peace – Dan Harper

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.

World Peace

Readings

The first reading was a short excerpt from the poem “Jerusalem” by Naomi Shihab Nye:

I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.

The second reading was from a poem titled “Poem” by Muriel Rukeyser:

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons….
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,…
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace….

The third reading was from the poem “Making Peace” by Denise Levertov:

…peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

Sermon: “World Peace”

When I was in my teens and early twenties, a fellow by the name of Dana Greeley was the minister of my Unitarian Universalist church, and he used to preach regularly about world peace. He had been a pacifist since before the Second World War, not only because violence was wrong but also because war could not solve the problems it was supposed to solve. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he became opposed to war for yet another reason: once atomic weapons became available, then war had the potential wipe out the entire human race. So as I recall it, Greeley had three good reasons to reject war: on moral grounds, because violence was wrong; and on pragmatic grounds, both because it could not obtain its stated objectives, and because it threatened all human existence.

I was convinced by these arguments, and became a pacifist myself. I was convinced to the point that I even registered with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, a Quaker group, just in case the draft was reinstated. But I must admit I was not entirely convinced by Greeley’s vision for what a peaceful world might look like. Greeley was an internationalist and a strong supporter of the United Nations. The United Nations offered a concrete vision of international cooperation that was especially compelling to those who lived through the Second World War. However, I think that while people in my age cohort found the humanitarian mission of the United Nations compelling, what we saw of the Vietnam War decreased our confidence in the ability of the United Nations to end war.

Put it this way: Yes, of course there should be an international community, and of course that community should promote international cooperation in areas like public health and economic development. But what does a peaceful world look like? It’s not enough to say: a peaceful world is a world without war. That’s a vision that’s essentially negative. But what are the positive aspects of a peaceful world? There must be more to a peaceful world than merely the absence of war.

This reminds me of an old Chinese story that presents a vision of a peaceful world. The story of “Peach Blossom Spring,” first told by Tao Yuan-ming, tries to answer the question: How are we to build the kind of peaceful community we long for? I’m going to retell this story for you using the 1894 translation by Herbert Giles.

In the year 390 or thereabouts, when the north of China had been conquered by the Mongol invaders from central Asia, and refugees from the invasion filled the south, there lived a fisherman in the village of Wu-ling. This was during the Qin dynasty. The Qin emperors were powerful, and while some people said they did what had to be done in troubled times, there were others who said that government officials were vain and greedy, and did not have the interests of the ordinary people at heart. (How often do we hear the same complaint, even in our own day!)

To get back to the fisherman of Wu-ling:

One day, while out on the river, this fisherman decided to follow the river upstream. At one point, he came to a place where the river branched, taking the right or left branch without paying attention to where he was going. Suddenly he rounded a bend in the river and came upon a grove of peach-trees in full bloom. The blossoming trees grew close along the banks of the river for as far as he could see. The fisherman was filled with joy and astonishment at the beauty of the scene and the delightful perfume of the flowers. He continued upstream, to see how far along the river these trees grew.

When at last he came to the end of the peach trees, the river was scarcely bigger than a stream, and then it suddenly ended at a line of steep hills. There where the river began, the fisherman saw a cave in the side of the hill, and a faint light came from within it. He tied up his boat to a tree, and crept in through the narrow entrance.

He emerged into a world of level country, with fine houses, rich fields, beautiful pools, and luxuriant mulberry and bamboo. He saw roads running north and south, carrying many people on foot and in carts. He could hear the sounds of crowing cocks and barking dogs around him. He noticed that the dress of the people who passed along or were at work in the fields was of a strange cut. He also saw that everyone, young and old, appeared to be happy and content.

One of the people caught sight of the fisherman, and expressed great astonishment. When this person learned whence the fisherman had come, he took him home, cooking a chicken for him and offering him some wine to drink. Before long, all the people of the place came to see the fisherman, this visitor from afar.

The people of the village told the fisherman that several centuries ago, during troubled times, their ancestors had sought refuge here. Over time, the way back to the wider world had been cut off, and they had lost touch with the rest of the human race.

They asked the fisherman about the current politics in the outside world. They were amazed to learn of new dynasty that ruled the land. And when the fishermen told them of the Mongol invasions, they grieved over the vicissitudes of human affairs.

