Tag: existentialism

A Brief Theological History of First Parish in Cohasset

Introduction

[Dan Harper] Last spring, during the “Question Box Service,” someone asked for a brief theological history of First Parish. This sermon is a partial answer to that question. I found four readings — one from 1770, one from 1823, one from 1960, and one from 1998 — each one written by a different First Parish minister, each one representing one theological position from the past three hundred years. After Holly reads each of these readings, I’ll give a brief commentary on it.

Luckily, a number of First Parish ministers were quite good writers. Three of the four readings you’re about to hear came from published writings. I think you’ll enjoy hearing the distinctive voices of these four people.

Title page of “A Discourse Delivered on the Day of the Annual Provincial Thanksgiving” by John Browne (1771)

Reading

[Read by Holly Harris] The first reading comes from a sermon preached by Rev. John Browne to our congregation here in Cohasset on December 6, 1770. The sermon was titled, “A Discourse Delivered on the Day of the Annual Provincial Thanksgiving.”

“The consideration of God’s sitting at the helm of the Universe should ever dispose us to put our trust in him; and not greatly fear what man can do unto us. Never let it be said that the difficulties which we feel, or think we have reason to fear, cause us to be unmindful of our creator, preserver, and constant benefactor. It was once the expression of a very impious woman to her religious husband, when his property was invaded, his children destroyed, and his life endangered, ‘Curse GOD and die.’ But he replied in the greatness of his distress: ‘Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh: What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not also receive evil?’ All that befalls the children of men is designed by their Maker to promote their happiness. The least glimmering of mercy amidst the greatest outward distress is sufficient to excite our gratitude, if we reflect properly on it.”

Commentary

[DH] Three decades before John Brown gave this sermon, Jonathan Edwards, a minister out in Northampton preached a very different kind of sermon. Jonathan Edwards titled his sermon “Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God,” and one sentence from that sermon will suffice to give you a sense of the whole:

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much in the same way as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; … you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”

John Brown believed in a very different kind of God. John Brown’s God was essentially good. John Brown’s God wants human beings to be happy. He admits that sometimes bad things happen to good people — sometimes God allows evil to befall us. But on the whole, John Brown’s God is trustworthy, merciful, and good. On the whole, John Brown’s God loves human beings.

Jonathan Edwards and John Brown represent the two sides of a great theological battle that raged in New England in the middle of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, people like Jonathan Edwards said that human beings are evil, that God despises us, that all human beings must throw themselves on the mercy of a wrathful and hate-filled God, even as that God is about to cast them into hell. On the other hand, people like John Brown said that both God and human beings are basically good, and that God’s love is more powerful that sin and evil.

There’s another important differences between these two theological positions. People like Jonathan Edwards believed that even before they were born, the majority of human beings were predestined by God to be sent to hell and eternal damnation. People like John Brown, on the other hand, believed that human beings had free will to choose goodness; in their view, God wanted to give humans every possible chance to show that they were worthy of God’s eternal love. This latter view was known as Arminianism, and nearly all Unitarian churches in New England come from this Arminian theology — this theology of humans having free will and being able to choose good.

Sadly, this theological battle continues to rage here in the United States. There are many right-wing Christians who believe that most human beings are loathsome insects that God is dangling over a fire. From what I’ve seen, such beliefs warp the people who hold them, encouraging them to despise poor people, women, immigrants, people of a different skin color. I continue to side with those who believe that human beings have infinite capacity for goodness, and infinite capacity for love.

Title page of “A Discourse in Which the Doctrine of the Trinity Is Examined…” by Jacob Flint (1824)

Reading

[HH] The second reading is from a sermon preached by Rev. Jacob Flint in the afternoon of December 7, 1823. The sermon was titled, “A Discourse in Which the Doctrine of the Trinity Is Examined.”

“The word ‘trinity’ cannot be found in the Old or New Testament; and there is not a word in any language among the tribes of men, which will express the existence of trinity in unity. The reason is, because such an existence is an impossibility in the nature of things. Professor Stuart is among the most able defenders of the trinitarian doctrine at the present day; and in his letters to Unitarians he states the question ‘How can three be one and one three.’ … ‘In no way,’ I necessarily and cheerfully reply. He still attempts to defend the doctrine. But he makes it only to be a distribution in the Godhead, and professes not to understand in what it consists. … In making Jesus, the Christ, [to be] God equal with the Father, we transgress the first of the ten commandments: ‘Thou shalt have no other God before, or beside me.’”

