This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.
Readings
The first reading this morning is from a poem titled “Toys” by Coventry Patmore, an English poet who lived in the middle of the 19th C.
My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
— His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone
A piece of glass abraded by the beach.
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart….
The second reading this morning is from the book 25 Beacon Street, a memoir written by Dana MacLean Greeley, Unitarian Universalist minister and long-time president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. He writes:
“I dream every once in a while that I am still faced with taking high school graduation examinations, or that I haven’t completed by work. I did complete it and was graduated, but I had devoted myself probably too much to church work, and to athletics, and to being president of my high school class, and never was as brilliant in my studies as my brothers and sisters. One of our daughters once wrote in an autobiographical sketch for college admission (we didn’t see it until it came back) that her grades in school were not as good as they might have been because always when she was going to study her father said that there was a young people’s meeting at church, and that that was just as important. This seems to have been the theory in my own youth.”
SERMON — “Teach Our Children Well”
Let me begin with the first reading today, the excerpt from the poem by Coventry Patmore. The poet is sitting at his desk trying to write a poem — now I’m imagining this, and this is not exactly what the poem says — but there’s the poet doing important grown-up things, not wanting to be bothered his son. But his son does bother him, a little boy whom I imagine to be about seven or eight years old, “who look’d from thoughtful eyes /And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise.” I imagine that the boy asks his father a question, like, “Daddy, why are sea-shells smooth inside?” His father says, “Son, don’t bother me now. Daddy’s trying to work.”
I imagine the boy is silent for what seems to his seven-year-old self to be an impossibly long time — say, about five minutes. Even though his father said, “Don’t bother me now”, “now” must be long past. The boy says, “Daddy, why are sea-shells smooth inside?”
His father snaps back at him, “Can’t you see that I’m busy? Not now.” I imagine that this exchange goes back and forth between father and son until the father spanks the boy and sends him to bed without any supper, and without a good night kiss. Now of course back in the 19th C. when Coventry Patmore wrote this poem, spanking your child was still socially acceptable; whereas today, spanking is no longer something you’d put in a poem; first of all because you know spanking doesn’t accomplish anything, and second of all because it is believed that spanking generally does more harm than good. If this poem had been written today, the poet would have said,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I took away his video game and dismiss’d
Him to bed early, with hard words, and unkiss’d…
After which the poem continues,
— His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Perhaps the boy’s now-dead mother would have been more patient; perhaps the father is still grieving his wife’s death. Whatever the case may be, the father sends his son off to find comfort in a red-veined stone, a piece of beach glass, and sea shells. All these are worthy objects of a child’s wonder; but how much more could that little boy have found in those objects of wonder if his poet-father had taken the time to look at them with him.
A century and a half later after this poem was written, we claim that we have a much more enlightened attitude towards children. Now we know all about the developmental stages of children, we know that children cannot act like little adults. Those old Victorians believed children should be seen and not heard, but now we encourage children’s questions, and encourage their interaction with the adult world.
Yet for all that we think we are enlightened when it comes to children, our society has become quite good at keeping children out of sight and out of mind. We do not allow children to accompany their parents to the workplace; even though we know that for the first two centuries of European settlements here in New England, when our forebears farmed, and kept shops, and fished the inshore waters, children were always a part of adult life. We have created a society where the norm is to place children together in schools, places where only a few adults come into contact with them. By putting children in schools, the rest of us don’t have to deal with children for a significant portion of each day. Furthermore, in the past decade we have created more and more after-school programs where again we can keep children out of the mainstream of society. We still keep children out of sight and out of mind.
Today’s attitude towards children is a change from a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, religious liberals, along with allies like the philosopher John Dewey, created what they called “progressive education.” Progressive education meant educating children for democracy, getting children out of the schools and into the real world, in a controlled manner, so they could begin to understand and address the deep-rooted social ills of our society. Progressive education means telling children that this world could be better than it is now; that we can improve the world and make “progress onwards and upwards forever.”
“Progress onwards and upwards forever” — that phrase is part of an old Unitarian affirmation of faith that was used in North Unitarian church in New Bedford’s North End, before North Unitarian merged into this church. “Progress onwards and upwards forever” is a religious concept: it represents our Unitarian belief that we should not wait until some afterlife to experience heavenly bliss; that we cannot wait until some hypothetical second coming; that we should try to institute heaven here on earth, and now in our lifetimes, to the extent that we are able.
A very different religious understanding now colors our understanding of schools and schooling: namely, that heaven and heavenly bliss must wait until after we are dead; that we will have to wait until some second coming for things to get better; and that humanity does not have it in its power to do much to change the world here and now; except, perhaps, to anticipate the Second Coming. These days, there is a push to educate children to conform to authority; instead of pushing them to think for themselves, to better themselves, to better the world.
Which brings us to the second reading. In our second reading this morning, we heard how Dana Greeley, a prominent Unitarian Universalist minister and a president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, was brought up. Dana Greeley’s parents believed in the best kind of progressive education:– progressive education that aimed to nurture full, well-rounded human beings. His parents supported academic schooling; but they felt it was equally important that Dana Greeley participate in church. His parents saw that going to church would give the young Dana Greeley high ideals that he would live up to; would nurture his sense of wonder at the universe; that going to church would give their son a framework of high morality for him to live up to; and, more pragmatically, church would give their son with lots of opportunities for leadership development. In short, going to church would help turn their son into a well-rounded human being.