Then each family of the village invited the fisherman to their home in turn, each family offering him hospitality. He saw that this was truly a land of peacefulness and contentment. But at last, the fisherman longed to return to his own family, and he prepared to take his leave. As he said his farewells and began to make his way back to his boat, the people said to him, “It will not be worth while to talk about what you have seen to the outside world.”

But of course the fisherman hoped to return to that lovely peaceful land. He made mental notes of his route as he proceeded on his homeward voyage. When at last he reached home, he at once went and reported what he had seen to the ruling magistrate of the district. The magistrate, greatly interested, sent off men to help him find the way back to this unknown region of peace and plenty. But, try as he might, the fisherman was never able to find it again. Later, a famous adventurer attempted to find the land of Peach Blossom Spring, but he also failed, and died soon afterwards of humiliation. From that time on, no further attempts were made.

The story of “Peach Blossom Spring” is a Utopian story. And in fact, the Chinese name of the story, Táohuā Yuán Jì, has come to mean much the same thing as our English word Utopia: a place of perfection that doesn’t really exist.

We can find versions of the Paech Blossom Spring story in our own time. When you hear people who want to go back to a simpler time, they’re looking for a land that’s stuck in the past, just like the land the land the fisherman found. Or when you hear people who don’t like the current political administration say that they’re going to emigrate to another country, they’re actually looking for a land like the fisherman found, removed from the real world.

Utopian fantasies have become our primary means of expressing our vision for a peaceful world. I consider this to be unfortunate, because we know that Utopian visions are impractical and can’t come true. Utopias can only exist if they are completely cut off from the rest of the world, but this is impossible in an interdependent world. A Utopian vision for the world is a dead end.

Yet we are still liable to fall under the spell of utopian visions. Many people in our own time fall under the spell of religious Utopian visions. So, for example, the Christian vision of heaven can function as a kind of Utopia: you can only reach heaven after you die, and you can only reach heaven if you’re extraordinarily good or lucky; this kind of vision of heaven neither pragmatic nor fair the vast majority of humanity. Our Universalist forebears rejected this conception of a Utopian heaven, saying that everyone gets to go to heaven, and also saying that the only hell was the one we humans created here on earth. Thus our Universalist forebears conclude that it’s up to us to fix the problems in this world, to create a Utopia in the here and now. I agree with our Universalist forebears, but this still leaves open the question of what is a positive vision for the world we’re trying to create.

I don’t think that any one person can provide us with a perfect vision for a peaceful world. That vision can only emerge through communal endeavor. And I suspect when a compelling vision for a peaceful world emerges, it will be far less grand that either the United Nations or Peach Blossom Spring. I think it far more likely that we will find a truly compelling vision for a peaceful world in the mundane details of life. So if we’re going to look for compelling visions for a peaceful world, we might do well to begin with images like the one offered by Joy Harjo in her poem titled “Perhaps the World Ends Here”:

[This copyrighted poem is online here.]

Of course if we’re not careful, even this prosaic vision can seem a bit Utopian. Anyone who knows anything about domestic violence, for example, knows that a kitchen table can be a place of fear and even violence. But the poet acknowledges this when she says that the kitchen table “is a place to hide in the shadow of terror.” There will be violence even in a peaceful world; but perhaps the difference is that the existence of violence will be recognized, and instead of being glorified it will be addressed openly.

I see one big barrier to a widespread adoption of this particular vision for a peaceful world. Joy Harjo’s vision of the peaceful kitchen table owes a great deal to her roots as an enrolled citizen of Muscogee Nation. That is to say, hers is not a vision of the individualistic suburban American nuclear family, but rather a vision of peace rooted in the human connection of extended family and supportive wider community. This is not a vision of life as portrayed on a picture postcard, but rather life as it really is, messy and complicated, but also filled with love and connection.

This makes the image of the kitchen table compelling to me. The kitchen table in the poem is messy: babies teethe at the corners, so at the very least it’s a table covered with baby drool. The kitchen table in the poem is also the place where people put themselves back together after having fallen down. That is to say, the kitchen table in the poem is not some kind of Utopia. But at the same time, it is a place where you can find support when life gets difficult; it can be a place of joy and of triumph; it can be a place to give thanks. It is a human-scaled vision, and a vision grounded in human connection.

