Dan Harper | Sermons

  • New Year’s Wishes

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

    Readings

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

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

    Sermon: “New Year Wishes”

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

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

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

    — What might we hope for in the new year?

    — What wishes and dreams might inspire us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Winter Solstice

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

    Readings

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

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

    Sermon: “Winter Solstice”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Notes

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

  • Jetpig!

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

    Readings

    The first reading was a short poem by Unitarian poet Celia Thaxter:

    The waves of Time may devastate our lives,
    The frosts of age may check our failing breath,
    They shall not touch the spirit that survives
    Triumphant over doubt and pain and death.

    The second reading was from an essay titled “What Do Unitarian Universalists Believe?” by Duncan Howlett, written in 1967 while he was the minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Washington, D.C.

    In the first place, we reject all doctrines and creeds and theologies if they pretend to any finality. We think the fabrication of such systems valuable, but we do not believe one or another of them. But a Unitarian Universalist is not an unbeliever. In fact, a Unitarian Universalist believes a great deal. Our beliefs are of a different order, but they are nonetheless real.

    We believe in humanity, that human beings are endowed with the power to move toward truth.
    We believe that human beings are endowed with the discrimination by which to tell the difference between truth and falsehood and error. Yet we know human beings are fallible. We know that individuals make mistakes.
    We believe humanity is to be trusted — not each human being, but humankind taken together, with the testimony of each checked against each.
    We believe that humankind can find truth, know the right, and do good — again, not each individual, but taken together, with each checked against all the rest.
    We believe human life has meaning, that the high purposes of humanity may be achieved and the spiritual nature of humanity indicates something about humankind and the cosmos as well.
    We believe in the freedom we need if we are to find a sense of selfhood and if we are to find what is the truth for us. We believe in the faculties we possess and in those possessed by others also, for we must believe in our own fallibility, too.
    We believe in the power of love to conquer hate and strife and in its power to suffuse our lives with the glory and the sense of reality that love alone can give.

    In this faith we live, by it we labor, and through it we find the courage to carry on amidst all the tragedy, misery, and stupidity of life.

    The third and final reading was a “found poem” noted by Everett Hoagland at the First Unitarian Church in New Bedford, Oct. 2006, titled “So Bet It” (not available online due to copyright restrictions).

    Sermon: “Jetpig!”

    Way back in 1887, William Channing Gannett, minister of the Unitarian church in St. Paul, Minnesota, was trying to come up with a way to unify the Unitarians of his day. This was not an easy task. Gannet was part of the so-called Western Unitarian Conference of the Midwest and the Plains states, a conference which encompassed a great diversity of belief. There were Christian Unitarians who believed in God, loved the Bible, and found their greatest inspiration in the life of Jesus. There were post-Christians who didn’t place much importance in belief in the Christian God, who read sacred texts from many different religions, and who were inspired by Jesus but also by Confucius, Buddha, Muhammad, and other spiritual leaders. And there were even a few proto-humanists as well. Among the ministers, there were men like William Greenleaf Eliot, from an elite East Coast family and with a graduate degree from Harvard. But there were also women like Mary Safford, from a Midwestern farm family and with only one year at the University of Iowa.

    William Channing Gannett saw all this diversity, and tried to formulate a statement that would bring them together so they could work more effectively together. In an essay titled “Things Common Believed Today Among Us” tried to point out the commonalities among people in the Western Unitarian Conference. In that essay, he made an observation which still holds true today. He said:

    “Because we have no ‘creed’ which we impose as a condition of fellowship, specific statements of belief abound among us, always somewhat differing, always largely agreeing.”

    This remains true for us Unitarian Universalists today, with one small caveat. Some of us today no longer want to use the word “belief,” because the concept of “belief” is so central to Christianity; and we want to be even more inclusive. Today, we might rephrase Gannet’s words like this: “Because we have no ‘creed’ which we impose on others, statements of religious identity abound among us, always somewhat differing, always largely agreeing.”

