Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: death and dying

  • 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.

  • What about Assisted Dying?

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

    Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Notes

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

  • A Unitarian Universalist Easter

    Sermon and moment for all ages copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading is from the Christian scriptures, the last chapter of the Book of Mark, as translated by Hugh Schonfield, a Jewish scholar of the ancient Near East. Later copyists added a more upbeat ending to the Book of Mark; in this reading you will hear the original ending, filled with ambiguity.

    When the sabbath was ended, Mary of Magdala, Mary mother of James, and Salome, brought spices in order to go and anoint him. And very early in the morning of the day after the sabbath they came to the tomb as soon as the sun was up. “Who is going to roll away the boulder for us from the entrance of the tomb?” they asked themselves. But when they came to look they saw that the boulder had been rolled aside.

    On entering the tomb they were startled to see a young man sitting on the far right side clad in a flowing white robe. “Do not be alarmed,” he said to them. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Look, here is the place where he was laid. Go now and tell his followers, and Peter particularly, he is preceding you to Galilee. You will see him there just as he told you.”

    They fled from the tomb, for they were trembling and unnerved. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

    The second reading is “The Hailstones,” by Ai Qing [aye ching], translated in 1983 by Angela Jung Palandri. This poem was written in 1979, after the poet was released from the prison camp where he had been spent the previous twenty years, because he had fallen out of favor with the Chinese Communist Party. The poem can be found in this online essay (scroll down to page 72).

    The final reading was by Joy Harjo, poet laureate of the United States. The title of the poem is “Singing Everything.” This poem is reproduced at the end of this newspaper article.

    [These two links go to webpages that reproduce the poems with full permission of the poets.]

    Sermon: “A Unitarian Universalist Easter”

    That last reading, the poem by Joy Harjo, tells a truth that is worth considering on Easter Sunday. We used to have songs for everything, “Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting,” as the poet tells us, and songs “for sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war.” But today we are reduced to a narrow range of songs.

    Admittedly, Joy Harjo exaggerates a little when she tells us, “Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and /Falling apart after falling in love songs.” We do have a few other kinds of songs such as political songs, and songs of interior landscapes by singer-songwriters. But Joy Harjo is an enrolled member of the Muscogee nation, and as a Native American she is aware of a broader range of songs that once existed. Most of those kinds of songs that once existed in indigenous cultures — including indigenous European and African and Asian cultures — have disappeared from today’s mass-produced culture.

    Mind you, I love the music of today’s culture. I love Taylor Swift’s song “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” It has to be the best falling-apart-after-falling-in-love song ever. And some of you will remember Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a song at the roots of hip hop; this is a truly great political song. Perhaps you are now hearing in your head the many other great songs of our time. Even so, most of our popular songs today are love songs, or political songs, or songs of interior landscapes. We have very few songs about sunrise, or planting, or harvesting, or giving birth, or (as Harjo says in her poem) “songs of the guardians of silence.” We have many great songs today, but they mostly stick to a relatively narrow range of topics.

    The same is true of much of religion in today’s world. Most of today’s religion occupies a narrow range of feeling and values and being. Popular American culture thinks of religion as having to do with the Bible, except that the Bible is merely supposed to support the assumptions and prejudices of conservative American Christianity. One of my favorite examples of this is that conservative American Christianity assumes that the God of their Bible is entirely male; except that in the Bible, in Genesis 1:28, it very clearly states that God is non-binary gender: “God created humankind in his image… male and female he created them.” God may choose to use he/him pronouns, but God’s actual body is both male and female. Somehow the conservative American Christians manage to ignore that part of the Bible. This shows you what I mean when I say that today’s American religion occupies a too-narrow range of feeling and values and being.