I think if we’re going to envision a peaceful world — not as the absence of war, but as something positive — we need to include in our vision the importance of human connection. Not some abstract connection, but the connection that can happen around a kitchen table. If we’re going to envision a peaceful world, we need to include all the messy complexities of human life. It’s not enough to have some big abstract vision, we need a vision that includes teething babies, and drinking coffee, and raising children, and preparing and eating meals together.

Actually, this sounds a bit like what we’re trying to do here in our congregational community. God knows, we are not perfect. But we try to be a community rooted in human connection. I might wish we had some teething babies, but we are a place where people can put themselves back together after having fallen down. We do give children instructions on what it means to be human. We do sing with both joy and sorrow, we do pray with both suffering and remorse. And we do give thanks. Probably the most important thing we do is to give thanks that we are here, and that we have the strength and the ability to make this world just a little bit better.

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from the long poem “Fasti” by the ancient Roman poet Ovid:

While I was musing, writing-tablets in hand,
The house seemed brighter than it was before.
Then suddenly, sacred and marvelous, Janus,
In two-headed form, showed his twin faces to my eyes.
Terrified, I felt my hair grow stiff with fear
And my heart was frozen with sudden cold.
Holding his stick in his right hand, his key in the left,
He spoke these words to me from his forward looking face:

“Do not fear, but learn what you seek, O poet who labors
Over the days, and remember what I say.

“The ancients called me Chaos (since I am of the first world):
Note the long ages past of which I shall tell.
The clear air, and the three other elements,
Fire, water, earth, were heaped together as one.
When, through the discord of its components,
The mass dissolved, and scattered to new regions,
Flame found the heights: air took a lower place,
While earth and sea sank to the furthest depth.
Then I, who was a shapeless mass, a ball,
Took on the appearance, and noble limbs of a god.
Even now, a small sign of my once confused state,
My front and back appear just the same….

“Now learn the reason for my shape:
Though already you partially understand it.
Every doorway has two sides, this way and that,
One facing the crowds, and the other the household gods:
And like your doorkeeper seated at the threshold,
Who watches who goes and out and who goes in,
So I am the doorkeeper of the heavenly court,
Looking towards both east and west at once:…
And I, lest I lose time twisting my neck around,
Am free to look both ways without moving.”

The second reading is from “Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye:

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers….

Sermon: “Looking Forward, Looking Back”

The ancient Roman gods and goddesses are part of our shared Western culture. We name planets and dwarf planets after them — Jupiter, Neptune, Ceres, Pluto. And most of us have at least some passing familiarity with these ancient deities: Jupiter, the ruler of the other gods and goddesses; Neptune, the god of the sea; and so on.

For the most part, the Romans gods and goddesses were said to have appearances that were much like humans. Some of the them, however, had a more bizarre appearance. Janus was one of those odd-looking gods: he had two faces, one which looked forward, and one which looked backwards. In the first reading this morning, we heard Janus’s own explanation for his appearance. “I am the doorkeeper of the heavenly court,” he told the poet Ovid, “Looking towards both east and west at once… [for] lest I lose time twisting my neck around, [I] am free to look both ways without moving.”

Janus also told the poet that he began as a part of Chaos, the stuff out of which the universe emerged. And Janus says, “as a small sign of my once confused state, my front and back appear just the same.” Because of that, he became the god of doorways, looking both outwards towards the crowds of people outside the door of the house, and inwards towards the household gods that preside over the safety of each household.

No wonder, then, that the Romans named the first month of their calendar year for Janus. He is the perfect god for the beginning of a new year, because of the way he looks both forward and backwards. So it is that we, at the beginning of a new year, feel an impulse to look both forwards and backwards. So I’m going imitate Janus, and at the beginning of this new year I’m going to take a look backwards at last year, then a look forward into the new year.

The most difficult task will be looking backwards. This is because looking back at 2024 seems to lead inevitably to conversations about the presidential election, and those conversations can be fraught. Either that, or people start arguing about the war in Gaza and Israel. Either that, or someone will bring up global climate change. When looking back at the past year, it’s all too easy to talk about topics which cause people distress.

