Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: meditation

  • 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).

  • Inner peace

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

    Readings

    The first reading was from a commentary on Psalm 23 by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. This is an interpretation of the phrase, “He restores my soul.”

    “The root of the Hebrew word yeshovev, translated here as ‘He restores,’ sometimes means ‘to grant rest,’ but its basic meaning is ‘to return.’ When one’s soul is troubled or worried, it is not at peace, as though it is not in its natural place, but distanced and dislocated. When the soul returns to its true place, the result is inner peace.

    The second reading was from the Confucian classic, The Great Learning, translated by A. Charles Muller, professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo:

    The way of great learning consists in manifesting one’s bright virtue, consists in loving the people, consists in stopping in perfect goodness.
    When you know where to stop, you have stability.
    When you have stability, you can be tranquil.
    When you are tranquil, you can be at ease.
    When you are at ease, you can deliberate.
    When you can deliberate you can attain your aims.
    Things have their roots and branches, affairs have their end and beginning. When you know what comes first and what comes last, then you are near the Way [of the Great Learning].

    The third reading was “The Peace of Wild Things,” a poem by Wendell Berry:

    When despair for the world grows in me
    and I wake in the night at the least sound
    in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
    I go and lie down where the wood drake
    rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
    I come into the peace of wild things
    who do not tax their lives with forethought
    of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
    And I feel above me the day-blind stars
    waiting with their light. For a time
    I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

    Sermon: “Inner Peace”

    For us Unitarian Universalists, the third reading this morning, the poem “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry, might be one of our most popular visions of how we might achieve inner peace. The poem tells us that when we are overwhelmed by despair and fear, we should go outside, find a pond where wild ducks and heron live, and there we can find peace.

    This poem reminds me of the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Walden tells the story of how Thoreau went and spent two years living next to Walden Pond, a small deep pond of clear still water. There’s a back story to Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond. While he lived there, he was writing a book about a boat trip he and his brother had taken some years before. His brother had died of tetanus a couple of years before Thoreau went to live at Walden. I’ve always imagined that part of the purpose behind living right next to a pond “where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water” was to allow Thoreau to regain the inner peace that had been overwhelmed by his brother’s sudden death at a young age.

    Nor is this idea of finding peace in wild places limited to Wendell Berry and Henry Thoreau. Many of us in this congregation will say that when we need respite from the cacophony of current events and the stress of day to day life, we take a walk in the woods. We are lucky here on the South Shore that even though we live in an area with a high density of human population, we also have lots of relatively wild places where we can “come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief.”

    As much as I personally like going outside to seek the peace of wild things (as Wendell Berry puts it), there are people for whom it doesn’t necessarily work to seek inner peace by being out in Nature. Some people just don’t find it peaceful to spend spend time outdoors. Then there are those who find it difficult to get outdoors, due to health or mobility limitations. There are also those who, because of our work or school schedules, find it difficult to get out into wild places except on weekends or holidays. What Wendell Berry calls “the peace of wild things” is one of my favorite ways to seek inner peace; but there can be times when it’s hard to do, and even though it works for me, it doesn’t work for everyone.

    This is going to be a theme for the first part of this sermon: There are many techniques for finding inner peace. But since we are all different, some techniques will work well for some people, but not others. And since we all change over time, a technique that works for you now might not work for you a few years from now; or a technique that didn’t work for you in the past might work for you now; or you might have a technique that you like but you just don’t have the time you need to devote to it right now.

    So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some techniques for finding inner peace. I’d like to start with an ancient Western technique for finding inner peace: prayer. In Western culture we usually think of prayer as a Christian practice, but it’s not that simple. Jews were praying before Christianity existed, and so were the ancient Greeks and Romans. Since both Jewish prayer and ancient pagan prayer predate Christianity, we should think of Christian prayer as just one subset of Western prayer practices and techniques. Today, there are humanists and atheists who pray, not because they believe in God — obviously they don’t — but because the technique of prayer is a part of our Western cultural inheritance.

