spiritual practices – 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.

Chant as a Spiritual Practice

Readings

The first reading is titled “Meditative Singing,” instructions on singing, from the website of the Taizé community in France:

“Singing is one of the most essential elements of worship. Short songs, repeated again and again, give it a meditative character. Using just a few words they express a basic reality of faith, quickly grasped by the mind. As the words are sung over many times, this reality gradually penetrates the whole being. Meditative singing thus becomes a way of listening to God. It allows everyone to take part in a time of prayer together and to remain together in attentive waiting on God, without having to fix the length of time too exactly….Nothing can replace the beauty of human voices united in song. This beauty can give us a glimpse of ‘heaven’s joy on earth,’ as Eastern Christians put it. And an inner life begins to blossom within us.

“These songs also sustain personal prayer…. They can continue in the silence of our hearts when we are at work, speaking with others or resting. In this way prayer and daily life are united. They allow us to keep on praying even when we are unaware of it, in the silence of our hearts….”

The second reading is from The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, a 1979 book by Starhawk:

“Witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology. The myths, legends, and teachings are recognized as metaphors for “That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told,” the absolute reality our limited minds can never completely know. The mysteries of the absolute can never be explained-only felt or intuited. Symbols and ritual acts are used to trigger altered states of awareness, in which insights that go beyond words are revealed.

“When we speak of ‘the secrets that cannot be told,’ we do not mean merely that rules prevent us from speaking freely. We mean that the inner knowledge literally cannot be expressed in words. It can only be conveyed by experience, and no one can legislate what insight another person may draw from any given experience. For example, after the ritual described at the opening of this chapter, one woman said, ‘As we were chanting, I felt that we blended together and became one voice; I sensed the oneness of everybody.’ Another woman said, ‘I became aware of how different the chant sounded for each of us, of how unique each person is.’ A man said simply, ‘I felt loved.’ To a Witch, all of these statements are equally true and valid….”

Sermon: “Chant as a Spiritual Practice”

One of the most interesting aspects of being a Unitarian Universalist is that we are not told what kind of spiritual practice we are supposed to do. No one tells us that we should read the Bible regularly, as happens for many Protestants. No one suggests that we light the shabbat candles on Friday evening, as is true for many Jews. No one reminds us to pray salat five times a day, which is the case for many Muslims. No one calls on us to do chant the sutras, something which is true for many Buddhists.

We Unitarian Universalists don’t have a prescribed spiritual practice. I believe this is mostly for very pragmatic reasons. We have learned that individuals can be quite different from one another. While we generally feel that having some kind of spiritual practice is a good idea (most of the time), we recognize that what works for one person may not work for another. So we might suggest to one another that we find some kind of spiritual practice, if that’s something we feel the need for. But there are no requirements, no guilt if you don’t need a spiritual practice. (Guilt if you don’t help make the world a better place, maybe, but no guilt around spiritual practices.)

There is one downside to this pragmatic flexibility. If you decide that you’d like to engage in some kind of spiritual practice, sometimes it’s hard to know which one to try. How do we find spiritual practices that work for us?

This is more or less the situation I found myself in back in the 1990s. As a young adult Unitarian Universalist, I had tried and given up on prayer and meditation. I still attended Sunday services when I could, but I had a vague feeling that it would be nice to have something I could do not just on Sundays, but all week long.

It was about this time that I started going to some Unitarian Universalist young adult conferences, and I went to a Unitarian Universalist summer conference for the first time. Back in the 1990s, there were a lot of Unitarian Universalists who were also involved in Neo-paganism and other earth-centered traditions. I met some of these Neo-pagans both at the young adult conferences and at the summer conference, and discovered that they all seemed to repertoire of earth-centered chants and songs. I had never run into chanting before. I liked the simple repetitive feeling of the chants, because they stuck in my memory better. I also liked the meaning of the lyrics — a deep feeling of connection with the non-human world, and with the human world as well. As Starhawk said in the second reading, when I sang these chants with these Neo-pagans, we blended together and became one voice.

Chant lies somewhere between the spoken word and singing, and it has both the power of music and the power of the spoken word. It is deceptively simple, and it can be inspiring and moving. I soon found out that chanting of this type is found in almost every culture around the world. Here, for example, is a chant from Hawai’i…. [At this point, Mike Nakashima sang “Oli Mahalo,” or “Gratitude Chant,” an oli (chant) composed by Kehau Camara]

After listening to, and participating in, various kinds of earth-centered chant, I began to become aware of the existence of other types of chant.

In particular, I kept hearing about something people were calling Taizé. My first direct experience with Taizé song and chant involved one person teaching a simple song, and then leading a group of us as we sang it over and over again. The melodies were a bit more complex than the earth-centered chants I already knew, but it didn’t seem all that interesting. It turns out that Taizé chant is more than just simple melodies that are sung over and over. Most Taizé chants are meant to be sung as rounds, or with four-part harmony. If people can’t sing all the harmony parts, there might be someone like Mary Beth to play those other parts on a piano or other instrument.

