First Parish of Watertown

“Pilgrim Fortitude” by Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - November 25, 2007

Call to Worship - from Hildegard of Bingen

I am the one whose praise
echoes on high.

I adorn all the earth.

I am the breeze
that nurtures all things
green.
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.

I am led by the spirit to feed
the purest streams.

I am the rain
coming from the dew
that causes the grasses to laugh
with the joy of life

I call forth tears,
the aroma of holy work.

I am yearning for good.


Reading - from Learning to Fall by Philip Simmons

Sermon - “Pilgrim Fortitude” Mark W. Harris

Senator Larry Craig from Idaho has been publicly denying that he's gay since 1982. He became the subject of many jokes in September when he denied "any inappropriate conduct" in a men's room at the Minneapolis airport. And then, he declared "I am not gay and never have been." His enduring denials and blatant hypocrisy are indeed sad commentary on what we might wish was the personal character of anyone who holds the honorable title of United State Senator. A recent New York Times book review article juxtaposed Craig’s pandering and posturing around the US Capitol with an exhibit at the Smithsonian just down the street. Here behind glass was a display of two picket signs that had been carried by homosexual rights protesters outside the White House in 1965, four years before the famous Stonewall clash. These signs are now national treasures, shown beside the hat that Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater the night John Wilkes Booth ended his life. Last week when Elizabeth Tappan-deFrees and others read the text elucidating the legality of Same sex marriage, we were all reminded once again of the enormous historic significance of this event. While we can celebrate this in Massachusetts, we also realize the continuing battle in 49 other states, many of whom have passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman. When will it be that civil marriage is a civil right in all states?

A lying Senator and picket signs remind us how difficult it is to keep on keeping on, as they used to say in the 1960’s; surviving and being true to yourself over decades, centuries, even millennia as you are relegated to the status of heretic, freak, sinner, slave, imbecile. How can anyone live from day to day when others want to keep you out of their neighborhood, out of their church, and out of their lives? These are stories of people shunned and persecuted, locked up in chains and locked up in institutions, manacled and shackled in some way, but always told that what they are is inferior, wrong or misguided, or worse, deserves death. And yet some survived, and some broke those chains. To do so, took what we sometimes call fortitude, or the courage to never give up. It is the fourth of our sometime series on the seven virtues - Justice, Temperance, Prudence and now Fortitude - to be followed by the three theological virtues; Faith, Hope and Love.

On Thanksgiving most of us sat down to a large feast. We also carry in our minds and hearts a mythic story about this celebration that is tied up with our nation’s origins, and how we conceive of ourselves as a people. We have even greater reminders of this here in Watertown when we see the Arbella in the entry way, and realize we are one of the oldest congregations in America, or when we celebrate Thanksgiving and retrieve the ancient silver from the MFA, and see and touch the vessels that are symbolic of the faith of our 17th century ancestors. School children still make floppy paper hats made of brown construction paper, and recite the bravery of a people who were persecuted in their homeland, and fled here to find religious freedom. Other children construct some kind of feathered headdresses to signify the Native American heritage, whom we designate as helpmates to these weary Pilgrims, extending a hand in friendship and teaching them to plant corn. Two cultures coming together in friendship.

There is some truth in that myth, and as Nathaniel Philbrick shows us in his bestseller Mayflower, the Natives and the English learned and absorbed much from each other over the first fifty years of coexistence. But despite the support and protection that had existed, both began to have different visions of what the future was going to be. Young natives saw more and more of their lands being taken over, and the young English settlers began to anticipate a day when poverty and disease would annihilate the natives. Philbrick shows us that the dynamic, diverse cultural interplay that did play a role in Plymouth self-destructed with King Philip’s War, population wise the most devastating war in American history. That Pilgrims and Natives alike had the fortitude to survive the first fifty years, and maintain the peace was founded on their ability to see what kind of obligations they had to each other or how much they needed one another. When they lost sight of this, one culture was virtually destroyed, and the other ended up fighting more Indian wars for nearly another century, before the fight for independence from Britain itself took over.