    When we think of prayer more broadly, it tends to subvert the usual conceptions we have about prayer. Pop culture has reduced prayer to asking God for something you want. This is known as petitionary prayer, because you’re petitioning God for something. Scientists have even studied this aspect of prayer — what happens when people pray for someone who is sick, does it improve their health outcome? But petitionary prayer is only a part of the Western prayer tradition, and I’d like to look at two forms of Western prayer that are aimed at improving your inner peace.

    First there’s the technique called contemplative prayer, or as it has been popularized in recent years, centering prayer. The famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton did much to popularize this kind of prayer with his 1971 book titled “Contemplative Prayer.” As a Christian, Merton described centering prayer as a practice where you simply focus your attention on the Christian god. Non-believers use this prayer technique by focusing attention on this present world. So Henry David Thoreau, for example, wrote about sitting outside his cabin at Walden Pond and becoming “rapt in a revery” for hours at a time; I’d say that what Thoreau was doing was a type of centering prayer that focused, not on God, but on the natural world. Centering prayer is specifically designed to achieve inner peace through the contemplation of that which is good in this world.

    A second type of prayer that can help achieve inner peace is the practice of remembering others in your prayers. Traditionally, in Western folk practice, during your daily prayers you’d go through a mental list all the people whom you think might need or appreciate prayers. Sometimes this takes the form of petitionary prayer — petitioning God to heal someone from cancer, for example — but often it takes the form of simply thinking of people who are important to you. Humanists and atheists who pray aren’t going to petition God, but they may still devote part of their prayer time thinking of people they know who might appreciate their attention. Prayer lists like this aren’t specifically designed to achieve inner peace, but I’ve seen how people who remember others in their prayers do in fact achieve some degree of inner peace. This makes sense to me, because reminding yourself of how you are connected to other people you can be a calming influence. It’s a way of remembering the ties of love that bind you to other people and give your support. And while praying for people who are ill or facing other troubles may or may not help them, I’ve seen how it can have a calming effect on the person who is praying.

    So both centering prayer and old-fashioned prayer lists can help some people achieve inner peace. However, prayer doesn’t work for everyone. I’m one of the people it doesn’t work for. For some years, I tried many kinds of prayer, including centering prayer and prayer lists, and I finally concluded that prayer just doesn’t do much for me. But prayer does help a great many people achieve inner peace, and you can’t know if it works for you until you give it a serious trial.

    Next, let’s consider meditation and mindfulness as techniques for achieving inner peace. Meditation and mindfulness became popular in this country in the middle of the last century. Most of these meditation and mindfulness practices came from Hindu or Buddhist traditions. Transcendental Meditation, a hugely popular meditation practice in the 1970s and 1980s, came out of the Hindu tradition. Sitting meditation, which also became hugely popular in the 1970s and 1980s, was popularized in large part by Zen Buddhist practitioners like Alan Watts. People like Dr. Herbert Benson also created secular adaptations of meditation and mindfulness. In his 1975 book “The Relaxation Response,” Benson claimed that all you needed was some mental device to keep your mind from wandering, along with a passive attitude towards the process. According to Benson, you didn’t need the arcane mantras of something like Transcendental Meditation, nor did you need the elaborate religious structure of something like Zen Buddhism. Through such secular adaptations, many humanists and atheists have adopted meditation and mindfulness practices.

    Meditation and mindfulness are now a part of mainstream culture. Schools teach meditation to children and teens to help lower stress, and maybe find some inner peace. Some employers offer meditation classes and meditation rooms in the workplace. When you talk about achieving inner peace, many people assume that means meditating or engaging in mindfulness practices. This tends to annoy Christians and Jews who feel that prayer can offer the same benefits as meditation and mindfulness; how come it’s OK to teach Eastern religious techniques in the schools, but not Western religious techniques? I don’t want to get in the middle of that particular religious debate, but I do want to point out that meditation and mindfulness don’t work for everyone. Recent research has shown that a minority of people experience negative effects from meditation and mindfulness. I’m actually one of those people. I meditated for years, and meditation did help me achieve some degree of inner peace, but there were enough times that it didn’t make me feel good that I finally stopped.

