Religion in society – Dan Harper

A Religious Liberal Looks at the Economy

Opening words

from “To His Newborn Great-Grandson,” by W. E. B. DuBois

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work. With this satisfaction, and this need, life is heaven or as near heaven as you can get. Without this — with work which you despise, which bores you, — with work which the world does not need — this life is hell.

Readings

The first reading comes from the New Revised Standard Version of the Christian scriptures, the Book of Mark, chapter 10, verses 17-26:

“As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and ”’ He said to him, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’ Jesus, looking at him … and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When he heard this, the man was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

“Then Jesus looked around and said to his followers, ‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ And his followers were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ They were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’”

The second reading comes from Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, from the first chapter, titled “Economy”:

“For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus [add MAY tose]. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.”

Sermon — “A Religious Liberal Looks at the Economy”

Back in 1992, Jim Carville was a strategist working in the presidential campaign for the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. To help his campaign workers promote a uniform message, Jim Carville posted a sign in the Clinton campaign headquarters with the three main points he wanted to convey to voters. Using Carville’s exact wording, those three points were as follows: Don’t forget healthcare; Change versus more of the same; The economy, stupid.

Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Thirty-two years later, these points could still be used by either of the major presidential campaigns. The last two points — Change versus more of the same; The economy, stupid — remain especially relevant. Indeed, I’d argue that the last point — “The economy, stupid” — probably motivates more voters than anything else.

Because the economy continues to be so important in our democracy, I thought it made sense for me to devote a sermon to the economy. However, I’m not an economist. Nor am I adept at talking about American politics. So this won’t be a political sermon. Instead I’m going to try to talk, from my point of view as a religious liberal, about some of the moral implications of economics.

To begin with, let’s consider the New England approach to doing business, as I experienced it growing up in a New England town during the late twentieth century. In those days, before the big box stores and multinational conglomerates took over, and before people bought everything online, many businesses were still local or regional. The most reputable of those businesses had a guiding philosophy of doing well by doing good. So, for example, during the 1980s I spent seven years working for a family-owned lumber yard. The family which owned the lumber yard went into the lumber business to make money. At the same time, they knew they had to provide goods and services that were needed in the community. They also felt it was their duty to provide stable middle class jobs that allowed their employees to buy a house and raise a family.

I don’t mean to romanticize those New England businesses from another day. The lumberyard where I worked, for example, was pretty sexist, and worker safety wasn’t always at the top of their list of priorities. But the best of those businesses did their best to follow the ideal of doing well by doing good; and there are still some businesses today that still follow that ideal.

Keeping that ideal in mind, let’s consider the story told about Jesus of Nazareth that we heard in the first reading.

The story opens by telling us that Jesus was about to set out on one of his travels through the countryside around Jerusalem. A young man approaches him, and asks this famous spiritual teacher what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus lists some of Moses’s teachings from the Torah: don’t murder anyone; don’t have sex with someone who is someone else’s spouse; don’t steal, lie, or cheat; take care of your parents. Upon hearing this, the young man feels complacent, for he has in fact done all these things. To puncture his complacency, Jesus tells this wealthy young man that there’s one more thing he must do: he must sell everything he owns, give it to the poor, and join Jesus on those travels through the countryside to bring teaching of spirituality and justice to all people. Upon hearing this one last requirement, the rich young man walks away grieving. As he walks away, Jesus turns to his followers, and tells them how difficult it will be for wealthy people to enter the kingdom of God.

Let me pause for just a moment to consider what Jesus meant when he spoke of the “kingdom of God.” Today’s mainstream Christians are sure they know exactly what the kingdom of God is. They assure us that the kingdom of God is some kind of afterlife where human beings get to go if they are good Christians. By “good Christian,” they mean people who belong to their Christian denomination, and profess belief in the orthodox dogma of their denomination. However, theirs is an anachronistic understanding of Jesus’s words. Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. Nor did Jesus profess belief in any kind of Christian orthodoxy; there was no Christian orthodoxy until a couple of centuries after Jesus had died.

