Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Age Discrimination and the Wisdom of Elders

    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.

    Readings

    The first reading is from a June, 2020, article on the Psychology Today website titled “The Wisdom of Elders,” by Paul Stoller. Dr. Stoller is professor of anthropology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

    “In some parts of the world, elders continue to be highly respected members of their communities. Considered the custodians of wisdom, elders in many societies enjoy considerable degrees of social reverence. If a person of power exercises sound judgment, he or she relies upon the wisdom of elders to reinforce important social values or to maintain a sense of social justice. In this way, elders have long been an elemental source of social well-being….

    “In contemporary American society many, if not most, elders are neither respected nor revered. Consider Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s heartless comment that elders, who are at high risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from the Covid-19 virus, should sacrifice themselves for the common economic good….

    “Such an ageist statement underscores a eugenic worldview in which society purifies itself when its putatively weaker members (the old, the sick, and/or ethnic and religious minorities) are deemed weak and expendable — a drain on economic resources. In a June 12 article in Sapiens, anthropologist Jayur Madhusudan Mehta rejects this eugenic supposition. He writes that ‘…our species would not be where it is today without grandparents to care for younger offspring. Elders are reservoirs of knowledge and experience, critical for preserving history, traditions, and survival skills.’…”

    [Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-path-well-being/202006/the-wisdom-elders]

    The second reading is from No Stone Unturned: The Life and Times of Maggie Kuhn, the 1991 autobiography of Maggie Kuhn. In 1970, when she was 65, Maggie Kuhn found the Gray Panthers organization to fight age discrimination.

    “I believe the intergenerational war over federal benefits, which continues to this day, is a charade to divert attention from the real budgetary issues. We do not need to take from the young to feed the old, or take from the old to feed the young. There will be enough for everyone if the federal government ends its love affair with military defense hardware and extravagant tax breaks to the rich….

    “I can’t understand or sympathize with people who think of government only in terms of what it does for them personally. That includes both the old who vote down school budget increases because they don’t have any children in school and the young who gripe about Social Security because it doesn’t do anything for them now. The elderly lobby has been forceful and effective in preserving benefits for the old. I would like to see it speak out as forcefully on behalf of the nearly 14 million children who now constitute 40 percent of the nation’s poor…. I feel strongly that the old must not simply advocate on their own behalf. We must act as elders of the tribe, looking out for the best interests of the future and preserving the precious compact between the generations.”

    The third very short reading is a contemporary Nigerian proverb:

    “What an elder can see when sitting down, a child cannot see when standing up.”

    Sermon

    A number of people from the congregation have asked me to talk about age discrimination. This morning I’d like to talk with you about some ethical and religious dimensions to age discrimination. And I’d like to begin by telling you a story.

    Some years ago, my cousin went to Kenya for her job, and spent two years living there with her husband and daughter. As a stay-at-home dad, her husband wound up doing a fair amount of driving. It’s important to know that his hair had gone gray early on, and at the time of the story was all gray. Now by his account, it sounded to me as though Kenyan drivers were even worse than Boston drivers. Not only that, but they have rotaries in Kenya, just as in Boston, which sounded to me like rotaries in the bad old days of Boston driving: complete free-for-alls where no one paid any attention to right-of-way rules.

    In any case, the story goes like this: My cousin’s husband was driving on a Kenyan rotary, taking their daughter somewhere or other, when he got into a collision with a truck. Both drivers had gotten out of their vehicles when a police officer drove up. The police officer asked what had happened. The truck driver, who was Kenyan, gave his account of the collision, saying that my cousin’s husband was entirely to blame. My cousin’s husband then gave his account of the collision, but with a sinking feeling that the police officer was going to believe the truck driver. The police officer listened to both stories, then said to the truck driver, “I believe him [pointing to my cousin’s husband’s white hair] because he’s an elder.”

    This story shows that other cultures have other attitudes towards elders; our current American attitudes towards elders are not the only possible attitudes. Had my cousin’s husband gotten into a traffic accident in one of the rotaries around Boston, he would not have been given the benefit of the doubt because of his age. In American culture, rather than treating elders with respect, we are more likely patronize or condescend to elders. This can serve as a very basic definition of age discrimination in our society today: age discrimination is the widely-held belief that elders are always less able, and less capable, than middle aged and young adults, and more prone to error.

    It is not clear to me where this strange belief comes from. Judaism and Christianity, the root sources of many of the ethical values in our society, both teach respect for elders. In the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 16:31 tells us “Grey hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.” One of the commandments that God gives to Israel, as told in Leviticus 19:32, says this: “You shall rise before the aged, and defer to the old.” Yet our American culture tends to pass lightly over the commandments given by God from the book of Leviticus, instead focusing on God’s commandments as stated in chapter 20 of the book of Exodus, where it only says, “Honor thy father and mother.” Thus as is true of most cultures around the world, American culture picks and choose which aspects of its religious heritage that it prefers to follow. And on the whole, American culture chooses to emphasize two different interpretations of our religious heritage. On the one hand, there is the strand of American culture that teaches submission to authority — where children submit to parents, wives submit to husbands, and the populace submits to the rulers. On the other hand, there is the strand of American culture that teaches equality between all people, as epitomized in Leviticus 19:18, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” words later repeated by Jesus of Nazareth. Yet neither of these strands of American culture teaches respect for elders; you are not going to find anyone saying that we should post Proverbs 16:31 in all school classrooms.

    From this, you can see that American culture tends to ignore its core religious teachings about respect for elders. Are there then any widely-held ethical principles in our American culture which can offer us guidance regarding age discrimination?