But I decided that for this first sermon of the year, I didn’t want to cause distress to either you or me. In the second reading, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye tells us: “So much of any year is flammable,/ lists of vegetables, partial poems./ Orange swirling flame of days,/ so little is a stone.” That is to say, at the end of any given year there are a great many things that we can let go of. In her poem, she imagines the things you can let go of as being things that are flammable. Then she adds another image: “So little is a stone”; or to put it another way, when you look back over the year there are only a few things that are solid like a stone, things that won’t perish in the flames, things that are worth holding on to. For example, it is worth holding on to the memories of the love of family and friends. It is worth holding on the the memories of people who have died in the past year. It is always worth holding on to that which is true and good.

With that in mind, I’d like to suggest that we might also think about some of the good things that happened in the past year. Perhaps we can’t avoid thinking about what went wrong in 2024; but let’s take a moment to think about what went right.

First: a sign of hope in the seemingly intractable problem of housing insecurity and homelessness. As we all know, the rate of homelessness is rising both nationwide and here in Massachusetts; our state is now in the top five states with the greatest numbers of people who are homeless. Yet in spite of these increases, last year the city of Los Angeles bucked the trend with a 2.2% decline the total number of people who were homeless in their city, while unsheltered homelessness declined by 10.4%. They accomplished this through a combination of policies and programs to get people into housing. (1) Thus we can see that homelessness is not an insoluble problem. There are viable solutions out there, and we can learn from places like Los Angeles.

A second piece of positive news: three more countries legalized same sex marriage. Two of those were countries we might not have expected: both Thailand and Greece legalized same sex marriage last year. Thailand is the first Southeast Asian country, and the third country in all of Asia, to legalize same-sex marriage. Greece is the first majority-Orthodox Christian country to legalize same-sex marriage. (2) Estonia was the third country that legalized same-sex marriage last year, so there are now 38 countries around the world where same-sex marriage is legal. Same-sex marriage is now legal somewhere on all six permanently inhabited continents. This is not something I ever expected to see in my lifetime.

Third: there was actually quite a bit of good news in the environment. In just one example, as of last year the United Kingdom no longer produces any of its energy from coal; the last coal power generation station closed in October. Since England was the site of the first coal power generation plant, this is both a symbolic milestone and a practical milestone. (3) In other positive environmental news from last year, the sail cargo ship Anemos completed its maiden voyage from the Netherlands to New York carrying one thousand tons of cargo. The ship Anemos has, and I quote, a “projected carbon intensity per unit transport [that is] less than a tenth of that of a sub-Panamax container ship.” Anemos will soon have seven sister ships, and regular cargo routes are already planned. (4) Electric vehicle sales continued to increase around the world in 2024. We’re still waiting for accurate data, but it looks like the price of renewable energy continued to drop significantly in the past year. All this is good news.

Fourth: there was good news, perhaps unexpectedly, in the area of peace and nonviolence. Homicide rates in the United States dropped sixteen percent last year. That’s the third straight year homicides have declined in our country. (5) This is true locally, too — my recollection is that the Boston Globe ran a front page story a couple of days ago reporting that homicide rates in Boston for 2024 were the lowest since 1957.

And one last bit of good news from the past year: This past summer, the United Nations reported that as of 2024, “population size had peaked in 63 countries…including China, Germany, Japan, and the Russian Federation.” The United Nations report went on to say that “in more than half of all countries…the average number of live births per woman is below 2.1 — the level required for a population to maintain a constant size.” Admittedly, because of so-called “population momentum,” the overall human population is still growing and will peak around the year 2080. Nevertheless, the projection for total human population is now projected to stabilize at three quarters of a billion people lower than was expected a decade ago. (6) Since human overpopulation contributes to just about every major world problem, from the environmental crisis to the worldwide refugee crisis, this final piece of news is very good news indeed.

Now if you only read social media, these news items are unlikely to rise to the top of what your social media outlet is feeding to you. The people who design the algorithms that drive social media know you spend more time on their sites when you’re doomscrolling. As for traditional news outlets, they too are more likely to emphasize the bad news over the good news. On the Freakonomics podcast a couple of years ago, young adult author John Green pointed out: “a lot of times good news happens slowly and bad news happens all at once, and so we tend to focus on the bad news that’s crashing over us in waves and not on the slow long-term work that people are doing together to try to make a better world for us to share.” (6.5)

Yes, there are many bad things going on in the world right now. But if you focus only on the bad things in the world, you’re presenting yourself with a distorted view of the world. Not only that, but when you’re thinking about good news you have to consider long-term stories that might not be newsworthy. And with that in mind, let’s look forward into the new year.