If you read the Book of Mark with an open mind — that is, if you do not cloak Jesus in anachronistic religiosity, but consider him as a spiritual thinker of depth and insight — you can see that when Jesus says “the kingdom of God,” he was not referring to an afterlife. Jesus felt that the kingdom of God is happening here and now, all around us. Nor is the kingdom of God limited to human beings, for Jesus tells us that not a sparrow falls but that God is aware of it. The Kingdom of God is, to use the words of theologian Bernard Loomer, nothing less than the “world conceived of as an indefinitely extended complex of interrelated, interdependent units of reality” — those of us who are not theologians call this the Web of Life, and it includes both the human and the non-human worlds. When even a tiny bird like a sparrow dies, that death affects the whole kingdom, because each being is connected to every other being.

To return to the story: When the rich young man approached Jesus, he faced a dilemma. Jesus and his followers hung out with people from a wide range of social classes, ranging from well-to-do merchants, to destitute beggars. Jesus saw that all persons were equally a part of the kingdom of God, and so Jesus maintained equality of relationships with all persons. The rich young man, on the other hand, liked his wealth, and he liked the high status his wealth gave to him. He followed all the teachings of the Torah to the letter, but his wealth prevented him from completely following the spirit of the Torah; or to put in contemporary terms, his love of his wealth prevented him from participating fully in the interdependent web of life. Seeing this, Jesus challenged him: Would the rich young man sell all his possessions and come follow Jesus? How attached was he to his wealth and possessions? Was he more attached to his wealth than he was to the interdependent web of life?

The followers of Jesus somehow manage to miss all these undercurrents. They are baffled by what Jesus says. If a rich person who has followed all the teachings of the Torah can’t enter the kingdom of God, then who can? Jesus tries to explain to them using a vivid metaphor to describe an almost impossible task. He says it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to become part of the kingdom of God.

Henry David Thoreau took up exactly this question in his book Walden. In this book, Thoreau describes how built himself a cabin a mile from the nearest house, and lived off the land. Walden is full of passages like the one we heard in the second reading, which ends: “I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.”

Because of passages like this, many people believe that Thoreau was telling us that we should all go off into the woods, plant a field of beans like he did, and stay out of the money economy. These same people then take great delight in pointing out that Thoreau did not in fact live completely on his own. They love to tell us that his mother did his laundry, and that he would often eat dinner with his family. Because of this, these people dismiss Thoreau. But these critics of Thoreau gloss over some key facts showing us that Thoreau’s actual message was more complex. Thoreau’s cabin was a station on the Underground Railroad, and one reason he went home to dinner was to attend gathering of anti-slavery activists. And Thoreau was also an important part of the family business of manufacturing pencils; he had to go home regularly because his work made an essential contribution to the family income.

Nor did Thoreau say that everyone should go build a cabin in the woods. He used his two year sojourn in the cabin at Walden Pond as an experiment. He wanted to that we could detach ourselves from our possessions; for when we allow ourselves to be governed by our money and our possessions, we lose sight of what Thoreau called “higher laws.” He was especially sensitive to the way that slavery in the United States warped the morality of the national economy. New Englanders liked to pretend they had nothing to do with slavery, but the Mexican American War showed him how northerners were happily complicit with southern slaveholders. Thoreau put it this way: “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” Jesus used the image of a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle to illustrate how attachment to wealth could disconnect people from the interdependent web of existence. Thoreau used a different metaphor, a metaphor of enslavement, and he talked of “higher laws” rather than the “kingdom of God.” But he was making the same point: too much wealth can disconnect us from the web of life.

This brings us to the present day, and to the present election cycle. When we listen to politicians talking about the economy — when we ourselves talk about the economy as it relates to the election — what exactly do we talk about? Are we talking about what Thoreau called “higher laws,” what Jesus called the “kingdom of God,” what we might call the interdependent web of existence? Or do our political conversations somehow fall short?

One area where the political conversations of our own day usually fall short is that we reduce the economy to jobs. If everyone has a job — so goes this rhetorical turn — then the voters will be happy with the politicians. But it is not just jobs that we human beings want and need. This has been true since ancient times. The Torah tells us, “one does not live by bread alone” [Duet. 8:3, NRSV]. Yes, we want work that allows us to put bread on the table. But we humans need more than that; we need to know how we are connected to the rest of humanity, and to the entire interdependent web of existence.

