Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: Henry David Thoreau

  • What Do You Do with Grief?

    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 first reading was the poem “Forty” by Hoang Trinh, trans. Huynh Sanh Trong, from the book An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems: From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries Hardcover, ed. Huynh Sanh Thong (Yale Univ. Press, 1996). (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    The second reading is a short poem by Lew Welch, number 2 from “The Hermit Songs.” (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    The third reading was a short poem by Nanao Sakaki titled “Why climb a mountain?” from the book How To Live on the Planet Earth: Collected Poems. (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    Sermon

    I wanted to talk with you this morning about grief solely because so many of you have spoken to me about your own grief. So this is a topic chosen, as it were, by the congregation.

    When speaking about grief, it’s easy to adopt a solemn and sad demeanor. However, I prefer a different approach. I’ll begin with some strictly pragmatic remarks about grief, and I’ll conclude with some thoughts about spiritual paths for handling grief.

    Here begin the pragmatic remarks.

    To begin with, we should recognize that grief is a normal part of life. Grief may not be fun, or pleasant, but it is not the same as trauma. Grief is normal, trauma is excessive. Grief can be associated with trauma, but trauma is when something happens to you that takes more than ordinary resources to cope with. If you’re dealing with trauma, I hope you’re able to get outside help; but what I’m going to talk about this morning is ordinary everyday grief.

    It sometimes seems that we only think of grief as something that happens when a person you love has died. However, there are many other things that can cause grief. In fact, grief isn’t necessarily sad — during weddings, people often cry from grief, but it’s happy grief, not sad grief. Most often, grief happens when suddenly life isn’t the same any more; or to put it more precisely, we tend to experience grief when we experience loss. Since things are constantly changing, guess what — that makes grief a frequent occurrence, and a normal part of life.

    Let me give you some examples of grief that does not involve someone dying.

    Many people experience grief in midlife, often in the late thirties or early forties. The first reading this morning, the poem titled “Forty,” expresses this kind of grief very well. I remember being in a group of older people and one younger man; the younger man was feeling downhearted because he had just turned thirty-six. Most of the older people dismissed his grief, laughing and saying, “Oh you’re not old yet.” But to himself, he was old compared to someone in their late teens. He was, in fact, experiencing the loss of his youth. It was good he was aware of his grief, and could talk about it; maybe it wasn’t so good that older people laughed at his sense of loss and grief.

    Next, here’s an example of what we might call good grief. When people leave a job they dislike and find a better job, they often experience grief. Even though you hated the old job that you left, there were probably a one or two things you liked about it — perhaps one or two co-workers you liked, or a place you went to lunch. Thus, even if you hated the job, you might experience some grief due to the change in you daily habits. It might be good grief — you now have a better job — but it’s still grief.

    Another example of good grief: I already mentioned people crying at weddings. People experience grief at a happy occasion like a wedding for the simple reason that a wedding represents a moment of huge change; familes change, habits change, social status changes. I have a vivid memory of one wedding at which I officiated. Both people in the couple cried the whole wedding service — not just looking a little weepy, I’m talking about tears streaming down their cheeks. Of course they were happy, but they were also aware enough to know that their wedding meant big changes; changes not just in their relationship, but in the relationship of everyone connected with them. So they cried, because they were aware of the loss. Their grief was good grief, but it was still grief.

    Grief can also arise from what’s going in in wider society. We live in a time in our country when an old order is being dismantled, and a new order is being constructed. The changes include everything from LGBTQIA rights, to the Department of Government Efficiency. As a result of all these changes, we have lost sight of old norms, and everything feels unfamiliar. We may support some of these changes, we may oppose some of these changes, but everyone is feeling grief, because the old order is passing away.

    Now, the funny thing about grief is that it’s additive. For example, if you feel good grief from a recent wedding, and sad grief from the passing of the old order in the United States, and good grief from losing a job that you disliked, and sad grief from the death of a pet — all that grief adds up. If, in addition to all that, someone close to you dies: well, you’ve got a whole lot of grief in your life. You may not be aware of all the grief in your life — you may only be aware of the big moments of grief, such as the death of a loved one — but all that background grief is also there. Thus if you experience a major loss on top of a lot of background grief, you can find yourself immersed in a large amount of grief.