I found that, for me, Taizé chants were not as elemental and ecstatic as the earth-centered chants I had heard and sung. But they were deeply meditative. Because they were repeated over and over, it was easier for me to learn one of the harmony parts. And even though it was far more structured than the earth-centered chant, Taizé chant also gave me that same feeling of connection to the people I was singing with.

There are other aspects of Taizé chant that I especially valued. First, while Taizé chants are distinctly Christian, there is a real effort to make them non-sectarian. The Taizé community in France, home of the chants, is a monastic community that welcomes anyone from any Christian denomination. Second, in an era when most Western religious groups seem to ignore young adults, the Taizé community makes a point to especially welcome young adults. Finally, the Taizé community has a distinctly internationalist perspective: an individual Taizé chant might be translated into twenty or more languages. “Nada Te Turbe,” a Taizé chant that we’ve been learning here at First Parish, and that we’ll sing in just a moment, has been translated into twenty-one languages. Thus, Taizé chant is meant to bind together a world that has become divided by religion, by age, and by language. Let’s sing together a Taizé chant that we’ve been singing a lot recently, “Nada Te Turbe.”

The third type of chant that I’d like to introduce to you comes from the Threshold Choir. The Threshold Choir was started by a woman named Kate Munger, who felt a need for a kind of healing music that could be sung to people who were dying. She began teaching others her singing techniques and her repertoire of songs, until now there are many Threshold Choirs. This past July, Kate Munger and the original Threshold Choir honored for their work by being invited to sing in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C.

About fifteen years ago, I took a workshop with Kate Munger, and learned some of her techniques for singing to people who are dying. She has singers sit around the person who is dying. The singers sing gently and quietly, but with power. Thus the person in the middle of the circle of singers is surrounding with gentle song. When her Threshold Choir groups are practicing, they take turns sitting in the center of the circle so they can experience what it feels like to be sung to. This helps all the singers listen better to one another, and it helps the singers to have great empathy with the people for whom they sing.

Some people have expanded the Threshold Choir concept to include singing to people who are ill or unwell, but not actually dying. My home congregation has such a choir, which they call the By Your Side Singers. My family had direct experience of the By Your Side Signers: in the last year and a half of my father’s life, they would go to his residential facility and sing to him. He was no longer able to talk so I don’t really know what he thought about it, but I liked the fact that someone would come and pay that kind of attention to my dad.

Even though I took a workshop with Kate Munger, I’ve never actually participated in a Threshold Choir myself, nor in one of the healing choirs like the one that sang to my father. But some of the Threshold Choir songs have stuck with me all these years, and I find myself singing them to myself. In the past couple of weeks, with all the turmoil in the world, I find myself singing one of these songs called “In These Times,” a short song I learned from my exposure to the Threshold Choir.

Chant begins as a communal activity: it’s something we do together; it’s something that is done in cultures around the world; it’s something that can bind us to people who are quite unlike ourselves. At the same time, chant can also be an individual practice as well, a kind of meditative singing that — to use the words of the Taizé community — “can continue in the silence of our hearts when we are at work, speaking with others, or resting.”

This means that chant is one of those spiritual practices that helps build community. Even when you practice it on your own, it is at heart a communal activity. Actually, this is true of any kind of singing — as you probably know, singing in community leads to all kinds of benefits, including relieving stress, boosting your immune response, develops a sense of wellbeing and meaningful connection to others, enhances memory including enhancing memory in dementia patients, helps with grief, calms your heart rate, improves sleep, and on and on.

This, by the way, is the pragmatic reason behind singing hymns in our Sunday services — singing is good for us. But honestly, some of our hymns are difficult to sing. By contrast, because many chants are relatively simple songs they can be learned more easily, even someone with little or no musical ability. At the same time, chant can provide interesting possibilities for skilled musicians: a more skilled singer might be able to sing a harmony part, or add accompaniment with a musical instrument that doesn’t overwhelm the simplicity of the chant.

Whether you’re a skilled musician or someone with no musical ability, the key to participating in chant is learning how to listen. Whether it’s chanting or singing, listen to the people with whom you’re singing or chanting. It is by listening while chanting in a group that the chants stick in your heart and mind; and in that way they can become a part of your everyday spiritual practice. This reveals to us a great religious truth. We can’t just follow a song leader or some other authority figure. We have to actually participate. Participating requires us to listen to those around us. So it is we give voice to what’s in our hearts and minds, and at the same time listening to what others are voicing is in their hearts and minds. This is how community is built: by listening, and by putting yourself out there, both at the same time.