there will be a whole community of other adults who will help look after their children. Because if it takes a village to raise a child, that implies that motherhood is more than a full-time job for one person.

    Without denying the importance of biological and adoptive mothers (some of whom may be men), we recognize that entire communities also provide mothering. In such communities, the mothering provided by biological and adoptive mothers is supplemented by the mothering provided by elders who may be other people’s grandparents; by young adults who may still be thinking about whether or not to have children of their own; by child-free couples like my wife and I; and, yes, by childless cat ladies. We have embraced a changed definition of motherhood, where nurturing children is the responsibility — not just of two parents in a nuclear family — but rather of an entire village, and entire community,.

    So on this Mother’s Day, we honor and support biological and adoptive mothers. We also honor communities that provide the additional nurture that children need; we embrace the proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child.”

    Notes

    (1) My transcription of a video clip of Tucker Carlson interviewing J. D. Vance in 2021, as posted on X / Twitter by Ron Filipowski @RonFilipkowski on 22 July 2024 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1815503440983867598 accessed 9 May 2025.
    (2) Corey Wrenn, “Woman-as-Cat in Anti-Suffrage Propaganda,” posted on 4 December 2013 in the Sociological Images category on The Society Pages website https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/12/04/the-feminization-of-the-cat-in-anti-suffrage-propaganda/ accessed 9 May 2025.
    (3) Details of Plath’s Unitarianism and personal theology from Wesley Hromatko, “Plath, Syliva,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, Unitarian Universalist Study Network https://www.uudb.org/plath-sylvia/ accessed 10 May 2025.
    (4) I’m basing my interpretation of the poem’s last stanza on Valerie Doris Frazier, Battlemaids of Domesticity: Domestic Epic in the Works of Gwendolyn Brooks and Slyvia Plath (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Georgia, 2002), pp. 119-120. Frazier writes: “When the speaker grasps at an answer for Miss Ella’s unmarried state, a sense of tension erupts in the last lines. Miss Ella’s flaw is apparently vanity, as the young women of the town have learned. But those in the town have misread the textual meaning, for there is a significant distinction between Narcissism and self-love. For narcissism means vanity or love for one’s physical body, but self-love which takes on a spiritual rather than physical quality means a concern for one’s happiness.”
    (5) Swift’s Instagram post, which includes a photo of her holding a cat, is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_wtAOKOW1z/
    (6) Hromatko; see also Lynn Gordon Hughes, “Prouty, Olive Higgins,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, Unitarian Universalist Study Network https://www.uudb.org/prouty-olive-higgins/ accessed 10 May 2025.
    (7) Lawrence Mbogoni as quoted by Joel Goldberg, “It Takes A Village To Determine The Origins Of An African Proverb,” on the “Goats and Soda: Stories of Life in a Changing World” blog on the National Public Radio website, 30 July 2016 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/30/487925796/it-takes-a-village-to-determine-the-origins-of-an-african-proverb accessed 10 May 2025.