    Because grief is additive, it’s not a bad idea to become more aware of all grief in your life. This is why I’m giving so many examples of what cause grief, and let me give a few more. The birth of a child can cause grief — it’s usually good grief, but it’s still a major change. Moving out of childhood into your teen years can cause grief; similarly, aging can lead to grief. Leaving home to go to college or the military can result in grief — usually good grief, but grief nonetheless. When children leave home and you become an an empty nester, it may be good grief or sad grief (depending on your relationship with your children), but it’s still a loss, which can cause grief. Retirement often results in major grief. You get the idea, and I’m sure you can think of other examples in your own life.

    Now the question becomes: what are we going to do with all that grief? In our culture, the usual approach is to ignore all the grief and loss in your life. This strategy can be quite effective for quite a long time, maybe for your whole life. But ignoring grief exposes you to the risk that some big grief will come along and put you over the edge, grief-wise. The opposite approach is to wallow in your grief. This seems to be an effective strategy for some people, but I can’t recommend it, because wallowing in grief can be really hard on the people around you. Thus, the best approach is probably to find some middle way between ignoring grief and wallowing in grief.

    As we consider how to find a middle way for managing the grief in our lives, we have to consider the fact that grief may never quite disappear. The most obvious example is when someone close to you dies: you grieve because you love them, and they’re no longer alive; the only way to stop grieving would be to tell yourself that you never loved them. Another obvious example is the grief that can happen when you’re no longer a child: obviously it’s good to grow up, but if you have even a partially happy childhood, growing up means losing a sense of magic, what we might call unicorns and rainbows. To not feel real grief at the end of childhood would be (in a sense) to betray the unicorns and rainbows and anything that was good about childhood. Yet while grief may not ever go away completely, the day usually comes when your feelings are no longer so raw. Or to put it another way, the day usually comes when you’ve gained whatever wisdom and self-knowledge has grown out of that grief. This is why a middle way is so important. If you wallow in your grief, it’s really hard to attain that wisdom and self-knowledge. And if you ignore your grief, again it’s almost impossible to attain that wisdom and knowledge.

    So to be practical for a moment, how can we get to that point of wisdom and self-knowledge, the point where grief is no longer so raw? I’m going to suggest two spiritual paths that may help get you to that point. Mind you, there are a great many paths and techniques that can help deal with grief, including: simply waiting it out; distracting yourself; thinking about others worse off than you; doing psychotherapy; joining grief support groups; and so on. Use whatever paths and techniques that work for you. I’m just going to mention two spiritual paths that may also help.

    The first spiritual path is hinted at in the poem by by Nanao Sakaki, the third reading this morning. Sakaki was a Buddhist, and his poem tells us how the individual self is a kind of illusion.

    This poem describes a classic spiritual path that can be found in different forms in many religious traditions. This is the spiritual path that helps us understand that none of us is an individual self that’s somehow separate from the universe; what I think of as my “self” is nothing more nor less than a tiny but integral part of the entire universe.

    This spiritual path has proved helpful to some people who are grieving: while not diminishing your individual grief, it puts your individual grief into a much wider perspective. A lovely example of this spiritual path from our own religious tradition is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s long poem “Threnody.” Emerson wrote this poem about his eldest child Waldo, who died at just five years old. Not surprisingly, Emerson experienced an enormous sense of grief upon Waldo’s death. In the first half of “Threnody,” Emerson expresses his great grief; but in the second half of the poem, a mysterious voice Emerson calls “the deep Heart” speaks:

    The deep Heart answered, Weepest thou?…
    Taught he not thee, — the man of eld,
    Whose eyes within his eyes beheld
    Heaven’s numerous hierarchy span
    The mystic gulf from God to man?…

    In this second half of the poem, the voice of the Deep Heart makes the poet realize how little he knows, and how little he understands the death of his child. It’s a sort of a Transcendentalist version of the Bible story of Job. In the first half of the Bible story, Job loses all his wealth, loses his family, loses his health, loses almost everything. In the second half of the Bible story, Job encounters God (who is similar to the Deep heart in Emerson’s poem), and God shows Job how much larger the universe is than his tiny human self. Both the book of Job and Emerson’s “Threnody” say much the same thing that the Buddhist Nanao Sakaki says in his poem about the mountain: our individual selves are actually quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things, yet they are also an integral part of the gran scheme of things. Indeed, the Buddhist spiritual practice of meditation can be used to achieve that same understanding. So can the Christian and Jewish practices of prayer, which can make us apprehend something that is far, far greater than our tiny mortal selves.

