Ralph Waldo Emerson – Dan Harper

Another Alternative: Religious Naturalism

Readings

The first reading was from the essay “What Is Religious Naturalism?” by Jerome A. Stone:

“Religious naturalism is a type of naturalism. Hence we start with naturalism. This is a set of beliefs and attitudes that focuses on this world. On the negative side it involves the assertion that there seems to be no ontologically distinct and superior realm (such as God, soul or heaven) to ground, explain, or give meaning to this world. On the positive side it affirms that attention should be focused on the events and processes of this world to provide what degree of explanation and meaning are possible to this life. While this world is not self-sufficient in the sense of providing by itself all of the meaning that we would like, it is sufficient in the sense of providing enough meaning for us to cope.”

The second reading was the poem “In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, Thinking of Rachel Carson,” by Anthony Walton.

Sermon: Another Alternative: Religious Naturalism

Probably most of us here this morning are firm believers in science. We believe that science is firmly grounded in the natural world. Science doesn’t need any supernatural elements — there’s no need of an afterlife, for example; no need for angels or demons or genies; no need for gods, goddesses, or other deities guiding our lives. As a result, many people give up on religions, because religions always seem to be full of supernatural elements.

This is a social trend that has been going on since at least the seventeenth century in Europe, when Baruch Spinoza rejected the idea that the Bible was divinely inspired, and raised questions about the nature of God. By the eighteenth century, a growing number of freethinkers, people who rejected many of the fundamental doctrines of Western religion, began to emerge. One such freethinker was Thomas Paine, who wrote the pamphlet Common Sense which did so much to further the cause of independence from Great Britain. Paine also wrote a treatise titled “The Age of Reason” which called the supernatural elements of the Bible:

“If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such a miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is,– Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.” (Pt. I, Ch. 17, The Age of Reason)

Paine said that while he liked the teachings of Jesus, many of the stories about Jesus found in the Bible are lies. It’s worth knowing about Paine because in today’s political debates we hear arguments that America was founded on the tenets of orthodox conservative Christianity; yet here is one of America’s founders arguing quite forcefully against orthodox Christianity.

The debate about miracles and supernaturalism continued in nineteenth century New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who served as a Unitarian minister for eight years before becoming a full-time writer, infuriated the religious establishment when he said that the miracles of the Bible have been grossly misunderstood. Here’s Emerson from his Divinity School Address:

“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul…. The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. [Jesus] spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle… and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”

Emerson’s younger colleague Henry David Thoreau found miracles in his close observations of the natural world. Thoreau said we need to face up to reality as it actually is. This is what he wrote in his book Walden:

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

Thoreau was telling us that this life has miracles enough in it, and we don’t need to add any miracles to it. Thoreau remained open to the insights of traditional religious and spiritual wisdom — not just Christian wisdom, but the wisdom that can be found in all spiritual and religious traditions — but he kept his focus firmly on this world. This present life is sufficient, said Thoreau: “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” So he did not reject religion. He simply wanted his religion to remain focused on this world, the world he could directly experience.

Many other religious naturalists emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Walt Whitman, whose poetry dealt with the here and now, could be called a religious naturalist. Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois has been called a religious naturalist. Religious naturalists often felt uncomfortable in organized religion. So for example the poet James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the words to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,” felt he lacked religiosity, but to me it seems like he was forced into that feeling because the only definition of religiosity that he knew involved supernatural religion.

In the late twentieth century, the philosopher Jerome Stone began researching the various people who could be classified as religious naturalists. One of Jerome Stone’s most interesting discoveries was that religious naturalists cannot simply be lumped in with religious atheists. Some religious naturalists choose to use the word “God,” while others feel “God” is not a useful concept. So the biologist Ursula Goodenough, who calls herself a religious naturalist, and who feels that the natural miracles investigated by the science of biology are sufficiently miraculous, sees no need to use the word “God.” By contrast, Bernard Loomer — he’s the person who gave us the phrase “the interdependent web of existence” — is a religious naturalist who feels that God is a useful and important philosophical concept.

