Challenges and Opportunities for a Future Church

 a service presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on October 13, 2024

Opening Words

The opening words are from the surgeon general’s report 
“Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Social Isolation”.

"Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word ‘lonely,’ 
time and time again, 
people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, 
from every corner of the country, 
would tell me, ‘I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,’ or ‘if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice’.

"[Social isolation] is associated with 
a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, 
dementia, stroke, depression, 
anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected 
is similar to that caused by 
smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that 
associated with obesity and physical inactivity."

Reading

A little over a year ago, Perry Bacon, 
a 42-year-old Black political reporter for the Washington Post, 
published a very different kind of article, 
one about his personal religious journey, 
and his longing for what he called
 “a church of the Nones”, i.e., 
a church that doesn’t require believing any specific dogma. The article is long enough to be a sermon on its own, 
so I’ll summarize.

Bacon grew up as the son of an assistant pastor 
and continued participating in Christian churches 
through his 20s and early 30s. Despite his theological doubts about Christianity, 
he stayed faithful because 
he believed in the values his churches promoted.

“I didn’t leave church for any one reason,” he writes. But partly it was politics. “I couldn’t ignore how the word ‘Christian’ 
was becoming a synonym for 
rabidly pro-Trump White people 
who argued that his and their meanness and intolerance 
were in some ways required to defend our faith.”

A final straw came when Bacon discovered 
that although his church allowed gays and lesbians to participate in church activities, 
his gay friend was barred 
from even the most minor leadership roles. By 2020, Bacon was church-shopping, 
and dissatisfied with what he was finding. When the pandemic cut off his search 
by closing most churches, he felt relieved.

He found he didn’t want to raise his daughter 
in a church whose doctrines and worldview he didn’t believe. “What has kept me away is having a child. If I were childless, 
I think I would join a church to be a part of its community, 
and I would ignore the theological elements I’m not sure about. But my 3-year-old is getting more inquisitive every day.”

He knows about Unitarian Universalism, but “Unitarian churches I have attended 
had overwhelmingly White and elderly congregations 
and lacked the wide range of activities for adults and kids 
found at the Christian congregations that I was a part of.”

He’s thought about starting his own church, 
as his uncle did for other reasons a generation before, 
or recruiting like-minded friends to join a UU church together 
to “make it younger and more racially diverse. But I’ve not followed through on any of these options.”

Instead, he has drifted into other forms of weekly community: 
his neighborhood’s farmers’ market 
and a happy hour for local journalists. Those activities allow him to meet people, 
but he still senses a “church-sized hole” in his life, 
and in the larger society as well.

“Kids need places to learn values such as forgiveness. Young adults need places to meet a potential spouse. Adults with children need places to meet with other parents. Retirees need places to build new relationships, 
as their friends and spouses pass away. Our society needs places that integrate people 
across class and racial lines. Newly woke Americans need places 
to get practical, weekly advice 
about how to live out the inclusive, anti-racist values 
they committed to during the Trump years.

“There are lots of organizations trying to address those needs. But strong churches could address them all. It’s strange to me that America, 
particularly its left-leaning cohort, 
is abandoning this institution, 
as opposed to reinventing it to align with our 2023 values.”

Talk

You may be familiar with the classic distinction 
between the fox and the hedgehog. The fox, the adage says, knows many things, 
but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Ordinarily, I give hedgehog talks: I’m building towards one central point, 
and I want to hold your attention until I get there.

This is a fox talk: There are a number of ideas 
that may send your thoughts down a side track, 
and that’s OK. I’ll try to call you back near the end. This talk is also different 
in that I don’t really answer anything. Instead, I want to lay out a paradox I’ve been thinking about, 
to see if I can get you thinking about it too. The paradox has to do with 
the future of churches generally in America, 
and of Unitarian Universalist churches in particular.

On the one hand, 
this ought to be a time 
of unprecedented opportunity for churches. As Perry Bacon noted in the reading: Churches offer precisely the kind of community and connection 
that America is lacking as a society, 
and that many individuals say they are yearning for. And yet, while some churches are doing well, 
nationwide the institution is in decline: Churches are closing, 
church membership is dropping, 
and the percentage of the population 
that says religion is personally important to them 
has been falling for decades.

If you listen to why people are leaving their churches, 
or never showed any interest in church to begin with, 
a lot of those reasons don’t seem like 
they should apply to Unitarian churches. We aren’t bound to ancient dogmas about sexuality and gender. We aren’t in conflict with science. We don’t consign people to hell 
if they think or live differently than we do. We focus our attention on the issues of life today, 
and discuss them in terms that are meaningful today, 
rather than try to shoehorn our moral intuitions 
into elaborate interpretations of scriptures written thousands of years ago.

And yet, all those people 
who need what a church can offer, 
but can’t seem to find one they can live with — most of them don’t find us either. Maybe they never hear about us. But even if they do, 
even if they show up to check us out, 
many of them run into barriers to entry 
that we may not even see and certainly never intended to put there.

So that’s the paradox: There are crying needs in today’s society, 
and there are institutions 
that seem perfectly designed to fill those needs. And yet it’s not happening. What’s going on? What can we do about it?

Let me back up and support some of those claims I just made. In America today 
there is a cluster of needs 
that different professions see from different angles, 
and have been reporting on for decades.

In the opening words, 
you heard the surgeon general 
diagnose the medical problem of social isolation.

Sociologists see something similar from their own perspective. As far back as 
Robert Putnam’s turn-of-the-millennium book Bowling Alone 
they’ve  been reporting a decline in what they call “social capital”. Community organizations of all sorts, 
from bowling teams to labor unions to churches, 
have been losing significance, 
and the result is a less cohesive society. People are less trusting. Communities that need to act together 
have a harder time reaching consensus, 
largely because it has become easier for us to demonize each other. 

A bowling team may not seem like it knits society together, 
but something about relying on 
an immigrant, a lesbian, or a Republican 
to pick up your spare 
helps you appreciate what wonderful people they can be. 

Francis Moore Lappe' wrote: 
“A culture of democracy can be defined as one that builds trust.” Sadly, the same logic works in the other direction: A culture that has trouble building trust 
will also have trouble preserving its democracy.

Psychologists talk about how hard it can be 
to establish a unified or coherent identity in a world where you may have a thousand Facebook friends, 
but no one who sees your whole life. Back in 1991, 
well before the Internet as we currently know it, Kenneth Gergen wrote a book called The Saturated Self. In it, he described 
the stress caused by modern communications technologies, 
which give us easy access to far more communities 
than we can effectively participate in. Each community has its own ideals, 
and its own vision of how a good person lives. Beset with all these conflicting goals, 
the postmodern individual feels perpetually inadequate.

Fast-forward 33 years, 
and individuals have become more and more atomized. It’s no longer just that you’re 
one person at home and another at work. Your work persona itself may have become narrower and have shallower relationships. When you meet primarily over Zoom, 
you no longer share coffee breaks with your colleagues 
or get a beer together on your way home.

Online communities are even more fragmenting: One community knows your political views, 
another your hobbies, 
and a third your taste in books or movies. Another group of acquaintances knows you 
only through your dating profile, 
which may not be entirely accurate. So does anyone really know you? And if not, who are you anyway?

If we were social planners, 
looking at all these phenomena together, 
we might be tempted to design some completely new institution: one that holds regular face-to-face events 
that don’t require an invitation. People could show up alone, 
or with their full household. Come regularly or only once in a while. At these gatherings, 
people might do simple things together 
— maybe sing songs or listen to music or a short talk.  These communal events could conclude 
with a chance to chat over coffee and cookies.

Our new institution 
would be even better if it encouraged you to show up as your whole self, 
and not just as some narrowly focused set of interests or beliefs or attitudes. And better still if it fulfilled all those needs 
Perry Bacon listed, and helped you teach your children values 
that run deeper than making money or getting famous 
or buying the latest products? 

Wouldn’t it be great if there were such a thing? Somebody should invent it.

And yet … In their book Beyond Doubt: the secularization of society 
sociologists Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman and Ryan Cragun say that “somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 churches 
close down every year”. In 1998, 62% of Americans answering a survey 
said that religion was very important to them. In 2023, only 39% did.

And it’s not that people don’t know churches are out there. The Christian pastors who authored The Great Dechurching 
estimate that 40 million Americans 
used to attend church at least once a month 
and now go less than once a year. The study they commissioned found that 
“no theological tradition, age group, ethnicity, political affiliation, 
education level, geographic location, or income bracket” 
has been immune to this trend.

The Great Dechurching goes into some detail 
about why people are leaving churches 
— again, from a survey, 
and not just reflecting the authors’ possibly biased intuitions.

Some reasons are specific to particular denominations. The Catholic Church’s clergy sexual abuse scandals 
disillusioned a lot of members. Young people have been leaving Evangelical churches 
for largely political reasons, 
as Perry Bacon described: They can’t reconcile the message of Christian love and compassion 
with the harsh and often hateful positions 
their churches take in the culture wars, or understand how loving Jesus can lead to voting for Trump.

We may not feel that those issues apply to us, 
but there is a more general lesson: Members begin to fall away 
when they sense hypocrisy in their churches, 
when what the church teaches doesn’t match 
what the church does 
or how members are treated.

One challenge many churches face 
has become known as the Rise of the Nones: The percentage of the population 
reporting their religious affiliation as None 
has grown from 6% in 1991 to almost 30% in 2022.

Many churches don’t know what to do with that trend. The whole point of a Baptist or Catholic church 
is to gather up all the Baptists or Catholics in a town, 
not to socialize seekers who balk at reciting a creed.

UUs, though, tend to see the rise of the Nones 
as an opportunity rather than a problem: "Not sure what you believe? Believe something you can’t put a label on? Welcome! You’ll fit right in."

But Nones present a challenge for us too. We know what to do with Nones like Perry Bacon: 
people who were raised in another faith, got disillusioned, 
and now report a church-sized hole in their lives. Lots of us got here that way: I used to be Lutheran. My wife used to be Catholic. That kind of journey is familiar to us.

But as more and more parents leave 
the churches they were born in, 
more and more children are growing up without a church. As adults, those children may discover 
exactly the same needs in their lives as Perry Bacon, 
but to them it won’t look like a church-sized hole. To them, church is an old-timey thing Gramma and Grandpa did, 
not a plausible solution to their own social isolation.

So lifelong Nones won’t walk in our door church-shopping. Someone will need to meet them where they are
 and communicate to them 
that church is a reasonable thing to do. We’re not used to making that case.

And even if they do walk in the door, 
even if they join, they may be slow to grasp how all this works. Not just the when-to-stand-up and when-to-sit-down 
of the Sunday service, but the constant give-and-take 
of being in community with a diverse group of people.