    Many Americans no longer rely on religion, but instead turn to science to provide justification for their ethical judgements. And beginning in the late nineteenth, Social Darwinism purported to offer ethical guidance, based on science, on how to structure society and social relations. Social Darwinists took Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest and applied it to human society.

    This held true across the political spectrum; Peter Dobkin Hall of the School of Public Affairs at City College of New York writes that Social Darwinism “served the purposes of both liberals and conservatives.” Political conservatives argued that giving aid to poor people only served to destroy their work ethic; Peter Hall quotes an 1874 report on pauperism in New York City which argued “The public example of alms induce many to be paupers who were never so before.” Political liberals also became Social Darwinists, though with a different emphasis. Peter Hall writes that while “conservatives emphasized the role of nature — competition, natural selection, and heredity — in shaping evolution, liberals stressed the role of nurture — humanity’s ability to manipulate the environment to foster evolutionary progress.”(1) Thus, Social Darwinism prompted Americans across the political spectrum to appeal to scientific data to justify their proposed solutions to social and economic problems, including how to treat elders.

    These Social Darwinist arguments remain powerful in the twenty-first century. In the first reading, we heard an example of the Social Darwinist thinking as applied by a political conservative to the COVID-19 pandemic. In late March of 2020, a week or so into the COVID pandemic, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, then age 69, argued that elders like himself should be willing to take a risk with their health in order to keep businesses open and the economy going. Faced with mandatory shut-downs, Patrick said, “Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.” He went on to add, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that America loves for its children and grandchildren?’ [But] if that is the exchange, I’m all in.” This is classic Social Darwinist thinking, which begins with economic data, then applies a survival of the fittest theory to social policy, with the ultimate goal of making a stronger society.

    The second reading exemplifies the way political liberals have used Social Darwinism. Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, argued that there could be plenty of money to fund benefits for elders — this could be accomplished by changing social policy to prioritize elder benefits over military hardware, such as expensive warships and airplanes. More to the point, Kuhn believed that society would be stronger if we adopted policies to eliminate poverty among elders. This again is classic Social Darwinist thinking, which begins with sociological data, then argues that humanity can manipulate the environment to create evolutionary progress in our society.

    Today, in the twenty-first century, Social Darwinism continues to dominate American thinking on social questions like about how to treat elders. We never see appeals to religious texts like Proverbs 16:31. Both political conservatives and political liberals, good Social Darwinists as they are, argue that our policies regarding elders should be guided by the data collected by social scientists — economists, sociologists, and so on. The problem is that the liberals and the conservatives use scientific data to come up with opposing solutions to the same problem.

    So traditional American religion fails to give adequate guidance on how to treat elders, and appeals to scientific data wind up giving us contradictory advice. Perhaps there are other sources of ethical or religious guidance that would be more helpful. Since this is a Unitarian Universalist congregation, let’s take a look at how our Unitarian Universalist worldview might offer us more secure guidance on how we should treat elders.

    First of all, as Unitarian Universalists, we place a great emphasis on individual human beings. The old Universalists spoke of the supreme worth of every human personality. Among the Unitarians, people like Emerson and Thoreau found infinite universes within each human personality. In the late twentieth century, Unitarian Universalists encapsulated both these old teaching in the phrase “respect for the inherent worthiness and dignity of each person.” (As a parenthetical note, many other religious groups say similar things. Some liberal Quakers, for example, like to say that there is that of God in each person; we might argue with them about what they mean by God, and whether the God they talk about is something we can believe in; but we can see that they are saying much the same thing that the old Universalists said, and that Emerson and Thoreau said: each one of us has something of supreme worth within us.)

    If we truly affirm the supreme worth of every human personality, then this gives us a starting point to understand why age discrimination is bad. Let’s return for a moment to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. If he makes the personal choice that he’s willing to die of COVID for the sake of the younger generation, then we can respect his individual choice, and we can even celebrate his willingness to put his personal duty to humanity over his own individual survival. However, if he makes this statement as a public official in such a way that it can be understood to encourage others to make the same sacrifice, and further it he seems to encourage public policies that may force other elders to make the same choice he wants to make, then we can challenge him on ethical grounds. Because we value the supreme worth of every human personality, we recognize that each person is going to have slightly different priorities. Some people in Dan Patrick’s age cohort might have been be pleased to follow his example, but others might have had ethically sound reasons for preferring social policies giving them a better chance of surviving COVID. Think, for example, of a 69 year old grandparent who had sole custody of their eight-year old grandchild: in our view, that grandparent would have had a valid reason to want government policies that would help them survive COVID, so they could continue to care for their grandchild. Or, for a more Emersonian example, think of a 69 year old novelist who is the midst of writing a great novel; perhaps they should not be forced to follow Dan Patrick’s example, and risk their life before their novel is complete. If I truly believe in the supreme worth of every human personality, then I’m going to be cautious about public policies that put large groups of individual human personalities at risk of extinction, just because they happen to be part of some group or other.

    By now you can see that this principle can be easily applied to the issue of age discrimination. Once we affirm the supreme worth of every human personality, it becomes obvious that this is true regardless of age. A newborn baby’s personality is supremely worthy, as is that of a teenager — and we hold the personality of a middle-aged adult to be equally worthy as that of an elder. It doesn’t matter what age a person is; no matter what their age, we find an inherent worthiness in every human personality. From this basic principle we can generate a more pragmatic ethical statement to help guide our actions. The book of Leviticus phrased offers just such a pragmatic ethical statement: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

    Admittedly, this is still a fairly general statement. But how might this general statement be applied to the specific situation of society’s treatment of elders? A partial answer to that question can be found in the Gray Panther organization. Maggie Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers specifically to combat age discrimination. So let’s take a look at what the Gray Panthers do.