Furthermore, not every job brings us that sense of connection to something larger than our selves. In my seven years working in the lumberyard, and five years working for a carpenter, I was lucky enough to have decent jobs that allowed me to bread on the table. But those jobs didn’t provide much opportunity for attending to “higher laws.” So I was grateful for the hour each week when I could attend a Unitarian Universalist worship service. Maybe I didn’t always pay much attention to the sermon, but the service as a whole gave me a time and place to reconnect with something greater than myself. The social hour following the service was equally valuable as a time when I could talk with others about something besides my job. This may sound trivial, but spending a couple of hours once a week thinking about something other than carpentry helped me to stay connected to what Thoreau called the “higher laws.” We all have a spiritual need to feel connected to a greater whole.

The political conversations of our own day also fall short if they fail to make a strong connection between the economy and justice. This was true in Thoreau’s day, too, as some politicians chose to ignore the fact that at that time the economy of the entire United States depended upon race-based chattel slavery. While many free White northerners may have found slavery to be reprehensible, they too were held in thrall by an economic system which was rooted in slavery. Their comfort and their relative wealth kept them from ending slavery — kept them from paying attention to the demands of the higher laws, kept them from a full awareness of the interdependence of all human beings.

This helps us better understand what Jesus was trying to tell the rich young man who wanted access to the kingdom of God. That rich young man was not in control of his wealth and possessions; he was controlled by them. His highest duty was to his wealth, not to his higher self. Because of this, even though he lived a seemingly moral and blameless life, divinity was not easily able to stir within him.

Or perhaps Thoreau and Jesus both set higher standards than most of us can live up to. Selling all our possessions and following an itinerant preacher is not possible for most of us. Building a cabin a mile from the nearest neighbor and growing all our own food is not possible for most of us. This is especially true if we are responsible for other people — children, elders, spouses. But we should not get caught up in the specifics of these stories. Both Jesus and Thoreau stated their case in extreme terms to grab our attention. Each of them, in their own way, wanted us to fully understand the truth of that old saying from the Torah: human beings need more than food to live; we need a higher life as well. They wanted us to reflect on how we are disconnected from the higher laws. What is keeping us from realizing our essential connection with the interdependent web of existence?

Somehow we all need to find ways to remember that we are connected to all other people; that we are connected to something greater than ourselves; and that we have it in ourselves to make this world a better place. Thus when we say that it’s only about “the economy, stupid” — when we make it sound like the economy is a matter of selfish gain for each individual — we are doing a disservice to ourselves and to our whole society. The economy is more than just a job for you and a job for me. The economy should also be a means for helping all persons to lead better lives. We do not live by jobs alone. The economy should be a means for making this a better world. We should realize that our economic policies need to be governed by “higher laws,” that is, by high moral standards and by the ideals of justice.

Not that we’ll always agree among ourselves. Nor will we agree with every politician’s moral standards, or their notions of justice. But we can demand that whenever we as a people consider economic policy, we must always consider morality and justice. We must always consider higher laws. We must always understand that economics means we are connected to the vast web of all existence.

Photo of a whiteboard hanging in an office. — A photo allegedly taken of a white board in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters in May, 1992, showing Jim Carville’s now-famous saying, “The economy, stupid.” Good campaign strategy, maybe, but there’s more to the world than “the economy, stupid.”

Global Problems, Local Actions

Readings

The first reading is from an essay titled “The Evolution of My Social Concern” by James Luther Adams. Adams was a Unitarian Universalist minister and professor at Harvard. In the 1930s, he studied in Germany where he experienced the rise of Naziism. In a 1977 essay, he reflected on those experiences:

“The German universities, supposedly independent entities, had been fairly easily Nazified…. Hitler has also liquidated the trade unions…. The Masons were forbidden to hold meetings. Repeatedly, I heard anti-Nazis say, If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler. I noticed the stubborn resistance of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I observed also the lack of religious pluralism in a country that had no significant Nonconformist movement in the Christian churches. Gradually I came to the conviction that a decisive institution of the viable democratic society is the voluntary association as a medium for the assumption of civic responsibility.”

[Essay dated 1977, reprinted in Voluntary Associations: Socio-cultural Analyses and Theological Interpretation, ed. J. Ronald Engel (Chicago: Exploration Press of the Chicago Theological Seminary, 1986).]

The second reading is from “You Are Responsible,” in the book Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principle and Practices by Peter Drucker.