UU minister Kimberley DeBus put it this way in her blog: “Understanding what it means to be a member, 
to be in covenant, 
to support the common endeavor. That means things like supporting a decision 
[that was] fairly and honestly made, 
even if it wasn’t your preference. It means looking to the future and trusting those with vision, 
even if it wasn’t your vision. It means teaching others and helping them along 
even as you were helped along when you first arrived. It means doing the work to support the congregation 
- helping out, taking on leadership roles, 
being engaged with each other.”

Most UU churches aren’t set up to be an adult’s first church. When adults walk into their first church, 
everything seems to happen by magic. It takes a while to understand 
that nothing happens unless someone does it, 
and nothing is paid for unless someone contributes. If you express a need and it isn’t instantly satisfied, 
that doesn’t necessarily mean people don’t like you 
or don’t want you to feel welcome. No one is born knowing this stuff. More and more, we will have to teach it.

And then there’s the problem that Bacon himself exemplifies: People like him aren’t joining our churches 
because people like him aren’t joining our churches. Many, many UU churches have a bootstrapping problem 
— racially, generationally, 
and across divides we may not even be aware of. Waiting for Perry Bacon to show up 
and bring his community with him 
is probably not a viable outreach strategy 
— but I’m not sure what is. 

And if he did show up with a cohort of friends -- 
younger, darker, 
hoping to change the church to better serve their needs -- 
what then? Would we see them as an opportunity, or as a threat? We come here now because we’re happy now. And new members, 
especially members different from us, 
might change things. How will we preserve what we need 
without sending away
 people whose needs are different?

And then, there’s the challenge churches always face, 
whether they’re growing or shrinking: How do we make the cost/benefit balance work? How do we reach out to more people 
without burning out the people who are already here?

Having raised the cost/benefit issue, 
I have to mention a challenging question 
Christian writer Jake Meador posed in The Atlantic: In our busy 21st-century lives, 
we may think we need a church 
that asks less of us. But what if what we really need 
a church that asks more of us, 
one that calls us to transform our busy life
 rather than just squeeze church into it? 

“Contemporary America,” he writes, 
“simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment 
as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy 
for forms of community 
that don’t contribute to one’s professional life. Workism reigns in America, 
and because of it, community in America, 
religious community included, 
is a math problem that doesn’t add up."

He continues: “The problem in front of us 
is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society 
that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans 
have adopted a way of life 
that has left us lonely, anxious, 
and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.”

I know how exhausting church responsibilities can be, 
so I don’t want to press the ask-more idea too hard. But think about it. Chew on it for a while.

So I’ve described a lot of challenges, 
but not all churches are failing. I only stop by a couple times a year, 
but everything I’ve seen at this church lately looks encouraging. My own church in Massachusetts 
recently came out the other side of a rough patch: Our minister of 31 years retired just as Covid was hitting. A lot of members decided this was a good time 
to take an extended vacation from church, 
and we wondered if they would ever come back. But our search committee did a good job of finding a new minister, 
and the congregation seems to be on the upswing again.

[Here I have edited out a couple of stories about churches I know that are struggling, for fear the churches are a little too recognizable.] One of my friends ministered to another UU church 
a little over an hour from Boston. I spoke there a few times. They have a lovely sanctuary 
that decades ago would hold hundreds, but they can’t afford to heat it in the winter, 
so we met in a side room with a couple dozen chairs.

In short, the future could go either way. Having invoked Emerson, 
I have to pass on one of my favorite Emerson quotes: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, 
if we but know what to do with it.”

So why am I bringing this up today? What am I hoping you take away from this talk? (This is that point where you might come back from your side track.)

I’m sure I’m not the first person to say 
it would be good if this church grew. I’m not the first person to try to sell you the vision 
of a congregation that becomes more racially diverse, 
and that renews itself by pulling in a new generation of young families. The UUA is full of consultants who will tell you that. 

But even if we agree with that vision,
 too often we repeat those statements
in the same tone of voice we use when we talk about cleaning out our garages or starting an exercise program. Of course it would be nice, 
but where are we going to find the time and energy to do it?

What I’m trying to do today 
is throw another coin on the motivation side of the scale: We don’t need to do this just for ourselves. In fact, our individual motives sometimes pull the other way: If my friends are here already, 
how much bigger does the church need to be? But growing Unitarian Universalist churches, 
and changing them so that they’re better equipped to grow, 
is something we need to do for the world. The world needs the kind of institutions we could build.

Many years ago, 
my church held a brainstorming afternoon 
to compose a new mission statement. The goal was to have a concise answer to the question: 
“What are we trying to do here?” 
so that every proposed project 
could be judged by how well it helped us do that thing.

I drew a complete blank that afternoon, 
and contributed almost nothing. The mission statement we came up with 
was one of those multi-subordinate-clause paragraphs 
that was all very well-intentioned. But I don’t remember it 
and I never hear anyone quote it.

A few months later I was out for a walk 
when what I should have proposed popped into my head: Becoming the people the world needs.

That’s what we ought to be doing. The world needs thoughtful, committed, compassionate, truth-seeking people. Right now, we may not always be those people. But we aspire to become them, 
and we come together as a community 
to help each other work on that aspiration.

Lately, though, I’ve been realizing that 
“becoming the people the world needs” 
isn’t quite good enough, because it only covers our individual growth. I think we also need to care about 
building the institution the world needs.

And so that’s the question I’d like to leave you with: Right here, right now, 
what church-resembling institution does Quincy need? And how could this church move 
in the direction of becoming that institution?

Closing words

The closing words are by William Wordsworth: 
“What we have loved, Others will love; and we will teach them how.”

Maintaining a Healthier Relationship with the News

 presented at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts
August 11, 2024

As most of you probably know, I write a weekly news and politics blog called The Weekly Sift. I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years.

And all that time, people have been telling me the same thing: “I could never do that. Following the news is just too depressing.”

While some people say that in a matter-of-fact way, UUs typically say it in a tone of self-criticism. Because Unitarian Universalism is a this-world religion, we feel like we ought stay informed about this world. But too often we end up bouncing back and forth between obsessive anxiety and depression when we do follow the news, and guilt when we don’t. So many, many UUs have an unsatisfying relationship with the news.

That’s what I want to talk about today: How could you relate to the news in a healthier, more positive way?

I want to start with a couple of simple suggestions. Then I’ll look back to a bad period in my own recent relationship with the news and draw some conclusions from it. And finally I’ll close with some general observations 
on what I think of as the “spirituality” of the news.

First the simple stuff. The reason the Sift comes out weekly is that I believe most Americans consume news at the wrong pace. The 24/7 news cycle tempts us into frequent, shallow interactions with the news rather than fewer, deeper ones. So in the course of a week you may spend an hour on some particular topic or event, but probably you’ve just processed the same five minutes 12 times. You’ve heard the same facts, felt the same emotions, and thought the same thoughts over and over again.

For example, think about watching coverage of a mass shooting. In the first five minutes you’ll learn where it was, an estimate — possibly wrong — of how many people were killed or injured, and whether the shooter is dead, in custody, or still at large.

At that point, you know all the information that is publicly available, and there may not be anything more for several days. If you want, you can keep watching the continuous coverage for three more hours. But you won’t learn anything new?

That pattern is more common than you probably think. Surprisingly often, you’d be better off following a story week by week rather than minute by minute.

My second simple suggestion is to be wary of speculation. It’s a rare day when the news networks actually uncover 
24 hours worth of information. So they pad their schedules with panels of “experts” who try to guess what will happen next. Very few of these pundits predict the future all that well, but they fill the time.

Sometimes, speculating about what’s going to happen next is fun. That’s why we do it in our personal conversations. Do you think the Red Sox will make the playoffs? Will that couple get married eventually? How is the final season of Stranger Things going to wrap things up?

We have those speculative conversations because we enjoy them. And so, if you enjoy watching TV talking heads speculate, feel free. There’s no harm in it.

But it also has no value. So if you’re not enjoying it, if it’s making you tense or agitated, you can walk away and do something else.

So those are my two simple pieces of advice: Consume news at a slower pace that allows you to think about it 
rather than just react to it. And walk away from speculation that you aren’t enjoying.


Now let’s go a little deeper. Often mistakes have a lot to teach us, so I thought I’d tell you about a recent time when I mismanaged my own relationship with the news.

Back in February, as you may remember, Special Counsel Robert Hur released his report on Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents. He found no justification for pressing charges, but along the way he made gratuitous comments about President Biden’s mental competence. Biden responded with an angry press conference that made things worse. As he was leaving the room, he answered an unscripted question about Gaza, and said “Mexico” when he obviously meant “Egypt”.

That started a media frenzy similar to the one this summer that led to Biden dropping out of the race. That next week, 
the Annenberg School for Communication counted 26 unique articles about Biden’s age in the New York Times alone. And only one of them pointed out that Trump might also have an age problem. So for an entire week, 
Biden’s age blotted out all other considerations: his administration’s accomplishments, January 6th, and even Trump’s criminal indictments and plans for authoritarian government. None of that was worth discussing, because Biden was old.And I thought: “This is it. We’re going to replace democracy with authoritarianism because one man said ‘Mexico’ instead of ‘Egypt’.”
 
And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. I felt it physically, as if I were carrying a weight around. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again.

And I don’t think it was just me. In Paul Krugman’s subsequent column he seemed to be carrying a similar weight: “I am,” he wrote, “for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.”

OK. At this point we could go down at least two long sidetracks and never find our way back, like Biden’s actual mental competence, exactly how bad a second Trump term would be, and stuff like that. But talk to me about that some other time.

Right now, I’m more interested in that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. If you’ve ever felt something like it, you know that the triggering information doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change or the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.

One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, “Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll probably be OK.” And then you hear or see something. Maybe it’s a big thing, like the Dobbs decision or the October 7 attacks. But it doesn’t have to be. Maybe you hear about a heat wave in Asia. Or see police fighting with protesters. Or maybe a personal friend, somebody you’ve always respected, surprises you by repeating some hateful talking point about trans people or immigrants.

And in an instant the bottom falls out. That guarded confidence you felt a minute ago is gone, and suddenly all you can think is: “We’re doomed. We’re on a track to some unthinkable dystopia, and nothing I do makes any difference. People don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to them, because I can’t figure out what they were thinking to begin with.”

I experienced this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so gullible or self-centered or short-sighted?

We don’t usually talk about these experiences, because it feels like confessing a weakness, or like a virus we don’t want to pass on. If I’m panicking inside, I don’t want to tell you about it, because I don’t want you to panic too.

But I think we do need to talk about this, for at least two reasons. First, because when this happens to you, it’s really unpleasant. Despair is one of the most painful emotions out there, so the less time you can spend in it, the better.