    Today, the most active Gray Panthers chapter is the New York City chapter. The New York City Gray Panthers engage in a wide range of actions to help end age discrimination. At one extreme, they carry out very simple, hands-on, one-to-one actions, such as their nursing home card project, called “Caring by Card.” The New York City Gray Panther website describes this project as follows: “Nursing homes are sad and lonely places to live, with very little personal freedom for residents. People living in nursing homes all too often feel forgotten. Will you join us in lifting up our elderly friends by reminding them that they deeply matter and are loved? Will you join us in sending handmade cards to a nursing home…?” To put it in larger context, the “Caring by Card” project addresses the social situation which forces us to put some elders into bleak nursing homes — not through data-driven social science interventions — not through appeals to religious scripture — but through the one-on-one human action of sending a handmade card to someone living in a nursing home.

    At the other end of their range of actions, the New York Gray City Panthers work on wide-ranging global policy initiatives. They have “consultative status” with the United Nations, and have consulted on policy issues ranging from the international rights of older persons, to the status of older women.

    And then, somewhere in the middle of their range of actions, the New York Gray City Panthers host monthly educational webinar series. At these, they invite scholars and policy makers to speak on emerging topics of concern. In October, they had a speaker on the future of health care at the Veteran’s Administration; in September they hosted a panel discussion titled “The Power of Age-Diversity in Dismantling Ageism.”

    For me, the signature initiative of the Gray Panthers is the way they have consistently taught that elders must work with youth to combat ageism. Maggie Kuhn called this “youth and age in action.” When I was eighteen years old, I heard Maggie Kuhn talk about this principle. I had become a committed pacifist under the influence of my Unitarian Universalist minister, and I was at a rally in support of stronger nuclear weapons treaties. Maggie Kuhn spoke at that rally, and made the point that young people and elders are natural allies to work together on things like limiting nuclear weapons — youth and elders have more time and a greater willingness to tackle difficult issues like world peace. She was making another related point at the same time — the best way for elders to tackle age discrimination was to build working alliances with younger people, and to work with them on problems of mutual concern. In the second reading this morning, she clearly articulated this principle: “I feel strongly that the old must not simply advocate on their own behalf. We must act as elders of the tribe, looking out for the best interests of the future and preserving the precious compact between the generations.”

    This is perhaps the best solution to the age discrimination problem. Those of us who are elders (which includes me, as I’m now officially classed as an elder) — we can follow Maggie Kuhn’s advice and reach out to younger people, we can work together with youth on projects of mutual concern. By acting as elders of the tribe, we can become more open to the possibility of working with younger people.

    Indeed, many of us in this congregation are already doing this kind of collaborative work across the generations. I know of elders from our congregation who work with younger people on a wide range of topics: empowering women; supporting food banks such as End Hunger New England; advocating for world peace; supporting the arts; and so on. And within our own congregation, we model how intergenerational collaboration can work in the way we govern ourselves: our Religious Education committee includes a teenager, middle-aged adults, and an elder; the same is true of our governing board.

    Obviously, none of this will magically end age discrimination. But it shows us a good way to begin to end age discrimination. And by working together across the generations, we can live out one of our core ethical and religious teachings — that we value the supreme worth of every human personality. Or, more succinctly, to paraphrase the Hebrew Bible, we aim to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

    Note

    (1) Peter Dobkin Hall, “Social Darwinism and the poor,” Social Welfare History Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/issues/social-darwinism-poor/ accessed 8 Nov. 2025.

  • What About the Afterlife?

    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.

    Moment for All Ages

    The great philosopher Socrates, who lived two thousand five hundred years ago, once had a long conversation with another philosopher named Gorgias. During that long conversation, Socrates told a story about what happens to human beings after we die.

    “Listen, then (said Socrates), as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale, which I dare say that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only. But I believe this is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth.

    “Since the days when the god Cronos ruled the universe, there has been a law about what happens to human beings after death: human beings who have lived their whole lives in justice and holiness shall go to the Islands of the Blessed, to dwell in perfect happiness; while human beings who have lived unjust and irreverent lives go to Tartaros, the house of punishment.

    “In the time of Cronos, judgement was given on the very day on which people were to die. The judges were alive, and the people had not yet died. But the judgements were not well given. So Hades came from Tartaros, and the authorities from the Islands of the Blessed came to Zeus. They said some people were sent to the wrong places after they died.

    “Zeus came up with a plan. “First of all,’ he said, ‘we must put a stop to human beings knowing the time of their death.
    Next, human beings must be fully dead when they are judged — not alive as is currently true — and being dead, they will be stripped of their their bodies, and stripped of everything else that might bias the judge either for them or against them. Then the judges themselves must also be dead, so that the judge’s naked soul will be able to perceive the truth of the other naked souls.” Zeus said only in this way could the judgement of the dead be truly just.

    “Zeus then decreed that three of his own human children, who were already dead, should become the judges. These three were assigned to stay in the ‘meadow at the parting of the ways.’ Two roads left this meadow: one way went to the Islands of the Blessed, and the other to Tartaros. Rhadamanthus judged all the humans who died in Asia. Aeacus judged all the humans who died in Europe. And if these two had any doubt about a human being, Minos served as the final court of appeal.”

    So ends the story that the philosopher Socrates told about the afterlife. Although this story sounds a little bit like the story that some Christians tell about what happens to humans after we die, it is a very different story, and Socrates told his story hundreds of years before the Christian era.