“Self-development is very deeply meshed in with the mission of the nonprofit organization, with commitment and belief that the work done in this church or this school matters. You cannot allow the lack of resources, of money, of people, and of time (always the scarcest) to overwhelm you…. Paying serious attention to self-development — your own and that of everyone in the nonprofit organization — is not a luxury. Most people don’t continue to work for a nonprofit organization if they don’t share, at least in part, the vision of the organization. Volunteers, particularly, who don’t get a great deal out of working for the organization aren’t going to be around very long. They don’t get a check, so they have to get even more out of the organization’s work. In fact, you don’t want people who stay on with the organization just because that’s what they’ve always done but who don’t believe in the organization any more. … You want constructive discontent. That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on respond, ‘But it’s so important!’

“The key to building an organization with such a spirit is organizing the work so everyone feels essential to a goal they believe in.”

Sermon: Global Problems, Local Actions

James Luther Adams, probably the greatest Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century, spent most of his brilliant career studying voluntary associations. A voluntary association is a group of people who have freely joined together, with no profit motive, to pursue a shared goal or interest.

The stereotype of the theologian is someone who writes unreadable books on how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin. Thus it might seem odd for a theologian to study something practical like voluntary associations. But that’s where James Luther Adams’s brilliance comes in. He realized that here in the United States, the primary location for religion was in local congregations, which were voluntary associations.

Another of Adams’s great insights was that one of the first things authoritarian governments do is to weaken, destroy, or take over all voluntary associations. Adams came to this realization during the 1930s while he was studying in Nazi Germany. One of the first things the Nazis did when they got into power was to take control of voluntary associations. The Nazis abolished many groups, from the trade unions to the Masons. They got rid of any youth movements such as Scouting that were already in existence, and instead imposed their own Nazi youth movements. They took over the churches, and ran the churches as a part of the Nazi state. Obviously, then, voluntary associations are crucial to a functioning democracy, and a critical bulwark against the authoritarian governments that would abolish them.

By combining these two insights, Adams helped us understand that here in the United States, religious congregations help support democracy. In fact, religious congregations are more important than some other voluntary associations, because congregations are groups that aspire to make a better society. The local soccer club is a voluntary association, but it has no aspirations beyond providing soccer games for its members. There are many such groups which exist primarily for the pleasure of their members. By contrast, a religious congregation is a voluntary association which exists not just for the pleasure of its members, but which also has higher goals: a vision of the earth made fair and all her people one.

When Adams returned from studying in Germany, he confronted an unpleasant realization about himself. Everyone in a democracy has a role in supporting that democracy. But after living for a time in an authoritarian state, Adams felt that he wasn’t doing enough to support democracy. In a 1966 essay titled “The Indispensable Discipline of Social Responsibility,” Adams wrote:

“…I had to confront a rather embarrassing question. I had to ask myself, ‘What in your typical behavior as an American citizen have you done that would help to prevent the rise of authoritarian government in your own country? What disciplines of democracy (except voting) have you habitually undertaken with other people which could serve in any way to directly affect public policy?’ More bluntly stated: I asked myself, ‘What precisely is the difference between you and a political idiot?’”

His answer, of course, was to increase his participation in voluntary associations. He participated in a number of racial integration movements in the 1940s and 1950s. He was active for many years with the American Civil Liberties Union. He participated in a number of professional associations. And he was always active in his local Unitarian Universalist congregation. He not only studied voluntary associations, he lived voluntary associations.

Adams died in 1994. Six years later, in the year 2000, the sociologist Robert Putnam published a book titled “Bowling Alone” in which he detailed how Americans were less and less involved in voluntary associations. That trend has continued to the present day: we Americans no longer join bowling leagues, we have stopped attending religious services, we don’t belong to the Masons or the Order of the Eastern Star. Putnam concluded that the two primary reasons for Americans’ decreasing involvement in voluntary associations were electronic entertainment — primarily television in those days — and generational change.

A quarter of a century later, the decline in voluntary associations seems to be continuing. In 2019, researchers at the University of Maryland wrote a report titled “A Less Charitable Nation” in which they said: “Immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, the volunteer rate surged to a peak level and stayed there for three straight years. After this record high in volunteering, the national rate of American volunteering declined and continued to slide throughout the decade from 2004 to 2015….” (1)

In my limited observation, this trend may have grown more pronounced during the pandemic, as people stayed safely at home with their electronic entertainment. Nor has the end of lockdown done much to change lure us Americans back into the public sphere. We continue to prefer staying at home with our electronic entertainment.