    We might imagine for ourselves a religion with a broader range. Consider with me the story of Easter as we heard it in the first reading, as it was originally told in the book of Mark. Here’s how I would retell this story:

    The Roman Empire executes Jesus of Nazareth, and he dies at sundown on Friday. The friends and followers of Jesus are all observant Jews. Since the Jewish sabbath begins at sundown of Friday, they want to wait until the sabbath is over to prepare the body for burial. So they place the body in a tomb. Promptly on the morning after the sabbath, Jesus’ mother, accompanied by Mary of Magdala and Salome (these three are leaders among the followers of Jesus, and as women would know more about preparing bodies for burial than any of the men), these three women go to the tomb to care for the body. There they encounter a stranger, a man who is strangely dressed, who tells them that Jesus has been raised, and will precede them to Galilee. The stranger tells the women not to tell the men these things. Not surprisingly, the three women find this strange and weird. They are unnerved. Fearing for themselves and for the other followers of Jesus, they quickly leave the tomb. They tell no one.

    That’s it. That’s the end of the story.

    Now, the book of Mark is accepted by most scholars as the earliest story we still have that tells about the life and death of Jesus. This means that all those traditional stories about Easter we hear — the stories of resurrection and triumph — that’s not the way the story was first told. The original book of Mark does not end in triumph, and so it sounds like some contemporary poetry — like the poem of Ai Qing we heard as the second reading. Ai Qing lived through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in China; he was exiled to a labor camp for twenty years. His poem “The Hailstones” is a poetic retelling of how the Cultural Revolution brought his poetry to a violent end. Since he’s telling us this in a poem, we know that eventually his poetry was reborn. Yet when he looks back on those twenty lost years, he can only say: “What remains / Are sad memories of the calamity.”

    You notice that I’m using a poem by a disgraced Chinese Communist poet to talk about Easter. I’m not talking about Easter the way we’re “supposed” to talk about Easter; at least, the way the conservative American Christians tell us is the correct, orthodox way to talk about Easter. We Unitarian Universalists have never limited our religion to the narrow confines of conservative American Christianity. For us, religion and spirituality are broad and inclusive. We can look at the Easter story with fresh eyes.

    We don’t feel a need to shoehorn the Easter story into a confining orthodoxy. We don’t need the Easter story to somehow prove that Jesus was a god who could not actually be killed. If you want to interpret the Easter story in that way, that’s fine. Yet for us, the Easter story contains far more complexity. As with any good literature, we find multiple levels of meaning. I’ll give you an example from my own life. This past year has been a year of loss in my household: my father-in-law died just about a year ago, and my spouse’s stepmother died the day after Christmas. So this year when I read the Easter story in the book of Mark, what I feel is the emotional truth of that story: someone you love is alive one day, and then they’re no longer alive, and you know they are gone forever. This can leave you (as the story puts it) trembling and unnerved, and you can find yourself afraid and unwilling to talk about it.

    That is one emotional truth we can find in the story. We can also find another emotional truth carried in that story. After people die, we have not lost them. They live on in our love. If there’s a resurrection story that all Unitarian Universalists agree on, this it it: love transcends death.

    And we can find still more emotional truths in this simple story. For example: Jesus was a brilliant spiritual teacher, who encapsulated spirituality in simple, easy-to-understand stories and formulas. His most famous spiritual teaching is quite simple: love your neighbor as yourself. (Simple in the saying, but far more difficult in actual practice.) When the Roman Empire executed him, his teachings did not die. You cannot kill truth that easily. This another emotional truth of the Easter story that all Unitarian Universalists can agree on: you cannot kill truth so easily.

    With enough time, we can find still more emotional truths in this story. So it is that we can see how religion and spirituality have a much wider range than popular American culture would have us believe. Popular American culture tells us that religion is concerned with beliefs many of us find unbelievable, beliefs to which we are supposed to conform. In truth, however, religion and spirituality exist to help us understand the perplexities of life. From this, we gain comfort and support. Religion and spirituality concern the truth that never dies. From this, we remember that love transcends even death. Religion and spirituality teach a universal love that includes all people, no matter what gender or sexual preference, no matter what race, no matter what, period. And with that knowledge, we can create a world where we truly love our neighbors as ourselves.

    That’s why we keep coming back here to this community. That’s why we keep our religion and spirituality alive in our personal lives. We celebrate the incredible diversity of humankind, the diversity which exists among us here today. And we celebrate that which transcends us all and which unites us all — that which is highest and best, that which keeps us going from day to day.