    Gannett was a Unitarian. The Universalist side of our heritage also refused to impose a creed on anyone. They avoided some of the chaos that confronted Gannett by adopting what they called a “profession of faith.” The Universalist professions of faith were agreed upon through a democratic process, and voted on by the delegates to the annual Universalist General Conference. I knew some older Universalists who still remembered the Washington Declaration of 1935, which said in part:

    “…We avow our faith in God as Eternal and All-conquering Love, in the spiritual leadership of Jesus, in the supreme worth of every human personality, in the authority of truth known or to be known, and in the power of men of good-will and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God. Neither this nor any other statement shall be imposed as a creedal test, provided that the faith thus indicated be professed.”

    That last sentence, often referred to as the “liberty clause,” is a crucial part of Universalist professions of faith. The liberty clause meant that even though individuals had to be in rough agreement with the sentiments behind the profession of faith, no individual had to agree in every detail. There was a great deal of room for interpretation. This was especially important in the mid-twentieth century, when a growing number of Universalists became humanists. Because of the liberty clause, the humanists did not have to conform to a literal interpretation of the Washington Declaration. The humanists could affirm the spirit of the Washington Declaration — they could affirm their faith in eternal and all-conquering love, while not having to believe in God.

    The Universalist professions of faith had one big advantage over the chaos of Unitarianism: they gave individuals something to hang on to. I’ll give you one example of what I mean. Wells Behee was born in 1925, was raised as a Universalist and in adulthood became a Universalist minister. As a young man, Wells served in the Second World War. When he died in 2011, his friend and colleague Derek Parker wrote:

    “During World War II, Wells served in the Navy. His military service included both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of combat, including the Battle of Iwo Jima. Later in life Wells would frequently comment that the only thing which kept his sanity at Iwo Jima were his repeated praying of the Washington [Declaration].” (1) From Wells Behee’s experience at Iwo Jima, you can see how a profession of faith can be a powerful spiritual tool in times of crisis.

    The Unitarians also had what amounted to professions of faith, statements which they used much like a profession of faith. In the twentieth century, many Unitarian children learned James Freeman Clarke’s “Five Points of a New Theology,” and some of you who have been Unitarians since the mid-twentieth century will remember “the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and progress onwards and upwards forever.” Those were Clarke’s “Five Points,” and they functioned as a kind of profession of faith. However, unlike the Universalist professions of faith, the Unitarian statements of faith were not developed through democratic process.

    When the Unitarian and the Universalists joined forces in 1961, one of the things they decided to do was to come up with a statement that could help unify these two different movements. So a committee came together and came up with six principles that served as a unifying statement, and these six principles were made official by placing them in the bylaws of the new Unitarian Universalist Association. The six principles were a kind of profession of faith. But while they were worthy and high-minded sentiments, they were not especially memorable. I don’t remember ever hearing about them when I was a child.

    Then in 1985, those old “six principles” were revised to remove sexist language, and they became the “seven principles.” The seven principles were expressed better than the six principles; the prose was livelier, the ideas more interesting . Because of this, the seven principles began to function as a kind of profession of faith. Personally, however, I always found them to be a bit too intellectual and dry, and not something that would give me much comfort and support in times of stress or trouble.

    And this brings me to “Jet Pig.” In the Moment for All Ages today, you heard from the Sunday school about Jet Pig. Jet Pig is an acronym that stands for Justice, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Interdependence, and Generosity. These are the six shared values that were added to the “Principles and Purposes” section of the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association this past June, during the Association’s annual business meeting. These new six shared values replace the former seven principles.

    When the democratic process to revise the “seven principles” began three years ago, I was pretty skeptical. The first drafts of the revised principles and purposes were even more wordy than the “seven principles,” and (to my mind, anyway) even less memorable. Considered as an addition to the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist association, I found the new revised principles and purposes to be fascinating. But as a spiritual resource, they seemed empty and boring.