While most of us have some vague idea of Pilgrims and Natives celebrating the first Thanksgiving feast, we probably also reflect on what we are each thankful for. It may be at a ministerial prompting in church, or simply a family sharing as we go around the table at dinnertime. This was true for the gathering I attended. What was interesting is that the youngest person there, a vibrant first grader, and the oldest person there, an almost 80 year old man who can barely speak due to a stroke, both echoed the same sentiment. The six year old saying, “I am happy to be alive,” and the older man, “I am glad just to be here.” Most of us usually think of family and friends, food and loved ones to be thankful for, and probably continue our mythic idea of the first Thanksgiving with the idea that the Pilgrims were thankful for the bounty they enjoyed. Perhaps there is some truth there, but it seems to me after they survived that first year where half of them died due to sickness, and the others made some misguided initial contacts with the Natives, that they were lucky to be here at all. So perhaps they gave thanks not for what they had, but that they had survived at all.

About a week ago Elijah Tappan-deFrees visited me in my office to interview me for a school project on the Puritans, although I probably gave him more detail than he ever imagined or wanted. He let me borrow a book on the first Thanksgiving, which explained to me that there were many feasts, not one, that Massasoit celebrated with his Wampanaog followers, when they happened to visit the Pilgrims who were preparing a traditional harvest celebration. The book also reminded me that the Wampanaogs give thanks every day, and in all things. It is a way of being. They give thanks for the ancestors. They give thanks for life. They look forward to the future. These are the touchstones of life - past, present and future. We all hope to learn truths from the past, so that we might live more nobly right now, guided by a vision of what life might be. In a personal context we all hope the children will grow up happy and healthy, and be given opportunities to live rich, full lives, and have children of their own, and grow old with dignity and grace. We envision a natural order of things graced by prosperity and happiness. Then we confront times when that natural order is broken. On Thanksgiving morning we received a call that a woman Andrea and I both know well had suffered the loss of her 18 year old son in a car accident in Lexington. Sad. Tragic. Unfair. Whatever his life was going to bring will never unfold - college, marriage, children, career, who knows? All lost.

This was an ultimate kind of tragedy, the loss of a life in the blossom of youth. In the book Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick describes how the Pilgrims discovered they were traveling in time as they walked around southern New England. All along the walking paths the Natives had made circular foot deep holes, not traps, but memory holes to remind people of where remarkable events had taken place. It was every person’s responsibility to maintain the holes, and to tell the stories of what had happened there. It was hallowed ground. It also made traveling less boring because there were these significant places. There was a sense of community and meaning literally dug into the ground. I suppose we try to do this today, when we mark the site of terrible accidents. Don’t forget the loss of life that occurred here. We all have reminders of the losses we endure as our lives go forward. We may mark the places in our heart where a parent or partner or child has died, and we, especially at a Thanksgiving table, note the missing place or person, tell their stories, and then give thanks that we still have life, knowing what we can learn from this memory hole. Those friends and family, bounty and good health we have can be snatched away in an instant. Those Pilgrims and those Natives knew that. Disease had struck down almost all the natives, and half the Pilgrims. They knew every day that life is impermanent, giving reason to say give thanks in all things, all days, all times. Give thanks that you are here at all.

I suspect it is hard to give thanks in those times when we feel life is most cruel. If we have lost a child, or gotten the news about a serious illness, we may respond that this cannot be happening, or ask why is it happening to me. Yet these moments certainly remind us most starkly of all that we have to be grateful for, and so we hug or hold more tightly those dear ones with whom we spend our days, or who are left with us to carry on in the days ahead. In his book Learning to Fall, Philip Simmons, who at the time he was writing was suffering from ALS, and has since died, tells us we must have a realization that all things are transient, and that we literally can’t keep a house, can’t keep anything, and not just because we grow old and lose the physical ability to care for it, but because we will die, and cannot hold on to material things. And then he goes on to say that the only way we can keep a house is not by trying to make it immortal, because it will pass away. The immortality must be found in the work we hallow with the days of our lives. And so we scrape and sand, plaster and paint and beautify and preserve, or hold together as long as we can with what strength and skill we have because it is a joy to be able to do what we can simply because we are alive. Sometimes in the summertime in Maine, I am sore when I get up in the morning, not from age and infirmity but because I have hauled logs, trimmed trees, painted windows or doors, and my body is aware of its labors. My soreness tells me I am alive. And it is good.