Commentary

[DH] By the early nineteenth century, the theological battle of the previous century had taken a somewhat different form. The Arminian camp — which included John Brown of Cohasset, and Ebeneezer Gay of Hingham, and Jacob Flint — the Arminians continued to believe that the universe was basically good, and that humans had the capacity to be good. Then their opponents, those in the Jonathan Edwards tradition, realized that the Arminians no longer believed in the Trinity; that is, they now refused to say that God was three persons in one. So the inheritors of Jonathan Edwards taunted them by calling them Unitarians. The Arminians decided that they liked that new term, and they began calling themselves Unitarians; even though the central element of their religious viewpoint was not the unity of God, but rather human freedom to choose goodness.

By the early 1820s, the Trinitarian party looked for towns where their party was in the minority, and then they would send in outside funding to set up a second, trinitarian church. Flint must have worried that the trinitarians were going to try this here in Cohasset, for on December 7, 1823, he preached a sermon in which he told his congregants that the doctrine of the trinity was ridiculous, and that they should all consider themselves Unitarians. Within weeks, a small number of trinitarians angrily withdrew from Flint’s congregation; outside money poured in, allowing Cohasset’s trinitarians to build a new building and hire a trinitarian minister.

When I read Jacob Flint’s 1823 sermons on Unitarianism, I agree with him on an intellectual level — I agree that the doctrine of the trinity doesn’t make intellectual sense. But I don’t feel the same need for intellectual purity that Flint seemed to feel. Day-to-day life can be difficult, and most of us have beliefs that maybe can’t be justified intellectually, but help us get through the days. When I compare Jacob Flint’s sermon to John Brown’s sermon, I find John Brown give me more help in getting through day-to-day life. When I’m confronted with the death of someone in my family, I don’t spend much time worrying about theological doctrines; but I find it comforting to be told that the universe is basically good, that even if I’m suffering evil now, on the whole things are going to be all right.

Title page of “I Was Alive — and Glad” by Roscoe Trueblood (1971)

Reading

[HH] The third reading comes from a sermon by Rev. Roscoe Trueblood, preached to our congregation here in Cohasset circa 1960. The title of the sermon is “The Splinter in Your Brother’s Eye.”

“’Judge not, that ye be not judged,’ began Jesus. And immediately some interpretation is necessary. We know that he was not telling people not to judge anybody. He himself often judged people. Therefore, for a long time — since the early days of New Testament criticism, it has been certain that Jesus was simply saying, … Be careful how you measure people, especially their faults, and be sure to do it as you would want it done to you….

“And those who have read the Vedas of India or the writings of Zarathustra or the works of Mohammed, know that these and other scriptures come to the full support of Jesus on this point. Zoroaster urged that the common burdens and troubles shared by all human kind, ought to make destructive or vicious criticism impossible. Mohammed in his theory of the salt that dissolves in water and can be tasted at the surface, … or as deep as one can go, was saying that our common humanity ought to make us kind and to stir up a mutual sympathy. And, as you doubtless know, the Vedas many times over, present and describe this spirit of generous measurement and judgment, which this overflowing, ubiquitous spirit can present in the minds and hearts of all men. Why note the splinter in your brother’s eye — and consider NOT the plank that is in thine own?”

Commentary

[DH] Of all the ministers of this congregation whose sermons or other writings I have managed to get my hands on, I like Roscoe Trueblood the best. He was minister here from 1945 to 1949, and again from 1951 to 1968. To my mind, he represents the best of what I call Emersonian Unitarianism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a profound influence on Unitarianism. Emerson believed that all human beings can have a direct connection to truth and goodness, a direct connection to the divine. Emerson also believed that every human being should be responsible for themselves; to use one of his terms, we should be self reliant. This means both that we should each take charge of our own ethical decisions, and that we should take charge of our own spiritual growth. These two things go together. If you have a direct connection to the divine, a direct connection to truth and goodness, then you don’t need someone else to tell you how to be a good person — you can rely on your inner sense of how to be good. And if you can know how to be good, then you must take responsibility for your actions. I see this Emersonian influence in Roscoe Trueblood’s interpretation of the saying, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” It is up to each of us to take care of how we judge others; we have enough access to the divine, each one of us, that we can take care in how we measure other people.