And second, it’s debilitating. When that sinkhole opens up or that volcano of rage erupts, it’s hard to keep doing any of the constructive things you ordinarily do. And if you do manage to keep doing them, you probably aren’t doing them very well. I know that when I’m coming from a place of fear or anger, when I’m running away from an internal panic, I have bad judgment and find it hard to connect with people. In situations where I’d like to communicate confidently and persuasively, what tends to come through instead is my anxiety. So despair, depression, and anger 
tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies. If you and everyone like you are panicking, that can easily turn into something to panic about.

FDR famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. But that quote skates over the fact that fear itself can be pretty fearsome.

After I surfaced again, I started asking people if they recognize this experience and, if so, what they do about it. I’ve learned two things from those conversations: First, not a single person has told me that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And second, from the remedies they suggest, I gather that most people experience this as a passing mood, a short-term unpleasantness that they just need to get over. So I’ve heard suggestions like: Eat something. Go walk in the woods. Watch a movie. Get a big hug from somebody.

And if you have a minor case, that works. Treat yourself like a malfunctioning device: Unplug yourself, wait a little while, and then plug yourself back in again.

But sometimes that only works for a few days, or until the next triggering event. News-induced despair or anger can be a recurring injury like a bad back or a trick knee. And if that’s the case, you need more than just a reboot, you need a strategy, a training regimen. You need to look for patterns in the outbreaks, to see what you need to strengthen and what you need to avoid.

One pattern in my life is that my blog gives me a weekly cycle. Monday mornings I put a lot of energy into getting the posts out, and that puts me in a vulnerable state Monday evenings and into Tuesday. So I’ve learned not to expect much of myself until Wednesday. Another thing I don’t do is double up Sunday services and Monday blogs. So you may have noticed that I’ve cancelled tomorrow’s Weekly Sift. I just don’t have the stamina to do both.

But I was doing all that in February, and it still wasn’t enough. And that got me looking at these sorts of crashes more deeply: What causes them? Is there some kind of mental hygiene that can prevent them?

Now, it’s tempting to say that the News itself is the cause, that the bad state of the World is making us feel this way. And if that’s true, then the only permanent solution is to stop paying attention altogether, or stop caring. That’s what Jackson Browne is wrestling with in the song. [Earlier in the service, we had listened to Jackson Browne’s song “Doctor, My Eyes”.] Maybe I should have closed my eyes rather than leaving them open for so long.

As you can imagine, I don’t want to go there. If we all do that, then the American experiment in self-government really is over, no matter who wins our elections. And if we stop paying attention to anything beyond our own private lives, our own loved ones and our own circle of friends, then our UU values become empty. Are people starving in Gaza? Is the planet going to be unlivable for future generations? Too bad for them. I’ve got my own problems.

So I was highly motivated to take a closer look at my February collapse and see what I could learn from it.

Think about the list of symptoms I experienced and that I’ve heard other people report: — paralyzing fear, despair, depression, and annihilating anger. To me, those are all symptoms of broken denial. You keep telling yourself that some unpleasant thing can’t happen, and then you get reminded that it can. So you get angry or depressed or fall into despair.

That tracks with my experience in February. I had been telling myself, and telling my readers, that the American people are basically sensible, and they’ll rise to the challenge of this election. Every voter starts paying attention on their own schedule, so at any given moment they might tell a pollster all kinds of things. But come November, 
most voters will look around, figure things out, and do the right thing.

But then for a week in February, nothing mattered but Biden’s age. And I was forced to admit: Maybe not.

Once you accept the diagnosis that the root problem is denial, it becomes important to understand what exactly you’ve been denying. This can be tricky, because the demons of Depression will do their best to fool you about it. Denial typically involves telling yourself that good things are going to happen, so Depression will try to convince you that the way to fix your mistake is to tell yourself that bad things are going to happen: Democracy is over. Climate change is going to destroy civilization. Rational thought can never compete with religious extremism. Humanity will never make any progress on poverty or war or bigotry. In short, we’re all doomed.

I went through that phase, as I imagine many of you have at one time or another.

But this kind of negative thinking is just the mirror image of the positive thinking that got me in trouble to begin with. Because my true mistake, the conclusion that needed replacing, wasn’t that the election was going to have a happy outcome. My true mistake was telling myself that I knew what was going to happen. Jumping from “I know things are going to turn out well” to “I know things are going to turn out badly” doesn’t undo that denial, it maintains it.

Because here’s the scary, humbling, but true thought that I was actually denying: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can guess. I can speculate. I can argue that one outcome is more likely than another. But when you come down to it, I just don’t know.

I don’t know who’s going to win the election. I don’t know if Trump will ever face justice. I don’t know how bad climate change will get before we turn it around, or if we even will turn it around. I don’t know what future wars we might find ourselves fighting. I don’t know what new plagues are out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out 
how to offer everyone a chance at a good life. I don’t know how long it will take the arc of the Universe to bend towards justice, or if it even wants to bend that way. Pick any problem or issue you care about, and I can’t promise you anything. Because I just don’t know.

And that, I think, is the essence of a problem we all face: How do we keep going, keep striving, keep doing whatever we can to give humanity its best chance to thrive — without falsely promising ourselves that whatever we’re doing is certain to work?

The answer to that question, I believe, is that we need to have a deeper appreciation of the difference between Optimism and Hope,And learn to practice Hope. We often use those two words interchangeably, but they’re actually quite different.

Optimism, like Pessimism, is a belief about the future: It will go well or it will go badly. But Hope is an attitude towards the Present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying. The future will always be uncertain, but Hope is what allows us to accept that uncertainty and keep going.

UUs ought to be good at this, because our religion has never offered us certainty. Unitarian Universalism doesn’t postulate a God who promises happy endings. It doesn’t guarantee us a place in Heaven or assure us that we’ll all meet again after death. Unitarian Universalism just says that living a good life is better than living a bad life. Focus on that, and have hope.

I think that’s an important lesson to remember right now, because in recent weeks the news cycle has turned again.
Biden dropping out of the race ended several weeks of what (from my point of view) was a really bad news cycle. And now, suddenly, we’re in a very good news cycle. People like me are excited again and polls are shifting. All the momentum is what I consider good momentum.

So it’s tempting to start buying into Optimism again, to tell myself that everything’s going to be fine, that on election night I’ll have the pleasure of watching good people win and bad people lose. And that may happen, but I don’t want to get attached to it. I don’t want to start the whole manic/depressive cycle going again. The mental hygiene I’m trying to live by is Hope, not Optimism. I want to strive for good things without ever losing sight of the possibility that they may not happen.

I recommend that attitude not just for this election, but for all other political issues, and for challenges in your personal life as well: Don’t spend a lot of time in the future, living in positive or negative scenarios that may never occur. Just keep striving for the best outcome you can reasonably imagine, and then let things happen as they will.

We don’t get to choose the future, but we do get to choose our own actions.  

Choose well.

Hope, Denial, and Healthy Relationship with the News

a service presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on May 5, 2024

Opening Words

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
and the slow parade of fears 
(without crying).
Now I want to understand.

I have done all that I could 

to see the evil and the good 
(without hiding)
You must help me if you can.

Doctor, my eyes tell me what is wrong.
Was I unwise 
to leave them open for so long?

- Jackson Browne

Reading

In addition to its plot and characters, the novel All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren is one of the greatest storehouses of metaphors in American literature. Here’s one relevant to today’s topic:

It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second.

While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself.

The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.

Sermon

I’m taking a bit of a risk this morning.

Whenever I write a talk, I try to keep certain balances in mind. To me, those balances define what it means for a talk to be a Unitarian sermon rather than an academic lecture or a political speech or some other kind of sermon.

One of those balances is between the personal and the universal. I think a Unitarian sermon needs to be personal. It shouldn’t just be a collection of abstract notions I think you’ll find interesting. The topic should mean something to me and figure in my life. But on the other hand, a Unitarian sermon shouldn’t just be personal.  It shouldn’t be idiosyncratic. My experiences and struggles should illustrate some larger, more universal point, because this isn’t therapy and you didn’t come here to listen to my problems.

Today, though, I’m talking about an experience that I know is personal, but I’m only guessing about its universality. I think maybe something similar happens to a lot of you also, but we tend not to talk about things like this, so I don’t really know.

The experience is an intense spiraling downward that gets triggered not by anything in my personal life, but from my interaction with the news. I hear about something in the outside world, the public world that we all share, and then the walls come tumbling down.

Let me tell you the last time this happened to me. The trigger — which, looking back, seems kind of trivial, but these things usually do after a few months — was the Hur report. Maybe you remember: Robert Hur was the special counsel tasked with investigating President Biden’s unauthorized retention of classified documents, an investigation that in some ways paralleled the one that led to former President Trump’s Florida indictment. The bottom line of that investigation, from my partisan perspective, was positive: Hur found nothing that would justify pressing charges. As an official matter, the case was closed.

But along the way, he took a swipe at Biden’s mental competence, describing the president as “an elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age”. Biden responded with an angry press conference that made things worse. As he was leaving the room, he answered an unscripted question about Gaza, and said “Mexico” when he obviously meant “Egypt”.

And then the media frenzy was on. According to the CSS Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication: During the next week the New York Times alone published 26 unique articles about Biden’s age, only one of which pointed out that age might also be a problem for Trump. For a week, Biden’s age blotted out all other considerations: It mattered more than anything his administration had accomplished, more than Trump’s plans for authoritarian government, and even more than January 6th. Nothing else was worth discussing, because Biden is old.

And I thought, “My God, we’re doomed. We’re going to lose our democracy because one man said Mexico instead of Egypt.”

And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again.

In Paul Krugman’s subsequent column he didn’t talk explicitly about his emotions, but I imagined he was having a similar experience: “I am,” he wrote, “for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.”

OK. From here I could go into a long rant about the importance of this election, or how the media is covering it, or why in spite of everything I’m still hopeful about November. But that’s not where I want to go.

No, what I want to talk about is that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. The something doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change or the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.

One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, “Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll be OK.” And then you hear or see something. Maybe it’s a big thing, like the Dobbs decision or the October 7 attacks. But it doesn’t have to be. Maybe you hear about a heat wave in Asia. Or see police fighting with protesters. Or maybe somebody you know, somebody you thought knew better, surprises you by repeating some hateful political talking point about trans people or immigrants.

And in an instant the bottom falls out. That guarded confidence you felt a minute ago is gone, and suddenly all you can think is: “We’re doomed. We’re on a track to some unthinkable dystopia, and nothing I do makes any difference. People don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to them, because I can’t even imagine what they were thinking to begin with.”

I experience this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so stupid or self-centered or short-sighted?

We don’t usually talk about these experiences, because it feels like confessing a weakness, or like a virus we don’t want to pass on. If I’m panicking inside, I don’t want to tell you about it, because I don’t want you to panic too. But I think we do need to talk about this, for at least two reasons. First, because when this happens to you, it’s really unpleasant. Despair is one of the most painful emotions out there, so the less time you can spend in it, the better.