    Sadly, then, although I gave both meditation and prayer a fair trial, although I had some success with both, eventually I wasn’t able to make them work. This, by the way, makes me feel inadequate as a minister; I’m supposed to be setting an example, yet here I am, a failure at both prayer and meditation, the two most popular techniques for achieving inner peace. Yet just be cause I failed doesn’t mean that you’re going to fail. If you’re searching for techniques to achieve inner peace, it’s worth trying prayer and meditation techniques.

    My failures with prayer and meditation have led me to an interesting conclusion that I think might be helpful to others. Part of my problem with both prayer and meditation arose because they are basically solitary activities. Yes, you can go to a meditation group, or you can join a prayer group, but prayer and meditation ultimately take place inside your head. I find this is also true in seeking out the peace of wild things: in Wendell Berry’s poem, he went out by himself to spend time with the wild drake and the heron. All this makes sense, because in order to achieve inner peace, you do need to spend some time in your head.

    Yet I began to realize what worked best for me were practices where I had to interact with other people. I think I first became aware of this through making music with other people. I’ve never found much inner peace in practicing music on my own, but I realized that doing music with other people was a fairly reliable way for me to achieve a degree of inner peace. Maybe in part this was because I’m not an especially good musician, and it was much more satisfactory to do music with people who are good musicians. Regardless of my own failings as a musician, I consistently found that when I did music with other people, I felt an increase in inner peace.

    Then I realized that the same thing was true of congregational life. When I was cooperating with other people in the congregation to make something happen, I could feel myself growing more peaceful. Although I didn’t have much success with individual spiritual practices like prayer or mindfulness or meditation, the experience of being part of a religious community did help me achieve inner peace. As more and more people began to say they were “spiritual but not religious,” I began to call myself “religious but not spiritual.” That is, although I was kind of a failure at individual spiritual practices, the communal and social aspects of communal religion did lead me to inner peace.

    I’ll give you some specific examples of communal religious activities that have helped me achieve at least some inner peace. And while you may skeptical about some of my examples, hold on to your doubts for a bit and I’ll try to explain.

    One obvious example of a communal religious practice that has provided me with some inner peace is being part of a congregation’s choir. I’ve sung in traditional choirs, once or twice with a gospel choir, with a folk music group, and now I play in this congregation’s bell choir. As I said before, I’m not an especially good musician, and I often find participating in choirs is difficult and frustrating — at the end of bell choir rehearsal, I often feel like my head is going to explode. Yet despite the frustrations, the sense of coming together with other people to do something I couldn’t do alone makes me feel less anxious and less alone, and ultimately moves me towards a feeling of inner peace.

    I also love being part of a team teaching in religious education programs. Last year, I taught in our OWL comprehensive sexuality education program with Mark and Holly; this year I’m teaching in the Coming of Age program with Tracey; and in the summer I help Ngoc run the ecology camp. Just like participating in a choir, teaching is often difficult and frustrating. Yet here again, despite the frustrations, I find I benefit the social aspects, both working with other adults and working with the kids. Teaching always takes me out of my own little personal concerns so that I feel a part of something larger than myself; that in turn lowers my levels of stress and anxiety; and that ultimately leads to a sense of inner peace.

    Another communal religious practice is committee work. I am not very good at committee work; I’m too impatient, and sometimes I find it hard to take the long view. But working with other people towards a common goal turns out to be good for me. If I can get past my impatience, if I can work through my frustrations, I eventually find I feel more peaceful when I’m a part a group working on a project together.

    I could go on, but you get the idea: working with other people to make a religious community function can lower stress and anxiety, reduce loneliness and isolation, and ultimately help us achieve a greater degree of inner peace. There may be a simple reason why this is so — perhaps it is merely because we humans are tribal animals, and we are meant to be working with others — and there may also be a deeper spiritual reason — we humans need to strive towards something greater than our individual selves.

    Whatever the case may be, I would argue that these days in-person contact and cooperation has become perhaps the most important benefits of religious communities. This is because we have so few opportunities to work together selflessly with others. We are increasingly isolated in today’s society. We increasingly buy everything we need online, so we don’t even have to go to the store any more. As a result, we’re in the midst of a well-documented epidemic of loneliness epidemic. Loneliness and isolation reduce your sense of inner peace, and yet there are fewer and fewer places where we can join with other people to work together on values-based projects. Because of this, while solitary spiritual practices like taking walks in the woods or meditating or praying still offer spiritual benefits, today the most important spiritual benefits come from being part of a religious community.