Simmons would have us believe that the true keeping of our unfinished houses must occur in the present. I am glad I am alive right now. I am glad to be here with you. I must hallow the work I do right now. But I think that point of view can be misinterpreted. While the present is really all that we have, and we must be fully aware of our gratitude in this moment, I think we must also be guided by the heaven that lies elsewhere. Sure we can be fooled by always waiting for the house to be finished, or waiting to be happy, and a fantasy can consume us. We may be unable to live in the present if we are always thinking of what is to come. I think we must distinguish between fantasy that will never be realized, and how we must still be guided by a vision of how life could be.

For several years on a frequent basis, Andrea and I and the boys have driven to Waltham to swim at the Fernald Center. While our children’s needs meant that we could use their facilities, I became struck by the battle still brewing to close down this facility which houses many severely disabled people, so that the land might be sold and developed. Many of you know that the people who live there have spent their entire lives within this center, and their families hope that they can end their days under the Fernald roofs. As a historian I have more than a passing interest in the Fernald, as it was founded by Samuel Gridley Howe, active Unitarian, and also the first director of what is now the Perkins School for the Blind. The Fernald was America’s first institution for the so-called feebleminded. Howe’s theories of education were and are admirable. He believed that all children should be educated to lead productive and independent lives. He expected everyone would graduate to a life beyond the institution. This changed with the advent of a misguided application of scientific theory called eugenics. Liberals and others began to fear that many social problems were caused by a wildly breeding underclass of people. Its advocates believed that selective breeding would stem the tide of idiocy, which would destroy America. By the early 20th century those who ran the Fernald came to believe that the students there could never be trained to live on their own, and should never be allowed to leave state custody.

Those are the parameters of a sad and depressing book called The State Boys Rebellion, which I am in the process of reading. It is sad and depressing because it tells the story of tens of thousands of children who were locked away and separated from their families because they were deemed deficient, and were said to likely become criminals in society, and if they bred they would degrade the gene pool. There are tales of abuse and neglect, fear and terror, and for many of these relatively normal children who nobody wanted, there was the horrible specter of never being free again. But that very fear of growing old and dying within the Fernald’s walls motivated Fred Boyce and others to never give up. We may think of rebels in Hungary in 1956. We may think of the lone Chinese student who stood before the tank in Tianamen Square. We may think of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Fred Boyce never believed he should be imprisoned at the Fernald. He never believed he was the useless “N” word that others called him, even when he was not sure what it meant. He never believed that he had no intelligence, or that nobody would ever love him.

Fred Boyce’s story reminds me of a 2nd century Christian bishop and martyr named Polycarp. He was confronted with a Roman judge who ordered him to bow before Caesar, and renounce his religious beliefs. Polycarp refused to do so. The judge not really wanting to throw the old saint to the lions, said, “Don’t you know that I have the power to kill you?” Polycarp stared him down and said, “Don’t you realize I have the power to let you?” What he meant was that rather than giving in to the threat and allowing the judge to force him to recant, he had the power to face the beasts while still upholding the principles that gave meaning to his life. He had the power to hold firm to those principles which gave him a higher truth to live by, and the judge could not take that away. He didn’t have to shrink back in fear, he could stand up with courage. His larger vision gave him the fortitude to withstand any threats.

How do you find the fortitude to carry on when your life has been destroyed? This was the enormous task before the State Boys like Fred Boyce. In Fred’s case that hope began to surface by seeing and hearing about the civil rights movement on TV and radio. He came to know why that “N” word had been applied to him. And so he and his friends protested their mistreatment, cried for freedom, ran away, and then ultimately seized a prison ward. They eventually won their freedom, and with minimal training were released into the world. Fred went on the carnival circuit, as his lifelong incarceration meant he could never be confined to one place again. When he worked in Roxbury at one time he connected his own experience with those of his black customers. He wrote, “There was nothing wrong with these guys. They were strong grown men who worked hard but had nothing. They were just black. That was the whole thing.”