And second, it’s debilitating. When that sinkhole opens up or that volcano of rage erupts, it’s hard to keep doing any of the constructive things you ordinarily do. And if you do manage to keep doing them, you probably aren’t doing them very well. I know that when I’m coming from a place of fear or anger, when I’m running away from an internal panic, I have bad judgment and find it hard to connect with people. In situations where I’d like to communicate confidently and persuasively, what tends to come through instead is my anxiety and fear. So despair, depression, and anger tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies. If you and everyone like you are panicking, that in itself can be something to panic about.

Ever since February I’ve been wandering around asking people if they recognize this experience and, if so, what they do about it. I’ve learned two things from those conversations: First, not a single person has told me that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And second, from the remedies they suggest, I gather that most people experience this as a passing mood, a short-term unpleasantness that they just need to get over.  So I’ve heard suggestions like: Eat something. Get a good night’s sleep. Go walk in the woods. Watch a movie. Get a big hug from somebody. Snuggle with a pet.

In essence, these remedies treat a poor mental state like a malfunctioning device. You don’t need to understand exactly what went wrong. Just unplug it and then plug it in again. Reboot, and hope the problem goes away. Most of the time, it does.

But sometimes it doesn’t. Or it goes away for a day or a week, and then the whole pattern repeats itself: You hear that the bird flu might lead to another pandemic, read about another species going extinct, hear somebody else confidently proclaim their racism or sexism, and the roller coaster takes another dive.

At this point, you need more than just a distracting hobby or a comfort animal. You need a strategy.

The beginning of strategy is noticing patterns. One pattern I’ve noticed in my life is a weekly cycle. I post my political blog on Monday mornings. And even though I’ve been assembling it all week, Monday morning usually requires about six hours of intense concentration. In particular, it’s emotional concentration, because I test each sentence for all the ways it could be misunderstood, and all the unintentional insults I might be dealing out to readers who come to this topic with life experiences different from mine. By Monday afternoon my empathy is exhausted, including my empathy for myself. So Monday evenings are difficult for me, and I’m highly vulnerable to these kinds of collapses.

I’ve tried a number of remedies, but the one that works best is simple acceptance: This is what Monday evening feels like. Notice it, accept it, don’t make it worse, but also don’t take it too seriously. I get through Monday, try not to expect much out of myself on Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning I’m almost always fine.

In the Carlos Castenada books, Don Juan talks about stalking your dysfunctions the way that a hunter stalks prey. In this case, you may need to stalk your fear, despair, anger, or other negativity. Find out where it hangs out, where it comes from, where it goes, and plan your strategy accordingly.

But sometimes even that doesn’t work. And at this point, you might wonder whether you’re in the territory of that old vaudeville joke: A guy walks in to his doctor’s office and says “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” And the doctor responds: “Don’t do that.”

Does it hurt when you pay attention to the news? Don’t do that. Stop looking. Stop caring about elections or the planet or global injustice or anything beyond what you need to get through your day. That’s the question Jackson Browne was wrestling with in the opening words: I’ve been living with my eyes open. Was that a mistake?

Now, for me, not paying attention to the news would mean shutting down my blog, which has become a major part of my identity. But even without that consideration, I also think it would betray my Unitarian values.

As Unitarians, I don’t believe we’re supposed to be fat and happy. I think we’re supposed to be active, well-informed citizens. I think we’re supposed to be involved in the give-and-take of democracy. And even to lead those discussions to the extent that we’re able. As a religious movement, we take seriously Thomas Jefferson’s warning: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

But that said, sometimes you do need to step back and let the world manage without you for a week or two. We all, I think, have inside us that sad little fetus Robert Penn Warren was talking about, the one that wants to stay warm in its not knowing. Once in a while, we need to show ourselves some compassion and take a little time to comfort that fetus.

And sometimes the negative pattern you’ve stalked to its lair is obsessiveness. So you need to ration your attention and set up circuit breakers to keep yourself from going down a rabbit hole. More than one person has told me that they need to enforce a rigorous bedtime to keep themselves from doomscrolling their news feeds far into the night. You can make those kinds of adjustments without permanently turning your back on the world.

I want to devote the rest of my time this morning to thinking about prevention. Short of ignoring the world’s problems, is there some regular practice, some mental hygiene, some healthy relationship to the news, that can prevent these sorts of mood collapses?

I think there is. But to understand it, we need a more precise diagnosis of the problem.

If you look at the kinds of responses I’ve mentioned — paralyzing fear, despair, depression, and annihilating anger — I think they’re all symptoms of broken denial. You keep telling yourself that some unpleasant thing can’t happen, and then you get reminded that it can. So you get angry or depressed or fall into despair.

That’s what happened to me in February. I had been telling myself, and telling my readers, that the American people are basically sensible, and they’ll rise to this challenge. Every voter starts paying attention on their own schedule, so at any given moment they might tell a pollster all kinds of things. But come November, most voters will look around, figure things out, and do the right thing.

But then for a week in February, nothing mattered but Biden’s age. And I was forced to admit: Maybe not.

So if the root problem is denial, then the obvious solution is to live without denial. But that’s a lot easier said than done. Perfect perception of reality is not given to human beings. We all piece together our worldviews from a few facts, some reasonable deductions, a little hearsay, a few wild guesses, and maybe a bit of wishful thinking. No matter how hard you work on your picture of reality, the world is going to continue to surprise you.

And figuring out how to respond to those surprises gets tricky. Take my response to the Hur report. That mood crash should have told me that I had been in denial about something. But what exactly? What was the belief that events had exposed as dysfunctional? And what was the right belief to replace it with? It’s really easy to get this wrong, and many people do.

Here’s one way I could have thought it through: What got me in trouble, what got exposed as denial, was my belief that the American people are going to do the right thing in November.

So maybe the correct view, the thing I need to admit to myself, is that the American people are going to do the wrong thing. The Republic is doomed. We’re going to vote to end democracy once and for all. That’s just how it is.

I see people do this all the time: If my positive belief is denial, then the exactly opposite negative belief must be true. Climate change is going to destroy civilization. Rational thought can never compete with religious extremism. Humanity will never make any progress on poverty or war or bigotry. We’re all doomed.

I say I could have thought it through that way, but it’s actually worse than that: I did. For several days I tormented myself with those kinds of negative thoughts.

But eventually I realized that this kind of thinking was just the flip side of the same denial. Because my true mistake, the conclusion that needed replacing, wasn’t that the election will have a happy outcome. My true mistake was telling myself that I know what’s going to happen. Jumping from “I know things are going to turn out well” to “I know things are going to turn out badly” wasn’t undoing my denial, it was maintaining it.

Because here’s the scary, humbling, but true thought that I was actually denying: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can guess. I can speculate. I can argue that one outcome is more likely than another. But when you come down to it, I just don’t know.

I don’t know who’s going to win the election. I don’t know if Trump will ever face justice. I don’t know how bad climate change will get before we turn it around, or if we even will turn it around. I don’t know what future wars we might find ourselves fighting. I don’t know what new plagues are out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out how to organize humanity to offer everyone a chance at a good life. I don’t know how long it will take the arc of the Universe to bend towards justice, or if it’s even bending that way at all. Pick any problem or issue you care about, and I can’t promise you anything. Because I just don’t know.

And that, I think, is the essence of the problem we all face: How do we keep going, keep striving, keep doing whatever we can to give humanity its best chance to thrive — without falsely promising ourselves that whatever we’re doing is certain to work?

My best response to that question is actually in one of my previous talks, the one I gave during the Covid lockdown, when we were meeting over Zoom with the congregation in La Crosse. Remember? I talked about hope.

My hope at the time was that if you remembered anything from that talk, it would be this: Hope is neither optimism nor pessimism. Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future, but hope is an attitude towards the present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise you an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying.

So in conclusion, that’s the mental hygiene I’ve been trying to live by these last few months, and that I recommend: Cultivate your capacity for hope, and regularly exercise your ability to live and function in the presence of uncertainty.

Whether we’re talking about the election, climate change, some other public issue, or even some challenge in your personal life, try to avoid both optimism and pessimism. Try to avoid either promising yourself a positive outcome or getting lost in some negative scenario. Just keep striving for the best outcome you can reasonably imagine, and then let things happen as they will.

We don’t get to choose the future, but we do get to choose our own actions.  

Choose well.

Closing Words

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance. -- Benjamin Franklin

My Humanist Afterlife

Presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois
12 November 2023

In the traditional wheel of the year, fall is when things come to a conclusion. You can see different aspects of that theme in the season’s two major holidays: Thanksgiving is about harvest, and Halloween is about death.

The great UU preacher and author Forrest Church once summed up all of religion as “our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die”. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Most of us deal with that challenge, at least in part, by practicing denial. Yes, we’ll die, but let’s not think about that right now.

This is the attitude Don Juan cautioned Carlos Castaneda against when he told him to “use Death as an advisor”. Simply by living, we use up a finite resource. When we deny Death or ignore it, we lose sight of that finiteness. And so we might be tempted to fritter time away. Death would advise us value our time more highly.

A second kind of denial is embedded in many religions, which teach that death is not as real as it looks: The body that dies is not important; it’s just the housing for a soul, which lives on eternally. In Christianity, that eternal life happens in Heaven or Hell. In many Eastern religions, the soul traverses a series of incarnations as anything from an insect to a god.

As I’ve mentioned in previous talks, I grew up at St. James [Lutheran Church in Quincy] with a very literal Christian theology, and my parents maintained that faith for their entire lives.

In 2011, my mother’s funeral was held at Hansen Spear [a local funeral home]. When I wrote about it later for UU World, I confessed how isolated I had felt as I listened to the minister’s description of Heaven, that perfect place where Mom now was and where we would all someday join her. Because as appealing as that story can be, and as much as I might want to believe it, I simply could not. Trying to assemble that vision in my mind was like building a house of cards that kept falling apart as fast as I could construct it.

Something I never wrote about is a very sad and difficult conversation I had with my father a year and a half later, shortly before his death. Dad knew he was dying, and in fact looked forward to it, because he believed he would see Mom again, along with his parents, sisters, and many old friends. My sister still practiced the Lutheran faith, so he was confident she also would arrive in Heaven eventually.

But as Death approached, he was now facing the fact that I probably would never get there. So he needed to say good-bye to me, and it was hard for him.

It was hard for me too. First, because no one wants to be included in his father’s list of dying regrets. And second, because my religion is something I take pride in, and to his final breath, Dad never understood.

As Dad was saying his good-byes to me, I think that he came as close as he ever would to having the Universalist epiphany, a religious awakening that Christians here and there have been experiencing since the earliest days of the faith: the realization that Heaven can’t truly be a place of perfect bliss if anybody you care about is missing. And if everybody is loved by somebody, then the only Christian salvation that makes sense is universal salvation. If we don’t all make it to Heaven, it can’t really be Heaven.