    We live in a strange world these days, where people on both sides of the political divide are convinced that they no longer have anything in common with the other side. We’ve gotten to this point in part because we spend so little time working together in face-to-face communities like First Parish. And with the diminishment of community life has come loneliness and isolation. We try to repair the damage through social media, but it turns out social media only makes things worse. It becomes a downwards spiral. The unsurprising result is a steep increase in anxiety and depression, political conflict, and a general feeling of malaise. Our lack of community involvement has greatly decreased our inner peace.

    So it is that I’ve come to believe that in this historical moment, the most effective technique for seeking inner peace is through community. It’s fine to seek the peace of wild things through solitary walks in the woods, but remember that Henry Thoreau actively participated in anti-slavery meetings while lived at Walden Pond. Prayer and meditation are well worth your while, but then you need a community to make sense out of the prayers and meditation. It is through being in community that we may transcend our troubles and worries, and return to the sense of inner peace.

  • Why I’m Not a Buddhist (But Maybe You Should Be)

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

    Opening words

    The opening words were the poem “Interbeing” by Thich Nhat Hanh. To read it, go to this webpage and scroll down.

    Readings

    The first reading comes from the book “Why I Am Not a Buddhist” by Evan Thompson, a philosopher who has studied Buddhist philosophy extensively:

    “I didn’t want to be someone who just wrote about Buddhist philosophy without practicing meditation and experiencing what the philosophy was supposedly about. ‘That’s like readings about sex and never having any,’ American Buddhist devotees would say to me…. Looking for a path forward, I visited many Buddhist meditation centers over the years of writing my philosophy dissertation, … and doing my postdoctoral work. But I couldn’t connect with any of them. It didn’t feel right to count my breath in Korean or chant in Japanese or try to do complex visualization of Tibetan Buddhist deities…. I wonder whether I was being too uptight and why I couldn’t just let go….”

    The second reading is from an essay by Rev. Takashi Kenryu Tsuji titled “The Heart of the Buddha-Dharma: Following the Jodo-Shinshu Path”:

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

    (As quoted by Jeff Wilson in Dixie Dharma, UNC Press, 2012)

    Sermon: Why I’m Not a Buddhist (But Maybe You Should Be)

    I’m going to begin with some introductory remarks. Then I’ll tell you why I’m not a Buddhist, even though I’m fascinated by Buddhism. And I’ll wind up talking about some forms of Buddhism that seem worthy of your attention.

    First, the introductory remarks:

    When First Parish posted this sermon topic on the Cohasset 143 Facebook page, one or two commenters made it clear why they are not Buddhists. One person made their point in simple, straightforward terms: “I am a Christian. I believe in Jesus Christ as My Lord [and] Savior.” Another person, presumably also a conservative Christian, wrote: “They [meaning Buddhists] don’t worship a God!” Actually, what this person meant was that Buddhists don’t worship the Christian God, which is a true statement. And if you’re a conservative Christian, these are both worthy reasons for not being a Buddhist.

    Yet another conservative Christian scornfully wrote: “‘I am the Lord thy God thou shalt not have false gods before me.’ — The First Commandment. (Did you not ‘get’ that basic point Reverend?)” This comment is worth paying attention to, because it’s an example of a conservative Christian assuming that everyone should believe exactly what they believe. But it’s not just conservative Christians who make this assumption. The vocal critic of religion Richard Dawkins takes the same attitude towards those who are not the kind of atheist he is; and Dawkins has an unfortunate tendency to anathematize atheists who differ from his own views, as for example atheists who belong to a religious organization like this one.

    I find these kinds of comments troubling mostly because they reveal an unpleasant truth about the current state of society in the United States today. All of us in the United States today are prone to believe that we are right and that people who disagree with us are wrong. We either hate Donald Trump or we hate Joe Biden, and anyone who disagrees with us is a horrible person. We are either right-to-lifers or we are pro-choicers, and anyone who disagrees with us is a horrible person. We are either conservative Christians, or we are not, and anyone who is not like us is a horrible person.