What gives us the fortitude to keep going? A vision. Sure we must give thanks that we have our life, but something must continue to inspire us to go on. Fred Boyce and others believed that they deserved to be free. They were inspired by others who were enchained in their fight for freedom. Juxtapose those who stand up for their freedom, for what is right, time and time again over decades, over lifetimes and will not sacrifice their integrity with those who will say anything to win your vote, to please you. At the Fernald School, a handful of boys fought against terrible oppression, and lived to tell the tale. They stood up. They told the truth. They carried on. They survived. Is it freedom? Is it friendship? Is it the search for truth? Is it love? Is it to give the world a more just or peaceful path to follow? Is it one life lived with integrity? We talk about our Pilgrim ancestors making some poor choices 50 years after settlement, and chaos ensured, especially for the Native culture, which was destroyed. But for the Pilgrims, too, who suffered through war after war. There was a way of life that surfaced in these first fifty years. That to really survive in the long run, we must respect our diversity, we must listen to one another, we must realize we are all in this together. This year we are all thankful we survived, but we will do so a lot longer if we remember how much we need everybody, so that when tragedy strikes, we are there for one another, when someone is enchained in some way, we are there for one another. In all things, we are there for another.

Closing Words from Carl Sandburg , “The People, Yes”

“And the king wanted an inscription
good for a thousand years and after
that to the end of the world?”
“Yes, precisely so.”
“Something so true and awful that no
matter what happened it would stand?”
“Yes, exactly that.”
Something no matter who spit on it or
laughed at it there it would stand
and nothing would change it?”
“Yes, that was what the king ordered
his wise men to write.”
“And what did they write?”
“Five Words: THIS TOO SHALL PASS AWAY.”

Lay Down Your Arms
November 11, 2007
The First Parish of Watertown
The Rev. Andrea Greenwood

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
William Saroyan, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, 1931


Time for Reflection
Arrangement of quotations from William Saroyan
My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?
Antranik and the Spirit of Armenia, 1936

There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.
Inhale and Exhale, 1936

If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language...
 Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization... Seventy Thousand Assyrians, 1934

The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the whole world has always been full of that loneliness. The loneliness does not come from the War. The War did not make it. It was the loneliness that made the War.
The Human Comedy, 1943

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one person at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each one involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all those who survived the war, including myself,
I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers. There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one person, and I cannot see anyone's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.
The Resurrection Of A Life, 1935

The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?
Chance Meetings, 1978

 Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated for one flash of time that he was aware of the preposterousness of his theory about himself.
And he didn't even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said?
Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang in Forever, 1976

 Whoever the kid had been, whoever had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: "You just change your attitude now please, young man." This transformation in kids--from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream--is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God, which is a fantastic way of saying I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.
The Flashing Dragonfly

I am deeply opposed to violence in all its forms, and yet I myself am violent in spirit, in my quarrel with the unbeatable: myself, my daemon, God, the human race, the world, time, pain, disorder, disgrace and death.
My Heart's in the Highlands. 1939

Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him. The Beggars

Somewhere among every man's ancestors is a prince or a lord, a priest or a saint, and don't forget it. Wake up! Inherit the wealth of your ancestors!.. Stop living like a mouse, live like the rich people do.
Jim Dandy, Fat Man in a Famine, 1947

You must remember always to give, of everything you have. You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You must give to all who come into your life.
Then nothing and no one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have to give.....
Everything alive is part of each us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them.
The Human Comedy 1943

I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.
Antranik and the Spirit of Armenia, 1936
 
Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends.
The Resurrection Of A Life. 1935


Reading
A new take on mental health
—By Staff, Living Lightly
January / February 2005 Issue

George Farthing, an expatriate British man living in America, was diagnosed as clinically depressed. {He was Prescribed} antidepressants, and {when they failed to cure him} scheduled for a controversial shock therapy.

Farthing, a man whose characteristic pessimism and gloomy perspective were interpreted as serious clinical depression, was led on a nightmare journey through the American psychiatric system. Doctors described Farthing as suffering from pervasive negative anticipation: a belief that everything will turn out for the worst, whether it's trains arriving late, England's chances of winning any national sports events, or his own prospects of getting ahead in life. The doctors reported that the satisfaction he seemed to get from his pessimism was particularly pathological.