Emerson was profoundly influential in another way. Since he believed that all human beings had equal access to the divine, he felt that we can look at all religious traditions to find wisdom. It is thanks to Emerson that Roscoe Trueblood can say the wisdom we find in the Christian scriptures can also be found in the sacred writings of the Hindus, the Zoroastrians, the Muslims, in all great wisdom traditions.

I chose this excerpt from one of Trueblood’s sermons because he addresses issues that are of interest today. We live in a polarized society, where it’s considered normal and OK to go on social media and mock the opposing political party, to hateful things about anyone with whom one disagrees. Both liberals and conservatives are doing this — and moderates too. In response, Roscoe Trueblood would tell us that “the common burdens and troubles shared by all human kind, ought to make destructive or vicious criticism impossible.” And Roscoe Trueblood also draws our attention to the “spirit of generous measurement and judgment, which this overflowing, ubiquitous spirit can present in the minds and hearts of all.” When he says this, Roscoe Trueblood reminds me of Rev. John Brown — not only is the universe basically good, but human beings can choose to rise to the high level of the goodness of the universe.

Cover of “Evening Tide” by Elizabeth Tarbox (1998)

Reading

[HH] The fourth reading is from a meditation by Rev. Elizabeth Tarbox, who was the minister of our congregation from 1997 to 1999. This is from her book “Evening Tide.”

“Where the light catches the tears in another’s eyes, where hands are held and there are moments without words, let us be present then, and alive to the possibility of changing. Let us seek to make another’s well-being the object of our concern. Let us seek to be present to another’s pain, to bathe another’s wounds, hear another’s sadness, celebrate another’s success, and allow the other’s story to change our own…..

“Let us not defend ourselves against the discomfort of unruly emotion, nor seek to close down our hearts for fear a new love will come to shake our foundations. Let us instead be open to discovering a new way of seeing an old problem, or appreciating the perfection of a seashell, or the possibility of friendship. For in giving ourselves to what we do not understand, we receive life’s blessings, and in taking care of another, we are cared for.”

Commentary

[DH] Elizabeth Tarbox is also in the Emersonian tradition. Like Emerson, she was a mystic who saw God in everything. Admittedly, it’s not clear to me how she conceived of God. I suspect she was a religious naturalist — that is, she did not spend much time worrying about supernatural things, but instead paid attention to her senses, and found the divine in what she found in this world. Curiously enough, this impulse towards religious naturalism extends back to the beginnings of our congregation. For the first half century of our existence, our congregation was under the influence of Rev. Dr. Ebeneezer Gay of Hingham, who once said that we do not need a Bible for there is another book which can always be studied: “The Heavens, the Earth and the Waters, are the Leaves of which it consists.”

Elizabeth Tarbox was more willing to embrace the full range of human emotions than the other ministers we’ve heard from. She was a product of feminist theology, and feminist theology taught us that emotions were just as much a part of religion as intellectual theology. This is not to say that Roscoe Trueblood and Jacob Flint and John Brown were unfeeling — but feminist theology gave us greater permission to feel our religion, not just think it. A history of the Middleboro Unitarian Universalist congregation, where Elizabeth Tarbox was minister before coming to Cohasset, describes the emotional impact of her sermons: “Parishioners were frequently so moved, they sat in voluntary silence after the postlude, often with tears streaming down their faces.” This is a far cry from Jacob Flint’s heady intellectual treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Conclusion

[DH] I’d like to point out two theological concepts that seem to run through the entire history of First Parish in Cohasset.

First of all, we have long stood for religious liberty. I can find no evidence that we ever had a creed. We had a covenant; but it was entirely optional as to whether you signed the covenant or not. For much of our history, we have been tolerant of a fairly wide range of beliefs. The search for truth and goodness requires religious liberty.

Secondly, we have long believed that human beings have the capacity to make this world a better place; or conversely, to turn this world into a kind of hell on earth. That is to say, we asset that human beings have free will. Instead of blaming evil on some original sin and an abusive father-figure of a God, we have seen that much of the evil in this world comes from human beings, while the rest comes from the random chance of unfortunate occurrences.