Thus religious naturalists interpret “God” in a variety of ways. Some religious naturalists interpret “God” as the natural laws of the universe, or as a human social construct, and so on. Other religious naturalists get along fine without God. So if you’re a religious naturalist, you can decide whether to use the word “God” or not. Yet all religious naturalists find common ground in their rejection of the supernatural and their embrace of this world. I like this aspect of religious naturalism, because it can facilitate communication across divisions. The search for truth is always communal, and anything that helps us talk across our divisions helps the search for truth.

As I’ve said before, I’m a devoted follower of Haven’t-figured-it-out-yet-ism — in other words, I don’t want to put a name to my ill-formed thoughts and feelings. But I guess I’d call myself “religious naturalism-adjacent.” I like the religious naturalists I’ve met in person; I took a class with Jerry Stone twenty years ago, and admired his humane and unpretentious attitude towards life.

And I appreciate the way religious naturalists have dealt with arguments about the existence of God. I grew up as a Unitarian Universalist, and the old battle between humanists and the theists doesn’t seem to have progressed much since I was a child. Instead of arguing about the existence of God, the religious naturalists want you to define what it is that you mean when you say the word “God,” and that has deepened my own spiritual life.

I also appreciate that religious naturalists focus on this world. And if we don’t have to worry about some supernatural afterlife, this releases our energies to deal with the problems we face here and now. This also releases us to appreciate the beauties of the here and now. If there’s a heaven, or an afterlife, or reincarnation, it will come in its own good time; in the mean time, here we are with reality all around us waiting to be experienced. Even when beauties exist side by side with horrors, it is better to face up to the horrors and do what we can to end them, than to wait for some heaven which may never arrive.

Our contemporary society does not encourage us to face both beauty and horror. Instead, our contemporary society encourages passivity and quietism. Religious quietism pervades our society, as when we say: “It’s in God’s hands,” or “It was meant to be,” or “Whatever happens, happens for the best.” Belief in the supernatural need not deteriorate into quietism, and I am firmly allied with those who believe in a God of justice and truth and love. But we live in a world where some religious people use quietism to prevent necessary change, religions that teach that women are meant to be subordinate to men, that White Christians are meant to rule everyone else, that rich people are rich because they are favored by God. Quietism is also encouraged by secular society, by a secular culture that teaches us to remain passive consumers of media. This is a form of anesthesia no different from the numbing effects of religious quietism; both forms of quietism want to convince us that we cannot change the world.

Instead of anesthetizing us, religious naturalism encourages the kind of spiritual practices that keep us engaged with reality, with the here and now. Think of Henry Thoreau next to his cabin at Walden Pond, kneeling down in the woods in order to the closest attention to the natural world, then writing about what he observed in his journal. Remember, too, that his cabin was a station on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau was not escaping from the world through supernatural beliefs, nor was he escaping from the world by ignoring the realities of injustice. Obviously, religious naturalism is not the only kind of religion that engages fully with this world — but it does set a high standard for other religious attitudes to match.

Why I’m a Mystic (But Maybe You Shouldn’t Be)

Readings

From the essay “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

From Louisa May Alcott’s satire on Transcendentalism, “Transcendental Wild Oats”:

“Each member [of the community] is to perform the work for which experience, strength, and taste best fit him,” continued Dictator Lion. “Thus drudgery and disorder will be avoided and harmony prevail. We shall rise at dawn, begin the day by bathing, followed by music, and then a chaste repast of fruit and bread. Each one finds congenial occupation till the meridian meal; when some deep-searching conversation gives rest to the body and development to the mind. Healthful labor again engages us till the last meal, when we assemble in social communion, prolonged till sunset, when we retire to sweet repose, ready for the next day’s activity.”

“What part of the work do you incline to yourself?” asked Sister Hope, with a humorous glimmer in her keen eyes.

“I shall wait till it is made clear to me. Being in preference to doing is the great aim, and this comes to us rather by a resigned willingness than a wilful activity, which is a check to all divine growth,” responded Brother Timon.

“I thought so.” And Mrs. Lamb sighed audibly, for during the year he had spent in her family Brother Timon had so faithfully carried out his idea of “being, not doing,” that she had found his “divine growth” both an expensive and unsatisfactory process.