Not surprisingly, this trend of staying at home — this trend of becoming disengaged from face-to-face groups and voluntary associations — has been accompanied by a surge in loneliness, depression, and anxiety disorders. The evolutionary development of human beings did not include an adaptation to sit at home in relative isolation while staring at screens. This epidemic of loneliness and depression has become the major spiritual crisis of our time. I’ll say more about this spiritual crisis in a moment.

Also not surprising: this is combined with an increase in demagoguery across the political spectrum. Civic engagement through voluntary associations remains a critical part of democracy. As we Americans spend more and more time with electronic entertainment, and less and less time in face-to-face groups and voluntary associations, we’re actually weakening our democracy. Indeed, it feels like we’re facing a major crisis in our democracy.

These two crises — the spiritual crisis of loneliness, and the democratic crisis of demagoguery — both have at least some roots in the American withdrawal from voluntary associations. Robert Putnam called it “electronic entertainment,” and today we might call it “screen time,” but it amounts to the same thing. We all do a lot of staring at screens. And it appears that all that staring at screens isn’t very good for us, and it isn’t very good for democracy.

I say this as someone who has spent a good part of his life happily staring at screens. Since the days of Usenet, back in the 1990s, I’ve lived way too much of my life online, and enjoyed almost all of it. But this summer I started noticing how much time I spent staring at screens. I didn’t count time at work, since I have to use email and videoconferencing for my job. But I realized I might spend 8 hours a day, outside of work time, staring at a screen. As a spiritual experiment, I decided to reduce my screen time by (say) twenty-five percent, and see what happened.

Not surprisingly, I found I had more time to do other things, like taking walks, or engaging in face-to-face activities, or practicing the ‘ukulele (and I was pleasantly surprised at how much better my ‘ukulele playing got). But the real surprise was on the spiritual side of things. I felt better. Cutting twenty-five percent of my screen time meant cutting out almost every social media outlet. I stopped reading Facebook and the like. I stopped doomscrolling through the endless clickbait bad-news stories that dominate online news sites. The result was that I felt happier and more hopeful. To put it spiritually, with less screen time, I was no longer bogged down in minutiae and details. This seemed to strengthen my connection with something larger than myself.

And here’s another thing I noticed: now that I’m not obsessively tracking every last detail of the presidential election, I can pay more attention to local issues. We have quite an array of local issues that need attention paid to them. The local issues on the South Shore include food insecurity, housing insecurity, an epidemic of mental illness, and maybe even a decline in good governance in our local governments.

These local problems sometimes get put to one side when we spend most of our time worrying about the clash between the two national presidential candidates. This is coupled with a tendency to believe that if only our political candidate wins the presidential election, all our local problems will be solved.

This brings me to the famous saying, “Think globally and act locally.” This saying is often attributed to the biologist René Dubos, but people were saying similar things long before Dubos said it in 1977. I’d argue that Jesus of Nazareth lived out that saying in everything he did: he always considered the big picture, up to and including God; but at the same time he was always focused on the needs and concerns of the individual people immediately in front of him. We could say the same of the Buddha and other great spiritual thinkers.

I’d also argue that this is exactly what our congregation has been doing for the past three centuries. We consider the big picture, up to and including whatever each of us call the universal. But we also focus on the needs and concerns of the people in this congregation, and the people in our immediate community. We continue to do that today. We take care of each other, as best we can. We address food insecurity in the wider community by maintaining a drop box for the Cohasset Food Pantry. We’re in the process of addressing housing insecurity here in Cohasset, as some of us work to establish a community fund that can help people with short term needs, such as meeting a sudden rent increase. We address the epidemic of mental illness in children and teens by supporting the families who come here, and by providing religious education programs that nurture our children and teens and build their social-emotional skills.

We also serve as a crucial training ground for democracy, and the skills associated with democracy. Democracy — especially local democracy — needs people who can speak in public, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy requires an understanding of how to work with others towards common goals, even when you disagree, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy needs people who see the big picture but who can focus on the immediate needs of the people right in front of them, and we all practice that skill here in our congregation.

I also believe that a functioning democracy needs people who are spiritually grounded. By “spiritually grounded,” I mean people who think deeply about the human condition, people who consider who they are in relation to the universe and to universal values, people who ponder how to make the world a better place. Spiritually grounded people are also people who have a community where they can feel grounded, such that they don’t sink into despair or disperse their energies in unwonted optimism.