I anticipate that some of the more interesting good news in the coming year will occur in the realm of public health. As one example of what I mean, consider the efforts to develop a vaccine for malaria. Beginning in 2021, a WHO-approved malaria vaccine has been made available to children in many high malaria transmission areas. In 2024, Cameroon was the first country to require childhood vaccination for malaria. We are in the middle of a long slow process to eradicate one of the more debilitating diseases on Earth. Some scientists are now predicting that malaria could be wiped out in another two decades. Because this is a long, slow process, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see it covered in social media or in traditional news outlets. But this represents a huge advance in public health, and a huge reduction in suffering world-wide.

In the coming year, I’m going to be watching another interesting development in public health, one that directly affects us here on the South Shore. Public health experts are beginning to work with an emerging concept known as “social health.” A group at Stanford University called “Stanford Lifestyle Medicine” defines social health this way: “Social health refers to the quality of our relationships and how often we interact with others. Since social connection is in our nature as humans, when we are isolated and feel a lack of connection, research shows that our mental health can be affected…. Research also shows that our social health profoundly impacts our physical health.” (7)

You may say this is just another case of university researchers catching up with good old common sense: we already know we’re going to have better physical and mental health when we have a good social network. But thinking about social health as an aspect of public health does represent an advance, because this allows us to think about how we might improve social health through communal effort. Two years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report about the health impacts of the loneliness epidemic in this country. (8) Treating loneliness as a public health issue means not blaming individuals for being lonely, but instead working on solutions that may include public policy, local community efforts, and so on.

So, for example, if we address social health from a public health perspective, we might develop public policies and public education campaigns that can deal effectively with the loneliness epidemic and the wider mental health crisis. This would be analogous to the way we used a public health perspective to develop public policies and public education campaigns that targeted the addictiveness of tobacco. Those public policies and those education campaigns led to a dramatic reduction in tobacco use, with a concomitant drop in the cancers associated with tobacco use. So I’m going to be watching what the public health community does to develop public policies and public education campaigns to improve social health, thereby addressing the loneliness epidemic and the mental health crisis.

And I feel we don’t have to wait for the public health community to do all the work. I believe we here at First Parish can contribute to this effort, because we’re already contributing to this effort through what we do here every Sunday morning. It is clear that one way to improve social health is by building local communities. That is something we actually do quite well here at First Parish: we’re actually quite good at creating a welcoming community. We’re not perfect, and of course there’s always room for improvement in every human endeavor. But I’ve noticed that during social hour following the weekly service, we are actually quite good at talking with one another, and reaching out to people we may not know well. Having spent the last thirty years working in nine different congregations, I’d say that our First Parish community is well above average in providing community and positive social interaction.

Now let’s put that into the context of the loneliness epidemic in the United States. When we think in terms of social health, what we offer as a community may be one of the most important things we do at First Parish. Simply by doing what we ordinarily do, we actually implement several of the U.S. Surgeon General’s recommendations for mitigating the loneliness epidemic: we “create opportunities and spaces for inclusive social connection”; we “embed social connection in … practices [and] programs”; and we “foster a culture of connection in the broader community by… leading by example.” (9) Just by doing what we would be doing anyway, we’re helping address a major public health crisis.

When I think about our First Parish community as a part of a larger public health effort to address the loneliness epidemic, two things occur to me. First, I believe we should recognize that we are in fact participating in this public health effort; I could reframe this slightly and say that this is yet another one of our unrecognized social justice projects. Second, we could also be a little more public about talking about how we are contributing to social health.

This would not require us to add any programs; we don’t have to do anything more, because we’re already promoting social health and fighting the loneliness epidemic. But the U.S. Surgeon General suggests that community-based organizations have a key role to play in advancing “public education and awareness.” And advancing public education and awareness could turn out to be quite simple. So, for example, if someone finds out that I’m part of First Parish, and if they express the least bit of interest, I make sure that the first thing I tell them is that First Parish is a good community. I make it clear being a community is one of most important things we do. Yes, I mention that we talk about moral and ethical issues; yes, I mention that we have good music programs; yes, I mention our beautiful historic Meetinghouse. But I always make sure to mention our sense of community first. I make sure to mention that it’s a good place to connect with other people.