"They put me on everything -- lithium, Prozac, St. John's wort," Farthing says. "They even told me to sit in front of a big light for half an hour a day or I'd become suicidal. I kept telling them this was all pointless, and they said that was exactly the sort of attitude that got me here in the first place."

Dr. Isaac Horney, a psychotherapist, explored Farthing's family history and couldn't believe his ears. Farthing spoke of growing up in a gray little town where it rained every day, of treeless streets lined with identical houses, and of passionately backing a football team that never won. Although Farthing had six months of therapy, he mainly wanted to talk about the weather. "I felt he wasn't responding to therapy at all," says Horney, who recommended electroconvulsive therapy.

Farthing takes up the story: "Hopeless case? I was all strapped down on the table, and they were about to put the rubber bit in my mouth when the psychiatric nurse picked up on my accent and said, 'Oh my God, I think we're making a terrible mistake!'" Identifying Farthing as British changed the diagnosis of clinical depression to rather quaint and charming. He was immediately discharged from the hospital with a selection of brightly colored leaflets and an I Love New York T-shirt.

Sermon Lay Down Your Arms

This will probably come as a shock to some of you, and perhaps will cause disillusionment, and who knows, maybe even a need to search out a new religious home, but: Occasionally my husband and I fight. Let me reassure you that there are no weapons involved, not even emotional ones. We stay strictly rational in our disagreements. Our arguments are -- rarely -- about what to do when; and more often, about who has proprietary interest in found articles. This morning’s reading was one I found two years ago, but would not let Mark take, despite the fact that I do not have a job requiring me to share readings on any sort of regular basis, and he does. Nevertheless, I played by the old “finder’s keepers” rule and would not let go; it was just too good. I wanted it. Of course, the purpose of anything either of us finds is ultimately to share it, but never mind that: we were fighting about who gets to share it. Having won, I will confess that there is little chance the article can live up to the pressure placed upon it.

Now we find ourselves in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month; a date and time that was designated to stand for peace 89 years ago. The great war was over. For five years, 35 countries battled, and then: This. Armistice Day, and we laid down our arms with a belief in the possibility of world peace; in the power of reflection to change our behavior; to make us less quick to battle; more able to focus on the larger purpose. Sadly, ironically, painfully, Armistice Day was a legal holiday for less than one year before we entered the next World War. It took twenty years to get the celebration through the legislative process, by which time the fate of world peace was already known. Armistice Day inaugurated the most violent century in modern times, so far.
Throughout the past six months, as we have watched Watertown and the No Place for Hate Committee move from a local social action program to a crucible for international affairs, we are carried back to World Wars -- the first, during which the Armenian genocide took place; and the second, which forced the Holocaust upon our consciousness. Armistice Day has been transformed into Veteran’s Day, and there is a sense of division in our mourning. Loyalty has come to mean supporting policies instead of the people who have served and suffered for our country. But beyond this kind of social segregation, we are divided in our own hearts. We don’t really know how to live in peace. Peace has come to mean a way of living comfortably; a kind of self care that separates us from larger concerns, and keeps the pain of real life at bay. We are so used to our culture of individualism that we don’t have a way to talk about our common humanity. Whenever we talk in groups, they are pitted against each other in ways that may sound natural or logical-- those who are loyal, those who are traitors; those who are brave; those who are afraid; doctors and patients, winners and losers. The list goes on..... But these divisions also reveal how we use fear and competing interests to prevent any real encounters that serve us all. We forget that only something that is whole can be divided; that breaking us into groups and subgroups may “only be natural”, but it is a political action, not a humanitarian one. We are one body, and what breaks us is the suffering; the dead; the blood on the ground and the bodies in the earth. Using that brokenness and pain to engender more warfare will never make us feel whole, even if it does make some feel stronger for a time.