    For the right person, this spiritual path can really help deal with grief. However, like any spiritual path, this spiritual path is not for everyone. If it works for you, use it! Speaking personally, it doesn’t work for me.

    A different spiritual path that may help some people deal with grief is hinted at in the second reading this morning, the short poem by Lew Welch. In our own religious tradition, this is the spiritual path followed by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is best known for going to live in a cabin at Walden Pond. Part of the reason Thoreau went to Walden Pond was to write a book commemorating time spent with his brother John; John had died suddenly from lockjaw a couple of years before Thoreau went to Walden. Thoreau experienced great grief at the sudden death of his older brother. At times he managed his grief much the way Emerson did, looking towards some vast reality that transcended his self. But he also paid close attention to what was immediately in front of him. So he did things like measuring the water temperature of various wells and springs in town, comparing them with the water temperature of Walden Pond (the pond water was colder than the wells and springs). He liked to name many of the plants and animals with their scientific names — Lepus americanus, Apios tuberosa, Hirundo bicolor; and where Emerson’s poem refers only to generic sparrows, Thoreau’s book distinguishes between different species, like the song sparrow and the field sparrow.

    This is the spiritual path that Lew Welch describes in his poem. If you step outside and look closely, there might be three hundred things nobody understands, and how many can you find? Unfortunately, this spiritual path is often dismissed as not being spiritual; it is merely science and inquiry. Yet for some people, it is a true spiritual path. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about this spiritual path in her book “Gathering Moss” when she describes spending an entire summer figuring out how one obscure species of moss manages to spread its spores; she discovered that the spores stuck to chipmunk feet, and that’s how they spread. To paraphrase Lew Welch, she managed to understand something that nobody understood before. Or I think about a scientific paper I once read on a small flowering plant called narrowleaf cow wheat (Melampyrum lineare). Botanist Martin Piehl spent three field seasons in the late 1950s carefully excavating the root systems of narrowleaf cow wheat, and, he reported, “after repeated attempts involving careful brushing away of sand, a thread-like rootlet was found attached to a host by a near-microscopic, hemispherical enlargement.” (1)

    Thoreau, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Lew Welch would each fully understand that what they were doing was a kind of spiritual practice. Neither prayer meditation and prayer works for me, but the older I get, the more I find this spiritual path helps me handle grief. Unlike Martin Piehl or Robin Wall Kimmerer, I’ve never found something nobody’s ever seen; but the simple act of looking closely and finding things that I don’t understand helps me learn my place in the universe; and over time, this has helped me to move through grief to a place of greater wisdom and self-awareness.

    I don’t expect many people will want to bother with this last spiritual path, nor am I telling you about it so that you will try to follow it. But there are people who try the major spiritual practices — meditation, prayer, and so on — and when those spiritual paths don’t work, they think they have to either compromise their spiritual selves, or give up on spirituality altogether. If you’re one of those people, I wanted you to know that there are other spiritual paths. Not only that, but you might already be following a spiritual path — some kind of practice or discipline that gives you comfort in hard times, something that helps you understand your place in the universe, something that puts your life into a greater perspective.

    Often — not always, but often — we actually have the spiritual tools we need close to hand. And a major purpose of our free and open religious tradition is to allow people to come together in community to share their experiences of spiritual paths, and to affirm the diversity of spiritual paths that exist in the world.

    Note

    (1) Martin A. Piehl, “The Parasitic Behavior of Melampyrum lineare,” Rhodora Vol. 64, No. 757 (January-March, 1962), p. 17.

    A small woodland flower.
    Melampyrum lineare (photo copyright (c) Dan Harper 2024).

  • Another Alternative: Religious Naturalism

    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 was from the essay “What Is Religious Naturalism?” by Jerome A. Stone:

    “Religious naturalism is a type of naturalism. Hence we start with naturalism. This is a set of beliefs and attitudes that focuses on this world. On the negative side it involves the assertion that there seems to be no ontologically distinct and superior realm (such as God, soul or heaven) to ground, explain, or give meaning to this world. On the positive side it affirms that attention should be focused on the events and processes of this world to provide what degree of explanation and meaning are possible to this life. While this world is not self-sufficient in the sense of providing by itself all of the meaning that we would like, it is sufficient in the sense of providing enough meaning for us to cope.”