Sermon: “Why I’m a Mystic (But Maybe You Shouldn’t Be)”

When I was 16, the summer camp I worked for sent me to a weekend workshop led by Steve van Matre, an environmental educator. Steve van Matre was an observant educator. After several years of working with kids, he noticed that conventional environmental education, with its emphasis on teaching identification skills and intellectual concepts, didn’t wind up producing environmentalists. So he, and the other environmental educators with whom he worked, began developing activities that would — to use his words — “turn people on to Nature.”

One group of these new activities was called “solitude enhancing activities.” Van Matre felt that most of the time when we are supposedly in solitude, we are actually listening to a little internal voice that is constantly talking. Van Matre called this voice “the little reprobate in the attic of your mind,” and he said that it was a dangerous voice in some ways, because it keeps us from living in the present. (1)

When he said this, for the first time I became aware of that little voice in my own head. And that little reprobate in the attic of my mind did in fact talk on and on with no respite. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t un-notice it: it was constantly talking, on and on and on, and saying (if I were to be honest with myself) little or nothing of interest.

Van Matre outlined several activities that environmental educators could use to help quiet that “little reprobate in the attic of your mind.” I decided that I wanted to teach those activities to this children I worked with in the summer. Since I was brought up in a family of educators, I knew that if you’re going to teach something, it’s a good idea to try doing it yourself first. So I tried some of van Matre’s solitude enhancing activities.

One of these activities, which called “Seton-Watching,” was to sit outdoors somewhere and do nothing but simply be aware. Van Matre had told us about a time when he did this: He went outdoors, and settled down to stay absolutely still for some lengthy period of time, perhaps half an hour. After sitting absolutely still and in silence for perhaps a quarter of an hour, a hummingbird came along to look at his red hat band. This prompted van Matre to look up, so he could see the hummingbird. The motion of his head startled the bird and it flew away before he could see it, and he concluded he would have been better off remaining motionless, instead of listening to the little voice in his head that told him to look up.

I began trying this “Seton Watching” activity. One afternoon while sitting at the foot of a birch tree, the little reprobate in the attic of my mind finally stopped talking. In that moment, I suddenly became aware of — for want of a better way of describing it — the connectedness of the entire universe. It was quite a sensation. I then discovered that words were not adequate to describe this sensation — it was not in fact a sense of the connectedness of the universe, but something that couldn’t be put into words. Which makes sense, because this sensation only occurred when that little voice in my head stopped talking. Words are very powerful and very useful, but there are other kinds of knowing that have nothing to do with words; and trying to describe those other kinds of knowing with words must obviously be a pointless exercise.

It turns out that experiences like this are fairly common. These experiences have been classed together under the title “mystical experiences.” When the psychologist William James studied mystical experiences, he argued they had two defining features. First, said James, the person who has a mystical experience “immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” James goes on to add: “It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.” Second, James said, mystical states are experienced by those who have them as a kind of knowing: “They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” James also pointed out that mystical experiences tend to be short-lived and transient, and they are generally passive. (2)

Mystical experiences are fairly common — William James believed that as many as a quarter of all people have them. And that makes me wonder — what good are these experiences? I’m less interested in whether these experiences are useful, but instead I wonder whether these experiences tend to move you towards or away from truth and goodness. To use the language of the Unitarian minister and mystic Theodore Parker: the moral arc of the universe is long, and the question is whether these experiences help bend it towards justice, or not.

I think mystical experiences can lead to justice, but they can also lead to injustice. In my observation, mystical experiences, when supported by the right kind of community, can strengthen individuals to help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. However, I’ve also seen how mystical experiences may twist an individual towards psychopathologies like narcissism and delusion, or embolden an individual to abuse their power and indulge their greed.

Here’s what I think causes someone to follow one or the other of these two possible paths. If someone has a mystical experience and they think it makes them special and somehow better than other people, that can prove to be the path to psychopathology or abusiveness. These people tend to have mystical experiences outside of a supportive and critical community. They are hyper-individualists, and the combination of mysticism and individualism can create a toxic brew. On the other hand, if someone has a mystical experience and is part of a community that holds them accountable for their actions, then a mystical experience can help that person bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. A mystical experience can provide a vision for a better future where Earth shall be fair and all her people one.