    Unfortunately, this kind of attitude makes it difficult to listen to those who might have different viewpoints or experiences from ours. As we are seeing in the House of Representatives right now, this kind of attitude makes it hard to have a functioning democracy. And we are all guilty of it. It’s so much a part of the atmosphere that I’m willing to bet everyone in this room has made a disparaging comment about someone with whom they disagree. I know I’ve done it.

    It’s not good for us to be this way. This kind of thing can make us angry, and when you get angry you can feel the negative effects of that anger in your body.

    That’s one of the reasons I wanted to give this sermon. I am not giving a sermon titled, “I’m not a Buddhist, and you shouldn’t be either or you’ll burn in hell.” I am not giving a sermon titled, “I’m a Buddhist and if you were a truly good person, you’d be one too.” Instead, I’m trying to respect the diversity in our world, while at the same time trying to think with you about what is true.

    That’s the introduction. Now I’ll tell you very briefly why I’m not a Buddhist.

    When I was a Unitarian Universalist teenager, Pat Green, the assistant minister of our church ran our youth group, and one week he talked to us about Zen Buddhism. Pat told us about “the sound of one hand clapping” and sitting meditation and all the rest. All of us in the youth group were fascinated. And I continued to try to learn about Zen Buddhism over the next couple of decades. Ultimately, I discovered that learning about Buddhism was a lot of work — I’m one of those people who, if I’m going to do something, have to pursue the highest level of excellence. I could have wound up like the philosopher Evan Thompson in the first reading, who not only read Buddhist philosophy in the original languages, but also spent a great deal of time learning Buddhist practices. Unlike Evan Thompson, I had grown up in a religious tradition that I felt comfortable in, and I finally realized that I was doing just fine as a Unitarian Universalist. Maybe I was simply lazy, but eventually I stopped trying to pursue Zen Buddhism, or any kind of Buddhist practice.

    So that’s why I’m not a Buddhist. But one thing I hope you noticed in that little story is that it’s perfectly acceptable for a Unitarian Universalist to participate in more than one religious tradition. You can be a Unitarian Universalist, while at the same time practicing Buddhism, or taking Buddhism seriously. Nor is this something that’s limited to Unitarian Universalists. It is increasingly common in Western society for a person to have more than one religious affiliation. This has long been the case in other societies — as for example in some east Asian societies, where it is common for an individual to feel connected to Buddhism, Daoism, and folk religions all at the same time. We began to see multiple religious affiliations emerge in the West in the middle of the last century. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton was one of the people who popularized the notion of multiple religious affiliations, when he began to augment his Christian practices with Buddhist practices.

    The notion of having multiple religious affiliations seriously annoys some conservative Christians, as we heard at the beginning of this sermon. We have a different point of view. We feel it’s OK to have multiple religious affiliations. Even if you have only one religious affiliation, we feel that encountering other religious traditions can help widen our perspectives and give us a better understanding of what it means to be human. With that in mind, I’d like to point out some varieties of Buddhism that might be worthy of your attention.

    First and foremost, we have a Buddhist meditation group right here within First Parish. This group is led by Christine Allen, who is both a practicing Buddhist and a Unitarian Universalist. She has spent years developing her own Buddhist meditation practice, and has a deep understanding of Buddhist philosophy. You can find one of her dharma talks on the First Parish website, a talk she gave at a meditation retreat she led in Trueblood Hall last year. If you’re looking for an introduction to Buddhist practice and thought, Christine Allen and the First Parish meditation group would be a good place to start.

    Our First Parish group represents a strand of Buddhism that we might call Westernized Buddhism. As Buddhism spread around the world from India where it originated, it has taken on the cultural characteristics of the places it has spread to. Westernized Buddhism adapts Buddhist thought and practice to Western cultures and Western languages. This makes it easier for Westerners to engage with Buddhism, without having to learn another language or new cultural norms.