    The second reading was the poem “In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, Thinking of Rachel Carson,” by Anthony Walton.

    Sermon: Another Alternative: Religious Naturalism

    Probably most of us here this morning are firm believers in science. We believe that science is firmly grounded in the natural world. Science doesn’t need any supernatural elements — there’s no need of an afterlife, for example; no need for angels or demons or genies; no need for gods, goddesses, or other deities guiding our lives. As a result, many people give up on religions, because religions always seem to be full of supernatural elements.

    This is a social trend that has been going on since at least the seventeenth century in Europe, when Baruch Spinoza rejected the idea that the Bible was divinely inspired, and raised questions about the nature of God. By the eighteenth century, a growing number of freethinkers, people who rejected many of the fundamental doctrines of Western religion, began to emerge. One such freethinker was Thomas Paine, who wrote the pamphlet Common Sense which did so much to further the cause of independence from Great Britain. Paine also wrote a treatise titled “The Age of Reason” which called the supernatural elements of the Bible:

    “If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such a miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is,– Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.” (Pt. I, Ch. 17, The Age of Reason)

    Paine said that while he liked the teachings of Jesus, many of the stories about Jesus found in the Bible are lies. It’s worth knowing about Paine because in today’s political debates we hear arguments that America was founded on the tenets of orthodox conservative Christianity; yet here is one of America’s founders arguing quite forcefully against orthodox Christianity.

    The debate about miracles and supernaturalism continued in nineteenth century New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who served as a Unitarian minister for eight years before becoming a full-time writer, infuriated the religious establishment when he said that the miracles of the Bible have been grossly misunderstood. Here’s Emerson from his Divinity School Address:

    “Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul…. The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. [Jesus] spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle… and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”

    Emerson’s younger colleague Henry David Thoreau found miracles in his close observations of the natural world. Thoreau said we need to face up to reality as it actually is. This is what he wrote in his book Walden:

    “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

    Thoreau was telling us that this life has miracles enough in it, and we don’t need to add any miracles to it. Thoreau remained open to the insights of traditional religious and spiritual wisdom — not just Christian wisdom, but the wisdom that can be found in all spiritual and religious traditions — but he kept his focus firmly on this world. This present life is sufficient, said Thoreau: “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” So he did not reject religion. He simply wanted his religion to remain focused on this world, the world he could directly experience.

    Many other religious naturalists emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Walt Whitman, whose poetry dealt with the here and now, could be called a religious naturalist. Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois has been called a religious naturalist. Religious naturalists often felt uncomfortable in organized religion. So for example the poet James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the words to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,” felt he lacked religiosity, but to me it seems like he was forced into that feeling because the only definition of religiosity that he knew involved supernatural religion.

    In the late twentieth century, the philosopher Jerome Stone began researching the various people who could be classified as religious naturalists. One of Jerome Stone’s most interesting discoveries was that religious naturalists cannot simply be lumped in with religious atheists. Some religious naturalists choose to use the word “God,” while others feel “God” is not a useful concept. So the biologist Ursula Goodenough, who calls herself a religious naturalist, and who feels that the natural miracles investigated by the science of biology are sufficiently miraculous, sees no need to use the word “God.” By contrast, Bernard Loomer — he’s the person who gave us the phrase “the interdependent web of existence” — is a religious naturalist who feels that God is a useful and important philosophical concept.

    Thus religious naturalists interpret “God” in a variety of ways. Some religious naturalists interpret “God” as the natural laws of the universe, or as a human social construct, and so on. Other religious naturalists get along fine without God. So if you’re a religious naturalist, you can decide whether to use the word “God” or not. Yet all religious naturalists find common ground in their rejection of the supernatural and their embrace of this world. I like this aspect of religious naturalism, because it can facilitate communication across divisions. The search for truth is always communal, and anything that helps us talk across our divisions helps the search for truth.

    As I’ve said before, I’m a devoted follower of Haven’t-figured-it-out-yet-ism — in other words, I don’t want to put a name to my ill-formed thoughts and feelings. But I guess I’d call myself “religious naturalism-adjacent.” I like the religious naturalists I’ve met in person; I took a class with Jerry Stone twenty years ago, and admired his humane and unpretentious attitude towards life.