In the second reading this morning, the excerpt from “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Louisa May Alcott tells a story of how mysticism can be destructive. “Transcendental Wild Oats” is based on Alcott’s lived experience. When she was a girl, her father moved his family to Fruitlands, a utopian community in Harvard, Massachusetts. The men who started the Fruitlands community were mystics, and their mystical insights informed them — so they said — of how to run the perfect human community. But the Fruitlands community fell apart in seven short months. The male mystics in charge of the community were unable to grow the crops they were depending on, unable to do anything practical, while the women in the community did their best to keep the children safe and feed everyone. Louisa May Alcott’s story “Transcendental Wild Oats” is a thinly disguised satire of the Fruitlands community. Alcott lays bare the sexism and the ignorance of the men whose abuse of their mystical experiences made the lives of other people miserable.

(I should note in passing that Louisa May Alcott was a Unitarian. But hers was not an individualistic religion; hers was a religion of community, connection, and mutual support.)

In our first reading, another Unitarian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, described one of his own mystical experiences. In a now-famous image, Emerson wrote: “…All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Christopher Cranch, a contemporary of Emerson’s and a fellow Unitarian minister, drew a cartoon making fun of Emerson’s transparent eye-ball: the cartoon shows an eyeball wearing a top hat atop a tiny body with long spindly legs. (3) I think what makes Emerson’s transparent eye-ball image so prone to mockery is the fact that it’s too individualistic. This is my criticism of Emerson’s mysticism: he is too self-centered. Emerson had the opportunity to go out and wander in the fields and become a transparent eye-ball in part because he left all the housework, all the management of their children, to his wife, Lidian. (4) This sounds too much like the mysticism that Louisa May Alcott satirized. If you become a transparent eye-ball while wandering the fields in leisure, that will be quite different from the mystical experiences you might have while caring for children, or mending clothes, or cooking dinner for your family.

And this brings me to another well-known mystic, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was raised as a Unitarian, but left in his early twenties because the church in Concord, where he was a member, refused to offer wholehearted support to the abolition of slavery. Thoreau’s most famous descriptions of his own mystical experiences occur in this book Walden. Once again, Thoreau’s mysticism is open to mockery. Critics of Thoreau love to tell the story of how Thoreau didn’t actually lead the life of a mystical hermit at Walden Pond — he went home regularly so his mother could do his laundry and cook him dinner. It’s easy to be a mystic when your mom cooks you dinner.

But I think Thoreau’s critics miss the point. While it is true that Thoreau didn’t break out of the strict gender roles of his time, at least he did much of his own cooking and cleaning while living at Walden. And Thoreau had to go home regularly to help his father run the family business of manufacturing pencils (an appropriate role for his gender in those times). Equally important for our purposes, Thoreau also went home to attend meetings of the anti-slavery group led by his mother. The Thoreau family was part of the Underground Railroad, and Thoreau wrote that his cabin at Walden Pond served as a place to harbor fugitive slaves. And while he lived at Walden Pond, Thoreau spent that famous night in jail because he refused to pay taxes that went to support an unjust war.

We can rightly criticize Thoreau for his sexism, the unquestioned sexism of his time. And it’s easy to make fun of his mysticism. But unlike the mysticism of the organizers of Fruitlands, Thoreau’s mysticism didn’t keep him from successfully growing his own food, and building his own house. And while Emerson’s mysticism can come across as self-indulgent, Thoreau’s mysticism gave him the strength to take courageous action against slavery, and against unjust war.

When I had my own first mystical experience, I lived in Concord, where Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau had all lived. The Concord public schools gave us a heavy dose of the Concord authors, so at age sixteen I knew their stories. I had even started to read Thoreau’s Walden, and liked him the best of all the Concord authors. So when I had my own mystical experience, I had Thoreau’s example to show that mystical experiences could move one towards making the world a better place.

The justification for a mystical experience is to help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. This helps explain Martin Luther King’s fascination with Thoreau. I suspect King had his own mystical experiences, which he no doubt understood from within his progressive Christian worldview. King understood how his deeply-felt religious experiences could give him the strength he needed to confront injustice. Nor is he the only one whose mystical experiences helped them bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. Hildegard de Bingen drew strength from her mysticism to enlarge the role of women within the confines of her medieval European society. Mahatma Gandhi drew on his mystical experiences to help him confront the evils of colonialism in India. And so on.