    I do have to point out that there is one form of Westernized Buddhism that it’s best to avoid. That’s the Buddhism that’s become fashionable in Silicon Valley in recent years. That’s the Buddhism that says if you practice meditation and mindfulness, you can become more successful in your career because mindfulness training allows you to work incredibly long hours in spite of poor work-life balance. I like to call this the “Prosperity Dharma,” because it’s analogous to the “Prosperity Gospel” of Christianity. The Prosperity Gospel of Christianity tells you to believe in God, give lots of money to the preacher who preaching the Prosperity Gospel to you, and that will make you financially successful. But the Prosperity Gospel really has nothing to do with Christianity, just as the Prosperity Dharma really has nothing to due with Buddhism — these aren’t religions, they’re ways for other people to make money from your credulity.

    The Prosperity Dharma has a couple of other problems. Carolyn Chen, a sociologist at the University of California in Berkeley, has pointed out that the people who push the Prosperity Dharma in Silicon Valley are mostly affluent White people who are openly dismissive of Asian Buddhist traditions and practices. Instead of being Westernized Buddhism, this is what Chen calls this “Whitened Buddhism”: “it erases the ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ Buddhism of Asians and Asian Americans in favor of the thinking of White Westerners.” It’s a subtle form of racism.

    I’m also troubled when the advocates of the Prosperity Dharma want to teach mindfulness in the schools to help children deal with stress. This perverts the real purpose of Buddhism. Mindfulness is not supposed to help your child deal with stress so they can get into Harvard. Buddhism is supposed to make you a better person. Prosperity Dharma treats children as a means to an end. Real Buddhism, like all real religions, treats persons as ends in themselves.

    Now that we’ve disposed of the Prosperity Dharma, let’s look at a couple of other forms of Buddhism.

    If I were going to affiliate with a Buddhist group, my first choice would be the Buddhist Churches of America. This is a Pure Land Buddhist group affiliated with the Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha tradition based in Kyoto, Japan. Pure Land Buddhism reminds me of our own Universalist tradition. The old Universalists, using Christian terms, said that everyone gets to go to heaven. Pure Land Buddhists say that everyone can can enter Buddha’s Pure land, everyone can achieve Buddhahood. Just as we Unitarian Universalists have translated the old Universalist ideas into modern terms, so the Buddhist Churches of America have translated the old ideas of the Pure Land into modern terms — we heard this in the second reading today, where Rev. Takashi Kenryu Tsuji said, “The Pure Land ideal is the culmination of the teaching of Wisdom and Compassion.” I also like the fact that the Buddhist Churches of America do not place much emphasis on meditation, because I have a hard time meditating. Sadly, the closest Buddhist Church of America is in New York, but if there were one nearby I would love to see if there were a way for our congregations to work together.

    And if I were going to affiliate with a Buddhist group, my second choice would be to affiliate with the Engaged Buddhism tradition, whose best known advocate is the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Engaged Buddhism teaches that a primary purpose of religion is to make this world a better place. Engaged Buddhism started out by working for world peace, and they have since expanded into other social justice work such a human rights work and women’s rights. Beyond that, Thich Nhat Hanh is, in my opinion, one of the best religious writers of the past fifty years. Even though I’m not a Buddhist, I’ve gotten a lot from Thich Nhat Hanh’s books on pacifism and peace. In particular, his concept of “interbeing” — which we heard a little about in the first reading — has given me a new way to think about world peace.

    We began by hearing from some people who commented on the Cohasset 143 Facebook page, telling us how they restrict themselves to one exclusive religious tradition. By contrast, we Unitarian Universalists are open to other religious points of view, and curious about other religion. We believe it is acceptable to have more than one religious affiliation. You can be a Unitarian Universalist, and you can be a Buddhist — just as you can be a Unitarian Universalist and an atheist, or you can be a Unitarian Universalist and a Christian. You can even be all of these things at once.

    This brings me to one final point I’d like to leave you with. When we talk with people who have a different religious outlook from ours, we don’t have to be defensive. We don’t have to immediately tell them about our religious outlook. We can respect the diversity in our world, while at the same time respecting our own religious outlook. We can engage in respectful dialogue that will enrich us, and make the world a more peaceful place.