    And I appreciate the way religious naturalists have dealt with arguments about the existence of God. I grew up as a Unitarian Universalist, and the old battle between humanists and the theists doesn’t seem to have progressed much since I was a child. Instead of arguing about the existence of God, the religious naturalists want you to define what it is that you mean when you say the word “God,” and that has deepened my own spiritual life.

    I also appreciate that religious naturalists focus on this world. And if we don’t have to worry about some supernatural afterlife, this releases our energies to deal with the problems we face here and now. This also releases us to appreciate the beauties of the here and now. If there’s a heaven, or an afterlife, or reincarnation, it will come in its own good time; in the mean time, here we are with reality all around us waiting to be experienced. Even when beauties exist side by side with horrors, it is better to face up to the horrors and do what we can to end them, than to wait for some heaven which may never arrive.

    Our contemporary society does not encourage us to face both beauty and horror. Instead, our contemporary society encourages passivity and quietism. Religious quietism pervades our society, as when we say: “It’s in God’s hands,” or “It was meant to be,” or “Whatever happens, happens for the best.” Belief in the supernatural need not deteriorate into quietism, and I am firmly allied with those who believe in a God of justice and truth and love. But we live in a world where some religious people use quietism to prevent necessary change, religions that teach that women are meant to be subordinate to men, that White Christians are meant to rule everyone else, that rich people are rich because they are favored by God. Quietism is also encouraged by secular society, by a secular culture that teaches us to remain passive consumers of media. This is a form of anesthesia no different from the numbing effects of religious quietism; both forms of quietism want to convince us that we cannot change the world.

    Instead of anesthetizing us, religious naturalism encourages the kind of spiritual practices that keep us engaged with reality, with the here and now. Think of Henry Thoreau next to his cabin at Walden Pond, kneeling down in the woods in order to the closest attention to the natural world, then writing about what he observed in his journal. Remember, too, that his cabin was a station on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau was not escaping from the world through supernatural beliefs, nor was he escaping from the world by ignoring the realities of injustice. Obviously, religious naturalism is not the only kind of religion that engages fully with this world — but it does set a high standard for other religious attitudes to match.

  • Why I’m a Mystic (But Maybe You Shouldn’t Be)

    Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    From the essay “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

    Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

    From Louisa May Alcott’s satire on Transcendentalism, “Transcendental Wild Oats”:

    “Each member [of the community] is to perform the work for which experience, strength, and taste best fit him,” continued Dictator Lion. “Thus drudgery and disorder will be avoided and harmony prevail. We shall rise at dawn, begin the day by bathing, followed by music, and then a chaste repast of fruit and bread. Each one finds congenial occupation till the meridian meal; when some deep-searching conversation gives rest to the body and development to the mind. Healthful labor again engages us till the last meal, when we assemble in social communion, prolonged till sunset, when we retire to sweet repose, ready for the next day’s activity.”

    “What part of the work do you incline to yourself?” asked Sister Hope, with a humorous glimmer in her keen eyes.

    “I shall wait till it is made clear to me. Being in preference to doing is the great aim, and this comes to us rather by a resigned willingness than a wilful activity, which is a check to all divine growth,” responded Brother Timon.

    “I thought so.” And Mrs. Lamb sighed audibly, for during the year he had spent in her family Brother Timon had so faithfully carried out his idea of “being, not doing,” that she had found his “divine growth” both an expensive and unsatisfactory process.

    Sermon: “Why I’m a Mystic (But Maybe You Shouldn’t Be)”

    When I was 16, the summer camp I worked for sent me to a weekend workshop led by Steve van Matre, an environmental educator. Steve van Matre was an observant educator. After several years of working with kids, he noticed that conventional environmental education, with its emphasis on teaching identification skills and intellectual concepts, didn’t wind up producing environmentalists. So he, and the other environmental educators with whom he worked, began developing activities that would — to use his words — “turn people on to Nature.”

    One group of these new activities was called “solitude enhancing activities.” Van Matre felt that most of the time when we are supposedly in solitude, we are actually listening to a little internal voice that is constantly talking. Van Matre called this voice “the little reprobate in the attic of your mind,” and he said that it was a dangerous voice in some ways, because it keeps us from living in the present. (1)

    When he said this, for the first time I became aware of that little voice in my own head. And that little reprobate in the attic of my mind did in fact talk on and on with no respite. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t un-notice it: it was constantly talking, on and on and on, and saying (if I were to be honest with myself) little or nothing of interest.