    You probably noticed some problems with the story. For example, if Rhadamanthus judges those who died in Asia, and Aeacus judges those who died in Europe, who judges those who died in Africa? With such obvious problems with the story, why did Socrates tell Gorgias that he was speaking the truth? You must remember that Socrates spoke a different language from us, and his word for truth — aletheia — meant revealing and disclosing, it meant the opposite of forgetfulness. In other words, there is more than one way to define the word “truth.”

    Readings

    The first reading comes from Mark Twain’s book “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” In this passage, Captain Stormfield has arrived in heaven, received a robe and a harp, and sets off to enjoy himself:

    “When I found myself perched on a cloud, with a million other people, I never felt so good in my life. Says I, ‘Now this is according to the promises; I’ve been having my doubts, but now I am in heaven, sure enough.’ I gave my palm branch a wave or two, for luck, and then I tautened up my harp-strings and struck in. Well, Peters, you can’t imagine anything like the row we made. It was grand to listen to, and made a body thrill all over, but there was considerable many tunes going on at once, and that was a drawback to the harmony, you understand…. By and by I quit performing, and judged I’d take a rest. There was quite a nice mild old gentleman sitting next me, and I noticed he didn’t take a hand; I encouraged him, but he said he was naturally bashful, and was afraid to try before so many people. By and by the old gentleman said he never could seem to enjoy music somehow. The fact was, I was beginning to feel the same way; but I didn’t say anything. … After about sixteen or seventeen hours, during which I played and sung a little, now and then — always the same tune, because I didn’t know any other — I laid down my harp and begun to fan myself with my palm branch. … Finally, says he, “Don’t you know any tune but the one you’ve been pegging at all day?”

    “Not another blessed one,” says I.

    “Don’t you reckon you could learn another one?” says he.

    “Never,” says I; “I’ve tried to, but I couldn’t manage it.”

    “It’s a long time to hang to the one — eternity, you know.”

    “Don’t break my heart,” says I; “I’m getting low-spirited enough already.”

    After another long silence, says he — “Are you glad to be here?”

    Says I, “Old man, I’ll be frank with you. This ain’t just as near my idea of bliss as I thought it was going to be, when I used to go to church.”

    Says he, “What do you say to knocking off and calling it half a day?”

    “That’s me,” says I. “I never wanted to get off watch so bad in my life.”

    So we started. Millions were coming to the cloud-bank all the time, happy and hosannahing; millions were leaving it all the time, looking mighty quiet, I tell you. We laid for the new-comers, and pretty soon I’d got them to hold all my things a minute, and then I was a free man again and most outrageously happy.

    The second reading comes from a small book published by the Buddhist Church of America. The book is titled “The Heart of the Buddha-Dharma” and it is by one of the great leaders of the late 20th century in the Buddhist Church of America, Kenryu T. Tsuji.

    “In the Jodo Shinsshu school of Buddhism, the spiritual development of the person is completed with their birth in what is known as the Pure Land…. ‘Birth in the Pure Land’ means the perfect growth and fulfillment one’s personality, to achieve a state of perfect selflessness whereupon one is able to realize the oneness of the whole universe; to become a Buddha and achieve oneness with Amida Buddha. While the human weaknesses of greed, anger, and ignorance are still functioning, this perfection of the personality is an impossibility.

    “Shinran Shonin and the teachers before him explained that the Pure Land was situated in the western corners of the universe, zillions of miles away. It was pictured as a very beautiful place, free of suffering, where everyone is happy. Philosophically speaking, however, the Pure Land does not refer to a specific location out there somewhere. Rather, the Pure Land is symbolic; it symbolizes the transcendence of relativity, of all limited qualities, of the finiteness of human life. In this transcendence, there is Compassion-Wisdom, an active moving, spiritual force. The Pure Land ideal is the culmination of the teaching of Wisdom and Compassion.”

    Sermon

    This is another in a series of sermons based on questions that were asked during last spring’s question-and-answer sermon: someone asked about the afterlife. I found this to be a difficult topic. My limited thinking about the afterlife is probably summed up in the following stupid Unitarian Universalist joke:

    Two Unitarian Universalists die, and next thing they know they find themselves standing in line in front of these large pearlescent gates. Somewhat to their surprise, they’re actually waiting in line to talk with St. Peter. When their turn finally comes, St. Pete asks them what religion they used to be, and they say, “Unitarian Universalists.”

    “Hmm. Unitarian Universalists,” replies St. Pete. “Well, even though you’re heretics, because you did so much good work on earth, you can go into heaven.”

    The two Unitarian Universalists look at each other, and one of them says, “You mean you actually send people to hell?”

    “Oh yes,” says St. Peter.

    On hearing that, they step out of line and start to picket the gates of heaven: one has a sign saying, “St. Peter Unfair to the Damned!” and the other’s sign says, “End Discrimination in Heaven!”

    This stupid joke represents about all the thinking I’ve done about the afterlife. Having the usual Unitarian Universalist preoccupation with the here-and-now, I tend to treat the afterlife as another social problem that needs fixing. Yet I’m also aware of how limited and narrow my thinking is, aware that much more can be said about the afterlife. Other people in our society do think about the afterlife, and some of them have come up with some pretty detailed descriptions of what it’s like. So let’s consider what the afterlife might be like. And I’d like to begin with the fable told by Socrates that we heard in the story for all ages this morning.