Today, we also recognize that with great freedom comes both great power and great responsibility. We define ourselves by our actions. We do not believe that human beings have some pre-ordained essence: we do not have original sin, but nor are we essentially good; rather, we constantly define and redefine our own essence through our own actions. Personally, it is this religious problem I struggle with more than any other. It would be so much easier if I could just say — oh, I’m basically a good person — or even: oh, I’m basically sinful. Life becomes more difficult when we realize that it we who define who we are, by the way we act in the world. This is such important matter that I’m going to devote the next two sermons to it.

However, I won’t keep you in suspense. It really all boils down to what Roscoe Trueblood said back in 1960: “our common humanity ought to make us kind and to stir up a mutual sympathy.” In the end, that’s all there is to it: kindness and the mutual sympathy of human connection.

To Be Continued…

February 15, 2026
The Problem with Grief

Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon text may contain typographical errors. The sermon as preached included a significant amount of improvisation.

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from the poem “Two Dreams” by Margaret Atwood:

Sitting at noon over the carrot salad
my sister and I compare dreams.

She says, Father was there
in some kind of very strange nightgown
covered with bristles, like a hair shirt.
He was blind, he was stumbling around
bumping into things, and I couldn’t stop crying.

I say, Mine was close.
He was still alive, and all of it
was a mistake, but it was our fault..
He couldn’t talk, but it was clear
he wanted everything back, the shoes, the binoculars
we’d given away or thrown out.
He was wearing stripes, like a prisoner.
We were trying to be cheerful,
but I wasn’t happy to see him:
now we would have to do the whole thing over again….

The second reading is from a book by Elaine Pagels titled Why Religion?: A Personal Memoir. In this book, she tells about her son Mark’s death, followed by the death of her husband a year later, and how she made sense of their deaths.

“Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random. During those dark, interminable days of Mark’s illness, I couldn’t help imagining that somehow I’d caused it If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us were willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.”

Sermon: “The Problem with Grief”

The sermon this morning is titled “The Problem with Grief.” So there is no suspense, I’ll tell you right up front what the problem is with grief: Grief seems to be cumulative. That is, all the individual instances of grief we happen to experience in life seem to add up. And a lot of times the total sum of grief seems to add up to more than all the individual instances of grief. The memoir by Elaine Pagels, from which came the second reading this morning, is a perfect example of what I mean. In that memoir, Elaine Pagels tells about how her son died, and then a year later her husband died. As you read her memoir, it becomes clear that these two overwhelming experiences of grief, happening so close together, added up to something more than each experience of grief on its own. And this tallies with my own less intense experiences of grief: when I was grieving one thing, I seemed to be extra sensitive to other feeling of grief.

So why is this a problem? Grieving has been a fact of life for human beings as long as there have been human beings. Surely we should be accustomed to it by now. Except that this has becomm a problem because there are at least two major sources of societal grief right now.

First of all, there’s the grief that we’re all feeling as climate change and other environmental problems become more pronounced. Lack of ice in the Arctic, too much plastic in the oceans, diminishing natural habitats near us: there are so many environmental changes to grieve. A field biologist friend calls this “eco-grief,” the grief that comes from the knowledge of the looming ecological disaster.

In addition to that, most of us are experiencing pandemic grief. This is the grief that most of society continues to experience every time people remember what we lost during the pandemic. Of course there are people for whom the pandemic went smoothly, and they don’t have any personal pandemic grief. But even if you’re not experiencing pandemic grief yourself, you’re surrounded by people who are. It is endemic in our society right now.

Thus nearly all of us are experiencing the effects of both eco-grief and pandemic grief. These add up with whatever individual grief we happen to be experiencing. The sum total is a lot of grief.

That’s it. Now you’ve heard the whole point of this sermon. Now there’s no more suspense, and you know the worst. If you want to check out now and stare out the window, I’ll try to talk softly.

Now that you know the problem with grief, I’d like to devote the rest of the sermon to talking about how we can manage grief — how we can manage it both individually, and as a community. What can we do to make ourselves feel better?