Just remember that you don’t need to be a mystic in order to help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. Some people have mystical experiences, and some people don’t. Having a mystical experience doesn’t make you a better person; what makes you a better person is furthering the cause of truth and justice. But if you are one of those people who happens to have a mystical experience or two, may you use it to strengthen you to help make the world a better place.

Notes

(1) Van Matre’s approach is outlined in his books Acclimatizing, a Personal and Reflective Approach to a Natural Relationship (American Camping Assoc., 1974) and Acclimatization : A S ensory and Conceptual Approach to Ecological Involvement (American Camping Assoc., 1972). The quote comes from my notes of van Matre’s workshop on 6 May 1977.

(2) William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 381.

(3) Here’s Cranch’s cartoon:

A sketch of a transparent eyeball on long spindly legs. — from Wikimedia Commons, public domain image

(4) For an account of busy Lidian’s daily life, see the biography by her daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, ed. by Delores Bird Carpenter (Boston: Twayne, 1981).

What the World Needs Now

Readings

The first reading was the poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” by Joy Harjo.

The second reading was from the essay “Friendship” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Gender-specific language has NOT been changed, since it may be central to Emerson’s argument.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man, who, under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and, omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity…. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him.

Sermon: “What the World Needs Now”

Back in the 1960s, lyricist Hal David was working regularly with pop composer Burt Bachrach. One day, while commuting in to New York City to work with Bachrach, Hal David came up with the line, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love / It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” Then for more than a year, he couldn’t make any progress with the lyrics. He knew the song was talking to God, but he wasn’t quite sure what the song wanted to say to God.

Now it would be easy to jump to conclusions about what Hal David meant by the word “God.” In this decade of the 2020s, it seems like the only people who talk about God are the right-wing Christians; as a result, when we hear the word “God,” we often think of their god, the stereotypical old white guy sitting on a cloud wearing long white robes and advocating for school prayer and the Ten Commandments displayed in every classroom. Hal David was most definitely not a right wing Christian. He was the child of Jewish immigrants who left Austria in the 1920s and settled in New York City, where they ran a delicatessen. On his website, when discussing this song, he left the interpretation of God wide open; it could, he said, be the “someone or something we call God.” In other words, not the narrow, sectarian notion of God so beloved by right-wing Christians, but an open expansive understanding that could include a range of ideas from a traditional Jewish God, all the way to “God” as a humanistic or even atheistic metaphor.

In any case, Hal David finally figured out what he wanted to say to God: we don’t need some transcendent all-powerful God to create any more mountains, we don’t need any more oceans, we don’t even need any more rivers or meadows; what we really need is enough love to go around. Once the lyrics were done, Burt Bachrach wrote music for it, they both looked at the song, and decided it was “a flop.” (1) Burt Bachrach had hoped that Dionne Warwick, whom they felt was the singer who was best at performing their songs, would record it. But, as he later recalled, “Dionne rejected that song. She might have thought it was too preachy and I thought Dionne was probably right.” (2)

Well, Dionne Warwick was right. The song is indeed too preachy. It begins with the chorus: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love / It’s the only thing there’s too little of.” How very mid-1960s. Not only is it too preachy, but it’s hard not to make fun of the lyrics. If we all had just a little more love, then all those 1960s problems would just go away — the racial prejudice, the Vietnam War, the assassinations — just a little more love, and they’d go away. Just another pop song about love, and the problems will all go away.

In 1965, Jackie DeShannon finally recorded the song, and to the surprise of the songwriters, it became a top ten hit. Since then, it has been recorded and performed over and over again — by singers, by jazz groups, by hardcore punk rockers, by high school bands. It even got performed at the Democratic National Convention in 2016. The song still sounds preachy. It still sounds too much like a willfully naive and saccharine 1960s pop song. Most performances of it wind up sounding schlocky. But somehow the song has managed to strike a chord in our popular unconscious.

There’s a good reason for that. Hal David was actually correct. The world actually does need more love. Maybe it wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems, but with all the hatred and violence in the world — yes, we do in fact need more love.