Long, long ago, and far, far away, there was a lonely and depressing guy who kept saying that the war his country was fighting was hopeless. The king of his land was not a particularly competent one, and he was feeling besieged from all sides, so he threw this man in jail, hoping to shut him up; hoping labeling him a subversive would cause people to stop listening to him; hoping the guy would start singing a new tune. He didn’t. He kept up his dire predictions right up until the day they came true. You may think this story is a parallel to the times you are living in. See if you still think so when I say more about this story from the book of the great Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah. The interesting thing about this story is not about who was right. They both were: the king’s panic was legitimate, since there really were Babylonians at the gate, and it was not going to end well. The land of Judah was going to be lost. But Jeremiah, the one who is in the most hopeless situation, not only knowing that the enemy is at the gate, but being held captive and unable to help his people; even being labelled a traitor to them -- Jeremiah can see outside the present circumstances. He buys a piece of land in Judah -- this land that his people are about to lose; acknowledging that this will not be his home, but that someday “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” (Jer, 32:15). The king, the one who is fighting so desperately to hang on to the land; to secure the perimeters and to eradicate any who will not join his cause -- the king does not think that far ahead. He just knows that they are in imminent danger, and he better give it all he has, right now.

Clearly, Jeremiah is the one with whom we want to identify. He is truthful and brave and, the book was written about him. But, if we are to be honest, most of us behave as the king did. He is profoundly human in a way we may not even recognize, because it is so like us. He gets completely stuck in the idea of each thing following inevitably from the situation, as if it is natural, and therefore the only possible outcome. The only future he can imagine is contingent upon what is happening right now and the response it requires. Jeremiah’s power is to step outside all of that; to have a future that we do not evolve toward, but which is simply independent of what is happening right now. By refusing to do anything but speak the truth; by refusing to silence himself, or to argue about whether the threat to the country is real, Jeremiah suffers. He is tormented physically and emotionally. But he also preserves his relationship with the whole -- with Israel, with Judah, and with an identity not based on who he is fighting against, but on who he is, on his connection to the land. He uses freedom to protect his vision, rather than to defend the present.
It does sound a bit unhinged, to think that tomorrow is not somehow related to today. But it is powerful, too. We can be liberated from these circumstances, and be faithful to our real desires, not simply believe we are forced into the positions we occupy. Last week’s New York Times reviewed Alan Kramer’s Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, which argues that the countries involved let military leaders, not civil or royal leaders -- set policy. This set in motion a kind of violence which became incorporated into the culture. Instead of conquering, or capturing, or winning, the goal was destroying, so that pervasive and gratuitous violence became integrated into our understanding of what is normal. War stopped being the arena of soldiers, and became a process engaging the whole culture, which was taught to believe in the purifying possibilities of annhilation. The total destruction of a civilization -- its libraries and religious icons and its people -- could now be seen as an opportunity; homicide became a solution, and savagry the state religion. Kramer argues that this was not inevitable.

One of the things this means is that the violence of the 20th century was not the logical conclusion to a historical event. There were other possibilities. This can be really hard to remember. But it is important to hold on to this knowledge: things did not and do not have to be this way. Choices were made, and are being made still; and they tend to be based on fear, and for political purposes -- yet are seen as decisions reflecting a fundamental identity. In the last few years there have been a number of books about the evils of religion published. We liberal religionists may be persuaded by people like Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, because we believe in being rational, and because the kind of religion they tend to skewer is not the one we practice. Since Biblical texts are seen as literature anyway, alongside Shakespeare and Chekhov or maybe Jane Austen, why don’t we all stay home and read, and keep the peace? Religious belief is divisive; humanity will never be peaceful as long as people believe in these ridiculous institutions. But this book, Dynamic of Destruction, helps us to see why the anti-religious writers are also wrong, and why we must continue to gather in churches and temples and shrines, even when we may not quite be sure why, or what we believe, if anything. These critics, too, are hopelessly rooted in the present; witnessing a failure to believe in a future that doesn’t evolve from today; or that doesn’t require us to destroy everything in order to begin again. The violence in our culture; the violence in the world is portrayed as the predictable result of religious faith. Terrorism is blamed on Islam; the Crusades deserve to be trotted out; but the attacks reveal both how deep the longing for something more is, and how little faith the authors have in anything outside of present circumstances. They can’t see beyond themselves. But we have to. And that is at least part of what religion is for; to help us see. We can’t stake everything on what’s happening right now; we can’t be undone by the miseries of the day. Life is bigger than that.