    According to Socrates’s fable, when Zeus took over from his father Cronos, he determined that admission to the afterlife was being poorly managed — some humans were being sent to the Islands of the Blessed after death when they really belonged in Tartaros. The humans were being judged before they had quite died, and their judges were also still alive, which meant that the judges could be impressed with the appearance or wealth of the people they were supposed to be judging impartially. So Zeus reformed the system, requiring that humans be judged after death, and also requiring that the judges themselves should be dead, which apparently removed the possibility of error or corruption from the whole process. This is a vivid description of what we might call the admissions process for the afterlife.

    Parts of this ancient Greek fable remind me of the story told by some Christians — the Christian story talks about heaven and hell rather than the Islands of the Blessed and Tartaros, and many Christians would say that it’s St. Peter who judges the dead, not Rhadamanthus — but in both cases, humans are judged after they die, and sent either to a good place or a bad place. Thus we can see that some people think of the afterlife as a place where humans will be judged based on our actions during our lifetimes; and furthermore, in the afterlife some humans will be condemned to punishment, while others will lead a delightful existence.

    And I’d like to consider a very specific story that was told about heaven and hell in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In these American stories, the Christian belief in heaven and hell takes on more details. If you went to heaven, so it was said, you’d receive a robe and a crown and a harp and wings, and you’d spend your days sitting on a cloud playing your harp. The American humorist Mark Twain decided to explore this nineteenth century American story more carefully, by telling about the adventures of one Captain Stormfield as he arrived in heaven; and as is so often the case with Mark Twain, underneath his humor lies some serious thinking and questioning.

    In the story, Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven and receives a robe and crown and wings and harp just as he expected. But he quickly finds out that it isn’t much fun sitting on a cloud and playing a harp — especially when you can only play but one song over and over again, and when everyone around you plays a different song, mostly with the same low level of skill that you have. After a time, the Captain sneaks away from his cloud, dumps his robe and crown and wings and his harp, and heads off to explore heaven.

    In the course of his explorations, Captain Stormfield meets up with his old friend Sam, who has been in heaven for a while. Sam fills the Captain in on the realities of heaven. To the Captain’s surprise, Sam tells him that pain and suffering exist in heaven. “You see,” Sam tells him, “happiness ain’t a thing in itself — it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant. That’s all it is.” In other words, in order for there to be happiness in heaven, there must also be pain and suffering, to serve as a contrast. The difference is that in heaven pain causes no lasting harm, and suffering cannot last.

    Mark Twain is not making fun of heaven in this story. Instead, he’s thinking carefully and logically about the afterlife by asking serious questions. He asks: what age will we be in heaven? If you die as a baby, will you have to remain as a baby throughout eternity? — in other words, can those in heaven continue to grow and change and gain more wisdom? Another question Twain asks is this: If heaven is a place where we’ll meet up with those who have died before us, how will that work, exactly? — will you still have something in common with someone who died twenty or thirty or forty years before you did? Twain also brings up a point that would have been very challenging for some white people in his time (and maybe equally challenging for some white people in our time): the majority of people in heaven would not be white, because white people have been a minority throughout human history. Those white people who are expecting an all-white heaven are going to be sadly disappointed.

    There’s more that could be said about American conceptions of heaven. But I’d like to consider some other ideas of the afterlife that are floating around in today’s popular culture. The other great proselytizing religion in the United States today is Buddhism, so it feels important to consider some Buddhist conceptions of the afterlife.

    Traditional Buddhism holds that after we die, we get reborn as something else. The goal is to get off the endless cycle of rebirth. Ordinarily, we don’t remember our previous lives, so one of the remarkable things about Gotama Buddha was that after he became enlightened he could remember his previous lives, and told his disciples more than five hundred stories about those previous lives. These stories became the Kataka tales, which are now part of the Buddhist scriptures, and in these stories Buddha remembers previous lives in which he took on human forms, animal forms, even the form of a tree. According to traditional Buddhism, we’ve all had hundreds of previous lives. Our actions in this life determine in what form we shall be reborn in our next life. Furthermore, in many Mahayana Buddhist traditions, there is a place called naraka into which you can be reborn if you were extremely bad in your previous life. Naraka is roughly equivalent to the Christian hell, though you don’t arrive through by being judged by someone else; furthermore, and you don’t stay there for all eternity, but rather only for as long as it takes to work out your karma so that you can be reborn again into a higher world.

    Just as naraka is not the same as the Christian hell, Buddhists don’t have an exact equivalent for the Christian heaven. The goal is to break the endless cycle of rebirth, which you do by achieving nirvana; as I understand it, the word nirvana means in a literal sense something like extinction or nothingness. Gotama Buddha was able to achieve enlightenment, to reach nirvana, and what made him truly great was that he was then able to turn back from nirvana so that he could tell others how to be freed from the endless cycle of rebirth.

    You can see that traditional Buddhism doesn’t think about the afterlife in the same way as the ancient Greeks did, nor as nineteenth century American Christians did. Yet each of these three different religious traditions argues that if you live your life in the right way, you can be rewarded after death with something good. Interestingly, we find this same basic notion in some atheist traditions — or to speak more precisely, in the tradition of religious naturalism, a tradition that rejects any kind of supernaturalism in religion. Religious naturalists argue that the only way we can live on is in the thoughts and memories and actions of the people who survive us. If during your lifetime, you treat other people with kindness and compassion, then after you die you can live on in them whenever they act with whatever kindness and compassion they may have learned from you. So this is yet another kind of afterlife — and it’s not just a metaphorical afterlife, because your memory can have a very real and literal impact on the world. While there is no heaven or hell, no nirvana or endless rebirth, nevertheless your actions during you life affect what happens to you after death.