But Dad never crossed over into Universalism, and I did not push him, and he died.

That UU World column I mentioned implied a question that I don’t think I’ve ever answered in public: If I can’t believe in the Christian afterlife I was taught at St. James, what do I believe? Have I come to some alternative vision? Or have I made peace with the idea that Death is final and there’s nothing more to say? Or do I just try not to think about it?

Well, the first thing I want to say is that since I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist, I’ve heard several theories of what persists after Death. And I have to confess, that if the goal is to help me make peace with my own death, I haven’t found them particularly helpful.

For example, I often hear that we live on in the effects of our actions, and particularly in the influence we’ve had on the lives of others. And while that’s certainly true, if you find it comforting, you have way more confidence in the efficacy of your good intentions than I have in mine.

How many of us can say with any confidence what the ultimate consequences of our actions will be, or if, when they’re all are added up, the sum total will be positive or negative. That kind of assessment is a Judgement Day I don’t think I want to face.

I also hear that we live on in the memories of those we leave behind. Now, I appreciate that this thought comforts survivors, and helps us get past that period when grief seems overwhelming. It encourages us to hang onto our memories of those we have lost, even through that period where those memories are most painful. As President Biden has said, “There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son, or daughter, or your wife or your husband, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.“

But as I look ahead to my own death, the thought of living on as a memory is not that consoling. For one thing, the people who know me best may not live much longer than I do.

And as for the others, let me put it like this: Do you ever overhear people talking about you? Whether they’re saying good things or bad things, how accurate is it? The thought that similar conversations might still be happening ten, twenty, fifty years after your death — how satisfying is that?

When I floated this topic on Facebook this week, I heard a third idea that I hadn’t even thought about: the satisfaction of letting your corpse dissolve into the Earth, so that its elements can be taken up by new life.

Those comments were a lesson to me in how different people find meaning in different places. Because I don’t really care what happens to my corpse. I’m with Socrates on this: According to Plato, when Crito asked Socrates what to do with his body, he replied: “Do whatever you want, as long as you don’t imagine that it is me.”

In short, if the point is to make peace with being alive and knowing that I’m going to die, I’m going to have to look for that peace somewhere else. But where?

Before I start trying to answer that I need to lay down some ground rules. First, I can’t just try to talk myself into believing something because it’s pleasant and I want to believe it. If that was going to work for me, I’d still be a Lutheran.

And second, I believe in Occam’s Razor. So I’m not going to postulate whole realms and forces and choirs of angels unless something in my lived experience suggests they exist.

Now, that said, I differ from a lot of humanists in having a fairly loose definition of what counts as experience. So if you’re like Ezekiel, and you’ve been granted a vision of going up to the throne of God and being shown what’s what, I wouldn’t tell you to ignore it. But nothing like that has happened to me, not even in dreams. So I’m limited to constructing my vision out of fairly mundane materials.

My final prior consideration concerns how humanists tend to go wrong when we reason about spiritual matters. Too often, we don’t back up far enough. We take the questions traditional religion asks, and we try to answer them within that established framework, but using only the evidence humanly available. And so the answer usually winds up being “I don’t believe in that.” — which may be honest, but is seldom very helpful.

So if you let the question be “What happens to the soul after the body dies?”, and if the possible answers are “It dies too”, or “It reincarnates”, or “It moves on to some eternal realm”, then I’ll probably wind up saying “I don’t believe in a soul”. And how does that help?

So I think I need to start further back. What the heck is a soul  supposed to be anyway?

Your soul, if you listen to the people who believe in such things, is the essence of who you are. It stays with you, or more accurately, it is you, all the way from birth to death.

Try to think, for a moment about the totality of your life: all the changes, all the relationships, all the roles, all the careers, all the responsibilities, all the activities and interests that dominated your attention for some period of time and then were replaced by something else. Does it feel like there’s been an essence to all that? Do you really feel like you’ve been the same person, all the way from birth to the present moment?

Personally, I don’t. I find myself agreeing with Joan Didion, who wrote: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”

The narrator of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men describes an even more fragmented experience of identity: Travel, he says, is a frail thread that connects “the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place. You ought to invite those two you’s to the same party, some time. Or you might have a family reunion for all the you’s with barbecue under the trees. It would be amusing to know what they would say to each other.”

I wonder the same thing sometimes. At age 14, I wanted to be a baseball pitcher. In high school, I was on the chess team and spent all my free time working on my game. For a time, I thought I would be a novelist. My first career was as a mathematician, and for years math was as all-consuming as any interest I’ve ever had.

I don’t do any of that stuff now. So am I really the same person? If any of those past versions of me could look into the future, would they feel vindicated or fulfilled by the person I am today? I’m not so sure. More and more, I suspect that there is no essential Me that has been present through my full 67 years.

That lack of identification explains why both reincarnation and Heaven fall flat for me. Suppose that someday after my death a baby is born who remembers nothing of my life, the people I loved, or the things I tried to do. In what sense could that baby possibly be me reincarnated? That eternal essence we supposedly share is so abstract that I can’t identify.

I also have trouble identifying with myself in Heaven. Think back over your life and consider the extent to which you have been shaped by imperfections, both in yourself and in the outside world.

Maybe you spent much of your life overcoming a disability, or trying to win the approval of a difficult authority figure, or fighting addiction or depression, or living up to unrealistic expectations, or competing with a brother or sister, or dealing with poverty, or believing that you’re ugly or unlovable, or facing the consequences of mistakes you made, or battling society’s bias against people like you.

Your whole life has been shaped by imperfection: the imperfections of your body, your character, the people you lived with, or the society you lived in. How you dealt with those challenges is a big part of who you are today.

Now imagine yourself transported to a perfect place, where none of that matters. All your questions have been answered. Your conflicts with others are now just misunderstandings that have been resolved. Your physical or psychological wounds are healed, and so on. Who are you, in that world? Is that really somebody you can identify with? Is that really you living on?

So I could stop here. But if I did, this would be another one of those typical nay-saying humanist talks: A bunch of people believe in X, Y, and Z, but I don’t. And the unstated implication would be that if you do believe something and it gives you comfort in the face of Death, then I think you’re just wrong. The end. Sing the closing hymn.

But instead, let’s take a step further back and see if we can still solve the original problem somehow. Remember: I’m supposed to be responding to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. I’ve been working with the idea that my soul is some kind of eternal essence, and trying to imagine how this essential Me can transcend Death. 

And I haven’t done very well with it. So I could just say, “That’s it. I’m done. Death is Death. Deal with it.” But what if we think of the soul differently? “OK,” I imagine you saying, “but different how?”

I want to introduce my soul model with an anecdote that’s meant to be amusing: A man takes his son aside and says, “I want you to have this; it’s your great-greatfather’s ax. Your grandfather replaced the head. And I replaced the handle.”

Now, you may notice that those two pieces are the whole ax. So not a single atom of what the man is handing down actually belonged to the boy’s great-grandfather. And yet, there is also some kind of continuity that goes back that far.

In philosophy, this conundrum is known as the Ship of Theseus. Plutarch tells us that the city of Athens preserved the ship on which Theseus returned from Crete after his adventure with the Minotaur. But rather than let it rot in a museum, they kept it seaworthy by replacing pieces as they wore out. Over the centuries, probably every plank of it had been replaced at one time or another. So in what sense was it still the Ship of Theseus?

See where I’m going with this? What if I think of my soul not as an eternal essence, but as a Ship of Theseus? It’s more or less the same from one day to the next, but pieces are constantly wearing out and being replaced. So while there’s continuity all the way back to my first breath, if I look back twenty years or forty years or sixty years, I barely recognize myself.

That feels more right to me somehow. It fits with how I experience my life and think about my past. But how does it help?

A few minutes ago I talked about the experience of looking back at moments in my life and not identifying with them. And I projected forward, imagining futures beyond my death and how I would have a hard time identifying with them as well.

But now let’s talk about the opposite experience. There are people who are not you at all. But when you see them, and what they’re going through, you identify completely. Say there’s a new kid at school who doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t fit into anything yet. And you’re not a new kid. You know lots of people and feel at home in all sorts of situations. But you remember when you were the new kid, and you feel a strong connection.

Or maybe you’re older and your children are grown and out of the house, but you talk to a young parent who feels overwhelmed in exactly the way you felt overwhelmed. Or you’re a teacher, and you see a student touched for the first time by a piece of great literature, just like you were. Or someone’s mother has died, and you remember how it felt when your mother died. Or you’re at a wedding (maybe of a couple you don’t even know, because you’re just somebody’s plus-one), but you savor the bittersweet memory of imagining a whole life stretching out in front of you with all those possibilities. 

You know what I’m talking about. Those people are not you. And yet, in some significant way, they are.

Or maybe, in some small way, they’re somebody else, somebody important to you. Someone you’ve lost. You see a smile or a gesture, or hear a tone of voice, and — just for a moment — it’s your old friend, your brother, the girl you took to the prom. It’s a small thing. And yet, it’s not.

My Ship of Theseus may be a unique collection of parts. But a lot of those parts were mass produced. I can look around and see them in other people’s ships. When I see another ship with one of my parts, or maybe a part I replaced long ago, I feel the connection.

That’s how I’m hoping to live on.

What doesn’t work for me in the traditional notions of an afterlife is that they promise to preserve my uniqueness. And that doesn’t feel credible to me, because I see my uniqueness as just an idea, an abstraction. What connects me to that baby born 67 years ago is so ephemeral, it barely matters to me. And if that thin thread somehow stretches into the infinite future, I’m not sure I care.

But what I believe is going to live on, and what I do feel strongly about, is my commonality, the ways that I am like other people. The challenges that shaped my life — people will go on facing those challenges. Some of them will rediscover the same responses I came up with. And some will do better. Probably right now, there are people out there somewhere facing situations that I screwed up, and they’re fixing my mistakes. There’s something satisfying about that thought.

The things I have been, other people will continue to be. The battles I have fought, other people will continue fighting. The relationships I have had, other people won’t have exactly those relationships, but they’ll have similar ones. My closest, most special relationships, maybe they won’t turn up that often. But they are part of the broad range of human possibility. And sometime, somewhere, other people will stumble down that same path.

When that happens, will I be looking down from some eternal realm, sharing their moment? Maybe not. But I don’t think I need that.

What I need, if I’m going to make peace with Death right here and right now, is to imagine those people, to be aware of my similarity to them, and to feel a sense of connection stretching out into the indefinite future. That connection seems real to me in a way that Heaven or future incarnations don’t seem real.

And you may feel differently. But for me, right now, it’s enough.

Closing words

The closing words are from The Grapes of Wrath:

Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one — an’ then …

Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.

If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.

See?

"You Must Have Learned Something in 20 Years": reflections on two decades of blogging

presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois
March 26, 2023

When an ostrich buries its head in the sand as danger approaches, it very likely takes the happiest course. - Charles Sanders Peirce

One of the things I learned growing up in Quincy is that news happens somewhere else.