It is not religious belief that causes violence; it is a belief in violence as a solution; as necessary; or inevitable that allows people to behave this way. Dismissing thousands of years of shared traditions based on human needs is hostile; it is an act of aggression dressed up in academic language. How else do those who see religion as foolish end up aligned with the evangelical forces who are using violence to liberate Iraq from religious violence? When we burden religion with the idea that it is inevitably a cause of divisions among us, we not only misunderstand the roots of violence, we also lose religion’s power as a cultural force for morality; as a social tool that uplifts, consoles, creates respite, and can help bring about a taste of heaven below, as the old Universalists would have it. Religion makes it possible to believe that we are not damned by the information we have today; the future is not a foregone conclusion. To believe only in the inevitability of historical process would create despair, and it is wrong. Things happen. Things change. We change.

This sounds easy for us, as we who tend to gether here are often screaming for change, but that is not the kind of change I mean. There are some kinds of change which are really about maintaining the status quo; about “regime change” or victory, in which we lay down our arms, but the arms are empty; hanging at our sides while we take a break, and get ready to return to action. Real change would be a vision that did not begin and end with reacting to our world today, but a vision of what could be; of an abundant earth, milk and honey, nectar and ambrosia, justice, mercy, love -- those ancient symbols and phrases that evoke a visceral response which lets us know this matters.

This is where we often fall down. A responsive feeling is not much to go on; and of course we differ in our responses. How can we call that reliable? If there is such thing as my truth, and your truth, how can we even talk about the truth? So we don’t. We try to be fair instead; to see the validity of all sides, and in the process we become neutral to the point of powerlessness. Everything is abstract, and meaning fades away, because of course being everyone means we are no one. This kind of even handedness may sound like peace, but it isn’t. It robs us of belief in our own experiences; silences us when true expression would liberate us. It heals us slightly, as Jeremiah says of those leaders who keep telling them there is peace when we all know there is not. We cannot settle for these superficial fixes that cover up the deep anguish. There will never be peace simply by deciding there should be. Reason has a funny way of having its own agenda, and it can actually alienate us. Honor is real; it is in personal sacrifice that serves the whole and all of us act with it every day -- caring for an aging parent, a vulnerable child; doing the thousand mundane tasks that drain the life out of us even as they sustain us because we know we must. Honor is what makes us suffer, as it requires us to define what is more important than ourselves, today. Reason can let us avoid life -- because it hurts too much, or because we don’t quite see the purpose of feeling all that pain. But it does have a purpose. Pain is what connects us with truth, with our humanity. And often pain is the place where our own personal narratives connect with a larger vision; with deeply moral truths. True speech liberates -- even when the speech is nothing but a lament; a grief so deep it becomes rage. What has happened to our world; what has been done to us, and what have we done? We beg for better eyes to cry with; some way to express our desperation; knowing that the captive king and the prophetic traitor are united in this love for something that is lost to them. We need an acknowledgement that this matters in a way that is not about feeling, but BEING, and it is in the honesty of that despair that we can climb through a doorway into hope. Pain like Jeremiah’s is proof of who he is; his core belief in his community and what they stood for. Rage against this loss confirms the value of his identity, and makes it possible to live again; to begin to imagine a new future. Honesty is compelling even when it is not particularly appealling.

Armistice Day. Lay down your arms. And with those empty arms, embrace life in its fullest terms, and speak your truth -- even when you are afraid; even when no one wants to hear it. The words burn to be spoken; to help carry us forward into a new place where acceptance is more valued than violence. Telling our stories honestly both gives us ourselves, and makes change possible. Even if you are from a gray and sunless town, where it drizzles constantly, the trains are forever late and your team always loses, there is a certain kind of power in laying claim to the facts; in refusing to be jolted to a new place by someone else’s inability to tolerate the truth of your life. It is, in fact, in refusing the slight healing of the hurt offered by the professionals that George Farthing, the expatriate British subject of our reading, was made new, living a life that looks nothing like his old one at all.