This turns out to be one of the key functions of a good congregation. The brilliant management theorist Peter Drucker said that nonprofits can make everyone feel in the organization feel essential to a shared goal they all believe in. Drucker gives a perfect example of how that can play out, which we heard in the second reading: “That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on, respond, ‘But it’s so important!’” The strength of a shared vision carries us through the inevitable frustrations of working together with fallible human beings who have come together in an imperfect community.

We tend to feel most spiritually grounded when we find ourselves working together with others towards a shared vision for a better world. This is the greatest of spiritual practices: to come together in community to shape a better world. May we each contribute to this great spiritual project in whatever way we can; and in so doing may we each find ourselves spiritually grounded.

Note:

(1) “A Less Charitable Nation: The Decline of Volunteering and Giving in the United States,” Nathan Dietz, Senior Researcher, Do Good Institute, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Robert T. Grimm, Jr., Levenson Family Chair in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland

Mother’s Day, Teachers, and Mothering

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from “A Practical Mom” by Amy Uyematsu.

The second reading this morning is from a short story by Grace Paley, titled “Mother”:

One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: “Oh, I Long To See My Mother in the Doorway.” By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. As a matter of fact, she did stand frequently in various doorways looking at me. She stood one day, just so, at the front door, the darkness of the hallway behind her. It was New Year’s Day. She said sadly, If you come home at 4 a.m. when you’re seventeen, what time will you come home when you’re twenty? She asked this question without humor or meanness. She had begun her worried preparations for death. She would not be present, she thought, when I was twenty. So she wondered.

Another time she stood in the doorway of my room. I had just issued a political manifesto attacking the family’s position on the Soviet Union. She said, Go to sleep for godsakes, you damn fool, you and your Communist ideas. We saw them already, Papa and me, in 1905. We guessed it all.

At the door of the kitchen she said, You never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you?

Then she died.

Naturally for the rest of my life I longed to see her, not only in doorways, in a great number of places — in the dining room with my aunts, at the window looking up and down the block… in the living room with my father….

Sermon: Mother’s Day and Teaching and Mothering

Today would have been my mother’s one hundredth birthday. For twelve years before she married, my mother taught grades K through 2 in public schools in New York, Delaware, and Massachusetts. As soon as her own children got old enough, she went back to teaching, and ended her career in a local preschool. Not surprisingly, my personal perception of motherhood was shaped by my experience of my own mother. My mother used the skills she had honed as a teacher with her own children. Thus it is no surprise that I learned to associate mothers with teaching, and that I still associate mothers with teaching. Of course all parents are teachers no matter what their gender. But on this Mothers Day, I’d like to talk about mothers as teachers. I’d also like to talk about how all of us can teach the way mothers teach.

To begin with, let’s consider what it is that mothers teach. From the beginning of a new life, mothers teach what it means to be cared for, what it means to be connected. This may seem too obvious, and too easy. But think about what happens to infants whose mothers neglect them (and before you rush into judgement against mothers who neglect their children, remember that a mother may be battling serious mental or physical illness, or having to deal with any number of other unavoidable problems): infants who are neglected can miss important learning about how to connect with, and how to trust in, other people. So it is that mothers begin teaching the moment they touch and hold a newborn. Those first lessons are lessons in love and human connection.

We tend to think of mothers as the ones who the primary teachers of love and connection, but of course a father or any parent who holds a newborn, who rocks a baby to sleep, who changes diapers and feeds an infant is also teaching important lessons of love and human connection. This is true of anyone who cares for an infant, including grandparents and other caring adults, and even older siblings.

Child psychoanalyst Erik Erikson said that infants in this first stage of life are not only learning about trust, they are also learning about hope. Trust and hope do seem to go together. If we have trust in the people around us, it does seem that we are more likely to have hope. If we trust in the stability of human connections, of human community, that allows us to trust in the future, which in turn brings to us hope.

Nor is this something that we learn only in infancy. Those people who don’t learn all they need to know about trust as infants will still have opportunities to finish learning this key lesson later in life. Indeed, trust may be one of the first lessons we must learn, but pretty much every one of us has to keep re-learning it over and over again. It is one of those lesson that we keep on learning throughout the course of our lives, including long after our biological mothers have died. And this leads to an interesting conclusion. While trust and hope are lessons that we associate with mothers and mothering, but if trust and hope have to be continually relearned over the course of our lives, even after our biological mothers have died, then clearly this is one aspect of mothering that we must all do for one another. In this sense, each of us, all of human society, is responsible for mothering each other.