First of all, let’s talk about guilt. Grief and guilt often seem to come hand-in-hand. In the second reading, Elaine Pagels talks about the guilt she felt while she was grieving. She felt tremendous guilt after the death of her son. Surely she could have done more for him. Surely she could have fought more aggressively for treatment for him. Looking back, knowing his medical problems, she worried about what choices she made that might have made his situation worse. She felt guilty that she didn’t do more for him. She felt guilty that she didn’t advocate more aggressively for him. She felt guilty about choices she made that she thought might have made him worse. The guilt was dragging her down, and she had to find a way to deal with it.

This mixture of grief and guilt happens to all of us. A friend dies, and we think: I should have reached out more, I should have been there for them. We think about the state of the environment, and we think: I should have gotten rid of that gas-guzzling car sooner. A parent or a spouse dies, and we think: I should have done more for them. I should have done this. I should not have done that. Those feelings of “should-have-done” are what lead us into guilt.

But Elaine Pagels points out that when you’re feeling guilty, it is because you have convinced yourself that you have a great deal of control over your life, and that you have a great deal of control over the lives of those close to you. After my father went into his final illness, my sisters and I talked a lot about what we should have done differently:– we should have talked Dad out of thus-and-so, we should have told him to get a second opinion… there were many things we felt we should have done differently. But after his death, when we could think more calmly, it became clear to us that we had done the best we could with what we knew at the time. It’s easy to look back on the past and say, “I should have known.” But the fact of the matter is that we didn’t know, nor could we have known.

This gets at a fundamental theological point. We human beings do not have a lot of control over our lives. We like to think we have a lot of control over our lives. We almost have to live our lives as though we have a lot of control. But in reality, we really don’t have as much control as we’d like to believe.

This is one area where the conservative Christians maybe have an advantage over us. For them, God controls absolutely everything, and once they die they feel fairly secure that they’re going to go up to heaven and everything will be fine. We Unitarian Universalists live in a more complex reality. We acknowledge the possibility of random events; that is, God does not control absolutely everything. We acknowledge the possibility that well-intentioned actions can have unanticipated consequences; that is, even when we are doing out best to do what is right, things can go wrong. As for an afterlife, some of us believe a pleasant afterlife, and since we are Universalists we know we all get to go to heaven. Some of us, like Socrates, see death as the most perfect night of sleep you could ever have, untroubled by dreams or fitfulness. Some of us are quite content with oblivion. But nearly all of us tend to focus on this world, not the next world. We worry less about what happens after death, and more about what happens here in this life. We want to make this world better. We believe that we have the ability, and the free will, to make this life better. In short, we are perfect candidates for guilt.

Back in the 1970s, the Unitarian Universalist theologian William R. Jones pointed out that within Unitarian Universalism, while the theists among us believe in God, and the humanists among us don’t believe in God, both parties believe in “radical [human] freedom and autonomy.” We are all existentialists. We have been thrown into an absurd world, and it is up to us to make meaning out of that world. The way we make meaning is through our actions. We cannot know all possible results of our actions, and fairly often our actions result in unforeseen consequences — because it is simply impossible for us to foresee every consequence of each action we take.

If we can seriously acknowledge this, we have taken the first step towards releasing ourselves from some of the burden of guilt that we might carry around. We do the best we can, knowing that oftentimes things are not going to turn out as we had hoped. There will always be things we could not anticipate. Of course we’ll still feel guilty about decisions we made that didn’t turn out well. But once we can accept that we have less control than we’d like to think, guilt will have a lot less power over us.

Once guilt has less power over us, then grief becomes a lot more manageable. If we’re not spending all our time thinking: “I should’ve done this,” or “I should’ve done that” — once we relieve ourselves of some of the burden of guilt, then we can actually do something with our grief.

Which brings me to the next point. Grieving is usually a fairly lengthy process, and there’s no good way to speed it up. I’ve learned a lot about the grieving process from hospice workers. They typically tell us that after someone close to you dies, the most intense grieving will take about a year, often with a moment of intense grief on the first anniversary of that person’s death. Then, so they tell us, we can expect another year of somewhat less intense grief. After the second anniversary of that person’s death, the grief tapers off to a much more manageable level. Of course everyone is different, but the general experience of hospice nurses and hospice chaplains tells us that after someone close to us dies, most of us can expect about two years of grief.