    These are just a few of the more common ideas of the afterlife that are floating around in our culture today. But I find I don’t fully agree with any of these ideas of the afterlife. I’m a Universalist, as the result of which I demand an egalitarian afterlife. Universalism began as the Christian heresy of universal salvation: if God is indeed omnibenevolent or all good, then God would not damn anyone to eternal punishment; so everyone gets to go to heaven. By now, I think I’ve heard all the standard rebuttals of Universalism — from people who want to make sure their political opponents go to hell; from people who want to make sure someone they especially dislike, like an ex-spouse, doesn’t join them in heaven; from people who rebel at the idea that evil-doers get to go to heaven; and so on. But I remain a Universalist because I figure if there is an afterlife (a question I remain neutral on), then universal salvation is my only chance of getting to heaven. I’m a fallible human being, and like every other fallible human being, I’ve done plenty of things that were — to use Mark Twain’s phrase — “ornery and low down and mean.” If there really are pearly gates, and if I get there, St. Peter is going to open up his big book and remind me of the time when I was four years old and I bit my older sister — and that would be only the beginning of a very long list of low-down, mean, ornery things I’ve done.

    In my opinion, the problem with all these schemes of an afterlife is how exclusive they are. You have to be a far better human being than I’ll ever be to make it into the afterlife. Not only would I not be allowed into heaven, I’m no good as a Buddhist, either. I meditated for fifteen years, and finally gave it up because it was making me miserable; which means I have no doubt I’m accumulating all kinds of karma that will keep me on the endless cycle of rebirth forever. Nor am I comforted by the religious naturalists who tell me that I’ll live on in the memories of those who knew me: partly because that’s a pretty short afterlife, lasting maybe sixty or seventy years; and partly because (as is true of all of us) there are plenty of people who don’t like me, and honestly I don’t want to live on in their memories.

    If there’s going to be an afterlife, I want it to be an egalitarian afterlife — I want everyone to get in. If I were a Buddhist, I’d be a Pure Land Buddhist. As I understand it, the Pure Land Buddhists teach that anyone can gain access to the Pure Land after you die; you don’t have to go into seclusion, you don’t have to engage in difficult esoteric practices like mindfulness, you don’t have to achieve some higher spiritual state. Really, all you have to do is to chant, “I take refuge in Buddha.” There, I just did it — now I get to go to the Pure Land. That’s why I want everyone to get in — because if everyone can get in, then I know I can get in, too.

    And there are many other notions of the afterlife that are more or less current in our society today. We can see traces of traditional African cultures in which someone who’s dead remains with us as long as there’s someone who knew them when they were alive, and who can pour libations for them; after everyone who knew them is dead, then they merge into a broad group of the dead, a sort of collective unconscious. In traditional Navajo religion, once you die you’re supposed to fade into oblivion, but if there’s something to keep you tied to the world of the living, then you persist as a troubled ghost; this is not the kind of afterlife any of us would hope for. Among some religious naturalists, the afterlife is nothing but a metaphor, and we heard an echo of that in the second reading this morning: “The Pure Land is symbolic; it symbolizes the transcendence of relativity, of all limited qualities, of the finiteness of human life.” And to return to Socrates — Plato tells us that when Socrates was on his deathbed, he gave two possibilities for what happens to us after we die: either we all go to the Elysian fields, enjoying there a blessed existence for all eternity; or we slip into oblivion, which he describes as having the most perfect sleep possible, without the disturbance of dreams or nightmares. This last idea of the afterlife retains currency for some people in our society today.

    These are but a few of the possibilities for the afterlife. All these different possibilities remind me of another stupid joke, which goes like this:

    A Unitarian Universalist dies and, somewhat to her surprise, finds herself standing in a long line of people waiting along the road to heaven. Way up ahead, she catches sight of a fork in the road. When she gets up to the fork in the road, she sees there’s a signpost. One sign, which points to the right, say “This Way to Heaven.” The other sign, which points to the left, says “This Way to a Discussion about Heaven.” She takes the left-hand path, going to the discussion about heaven.

    It’s just a stupid joke, but I think it reveals something that’s true for me. If the afterlife is going to be a place of exquisite perfection, I’d be exquisitely bored — and I don’t want to be bored for all eternity. If I were confronted with the situation in the joke, I guess I too would go to the discussion about heaven. At least it wouldn’t be boring, and there’d always be the possibility of making some kind of progress.

  • What Do We Tell Children about God, Death, etc.?

    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 an essay titled “Home-grown Unitarian Universalism” by William J. Doherty. Dr. Doherty recently retired as professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota and has worked with couples and families as a therapist since 1977. This essay was published in UU World magazine in 2008.

    “It was 1980. I had been a Unitarian Universalist for about two years when my seven-year-old son Eric said to me, ‘Dad, what happens to us after we die? Is there a heaven?’

    “‘Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven where we live forever,’ I replied, ‘and other people believe that when we die, our life is over and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.’

    “‘What do you believe?’ said Eric.

    “‘Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven, and other people believe….’

    “‘But what do you believe?’

    “‘OK,’ I said. ‘I believe that when we die we live on through other people but not in a heaven.’

    “Eric took this in and responded with words I will never forget: ‘I’ll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up I’ll make up my own mind.’

    “My seven-year-old was teaching me something. He was being a developmentally appropriate UU child, but I was not being a developmentally appropriate UU parent. He knew he needed answers, for now, to an important religious question, and he also knew that he could seek his own answers when he was ready. For my part, being a former Roman Catholic still fleeing dogmatism, I was afraid of imposing my beliefs on my child. So I responded to him as if he were a 20-year-old taking a course on world religions. I had a better sense of what not to do as a UU parent — don’t impose my beliefs — than of what to do, namely, give him religious guidance.”