Though we need to be careful what kind of love we’re talking about here. The English language uses the single word “love” to smush together several different concepts: romantic love, love between family members, love of oneself, love among good friends, love extended to strangers, a kind of selfless love that includes all beings, and so on. Even though this was a 1960s pop song, Hal David’s lyrics are not talking specifically about romantic love. Nor are Hal David’s lyrics talking specifically about love between family members, or love of oneself, though these might be a part of what the world needs now. The song is talking about a love that is “not just for some, but for everyone.” This is a love that is inclusive, that includes all of humankind.

Back in the 1960s, there was an ol-fashioned term for this kind of love. They called it “brotherhood.” Brotherhood meant that people should extend idealized feelings of sibling love to all of humanity. Political conservatives like Hubert Humphrey referred to “brotherhood” in their speeches. Progressives like Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of lifting “our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to solid rock of brotherhood.” Indeed, some Unitarian Universalists in the 1960s, when asked what they believed, might have responded with the words of Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and progress of mankind onward and upward forever. Brotherhood, the brotherhood of man — those old words and phrases aimed to capture the kind of love that the world needs now. If all men are truly my brothers, how could I do anything hateful to them? — brotherly love would prevent me from acting with hate.

Of course, we now know the big problem with the word “brotherhood” — it ignores women. The second wave feminists pointed out this uncomfortable fact in the late 1960s. At first, some people pushed back against the second wave feminists saying that of course the word “brotherhood” included women and girls. In response, there were a great many women and girls who bluntly replied that they did in fact feel left out; oh, and by the way, if that’s the way things worked, then they were going to start using the word “sisterhood” to include all people. The men who liked the word “brotherhood” decided they didn’t want to substitute the word “sisterhood.” By the 1980s, we Unitarian Universalists had stopped using the term “brotherhood.”

We really haven’t come up with another word to put in its place. I’ve been thinking about this recently. We know what we want to say: that all human beings are interdependent, we are all connected, we are all part of the same human race. What single word or short phrase might we use that communicates this rather complex idea? And it is a complex idea. Rabbi Hillel said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.” (3) Here is a very simple statement that gets at the same basic idea — If you wouldn’t do it to yourself, don’t do it to someone else — but then Rabbi Hillel ends by telling us to go study the Torah. It looks like a simple idea on the surface; then we need to study the rest of the Torah to help us fully understand this seemingly simple idea.

It is this same seemingly simple idea that Emerson was getting at in his essay on friendship. Friendship, in Emerson’s essay, is the meeting of souls. Friendship is when we can be utterly genuine with another person, speaking directly to each other’s consciences; not speaking falsely, not falling into gossip or chit-chat, but a meeting of souls that is entirely honest and lacking in pretense. If we could be this genuine with others, if we could know another’s soul in this way, then we would naturally follow Rabbi Hillel’s maxim; if I fully encounter another’s soul, how could I possibly do anything hateful to them?

But I’ve finally decided that Emerson is missing something in this essay in this essay. Yes, there are those intense friendships where you feel like your soul is directly meeting another person’s soul. Emerson writes, “to most of us, society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back.” But I realized that many of my best and strongest relationships with other people have taken place, not face to face and eye to eye, but side by side.

For example, I think about the times when I helped prepare a meal for a certain homeless shelter that aimed to provide not just food and warm housing, but human interaction as well. While we were cooking dinner at this homeless shelter, we spend quite a lot of time seeing the sides and backs of other people, because everyone was working; not just the volunteers, but some of the guests would also come help prepare the meal. Then, before COVID hit, an essential part of this homeless shelter was that the people cooking the meal would sit down with the guests and everyone would eat dinner together. When you’re eating a meal with other people, you don’t spend all your time staring at their faces and eyes. When you’re sitting at a table with half a dozen others, you’re going to see the faces of some people and the sides of others — and maybe the backs of other people who are sitting at other tables. And then when everyone joins in cleaning up together, once again, more often you’d be side-by-side than face to face. Emerson would say, this was society showing its side and back. But it seems to me that there was just as much real connection happening in that setting as in some intense one-on-one face-to-face conversation with a Transcendental friend.