However, our society expects us to be done with grieving in a few weeks. As a minister, I’ve noticed this again and again. I’ll watch as someone loses a spouse, or a parent, and they get a lot of support from their workplace for about two weeks, and from their friends for about two months. Then they’re expected to be back to normal. Yet what I’ve seen again and again — and what I’ve experienced myself after the death of each of my parents — is that the worst of time grief seems to come about three months in, give or take a month. It’s at about three months in when the numbness wears off, and suddenly the feelings of grief become most acute. And three months is past the time when our society expects us to be done with grieving, when everyone expects us to be “back to normal.”

But if you try to get “back to normal” too quickly, you can actually prolong your grief. During those two years of more intense grief, you have to take the time to allow yourself to grieve. If your life if filled with busy activity, allowing you no time to grieve, what seems to happen is that it takes longer than two years to get through the worst of grief. This, by the way, is one reason some people come here to attend Sunday services. Quite a few people start coming to Sunday services in the aftermath of the death of someone close to them. They come here to have some time for themselves, where they can grieve without being interrupted. Because you can sit here, going through the motions — pretending that you’re listening to the sermon, standing up and mouthing the words to the hymns — but what you’re really doing is dealing with grief. We need places like this, where we are allowed to sit and grieve if we need to.

Our society doesn’t allow much space for grieving. Yes, we have developed grief support groups, and you can go see a therapist. You can install a grief app on your phone to help you grieve. Unfortunately, our society wants us to use grief groups and therapy and grief apps to hasten the grieving process, so that people can become more productive. That’s what our society wants us to do — be more productive. Whereas actually what we need is time to just be — we need to spend less time doing, less time doing therapy and doing grief group and doing our grief app — we need to spend more time just being human.

Trying to hurry through grief doesn’t work. Of course you should use a grief app if that works for you. Of course you should see a therapist if you can afford it and if that will help you in your grieving. Of course you should participate in a grief support group if that’s going to help you. But don’t expect these things are going to make the grieving end more quickly. If you try to hurry through your grief, it will come back later to haunt you — just like a ghost in those old ghost stories. When we try to hurry through grief, what we are actually doing is ignoring our essential humanity. We are trying to pretend that we are machines that just need a little metaphorical oil to function more smoothly. We are trying to pretend that we are computers that happen to have a software bug called grief, and if we just get the right app, or if we just update our operating system, we can get rid of this bug. As a minister, I see this happening again and again. People try to hurry through grief, they try to hack their grief, they try to fix their grief as if grief is something that is broken — and it doesn’t work. You can’t hurry grief. You can’t hack grief. You can’t fix grief.

Grief happens when someone we love, or something we love, is gone. If you want to get rid of grief, the only way to do that is by getting rid of love. If you don’t love anything, then you won’t grieve; you will be nothing more than a machine. Once you open your heart to love, you open yourself to the possibility of grief.

This brings me to the final point I’d like to make about grief. Grief happens when something or someone you love is gone. From this, a logical consequence follows: When we are surrounded by love, then we will be supported in times of grief. Family, friends, and/or communities like First Parish can surround us with love. Love is what we need as we move through grief.

Because of this, it makes sense to strengthen our ties with those groups where we can be surrounded by love. For many of us, our immediate families will be one of the most important groups to surround us with love. (However, I do want to acknowledge that not everyone’s immediate family has the possibility of being filled with love, and sometimes some of us have to get out of our immediate families.) But even those of us with immediate families that are filled with love need something beyond our immediate families. To that end, we might cultivate circles of friends and acquaintances. Even more important, in my opinion, are communities like First Parish, organized communities of friends and acquaintances where we share common values and where there are mechanisms in place the help us reach out to one another. We need communities like First Parish where people know what it is to grieve, and where people know what it is to love.

All this takes time. Strengthening our families takes time. Building networks of friends and acquaintances takes time. Making caring communities like First Parish takes time. Yet we are pressured by society to spend less and less time on these things. We are pressured by society to spend more and more time being busy and productive.

I’d like to suggest that this is where we want to be counter-cultural. Let’s resist that pressure to be busy and productive all the time. Let’s strengthen our families, nurture our friendships, be part of communities like First Parish. These are the things that allow us to be fully human.

To grieve is to be human. To love is to be human. And maybe this is the real problem with grief these days, and the problem with love — our society does not value the time we need to spend in being human. But I would suggest to you that you will find it to be worth your while to become more human, even if that means you are less productive. Become more human. Fill your life with love. That is what we are meant to do.

March 19, 2023