Years later, I heard ESPN anchor Kenny Mayne capture the experience perfectly with a twist on an old sports cliche. On paper, he said, it was obvious who would win the upcoming game. “But football games aren’t played on paper, they’re played inside TV sets.”

That was my experience of the news: It all happened inside a TV. The images on the screen might be of DC or New York or some city on the other side of the world, like Saigon or Tel Aviv. Occasionally they might show a small town somewhere. But almost never this small town. Because news happens somewhere else.

After I left Quincy I lived in a number of places, and then in 1996 I moved to New Hampshire. I got there too late for that year’s presidential primary. But in the 2000 cycle, I began to understand the magic of living in the land where presidential campaigns begin: Big name politicians wander the streets trying to get your attention.

Most of that cycle, I was a day late. I’d read in the local newspaper that Vice President Gore had been shaking hands in a restaurant a few blocks from my apartment. Or Senator Bradley had talked to 15 voters in somebody’s back yard.

Yesterday.

But I did manage to see John McCain, because everybody saw John McCain. He was everywhere. No venue was too small and no question too trivial. The man was amazing.

On the night of the primary, the big news was McCain’s landslide victory over Governor Bush, who had spent a lot of money on advertising, but almost never let ordinary people touch him or talk to him.

So I’m watching returns come in on TV, and they cut over to a reporter at the McCain victory party, where excitement was building and the candidate was expected to appear soon. It was in a hotel about three miles away, so I said to Deb, “Let’s go.” And we did. We walked in the door, elbowed our way into the crowd, and got there in time to hear McCain’s victory speech.

Some of you may have been watching that night, and you may have thought that speech was happening inside a TV set. But it wasn’t. I was on the floor, and when I looked up there it was: news.

The next day, all the candidates and cameramen packed up and forgot about us for another three years. But in 2003, the cycle was starting up again. And this time I was determined to do it right. I found the web page where the Manchester Union Leader kept track of which candidates were going to be where, and I decided I was going to see everybody. Best of all, I was going to see them early, when even the front-runners would be begging for attention.

And while I was at it, I thought I’d participate in the latest trend on the internet, and invite my friends to join me on a vicarious journey. Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist yet, but I planned to write up an account of every candidate I saw and email it to anybody I thought might be interested.

My project began on April 3, 20 years ago next week, which I now regard as the anniversary of my blogging career. John Kerry was speaking at the public library in Peterborough, about 45 minutes away. His speech was full of exactly the kinds of information an undecided voter needed: He told us about himself and his qualifications, talked about what he wanted to do as president and how he would be different from President Bush.

And then he opened the floor for questions. I had always wondered whether the questions at events like this are real or planted, and I found out: I got to ask Kerry about his vote for the Patriot Act, which I doubt he wanted to discuss. He gave an answer that I didn’t totally agree with, but I could respect it. And that was the general impression I wrote to my friends: Kerry probably wouldn’t be my first choice, but I could be OK with him as president.

When I had envisioned this project, I thought the only value my emails would add was immediacy: My friends could read about the same events in newspapers, but the accounts would seem more real coming from someone they actually knew. I didn’t expect to see completely different events from the ones that got reported nationally.

But I did.

You see, somewhere in the middle of his talk, Kerry made a quip. The Bush administration had used the phrase “regime change” to describe its goal in Iraq, and Kerry turned that around, saying that we needed some regime change right here in America.

It was a cute line, but there wasn’t much substance to it, so I ignored it. Rush Limbaugh didn’t. Somehow Rush heard that line and told his radio audience how unpatriotic he thought it was. Several Republican congressmen picked up that attack: This decorated Vietnam veteran was unpatriotic because he had characterized an incumbent president losing an election as “regime change”. So now it was on. Kerry had to strike back, saying that he didn’t need lessons in patriotism from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. It went back and forth for days. So if you heard anything about the Peterborough speech, that quip was what you heard. But if you had been in the room, it would have gone right past you.

Then I heard Howard Dean speak in a room above my local brewpub. The media had been describing Dean as the antiwar candidate. And yes, he said a few things against the Iraq War. But mainly he talked about his record as governor of Vermont, with particular emphasis on healthcare and education. The next morning, though, the major newspapers only quoted what he said about the war, as if that had been his whole speech.

It happened again and again: I saw one event, and then I read about a completely different one.

I had trouble wrapping my mind around what I was seeing. I felt like the campaign speeches were being covered badly, but it didn’t match any recognizable model of bad news coverage. The articles weren’t lying. No one was being misquoted. The omissions didn’t seem to favor one candidate over another. But I was coming at these events from the point of view of a voter trying to decide what kind of president these candidates would make. And apparently, that made me different from just about everyone else who was covering the campaign.

My project had started out as a lark, a fun thing to do and share with my friends. But as I got into it, I started to think that it was actually important. And that was my first step towards becoming a blogger.

Now, the theme of this talk, other than me getting nostalgic, is what twenty years of blogging has taught me. And so the first lesson I’ll pick out goes back to that beginning: The media doesn’t have to lie in order to do you a disservice.

Journalists may report what they’re seeing and hearing with perfect accuracy. But if they’re coming to those events with a mindset that isn’t your mindset, and if they’re trying to answer questions that aren’t your questions, then they’re not going to tell you what you really want to know. Nobody has to be a villain in this story, but your interests are not being served. So no matter how many articles you read, and how much time you put into following the issues you care about, you can’t be sure you’re being well informed.

This lesson sits in the background of my Weekly Sift blog every Monday. Because the hardest work I do on the Sift actually is not gathering the information or crafting the text. The hardest work is discernment: I’m trying to be a responsible citizen of a democracy, and I assume the same about my readers. Given that basic mindset, what issues should I — and by projection, you — being paying attention to? And of all the things that were said and done this week relating to those issues, which ones are genuinely important?

From the primary campaign, I branched out. That November, the Massachusetts Supreme Court found that same-sex couples had a right to marry. The news media focused on reactions to the ruling — who was for it or against it — but I wanted to know what the judge had said. I found the text of the opinion, and discovered that it was easier to understand than I had expected. So I wrote about it.

Periodically, I was noticing things about the Iraq War or the War on Terror that weren’t getting the attention I thought they deserved. So I wrote about them too.

Distribution by email turned into a web page anyone could access, and then in 2005 became a blog. I got into the habit of starting each week by posting a list of articles I had found worthwhile the previous week. Later I began adding short comments on those articles, and in 2008, I spun that Monday-morning summary off into its own blog, The Weekly Sift. I’ve posted something there almost every Monday since.

So that’s the second thing to learn from my experience: Once you start something, you never know where it’s going to go. Something that begins as a lark may turn into a project that lasts 20 years.

And when you do something for 20 years, the world changes around you. When I started blogging, the problem I saw was that a dominant media narrative might be out of touch with what ordinary people need to know. And I saw the internet as a tool for fixing that problem.

So along with much better known writers like Ezra Klein, Digby, Josh Marshall, and Amanda Marcotte,  I became part of the movement that made independent blogs more influential. Then came Facebook, Tik Tok, podcasts, and social media as we have come to know it. And now we have the opposite problem, which is arguably worse: people can create echo chambers that responsible journalism never penetrates. And they can support each other in believing whatever they want to believe, independent of the facts.

So today, if you want to believe that your candidate won an election he actually lost by seven million votes, or that a vaccine that has saved millions of lives is part of a sinister plot to control you, you can. Maybe the people trying to save the world from climate change are actually conspiring to enslave us all in a global socialist dictatorship. Who can say? There is no Truth to be reported. There’s only what you want to believe, and how many people you can find who agree with you.

What’s even more disturbing to me is that so much of the rhetoric that justifies that disinformation sounds like what I was saying 20 years ago: You can’t always believe what you’re told. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions. You need to look behind the curtain and do your own research.

In some ways I feel like the Clint Eastwood character Dirty Harry. In the first movie, he’s a police detective who refuses to be bound by procedural niceties that let guilty people go free. But in the second, he sees what happens when that attitude goes too far. This time, the villains he has to track down are a cabal of cops who take it on themselves to assassinate anyone they identify as a bad guy. Late in that film Harry says what to me is the most memorable line of the whole series: “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

And so today, as the internet takes away the power of experts in all fields to make us look at truths we’d rather ignore, we all need know our limitations. I can write about anything, but I’m not a universal expert. I’m not a climate scientist or an epidemiologist or a military strategist. My life experience doesn’t tell me much about being Black or female or poor or trans. The world is full of people who know things I don’t. Important things. True things. And so, over the years, the Sift has had to become more balanced: It’s not just about what to doubt, but also who to trust, and what I believe we can rely on.

The final and most important lesson I want to draw this morning centers on an issue that never comes up explicitly in the Sift, but hovers constantly in the background. The roots of this actually go back further than 20 years.

In the spring of 2000, CNN was intensely following several stories that had little to do with my daily life, but that I got hooked on: A court was deciding whether to break up Microsoft. Elian Gonzalez’s mother had drowned bringing him to the United States, and now his father in Cuba wanted him back. There were a couple of other major stories that, truthfully, I can’t even remember now. But following them took up a huge amount of my time, not just watching reports on them, but also arguing in my head with people who took the other side of those issues.

So one day I was walking through a park next to the Nashua River, while in my mind I raged against some wrongheaded person I had just seen on TV. And I was miserable, in that particular way that I get when I’m afraid my side is going to lose an argument that we really deserve to win. (Maybe you know that feeling.)

And then something happened. A theist might say that God’s grace shone down on me for a moment. But whatever caused it, my consciousness suddenly took a step backwards and I got a longer perspective. And I began to laugh at myself. Because here I was on a beautiful spring day, in a lovely spot, at a moment when my life overall was going pretty well, and I was miserable.

I was miserable in that unique way that addicts are miserable. I was filled with anxiety and tension and fear and rage — and a yearning for relief from those feelings. But I was looking for relief in something that was actually going to make it all worse: more news coverage. The latest details on those stories, more talking heads arguing about them — that’s what I felt like I needed. It was crazy.

So I went cold turkey on the news for a couple weeks, and I did indeed get better. I was once again able to experience the ups and downs of life as they came, without an ever-present background anxiety, and a desperate grasping after experiences that would make that anxiety worse.

But of course, ignoring the news is not an answer either, any more than it’s an answer for an alcoholic to live the rest of his life in a rehab center. I am a voting citizen in a democracy, and I live in a society that faces real issues of justice and injustice. Closing my eyes to everything bigger than my personal life might be necessary from time to time, but long term it can’t be the right response.

So there’s one central question that always hangs in the background of The Weekly Sift: What is a right relationship to the news?