Emerson levels another criticism at society: “We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements….” And in every homeless shelter I’ve volunteered at, in every communal living situation, in every family — there are always the little dramas going on, just as Emerson pointed out: people who are temporarily angry with each other, people who have stopped being angry with each other, and so on. But I think Emerson got it exactly wrong. Gossip, compliments, amusements: these are how we hold our fellow human beings at arm’s length; these are all ways that human communities can become more closely interwoven. When you think about it this way, Emerson’s use of gender-specific male language actually makes sense. In nineteenth century America, middle class and upper class men were able to have time to have intense face-to-face, one-on-one conversations with other men, because women took on much of the burden of housework. Since women were considered inferior to men, the kind of social interaction associated with women — small talk, exchanging news with others, keeping each other entertained while working around the kitchen table — these kinds of social interactions would also be considered inferior. Yet it is in these daily mundane tasks that the complex love of human communities becomes apparent.

Which brings me to the first reading, the excerpt from the poem by Joy Harjo. “The world begins at a kitchen table,” she tells us, and then she lists all the other things that happen at kitchen tables: food is prepared and served; babies teethe; children are instructed in how to be human; we gossip; we dream; we laugh when we fall down; we pull ourselves back together again. Births happen next to the kitchen table, bodies are prepared for burial there. We sing there, we pray, we give thanks, we laugh, we cry, we eat “the last sweet bite.” Joy Harjo says the world begins and ends at the kitchen table.

Emersonian friendship is a lovely ideal, especially for those who have the time for it. But I think it is the kitchen table kind of love that the world needs much more of. It begins with the love that comes when preparing food and eating it together. This love includes gossip too: not hateful hurtful gossip, not the mean gossip of junior high school, but gossip that is actually the exchange of everyday life-and-death matters: who is ill, who is caring for whom, who is well, who is falling in love with whom, all the little bits of news that come with the ordinary life of a human community. It is through this kind of talk around the kitchen table, this talk of ordinary life — who is dying; who just gave birth, who has grown up, who has become a wise elder — this is how children learn to become human. It is through these ordinary conversations that adults are reminded how to remain human, to remain humane. And sometimes the deepest conversations on becoming human happen when we are working side by side with our elders, with our children.

Maybe this is what we should mean if we want to talk about the kind of love the world needs more of. I would not call this brotherhood, nor would I call this sisterhood; but it is a way of being human together. Like Emerson, I want to be genuine and to stand in true relation with other people; but in my own life I’ve found that is most likely to happen when human beings are cooking a meal together, when we are cleaning up together, when we are gossiping (in the best sense), when we are helping one other.

Not that sitting around a kitchen table is going solve all the world’s problems. No more did “brotherhood” solve the problems of racism and war in the 1960s. No more did “sisterhood” solve the problems of sexism in the 1970s. But in a era when we spend more time staring at screens than we spend sitting around a kitchen table, I would say that it would be worth our while to spend more time sitting around kitchen tables than staring at screens. It is more difficult to do something hateful to another person if you have sat down with that person at a kitchen table. Once someone sits down to dinner with a homeless person, they have to see that person as just another human being. We also saw this phenomenon during the fight for marriage equality: acceptance for same-sex marriage increased as more and more heterosexual people had friends who were same sex couples. These experiences are even changing the right-wing Christians: younger conservative Christians are more likely to be tolerant of same sex marriage than older conservative Christians. We are slowly seeing this phenomenon play out in the struggle against racism: as our society becomes more and more racially diverse, racial attitudes are being changed; when you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with your cousin or in-law who is of a different race than you are, it’s harder for you to be racist.

This is where it begins, and this is where it ends: seeing ourselves in the other, and seeing the other in ourselves. For some, this might happen in great Emersonian moments of Transcendental friendship. But for most of us, it happens in day-to-day life. It happens around the kitchen table, if we would just notice it. This is the love, sweet love, that the world needs more of.

Notes:

(1) Hal David, “Words: What the World Needs Now,” Hal David: Official Website, https://www.haldavid.com/words.htm accessed 28 April 2023.
(2) Burt Bachrach in an interview with Ken Sharp, “Burt Bachrach: What the World Needs Now,” Record Collector [UK magazine], May, 2006, issue 323.
(3) Talmud Shabbat 31 a