Here at First Unitarian, we can still offer these four things to children and teenagers. We have high ideals: when they are young we tell children that Unitarian Universalists have minds that think, hearts that love, and hands that are ready to serve; and as they get older, we help them deepen their thinking about their high ideals, challenging them to live out those ideals. We nurture a sense of wonder at the universe; whether our kids choose to call that wonder “God” or by some other name is less important than that they realize that we should all be struck with awe by the wonder of a new birth or the mystery of death, or the complex beauty that results from biological evolution. We still give young people a framework of high morality, steeping them in the knowledge that the world is imperfect and that each of us must do our part to make the world a better place; and that we as individuals are also imperfect but perfectible. Finally, we have leadership opportunities for young people, particularly teenagers: we allow them to become members of this congregation; and though, sadly, we still don’t allow them a full vote at congregational meetings, we allow them to serve on committees, and to have at least some voice in the governance of this congregation.
Let me give you an example:– When a child or teenager comes to First Unitarian, they come to one of the few places in our society that offers a deep and holistic sense of what it means to cherish the earth. A young person might feel deeply about ecological issues. A young person might learn all kinds of facts about global climate change. But here in our church, we unify the emotional and the intellectual into a spiritual whole. We have high ideals, that we are able to, and have the moral duty to halt environmental disaster. To this we add a sense of awe and wonder, we see the world as sacred, an expression of God if you prefer, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other Unitarian Transcendentalists did. Then we give kids a framework for high morality, a sense of duty and self-discipline that allows them to work to better an imperfect world. Finally, we give them manageable and age-appropriate leadership development opportunities, so that they can actually do something with their high ideals and morality and sense of awe and wonder.
While the MCAS, our state’s standardized test, may serve its purpose, it cannot do for young people what our church can do. If we insist that our children attend school so that they may pass the MCAS and get their high school diplomas, we must also insist that our children attend church so that they may learn what it means to be a good person, and learn how to make the world a better place.
Well over a century ago, Unitarian and Universalist churches figured out that if you really want to effect social change, then go teach high ideals to children. You can fix one social justice problem, but it’s like sticking your finger in a leaking dike, and another hole is sure to open up somewhere else in the dike. We have to teach our children to build a whole new dike, one that won’t crack and leak at all. And we have been doing this kind of religious education for over a century.
I’ll put this in fancier language. As Unitarian Universalists, we hold a deep and unshaken belief in the possibility of progress onwards and upwards forever; we hold a deep belief that we can institute heaven here on earth, now during our lifetimes. And we know that education is central to human progress. Therefore, our programs for young people must be at the very center of our Unitarian Universalist churches; and historically, that has been true for us Unitarian Universalists. It is no accident that our religious education programs are well-known outside of Unitarian Universalist circles; even though we are a tiny denomination, comprising less than one percent of the United States population, other denominations have looked to us for ideas and inspiration for their own religious education programs.
Yet as a movement, we have drifted away from our high ideals for religious education. The past ten years marked a time of decline in our historic commitment to religious education. Salaries for religious educators in our churches have been dropping in terms of constant dollars. Worse yet, it is harder to find volunteers who take joy in teaching children and youth.
It would be easy for us here at First Unitarian to fall prey to this wider trend. For example, seeing that we only have a few children, we could have slashed the Director of Religious Education position. But that didn’t happen. This fiscal year, I recommended a modest increase in salary for the Director of Religious Education position, but your elected Board of Trustees overrode my recommendation and provided for an even bigger increase in hours and salary. Then the congregational meeting approved that bigger increase, and furthermore, members and friends of this congregation increased their pledges on average ten percent over last year to help pay for that increase (I myself increased my pledge to over five percent of my gross income to help meet the budget).
We have the money — although we still need volunteers who will take joy in teaching our children….
*****
That’s about where I was planning to end this sermon when I sketched it out a week ago. Then I got a telephone call from our brand-new, enthusiastic Director of Religious Education, Erin Dunn. Erin said she was in the hospital again, that they didn’t know what was wrong with her heart, but that she was not allowed to continue working. She had been in the hospital four times in the past month. So Erin resigned before she could recruit teachers for our Sunday school, before she could organize the schedule for our youth advisors, before she could get the Religious Education Committee up and running.
We have a great Sunday school program all ready to go, but we don’t have the people to make it happen. We need to figure out a way to support a religious education program to help our church’s children — Sophia and Amanda and Peter and Kyle and all the others — grow up to save the world. I can help in this effort, but I’m finding I cannot do it alone. We all have to pull together to keep our programs for young people going — not just parents (I’m not a parent!), but all of us.
Nor is such an effort entirely altruistic on our part, because a truly excellent religious education program will bring us all a deep satisfaction, if for no other reason than we are hard-wired genetically to strive constantly for the continuation and improvement of the human species. We need good organizers to serve on the Religious Education Committee, we need Sunday school teachers to carry out a teaching ministry with kids, and yes we could use some more pledge increases because the budget is still going to fall a little short. But what I am really calling on us to do is to align our personal attitudes with our deepest religious beliefs and longings. Of course we won’t speak harshly to children and send them off to their rooms alone, as the father in the poem did. But we can’t ignore our young people, either. Let us learn how to treat all children the way Dana Greeley’s parents and his church did: seeing in our children the best hope for our future, nurturing and caring for our children as a deeply-satisfying religious and spiritual discipline.
To raise up children to be good people, knowing they an bring about a heaven here on earth, is one of the chief religious wonders and joys we can experience as a community. For us to do so will only lead to greater joy for each of us personally — joy, though not necessarily greater comfort — but definitely the joy and spiritual satisfaction that comes in knowing we are living out our deepest beliefs.