Over time, the central mission of the Weekly Sift, at least as I see it, has become modeling that right relationship — staying aware of the news, thinking about it, even reacting emotionally to it at times, but not sliding into a destructive obsession with it, or letting it depress me to the point that I can’t enjoy my personal life.
 
A lot of that right relationship has to do with pace. And that’s why I stay disciplined about keeping the Sift weekly rather than interrupting your life with updates whenever something happens. Because you ought to think about the news regularly, but you don’t need to be thinking about it all the time. If you are thinking about it all the time, particularly if you’re thinking about it in an anxious, needy way that makes you keep turning on your TV or picking up your phone thinking “What’s new? What’s new? What’s new?” — that’s a sign of addiction. Back up. Go walk in the sunshine. The world can survive without you for a few days.

Even weekly is too frequent for many issues, so you’ll notice that I don’t try to cover every issue every week. I don’t write about racism every week. I don’t write about climate change. It’s not that those issues aren’t important, but they’re playing out over decades, and the struggle against them is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to keep tabs on those issues, and if you think of yourself as an activist, you should probably review your strategy occasionally: Are you doing enough? Is your work effective? What might you do differently?

Having that conversation with yourself several times a year is probably healthy. But if you’re having it several times a day, you’re probably just driving yourself nuts. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb for thinking about the news: Thinking deeply about an issue now and then is generally better than rehashing the same few thoughts over and over.

Once you start thinking about the news as a possible source of addiction, you may begin to notice how that addiction works. One of the main mechanisms for getting us hooked is through speculation. Once you believe that you know what’s going to happen next, good or bad, then you have to keep checking to see whether it has happened. If you anticipate something hopeful, then you are plagued by the fear that it won’t happen. And if you anticipate something fearful, you still keep hoping that it won’t happen. Either way, you feel like you need to know.

The business model of the news media relies on keeping you hooked, so they do their best to feed speculation. Imagine a news anchor saying:“Nothing much happened today, so you can take some time off from the news. Watch a movie, tend your garden, call an old friend. You can check back tomorrow.”

Of course they’re not going to say that. If nothing much happened today, then they need to keep you focused on all the things that might happen soon. Important things. Scary things. Things that might give you the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. So you should feel about them, yearn for them, fear them.

Getting ahead of the news can make sense if you need to be taking preemptive action or preparing for a quick response. If there’s a bill in the legislature, maybe you need to call your representative about it now, rather than waiting to see if it passes. If a change in government policy might hurt a certain group of people, maybe you should be thinking ahead about how you’ll  help those people.

But most of the speculation we hear isn’t like that. It’s a pure “I want to know what’s going to happen.” And the people telling you what’s going to happen typically don’t know.

Take a Trump indictment, for example. All this past week, the media kept us on edge. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. Today — no, not today. Tomorrow then. These are the charges you can expect. Or maybe those. And his supporters will riot. Or they won’t.

And what good has any of that speculating done us? How are we better off than the people who have been withholding their attention until something actually happens? Think about the hours we could have been spending appreciating life.

In conclusion, I want to emphasize that no one else can tell you whether you have a healthy relationship to the news. It’s a matter for your own introspection and discernment. There’s no number of hours you should or shouldn’t be spending. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether or not you can pass some current-events test.

There are really only two questions to focus on. First, what role do you want to be playing in our society and culture? Do you see yourself as an activist, as someone who helps in some way, large or small, in shaping opinion and plotting the course of our democracy? Are you well enough informed to play the role you see for yourself?

Second, how is your experience of the news affecting your experience of life? Does staying informed make you feel more competent and effective? Or is it filling you with anxiety or depression or guilt? If it’s the latter, then I would urge you not to just take those feelings as an unavoidable response to the way things are. Instead, I encourage you to use those feelings to examine how you relate to the news, and to think about whether or how that relationship could change.

The closing words have been attributed to the Sufi poet Hafez, and I think what he’s saying about fear could also apply to anxiety or guilt or depression: “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.”

Delight in Each Other: Democracy as a Covenantal Relationship

 a service presented at First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church
in Bedford, Massachusetts
February 19, 2023

Opening Words 

The opening words are from the sermon John Winthrop preached on board the Arbella, to the colonists on their way to found the new town of Boston. 

"We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body."

Time for All Ages: Stone Soup 

One day a traveler came to a village, pulling a cart behind him. In the cart was an enormous cooking pot, 
and inside the pot was … nothing. 

As he approached the village green, villagers came up to him, looked in the cart, looked in the pot, 
and said, “You don’t seem to have any food with you, so I think you may have come to the wrong place. This is a poor village in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Many are hungry, and no one has extra food to offer you. You should just keep going, and maybe you’ll have better luck down the road.” 

But the traveler said, “You mistake my purpose. I didn’t come to ask you for food. I am going to cook a wonderful soup in this pot, and offer a bowl to anybody who wants one.” 

Well, there were indeed many hungry people in the village, so that offer drew their attention. “But what are you going to put in your soup?” 

To which the traveler replied: “Watch and see.” 

So the villagers watched him as he filled the pot with water from the village well, and gathered wood and started a fire. And as the water began to heat, he took something out of his cloak and unwrapped it: a stone. 

“This is a magic stone,” he said. “Exactly how I obtained it is a tale that perhaps I might tell some other time. But for now just let me tell you how the enchantment works: Whenever I am hungry (and I have to admit I am getting hungry now) all I have to do is boil this stone, and it produces stone soup, which is the most filling and nutritious soup I have ever eaten. The stone will fill any vessel with soup, and that’s why I carry a pot so much bigger than I need for myself, so that I have plenty to share with others.” 

The villagers weren’t sure what to make of this story, but they watched as the traveler stirred and sniffed and reminisced about all the wonderful times he had eaten stone soup. And as they listened to him, their mouths watered and their stomachs growled. 

“All you need is that stone?” someone asked. 

“Well,” admitted the traveler, “by itself stone soup is filling and nutritious, as I said. But if you add just a little cabbage, it becomes tasty as well.” 

To everyone’s surprise, one of the village’s poorest women said: “I have a few cabbages hidden away.” 

“These will do marvelously,” said the traveler as he cut them up and added them to the pot. Now the air was full of the smell of cooking cabbage, which drew all the rest of the villagers out to the green. 

“Stone soup with cabbage is indeed quite tasty,” the traveler said. “But if it also has a few carrots, it becomes downright delicious.” 

“I have a few carrots,” another villager offered. 

Once the carrots were added, the aroma became irresistible, and the villagers began to volunteer. 

“Do you think some potatoes would help?” 

“I have just a bit of salted pork.” 

“Corn,” offered another. “Salt and pepper.” 

The traveler praised each offering as exactly what the soup needed, until one by one, every household in the village had added something to the pot. With each ingredient, his claims for the soup grew, until he declared that even the King himself would not enjoy such a fine soup that day. 

When the traveler pronounced the soup done, he ladled out a bowl to each and every villager. And as he scraped out the last of the soup for himself, there at the bottom of the pot was the stone. He very carefully picked it up, cleaned it off, wrapped it in a cloth, and put it back in his cloak for the next time he might need stone soup. 

And as the villagers ate, they all agreed that this was indeed the most wonderful soup they had ever tasted, and every word the traveler had said about it was perfectly true. 

Readings 

I’m Doug Muder. As you might guess from my name, I’m of German ancestry. Large numbers of Germans were already coming to the American colonies in the 1700s, and my direct ancestors began arriving in the 1840s. And so, whenever people start debating who is or isn’t a “real” American, my status never comes into question. 

If you are similarly privileged, I recommend this exercise: Page back to the era when people like you first started coming here, and see what was being said about them then. When I did that, I found this letter Benjamin Franklin wrote to Peter Collinson in 1753 about the threat that German immigration posed to the Pennsylvania colony. 

“Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch and English; the Signs in our Streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German: They begin of late to make all their Bonds and other legal Writings 
in their own Language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our Courts, where the German Business so encreases that there is continual need of Interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will be also necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our Legislators what the other half say; In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.” 

In time, though, Germans and a variety of other immigrants became acceptable. As far back as de Tocqueville, it has been observed that Americans are united more by a set of beliefs than by ethnicity or sect. The canon that defines that so-called American creed has never been codified, but I’ve collected a few texts that I think you will all recognize. 

From the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” 

The Preamble of the Constitution says a little more about why governments are instituted: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

From the Gettysburg Address: “We here highly resolve that … this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” 

The final reading is by Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who, when she doesn’t have a job that takes her elsewhere lives in Concord. She may look and sound like a lifelong American, but she is an immigrant. She came from Ireland at the age of 8, and wasn’t naturalized until adulthood. 

In her autobiography The Education of an Idealist she describes the ceremony like this: “During our collective Oath of Allegiance, we pledged, ‘I will support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ 

“Looking around the courtroom, seeing emotion ripple across the faces of those whose hands were raised, I was struck by what America meant as a refuge, and as an idea. All of us gathered that morning had reached the modern Promised Land. We weren’t giving up who we were or where we came from; we were making it American. 

“I hugged an elderly woman from Central America on my left, and a tall man from Russia to my right. We were all Americans now.” 

Sermon 

As many of you probably know, I write a weekly political blog where the topic of democracy often comes up. 

One downside of looking at the news week-by-week, as I do, or day-by-day, as many cable news shows do, is that it’s easy to focus on the latest threats to democracy, whatever they happen to be: Say, election denial, or a violent attempt to overturn an election (like the one in Brazil last month or here two years ago), or a voter suppression law, or gerrymandering, or an assault on the free press. A short-term view tends to make us reactive: Democracy is under attack. How can we defend? 

But this morning I want to take a longer view and think about the health of democracy. Not who is attacking it and how, but what do we need to shore up and rebuild? Not what is tearing democracy down, but what makes democracy work in the first place? 

Health is often more mysterious than disease, and I believe that’s the case here. Some very important things about democracy aren’t well understood or appreciated, even by people who value it highly, like Unitarian Universalists. One big misunderstanding, I’m sorry to say, is embedded in our Fifth Principle, the one that commits us to affirm and support “the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” 

It’s the only mention of democracy in our principles, and from it you might get the idea that the essence of democracy is process: holding elections, having a Congress, giving courts the power to uphold human rights.
 

That kind of thinking has led well-intentioned people astray time and time again, for a very simple reason: If you have military control over someone else’s land, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the European powers did in their former colonies, then it’s not hard to impose a process.You can assemble a constitutional convention, guarantee that the first set of votes are counted accurately, and leave behind an elected government operating under a constitution that promises human rights and the rule of law. 

Presto! You’ve created a democracy. 

But again and again, those externally imposed democracies have failed, because the processes of democracy are empty 
unless a Spirit of Democracy animates them. Anyone with enough power can set up a democratic process. But only the people themselves can infuse that process with a democratic spirit. 