While this may seem obvious, it’s equally obvious that our contemporary world culture does not center around mothering. To give one obvious example, I’m willing to bet that Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia, thinks mothering is something that is only done by young women when they’re out of sight of the big strong men of the world. If I suggested to him that we all need to mother one another, he would scoff at the idea. A big strong man like himself? He doesn’t need any mothering. Besides, Vladimir Putin has no interest in building trust in others. He dominates others through fear; the lesson he teaches is mistrust. And because he generates mistrust through nearly every action he takes, he destroys hope for millions of people. Hope disappears, and all that is left is violent resistance, or acquiescence and resignation to brutal domination. Vladimir Putin is admired by others who want to be like him — not because they trust him, but because they too have lost a sense of trust and so they hope to emulate Putin.

Those who admire Putin seem to me to have given up hope in humankind. They have decided the only way to live in a dog-eat-dog world is to brutally dominate others. They have forgotten the lessons of trust and hope they had once learned from whomever it was who mothered them when they were young. It is easy to forget what our mothers taught us about trust and hope; we all need to learn and relearn those lessons of trust and hope over and over again as we grow older.

And given what’s going on in the world right now, contemporary society does not give us much reason to believe in trust and hope. Wars and violence, sexism and sexual assault, racism and hatred — the news is full of things that erode our trust and hope.

I happened to be making a long drive yesterday, and while I was fiddling with the radio I tuned in to an interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin, a writer who taught history and government at Harvard for many years. The interviewer asked her if she, as a historian, thought that ours was an especially challenging historical moment. Without minimizing the challenges we face, Doris Kearns Goodwin pointed out several moments in American history which she judged to be more challenging — the Great Depression, the early part of the Second World War when it seemed the Nazis were unstoppable, and above all the Civil War and the years leading up to it. I’m not a particular fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s work, but as I listened to her on the radio, I felt a sense of hope. She did not minimize the dangers facing the United States today, but she offered hope that we can find a way through our current troubles, hope that we can learn to trust one another once again.

In this moment on the radio, Doris Kearns Goodwin was teaching the radio audience the way we hope a mother would teach. It brought back memories of listening to my own mother, even though Doris Kearns Goodwin and my mother were polar opposites in many ways. As a young adult in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was especially worried about the prospect of global nuclear war. Without minimizing the danger of such a war, my mother, in her no-nonsense way, talked me out of fear, and talked me into feeling trust and hope. She was continuing the lessons she had begun teaching me as an infant, although in a different way now that I was an adult.

These lessons that my mother taught me in adulthood were not like some soft-focus heart-warming TV show. The lessons my mother taught me were much closer to what we heard in the second reading this morning, as in this short excerpt from Grace Paley’s story titled “Mother”: “At the door of the kitchen [my mother] said, You never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you?” Grace Paley’s mother was saying: take care of yourself. Telling someone to take care of themselves means telling them to have hope in the future. And to have hope in the future means that you have to learn to trust. And the way you teach trust is to show someone you love them — by, for example, telling them to stop running around senselessly so they can take the time to finish their lunch.

Now, not everyone has a biological mother who can teach us trust and hope. And even if you have a biological mother like Grace Paley’s mother, who does teach you these things well into your adult years, at some point — just like Grace Paley — you’re going to lose your mother. So it is that we all need other people in our lives who can provide those lessons in trust and hope — we all need what I might call “alternate mothers.” The gender of these people is not especially important, nor is the age of these people, nor do they need to be our biological relatives. They don’t even have to be someone we have met in person. Let me give you an example, from my own life, of how someone you haven’t even met could teach these lessons of trust and hope.

My own mother died twenty-five years ago. As I look back on the years immediately following her death, I now realize that quite a few alternate mothers entered my life in that time. One of those people was Hans Georg Gadamer, the philosopher, whom I never actually met. In 2001, when he was 101 years old, an interviewer asked Gadamer if he had hope for the world. Now, Gadamer lived in Germany throughout the tumultuous twentieth century: through the First World War, through the rise of Hitler and Naziism, through the Second World War, and finally through the Soviet takeover of East Germany (Gadamer left East Germany to go live in West Germany) and the building of the Berlin Wall, through the Cold War and the ongoing threat of nuclear war. The interviewer knew all this, and asked Gadamer this question not long after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Did he, Gadamer, have hope for the world? Gadamer, being a philosopher, gave a suitably nuanced reply. But I will strip his reply of all nuance, and summarize it like this: In spite of everything, we still have grounds for hope; not much hope, perhaps, maybe about this much hope — hold your finger and thumb about in inch apart — but there is still hope for the world.