    Van Matre outlined several activities that environmental educators could use to help quiet that “little reprobate in the attic of your mind.” I decided that I wanted to teach those activities to this children I worked with in the summer. Since I was brought up in a family of educators, I knew that if you’re going to teach something, it’s a good idea to try doing it yourself first. So I tried some of van Matre’s solitude enhancing activities.

    One of these activities, which called “Seton-Watching,” was to sit outdoors somewhere and do nothing but simply be aware. Van Matre had told us about a time when he did this: He went outdoors, and settled down to stay absolutely still for some lengthy period of time, perhaps half an hour. After sitting absolutely still and in silence for perhaps a quarter of an hour, a hummingbird came along to look at his red hat band. This prompted van Matre to look up, so he could see the hummingbird. The motion of his head startled the bird and it flew away before he could see it, and he concluded he would have been better off remaining motionless, instead of listening to the little voice in his head that told him to look up.

    I began trying this “Seton Watching” activity. One afternoon while sitting at the foot of a birch tree, the little reprobate in the attic of my mind finally stopped talking. In that moment, I suddenly became aware of — for want of a better way of describing it — the connectedness of the entire universe. It was quite a sensation. I then discovered that words were not adequate to describe this sensation — it was not in fact a sense of the connectedness of the universe, but something that couldn’t be put into words. Which makes sense, because this sensation only occurred when that little voice in my head stopped talking. Words are very powerful and very useful, but there are other kinds of knowing that have nothing to do with words; and trying to describe those other kinds of knowing with words must obviously be a pointless exercise.

    It turns out that experiences like this are fairly common. These experiences have been classed together under the title “mystical experiences.” When the psychologist William James studied mystical experiences, he argued they had two defining features. First, said James, the person who has a mystical experience “immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” James goes on to add: “It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.” Second, James said, mystical states are experienced by those who have them as a kind of knowing: “They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” James also pointed out that mystical experiences tend to be short-lived and transient, and they are generally passive. (2)

    Mystical experiences are fairly common — William James believed that as many as a quarter of all people have them. And that makes me wonder — what good are these experiences? I’m less interested in whether these experiences are useful, but instead I wonder whether these experiences tend to move you towards or away from truth and goodness. To use the language of the Unitarian minister and mystic Theodore Parker: the moral arc of the universe is long, and the question is whether these experiences help bend it towards justice, or not.

    I think mystical experiences can lead to justice, but they can also lead to injustice. In my observation, mystical experiences, when supported by the right kind of community, can strengthen individuals to help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. However, I’ve also seen how mystical experiences may twist an individual towards psychopathologies like narcissism and delusion, or embolden an individual to abuse their power and indulge their greed.

    Here’s what I think causes someone to follow one or the other of these two possible paths. If someone has a mystical experience and they think it makes them special and somehow better than other people, that can prove to be the path to psychopathology or abusiveness. These people tend to have mystical experiences outside of a supportive and critical community. They are hyper-individualists, and the combination of mysticism and individualism can create a toxic brew. On the other hand, if someone has a mystical experience and is part of a community that holds them accountable for their actions, then a mystical experience can help that person bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. A mystical experience can provide a vision for a better future where Earth shall be fair and all her people one.

    In the second reading this morning, the excerpt from “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Louisa May Alcott tells a story of how mysticism can be destructive. “Transcendental Wild Oats” is based on Alcott’s lived experience. When she was a girl, her father moved his family to Fruitlands, a utopian community in Harvard, Massachusetts. The men who started the Fruitlands community were mystics, and their mystical insights informed them — so they said — of how to run the perfect human community. But the Fruitlands community fell apart in seven short months. The male mystics in charge of the community were unable to grow the crops they were depending on, unable to do anything practical, while the women in the community did their best to keep the children safe and feed everyone. Louisa May Alcott’s story “Transcendental Wild Oats” is a thinly disguised satire of the Fruitlands community. Alcott lays bare the sexism and the ignorance of the men whose abuse of their mystical experiences made the lives of other people miserable.

    (I should note in passing that Louisa May Alcott was a Unitarian. But hers was not an individualistic religion; hers was a religion of community, connection, and mutual support.)