While this may seem like a very minor point, it’s not. Most people here on the South Shore still think that religion is primarily about religious belief. Many people still think the only reason to do religion is to shore up your belief system. However, in the context of the loneliness epidemic, I’d argue that the most important thing we do here at First Parish is provide social connection. By pointing this out, we can contribute to public education and awareness; we can help others in our community to understand that any organization they join is going to reduce their social disconnection and improve their social health. We can help them understand that this is true for all the community groups we participate in — whether it’s Rotary, or the sailing club, or the town elder affairs group — any membership-based organization, civic group, or arts and education group.

We can all be a part of this low-key campaign of public education and awareness, and it doesn’t take much effort. All we have to do is just be a little more willing to talk with others about the community-based organizations we belong to, and to mention that belonging to such community based groups helps support social health.

As I look forward into the coming year — as I look for positive trends that I think may continue in the coming year –I’ve spent most of my time talking about social health. The way we can contribute to social health is just one among many long-term projects that people are doing together to make this a better world. I know many of you are participating in other long-term projects that are making this a better world; long-term projects that don’t make it into the news. The only reason that I’ve focused on social health is that it’s something that we do together here in our First Parish community; improving social health is a project that we all share.

Just by showing up here at First Parish, we help create a place where people who are lonely can come and find safe, healthy, supportive social interaction. Just by showing up here, we are helping improve our community’s social health, and thereby making the world a better place.

As we look back over the past year, as we look forward into the new year, it’s easy to be negative. It’s easy to think about everything that’s wrong with the world. But I think it’s more productive to think about how we are contributing to making the world a better place; and in the year to come, may we all think more about our positive efforts in this world.

Notes

(1) “Unsheltered Homelessness Drops and Sheltered Homelessness Rises in City and County of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority website, 28 June, 2024, https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=977-unsheltered-homelessness-drops-and-sheltered-homelessness-rises-in-la accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(2) “Thailand’s king signs landmark same-sex marriage bill into law,” Associated Press, 24 Sept. 2024 https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/asia/thailand-same-sex-marriage-intl-hnk/index.html accessed 4 Jan. 2025. — James Gregory, “Greece legalises same-sex marriage,” BBC News, 15 Feb. 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68310126 accessed 4 Jan. 2025
(3) Mark Poynting and Esme Stallard, “UK to finish with coal power after 142 years,” BBC News, 30 September 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(4) The Maritime Executive, “High-Tech Sailing Ship Starts Maiden Voyage With 1,000 Tonnes of Cargo,” 18 Aug. 2024 https://maritime-executive.com/article/high-tech-sailing-ship-starts-maiden-voyage-with-1-000-tonnes-of-cargo accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(5) Bill Hutchinson, “US poised to see dramatic drop in homicides for 3rd straight year: More than 5,000 fewer homicides have been recorded this year compared to 2023,” ABC News, 31 Dec. 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/US/united-states-drop-homicides-2024/story?id=116902123 accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(6) “Growing or shrinking? What the latest trends tell us about the world’s population,” United Nations News, Global perspective Human stories, 11 July 2024 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/07/1151971 accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(6.5) Freakonomics podcast, Episode 92, “John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride,” 11 Nov. 2022, transcript at: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/john-greens-reluctant-rocket-ship-ride/ accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(7) Sharon Brock, What is Social Health and How Does it Impact Longevity? Stanford Lifestyle Medicine website, 14 Nov. 2024 https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2024/11/14/what-is-social-health-and-how-does-it-impact-longevity/ accessed 4 Jan. 2025. Robert D. Russell of Southern Illinois University is usually credited with originating the concept of social health back in the 1970s: “With an interest in the holistic and ecological aspects of health and spirituality as components of personal health, he often gets credit from colleagues for creating the ecological model of health education.” Southern Illinois University News, https://news.siu.edu/2012/03/032812cjm12090.php accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(8) See: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (Washington, DC: Office of the Surgeon General, 2023), https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
(9) Ibid., p. 62.