This was an adult-level lesson in trust and hope. Gadamer did not minimize the danger the world faced, but he made the case based on his long experience of life that there is still reason to hope; which means there is still reason to trust in humanity. Now, you may not have the same response to Gadamer that I did; philosophy is an acquired taste. But the point is that Gadamer became a sort of literary mother for me — someone I never met, but who gave me a message of hope through what he wrote and said publicly. I was convinced by his message of hope, and from that message I was able to relearn the lesson of trusting in other human beings.

Mothering from public figures like Hans Georg Gadamer is convenient. You pick up a book or listen to a podcast, and there they are. Plus, they never stand in your doorway and say, “You never finish your lunch.” For this, we still need real-life mothers. Which can pose a problem for those us of who don’t have real-life biological mothers in our lives, or whose real-life biological mothers don’t fill this role for whatever reason.

But we can find other people who help us re-learn the lessons of trust and hope throughout our lives. If I think about my own life, I can think of several people who have filled that role for me. These people have generally been older than me, but not all of them; perhaps half of them have been women; and to each of them I felt a strong enough bond of affection that I’d want to call it love. As I say this, maybe you’re making a mental list of the people who might fill this role in your life. This list might include your own biological mother (or it might not). But this list could include a number of people who are family, chosen family, or older friends. This list might include people who aren’t even aware that you feel as though you’ve received some mothering from them. My own mental list includes at least one person who would probably be appalled if I told him that I felt like he mothered me — that he gave me love, and helped me re-learn lessons of trust and hope. (Of course this can also be true of biological mothers who don’t want to engage in mothering once their child is past infancy.)

And as you make your mental list of people who have mothered you, perhaps you’ll become aware of people who might consider you to be giving them some mothering. If you’re an actual biological mother who still has your biological children in your life, obviously you’re mothering them. But I think almost anyone can do some mothering, starting as early as your late teens and continuing for the rest of your life. Again, this need not look like the kind of mothering you find on Hallmark greeting cards, all unicorns and rainbows. It can look like the mothering Grace Paley describes her own mother doing: “Another time [my mother] stood in the doorway of my room. I had just issued a political manifesto attacking the family’s position on the Soviet Union. She said, Go to sleep for godsakes, you damn fool, you and your Communist ideas. We saw them already, Papa and me, in 1905.” This may not sound like mothering, but along with criticism of her actions, her mother expresses trust in Grace Paley’s abilities. You can hear the deep affection and love. Finally, you can hear concern for Grace Paley’s future (“Go to sleep for godsakes”), a loving concern which engenders hope.

There are billions of ways to be a mother. You can be a cranky critical mom like Grace Paley’s mother (or like my mother). You can be a practical mom, as we heard described in the first reading, the poem by Amy Uyematsu. Personally, I don’t want to think of myself as a mother at all; I’d rather think of myself as a sort of eccentric uncle; but even then, I can still acknowledge that I as an eccentric uncle can sometimes help young people re-learn lessons of trust and hope. There are as many ways to be a good mother — someone who teaches love and hope and trust — as there are people in the world.

On Mother’s Day we do especially honor those who served the more traditional role of mother within a nuclear family. And to all of you who fill that role, we honor you and thank you. But right now, the world needs more mothering than can fit into that traditional role. The world needs as many mothers as we can find. We need mothering to help us re-establish trust and and hope for the future; we need mothering to remind us that love is the most important force in the universe. We need people who can do public mothering — people on the radio, in books, on podcasts. But more than that, we need people who are willing to extend mothering to those in their immediate social circles — people who can help us re-learn what it means to trust one another. There are many of us who are already doing this mothering in our work lives — teachers and doctors and social workers and therapists and anyone in the helping professions. There are many of us who are already teaching trust and hope in our volunteer work, or in our day-to-day living. And if it seems too much to be a mother to people who are not your biological children, you can join me in becoming and eccentric aunt or uncle. The point is that maybe we all can think about the ways in which each one of us might actually be acting as mothers in the sense of helping people we love to re-learn basic lessons of trust and hope; for the world needs us to do this.