That sounds a little mystical, so I should probably give a concrete example of a living democratic process I have experienced myself, and which you may have experienced as well. Several years ago I served on a jury in a criminal case. In the beginning I wasn’t thrilled to be there, and I doubt that my colleagues were either. Who is, really? I doubt many people get the summons and say, “Oh great! I get to do jury duty!” 

But it didn’t take long for the ritual of the court to work its magic on us. Surprisingly quickly, it became real to us 
that in this particular time and place, we were the community. It was up to us to weigh the law’s just demands against the defendant’s rights. 

None of us had a personal stake in the outcome. We didn’t know the defendant or anyone else connected with the alleged crime. If we had not caught the spirit, our deliberations might have become a rote performance. We might have listened to the witnesses half-heartedly and then just voted our preconceived opinions about crime or the kind of people who live in that neighborhood. We might have gone along with the majority just to get it over with. 

But we did catch the spirit, and we did our job well. We listened intently, both to the evidence and to each other. We thought hard about the case, and as we discussed it, several of us changed our minds. And even though we voted to convict, if I am ever on trial, I hope I get a jury like us. 

But whether we understand the importance of spirit or not, the people threatening democracy do. It’s striking how many of their attacks leave the processes standing, but hollow out their meaning. Russia, for example, still preserves the form of campaigns and elections, but any opposition leader who gets too popular, if he’s not just killed, may have to choose between exile and prison. Hungary still has the appearance of a free press, but nearly all the major news outlets have been bought by allies of the government. In a gerrymandered state like Wisconsin or North Carolina, voters can cast ballots however they like, but whatever they choose, the party that drew the maps has locked itself into power. 

The worldview that underlies such empty democratic rituals is one of deep cynicism. Justice can’t be blind. Government is always corrupt. Science is fake. News is just propaganda. There is no shame in lying, because everyone lies. 

And none of that is seen as the debasement of higher values; it’s just how life is. There are no real democracies, no common truths on which we might base our discussions, no shared principles that might guide our deliberations. Only children believe in such things. Only power is real. 

Having invoked that cynicism, I’ll try to dispel it with a second positive example, this time from one more document out of the American canon, the Mayflower Compact, which bound together the pilgrims on their way to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

The Compact is pretty thin on process. The pilgrims promise “to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient”. In other words, they pledge to come up with some kind of process eventually. 

But they do something else in this document, something no external power can make you do. The pilgrims “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic”. They promise that those processes they intend to establish someday will be “just and equal”, and work towards “the general good of the colony”. 

What they’re are saying, in other words, is that we have decided to be a People together. Rather than submit to some external authority, we commit to govern ourselves. And rather than use that government to exploit each other, we pledge to treat each other as equals and seek the common good. 

That’s what’s missing when the processes of democracy become empty: a covenantal relationship among people. Democracy is alive not when we are committed to freedom of the press or one man one vote or trial by jury. All those abstractions only come alive when we are committed to each other, and to all the people who share our covenant. Everything else flows from that. “Delight in each other,” John Winthrop told his flock. That’s where it starts. When we value each other, when we feel responsible for each other, and accountable to each other, then the Spirit of Democracy will animate our processes. 

Today I’m mainly talking about American democracy and the American covenant. But an idea I want you to hold in the back of your minds is that this applies to First Parish too. For more than two years, Covid has really been doing a number on our ability to delight in each other. Our democratic processes have continued to function, but we’ve also seen how brittle they can become when they can’t be anchored in a larger consensus formed during coffee hours and potlucks and concerts, or while working together on an auction or a plant fair or a haunted house. 

All that has been restarting lately, and just in time. In a little over two months, the search committee will be introducing us to a candidate to be our senior minister. Then we’ll have decisions to make, and maybe a new era to kick off. It will be an exciting time, and it will also be challenging. 

But if we remember our covenant, stay true to each other, and take advantage of whatever opportunities we can find to delight in each other, then I’m pretty sure we’ll be OK. 

So back to America. If democracy depends on its covenant, then we need to do some hard thinking about the American covenant and how to keep it strong. Fundamentally, a covenant is two things: a group of people, and the commitment they make to each other. And so the health of our democracy depends on finding the right answers to two foundational questions: Who is an American? And what is this “America” that we have come together to form? 

The Samantha Power reading described our ritual of naturalization, through which we induct new people into our covenant. And as she makes clear, that ritual is not empty for the new Americans themselves. It’s also deeply meaningful for the people who preside; I could have offered any number of readings testifying to that. 

But one of the primary avenues of attack on our democracy is to hollow that ritual out. Too often today, we hear people talk about “real Americans”, a group of people different from (and presumably much smaller than) 
American citizens as the law defines them. The definition of a “real American” changes from one speaker to the next. Maybe you have to be white. Maybe you have to be Christian. Maybe you have to be native-born, or speak English with a certain accent. You may become less “real” if you turn out to be gay or trans or socialist. 

Once you accept this notion that some American citizens are not “real”, you are on your way to overthrowing democracy. Because how can an election be legitimate unless the legal voters make the same choice the “real” voters would make? And if they don’t, doesn’t it make sense to suppress the votes of the “unreal” Americans, or gerrymander them into districts that minimize their power, or find some loophole in the process that allows the “real” candidate to take office in spite of getting fewer legal votes? Ultimately, wouldn’t even violence be justified? 

So to defend democracy, we need to stand up for the idea that naturalization is real, the birthright citizenship promised by the 14th Amendment is real, and nothing about your sexual preference or gender identity or political philosophy makes you any less real of an American. We need to hang onto that vision of Samantha Power hugging the Hispanic woman to her left and the Russian man to her right, because “We were all Americans now.” 

To a large extent, that vision is true to our history. At the time of the Founders, the challenge was to get people to come here, not to keep them out. And so we barely had immigration laws at all until after the Civil War. 

Some people like to claim that their ancestors came here “the right way”. But there was no wrong way for my ancestors to come in the 1840s. They just showed up and survived a few years, and then they were Americans. 

What united Americans then, and has continued to unite us through the centuries, was not ethnicity or language or religion, but that vision expressed in Jefferson’s Declaration: Everyone comes to this world with equal worth and dignity. Everyone has the right to live, to steer their own course through life, and to try to thrive as best they can. Government power derives not from God or the ancestors or any other external source, but from the consent of the governed. 

As President Washington told the Hebrew Congregation of Newport: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” 

If you’re here, and you believe those things, and if you’re willing to cast your lot with the rest of us, to defend our lives and our rights the way we defend yours, then you’re as American as anybody else. 

Last week, Lisa Maria mentioned some of the metaphors Americans have used to describe this joinable covenant: a melting pot, or (as she prefers) a patchwork quilt, where immigrants keep their prior identities, but (in Samantha Power’s words) “make them American”. In the same vein, I’ve also heard America described as a tossed salad. Personally, though, I see America as a stone soup. 

Think about the mistake the villagers are making at the beginning of that story, the one the traveller tricks them out of. Each of them has a little food, but they all imagine that their own stash is the only one. And so they look at each other as mouths to feed, and not as people who might have something to offer. 

Again and again, immigrants have come to our shores looking like they have nothing. But again and again, that has turned out not to be true. They brought their talents. They brought their culture. They brought their energy. And they made it American. We haven’t always treated our immigrants well. But America at its best has always eventually realized that these aren’t just mouths to feed. These are people with something they can add to our soup. 

That unofficial American creed also goes a long way to answer the second fundamental question, to define the “America” our covenant is trying to form: a place of liberty and equality, where people have the opportunity to apply their talents and become whatever they have it in themselves to be. 

And to that I would add one more idea, which I would trace back to George Washington’s Farewell Address: America is a kind and generous member of the community of nations — willing to help, standing with others who defend the same freedoms we want for ourselves, but not seeking empire or dominance. 

But as I paint that patriotic picture, I can already hear the objections rising in your minds: How can we reconcile such a positive vision with the actual history of the United States? With the Native American genocide? With slavery and Jim Crow? With the oppression of women, of gays and lesbians, of a long list of groups who in one way or another have been labeled abnormal or unworthy? How do we reconcile it with the way we treat those who are coming to our border right now, looking for help because they have nowhere else to go? 

Those questions point to the second argument we have to win, if we are going to defend democracy: The America that defines our covenant — we can’t look for it in the past. It is a goal for our future. There is no moment we can look back to and say, “That was America. Let us make America great again.”

The America that defines our covenant is an ideal and always has been. We have never lived up to it and we’re not living up to it now. 

Who would know better than a black man in the midst of the Great Depression just how far the America of history has fallen short of the American ideal? 

In 1935, Langston Hughes saw the vision of America as clearly as anyone: 

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

But he also lived the reality. “America,” he wrote, “never was America to me.” 

His poem laments not just his own oppression, but all the people America has failed. And yet he does not give in to cynicism, or reject the ideal of America in scorn or disgust. For Hughes, our repeated failures only reinforce his commitment that someday we must succeed: “

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every [one] is free. …
America has never been America to me,
And yet I swear this oath: "America will be!"

We fulfill the vision of America today in many ways that we fell short two hundred years ago, fifty years ago, or even ten years ago. Our highest hope is that future generations will be America in ways that we never have been, that they will look back on us not as the good old days, but as an era only slightly less benighted than the ones before it. 

Summing up, to keep our democracy healthy, we need to renew our commitment both to each other and to the ideal America we want to create. But how? Every day, whether you get your news from the Left or the Right, you are reminded how divided we are, how polarized. So how can we renew our covenant, even with people on the other side of the partisan gap? “Delight in each other,” John Winthrop said. That seems so distant now. 

In his recent book The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas describes the work of a Russian internet troll farm that created countless fake American social media identities in order to influence American politics and culture. Their goal was not to convince us to support Russia, but rather to turn us against one another. 

“The troll farm … had encouraged the view, already on the rise, and not without roots in reality, that the basic activity of democratic life, the changing of minds, had become futile work. … [It] wanted Americans to regard each other as immovable, brainwashed, of bad faith, not worth energy, disloyal, repulsive.” 

That belief is easy to find today on both sides of our political divide: Our opponents are not just wrong, they are irredeemable. But I want to close by pointing out that this hardened attitude violates our Universalist tradition, which refuses to write people off just because they don’t see what we see. 

Leaders may act in bad faith, but many follow them in good faith, believing what they have been told. The solutions they ask for may be misguided, but the problems they see in their lives may still be real, and deserve our compassion. 

I know how hard it can be to look past the name-calling, trolling, and bullying to try to understand the genuine disappointments and hurts fueling that behavior. But no matter how frustrating and annoying such people may be, they are Americans, and we are in covenant with them. 

If we’re going to renew our covenant and preserve our democracy, we need to hold onto our Universalist faith that no one is beyond redemption. And that — no matter how stubborn they are or how many times they have been hoodwinked — no one is completely incapable of seeing Truth. 

Closing Words 

The closing words are by Langston Hughes 

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be