    As the democratic process continued over the next three years, more and more got added into the revised principles and purposes. Each time they were amended through the democratic process, they became longer, and wordier, and more painfully earnest. When it came time to vote on them — and I was one of this congregation’s delegates at the meeting in June — I wound up voting for the new revision. But because they were so boring and so convoluted and so painfully earnest, I assumed that they would be mostly ignored.

    I did not take into account the creativity of the religious educators. Someone noticed that the six values articulated in the new revision formed the acronym “jet pig.” Religious educators picked up on this idea, and created Jet Pig characters to make these shared values seem fun and interesting and relevant. The humor of the Jet Pig character helped leaven the painful earnestness of the actual bylaws. I also appreciated that Jet Pig is memorable. I have a poor memory, and I spent nearly forty years not being able to remember the old seven principles. Now, because of Jet Pig, I can actually remember justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence, and … wait, what does “g” stand for? But even if I can’t remember every element of the Jet Pig acronym, I can easily remember the most important thing — love is at the center. Because that’s what the new principles and purposes say: that love is at the center.

    In short, I like Jet Pig. I also like the fact that even if I can’t remember all six things that Jet Pig stands for, I can always remember that love is the central value. These strike me as positive developments in the wider Unitarian Universalist community. We have some shared values that we can articulate quickly and easily, and thanks to Jet Pig we can even have a sense of humor when we do so.

    But I also remember what William Channing Gannett pointed out back in 1887. We don’t impose any creed or statement of belief, we don’t impose any profession of faith, upon individuals. In 1887, Gannett said, “specific statements of belief abound among us, always somewhat differing, always largely agreeing.” This continues to be true today. We allow, and even encourage, individuals to come up with their own statements of religious identity. In May, teens from our Coming of Age class will present their statements of religious identity during a Sunday service, and you’ll get to hear how they differ and how they agree. The rest of us can do the same thing: we can, and should, develop our own personal sense of religious identity.

    For me personally, however, I need something more than a personal statement of religious identity. I want a communal sense of identity. The new principles and purposes in the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association provide part of that communal sense of identity, but honestly I can’t see myself turning to them in times of personal trouble. Speaking entirely personally, I find more meaning in some of the words we heard this morning in readings.

    I am moved by Duncan Howlett when he said, “I believe in the power of love to conquer hate and strife and in its power to suffuse our lives with the glory and the sense of reality that love alone can give.” That’s something I can hang onto in times of trouble.

    I am moved by Celia Thaxter’s short poem that says:

    The waves of Time may devastate our lives,
    The frosts of age may check our failing breath,
    They shall not touch the spirit that survives
    Triumphant over doubt and pain and death.

    Again, that’s something I can hang onto in times of trouble.

    And I often find myself reciting Edwin Markham’s poem “Outwitted” to myself:

    They drew a circle that shut me out —
    Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout;
    But love and I had the wit to win,
    We drew a circle that took them in.

    This poem has helped me through some rough spots in my personal life. And Edward Everett Hale’s little poem has been one of my constant companions:

    I am only one.
    But still I am one.
    I cannot do everything.
    But still I can do something.
    And because I cannot do everything
    I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

    These words have helped me get through those times when I felt overwhelmed by all that needed to be done.

    So it is that while Jet Pig (with love at the center) is proving to be a good way to articulate our shared values as a wider community, it is not sufficient. We each need to articulate our own personal sense of religious identity. And beyond that, each of us can choose whatever words or poetry work best for us, to help lift us up when we are down — to, as Everett Hoagland says in his short and humorous poem, lift us beyond belief.

    Note

    (1) Derek Parker, “In Memoriam: Mary and Wells Behee,” Dec. 17, 2011, posted on Rev. Scott Wells’s blog https://www.revscottwells.com/2011/12/17/in-memoriam-mary-and-wells-behee/