    Sermon

    Here’s the question I’d like to consider with you: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious and existential questions? In many religious traditions, I’d answer that question by giving you scripted answers to all the most important religious questions. But Unitarian Universalism has no dogma — no scripted answers to life’s big questions. This complicates matters somewhat. If we don’t tell other people what to believe, then what are we supposed to say to children when they ask these big questions?

    Yet as we heard in the first reading, sometimes Unitarian Universalist kids want a firm and definite answer. When professor William J. Doherty’s seven year old child Eric asked, “Dad, what happens to us after we die? Is there a heaven?” Doherty reacted as a good Unitarian Universalist. Doherty gave his son a college professor’s lecture: “Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven where we live forever … and other people believe that when we die, our life is over and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.” This was not the reply Eric wanted, and he demanded to know what his father believed. And when Doherty finally told him, Eric said: “I’ll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up I’ll make up my own mind.”

    So if you’re a parent, and like Bill Doherty you have a child who has not yet reached puberty, often there will be a fairly simple answer to the question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious and existential questions? You tell your child what your answers to those questions are, assuming they will accept your answers for now. Sometimes you may find it challenging to provide ready answers to questions of what you believe, but for the most part children will be more or less content with the answers given by their parents.

    However, if a child asks you one of those questions, and you are not their parent, then you have to give a different kind of answer. If the child is not your own child, you cannot simply say, “What we believe is this.” If you did that, you’d be stepping into the role of their parent; not even grandparents can get away with that. That leaves you with three options. First, you can give an answer that sounds like the first answer Bill Doherty gave to his son Eric, something to the effect of: “Well, some people think, thus and so, while other people think something else.” Second, you could tell the child what your personal answer to that question might be. And the third option is to combine those two — so if, for example, a child asks you, “What happens after we die?” you can reply something like this: “Different people have different answers to that question; some people believe that you go to a place called heaven after you die; some people believe that you are reborn as another person or animal after you die; some people believe that you when die you can live on in other people’s memories; and what I believe is….” Thus in the third option, you first tell the child some of the answers that other people give, and you conclude by stating what you believe.

    These strategies work fairly well for children. Once a child hits puberty, though, everything changes. Developmental psychologist tell us that in the middle school years, young people begin for the first time to have the ability to reason abstractly; developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called this the formal operational stage of cognitive development. When young people achieve the ability to reason abstractly, this new stage of cognitive development gives them the ability to question everything. While this can be exhausting for their parents, for the young people themselves it can be an incredibly exciting time. When you’re in your middle school years, your cognitive horizons begin to expand rapidly: all of a sudden, you can understand things that you couldn’t understand before; entire new worlds open up before you. And while this can be an exhausting developmental stage for their parents, those of us who teach or mentor young adolescents can also find this an incredibly exciting time. Personally, I love talking with young adolescents as they use their new ability to reason abstractly to tackle big existential questions; I love their fearlessness and excitement as they begin to think hard about life’s biggest questions for the first time.

    Once people get to the age where they can reason abstractly, you can’t respond in the same way you respond to children. When a young adolescent asks, “What happens after we die?” they don’t want the same kind of response that a child wants. In fact, if a young adolescent asks you a question like that, the best way to answer is to respond in exactly the same way you’d respond if one of your age peers asked you that same question. Most especially, it’s important not to be condescending or patronizing — no more than you would condescend or patronize someone your own age who asked a serious question. This is true no matter what age you are; I’ve actually seen older teens condescend to younger teens, and not surprisingly, it didn’t go well. I’ve also seen middle aged adults patronize their elders — once again, it didn’t go well.

    I actually have a couple of theories that explain why some people are condescending or patronizing when asked one of life’s biggest questions like what happens after we die, or is there a deity, or is there any meaning to life. First theory: If someone asks you a big question like that, and you haven’t really thought it through, you may try to avoid answering the question by being condescending or patronizing. Second theory: Some people turn condescending or patronizing because they don’t want to have to talk about that subject to that person. So, for example, when your aging parent who’s in poor health asks you, “What happens after we die?” — and you know they’re asking that question because they’re thinking about their own imminent death — you might try to dodge the whole subject by saying something like, “Now let’s not talk about such things right now. Let’s make sure we feel all comfy and cosy” — which while well-meaning sounds a bit patronizing or condescending.

    Let’s dwell for a moment on that particular situation of someone who’s in ill health and who is probably already thinking about their own death. If someone in that situation asks you “What happens when we die?” — you may find it emotionally difficult to give your own answer. If so, you can simply turn the question back to them, and say: “Well, I’d have to think about it. But what do YOU think happens after we die?” And then all you have to do is listen carefully to what they say.

    Indeed, it’s always a good idea to be prepared to listen carefully to the other person whenever someone brings up one of life’s biggest questions. Even when you’re talking to your own child, you can give them your answer to whatever big question they raised, then check to make sure what you said makes sense to them — did you use words they could understand, and did they follow what you said? If you’re talking with a child, it’s also important to remember that children can have profound spiritual experiences at a very young age, experiences that they might not be able to articulate well. The author Dan Wakefield, in his 1985 memoir “Returning,” described a profound spiritual experience he had when he was a child:

    “On an ordinary school night I went to bed, turned out the light, said the Lord’s prayer as I always did, and prepared to go to sleep. I lay there for only a few moments, not long enough to go to sleep (I was clearly and vividly awake during this whole experience) when I had the sensation that my whole body was filled with light. It was a white light of such brightness and intensity that it seemed almost alive. It was neither hot nor cold, neither burning nor soothing, it was simply there, filling every part of my body from my head to my feet.”