    In our first reading, another Unitarian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, described one of his own mystical experiences. In a now-famous image, Emerson wrote: “…All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Christopher Cranch, a contemporary of Emerson’s and a fellow Unitarian minister, drew a cartoon making fun of Emerson’s transparent eye-ball: the cartoon shows an eyeball wearing a top hat atop a tiny body with long spindly legs. (3) I think what makes Emerson’s transparent eye-ball image so prone to mockery is the fact that it’s too individualistic. This is my criticism of Emerson’s mysticism: he is too self-centered. Emerson had the opportunity to go out and wander in the fields and become a transparent eye-ball in part because he left all the housework, all the management of their children, to his wife, Lidian. (4) This sounds too much like the mysticism that Louisa May Alcott satirized. If you become a transparent eye-ball while wandering the fields in leisure, that will be quite different from the mystical experiences you might have while caring for children, or mending clothes, or cooking dinner for your family.

    And this brings me to another well-known mystic, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was raised as a Unitarian, but left in his early twenties because the church in Concord, where he was a member, refused to offer wholehearted support to the abolition of slavery. Thoreau’s most famous descriptions of his own mystical experiences occur in this book Walden. Once again, Thoreau’s mysticism is open to mockery. Critics of Thoreau love to tell the story of how Thoreau didn’t actually lead the life of a mystical hermit at Walden Pond — he went home regularly so his mother could do his laundry and cook him dinner. It’s easy to be a mystic when your mom cooks you dinner.

    But I think Thoreau’s critics miss the point. While it is true that Thoreau didn’t break out of the strict gender roles of his time, at least he did much of his own cooking and cleaning while living at Walden. And Thoreau had to go home regularly to help his father run the family business of manufacturing pencils (an appropriate role for his gender in those times). Equally important for our purposes, Thoreau also went home to attend meetings of the anti-slavery group led by his mother. The Thoreau family was part of the Underground Railroad, and Thoreau wrote that his cabin at Walden Pond served as a place to harbor fugitive slaves. And while he lived at Walden Pond, Thoreau spent that famous night in jail because he refused to pay taxes that went to support an unjust war.

    We can rightly criticize Thoreau for his sexism, the unquestioned sexism of his time. And it’s easy to make fun of his mysticism. But unlike the mysticism of the organizers of Fruitlands, Thoreau’s mysticism didn’t keep him from successfully growing his own food, and building his own house. And while Emerson’s mysticism can come across as self-indulgent, Thoreau’s mysticism gave him the strength to take courageous action against slavery, and against unjust war.

    When I had my own first mystical experience, I lived in Concord, where Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau had all lived. The Concord public schools gave us a heavy dose of the Concord authors, so at age sixteen I knew their stories. I had even started to read Thoreau’s Walden, and liked him the best of all the Concord authors. So when I had my own mystical experience, I had Thoreau’s example to show that mystical experiences could move one towards making the world a better place.

    The justification for a mystical experience is to help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. This helps explain Martin Luther King’s fascination with Thoreau. I suspect King had his own mystical experiences, which he no doubt understood from within his progressive Christian worldview. King understood how his deeply-felt religious experiences could give him the strength he needed to confront injustice. Nor is he the only one whose mystical experiences helped them bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. Hildegard de Bingen drew strength from her mysticism to enlarge the role of women within the confines of her medieval European society. Mahatma Gandhi drew on his mystical experiences to help him confront the evils of colonialism in India. And so on.

    Just remember that you don’t need to be a mystic in order to help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. Some people have mystical experiences, and some people don’t. Having a mystical experience doesn’t make you a better person; what makes you a better person is furthering the cause of truth and justice. But if you are one of those people who happens to have a mystical experience or two, may you use it to strengthen you to help make the world a better place.

    Notes

    (1) Van Matre’s approach is outlined in his books Acclimatizing, a Personal and Reflective Approach to a Natural Relationship (American Camping Assoc., 1974) and Acclimatization : A Sensory and Conceptual Approach to Ecological Involvement (American Camping Assoc., 1972). The quote comes from my notes of van Matre’s workshop on 6 May 1977.

    (2) William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 381.

    (3) Here’s Cranch’s cartoon:

    A sketch of a transparent eyeball on long spindly legs.
    from Wikimedia Commons, public domain image

    (4) For an account of busy Lidian’s daily life, see the biography by her daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, ed. by Delores Bird Carpenter (Boston: Twayne, 1981).