    Dan Wakefield’s parents were nominally Christian, and so of course he understood this experience in Christian terms, as the light of Christ. Now Wakefield wrote that he didn’t tell anyone about his experience for some years. But when finally he did tell an adult about this experience, I hope that adult would not be dismissive of something that felt like a very real experience to him. Sometimes when children ask a parent one of life’s big questions, they not only want to know what they parent thinks; sometimes they also want the parent to listen to something they have to say.

    Whether it’s an aging parent confronting their own mortality, or a child who’s had a profound spiritual experience, sometimes when people ask one of life’s big questions, they’re using that question as an opening to tell you about something they’ve experienced, or something they’ve thought hard about. So when one of these big questions arises, you have to be prepared both to give an answer, and to listen carefully.

    It’s even more important to be prepared to listen carefully if you’re talking to someone who has reached the age where they can reason abstractly, whether that person is a teen or an adult. I’ll give a couple of examples of what I mean. When someone asks, “What happens after we die?” — it might be that they’re simply curious to know, it might mean that one of their friends brought the subject up, or the question might be prompted by a health scare they have had. Or when someone asks, “is there a God?” — it might be they have a straightforward intellectual interest in the question, it might be they’ve heard something in popular culture the piqued their interest, or it might be that they’ve had some kind of transcendent experience (like the one Dan Wakefield had) which they’re trying to make sense of. In other words, sometimes what seems to be a simple question has other layers of meaning — and of course at other times, what seems to be a simple question actually is a simple question.

    It might seem that you’ll have the easiest time when someone asks you a simple question that really is nothing more than a simple question. But a simple question that is nothing more than a simple question might actually be the hardest one to answer, because then you have to give an answer that is honest and genuine. If your aging parent starts talking about what happens after you die, and you figure out that what they really want to talk about is their own feelings about their own approaching death (which once happened to me), then all you have to do is listen to their their feelings and concerns; you don’t have to try to articulate your own half-formed answer to the question. If, on the other hand, another adult asks you what happens after we die and you realize they sincerely want to know, I feel we have a duty to do the best we can to answer that question; and this is true whether the person asking the question is a child, a teen, or an adult. We have a duty to take other people seriously.

    This implies that we should spend some time thinking through some of life’s biggest questions, so that when we are asked one of those questions, we can give a more or less coherent answer. Because of my job, I actually have these conversations fairly often, and I’ve come up with five basic questions that cover most — not all, but most — of life’s big questions. I’ve found it helpful to think through these questions on my own, so that when someone springs a big life question, I won’t be completely at a loss. I offer these questions hoping they might be useful to you in the same way.

    Here’s the first big question: What should I do with my life? — or you might ask: What’s the purpose of my life? For most Unitarian Universalists, this question is the most important of all religious questions. We are a pragmatic people, and this question forces us to think about our own ethics and morality, to think about what we want to prioritize in our lives.

    Second big question: Who am I? — which goes with several related questions, including: What am I capable of? What kind of being am I? This question often comes up after you’ve tried to think through the first question. Because if you want to figure out what you should do with your life, maybe first you have to figure out who you are.

    Third big question: What’s the nature of goodness? — and there are other questions related to this, like: Where does goodness come from? Where do suffering and evil come from? The question of goodness is also a major concern for most Unitarian Universalists. As a pragmatic people, we want to make the world a better place. And if you want to make the world a better place, then it’s probably a good idea to figure out what you man by “better.”

    Fourth big question: What can I know? — which goes along with related questions like: How do I know what I know? How do I know what is true? For many Unitarian Universalists, questions about truth encompass many of the traditional religious questions like: Is there a God? and: What happens after death? Thus if a Unitarian Universalist says that they do not believe in God, their Unitarian Universalist friends may treat this as a question of how we know what is true, saying: How do you know that God does not exist? Or if a Unitarian Universalist says that they do believe in God, their Unitarian Universalist friends are going to ask the same question: How do you know? There’s a reason why we tend to lump these traditional religious questions together and treat them as questions about truth. Most of us know people who hold a vast range of beliefs. Thinking just of the people I happen to know, my acquaintances include people who are atheists, agnostics, New Age-ers, Pagans, many different varieties of Christian, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, even a Zoroastrian. Each of these people has a worldview that claims to be true, yet they disagree in fundamental ways. So how can I know which of them is right; how can I know what is true?

    Fifth, and finally: Does my life have any meaning? (And if so, where does that meaning come from?) For many Unitarian Universalists, the question about what happens after death often resolves to the deeper question of whether an individual human life has any meaning or not. And many of us are existentialist who believe that there is no pre-existing meaning but that we create meaning through our actions; so to ask if my life has meaning is to inquire into the meaning I’m already making through the way I’m living right now.

    Now let’s circle back to my opening question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious questions? One partial answer I’ve given is that we parents are going to provides answers those questions for their own children, at least until their children develop the ability to reason abstractly. Another partial answer: when someone asks one of those questions, we should listen carefully, because sometimes when people ask you those big questions they’re really saying something else. Another partial answer: because we are part of the human community, we have the responsibility to take such questions seriously, and not try to dodge them or dismiss them. So those are some partial answers to the opening question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious questions?

    And the ultimate answer is this: The only way to provide answers to the big questions about life, the universe, and everything — is to spend time thinking about those questions yourself. That’s actually why I keep coming here every week, to keep myself in practice at answering these big questions — because this congregation is a place where people do ask those big questions, where people do think seriously about them.