Closing Words

These lines are from William Hutchinson Murray, a Scottish explorer who climbed the Himalayas in the 1940s.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

“Get Happy” a sermon by Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - November 4, 2007

Call to Worship - from Alfred North Whitehead

The secret of happiness lies in knowing this: that we live by the law of expenditure. We find the greatest joy not in getting, but in expressing what we are. There are tides in the ocean of life, and what comes in depends upon what goes out. The current flows inward only where there is an outlet . . . The more you give out the more you shall receive . . . People do not really live for honors or for pay; their gladness is in not taking and holding , but in doing, the striving, the building, the living. . . The happy person is the one who lives the life of love, not for the honors it may bring, but for the life itself.

Sermon - “Get Happy” Mark W. Harris

People have been thinking about happiness for a long time. In the book of Proverbs (3:13) it tells us, “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.” Of course we all make up our own wisdom about what will bring us happiness, or we literally buy in to the current cultural code for what we need to do to achieve happiness. We also think of happiness as a more modern concept. After all, didn’t Hobbes tell us that life in the old days was nasty, short and brutish? Only we have time and leisure for recreational pleasures while our ancestors were either too busy running from ferocious animals, plowing the fields or sitting in church hearing that even thinking about fun was a sin against God and humanity. Yet the stereotypes we hold about our ancestors are often not true. Just this week my third grader had printed materials from school that said the Puritans did not drink liquor. While this might fit the Mormon approach to religion, prohibition was not part of Puritan moral fervor. In fact the water was so bad, they drank a lot more liquor than most of us would ever consider doing.

Happiness is part of a strong historical myth about American culture. After all, the Founders took John Locke’s phrase life liberty and property, and changed it to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In that context, perhaps they meant that owning property was the way we achieve happiness, but more commonly we think of it as enjoying the good life - home, family, friends, food and furnishings for personal comfort and enjoyment. Traditionally this American dream lured immigrants to our shore in the hope of achieving some degree of personal happiness. This is depicted in a fine movie called “Golden Door”, where passage to America by Sicilian peasants is viewed as the culmination of a dream of the good life. In 1904 Salvatore Mancuso leaves his sad, hardscrabble, peasant existence to come to a beautiful land where everything is described as magically wonderful. We see him swimming in a river of milk. Donkeys fly overhead and scatter money, and postcards show vegetables which grow to enormous sizes- carrots are like trees. In this vision of life, everything is bigger, better and more beautiful. Of course this vision of happiness bears little relationship to reality. Their trip across the ocean makes them feel like cattle, and then once they reach Ellis Island, metaphorical cattle prods explore every part of their bodies and psyches as immigration officials see if they are fit to be Americans. The imagined life of eternal happiness becomes the sober reality of women being introduced to men they have been pledged to marry sight unseen. Will they find happiness?

This is the question we are left with, after Salvatore meets a beguiling Englishwoman traveling alone on this boat full of Italians. He agrees to marry her, and while we may imagine a future for them together, we can only wonder if this unlikely union will last and bring them happiness. The world he has dreamed about is not the reality he encounters, but now Salvatore has a new opportunity for hope. What we see in the immigrant experience is that the old ways become obsolete. The matriarch of the clan must return to Sicily. She has been born too late to find happiness in this new world. But despite whatever hardships they encounter, happiness for the others will be found under new circumstances. Ultimately we cannot predict if they will be happy. And this is so true for us. All that we may have planned imagining a life of happiness may not come to fruition - the marriage is not what we hoped for, the children are not what we expected, and the job we trained so hard for is a disaster. So it seems much of what we think and experience about happiness is bound by the contingencies of time and context.

In her book, Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs reminds us that far too often our notion of happiness lies in some future state we hope to achieve. She says that her entire life she has been waiting for happiness to occur. It will happen she says, as soon as school is out, or as soon as she is married, or as soon as the next major hurdle is surmounted. Divorced. Has a job. Retired. And so the stage we are living in is never quite good enough to be happy in. We always need something more, either to have children or not have them, have a job or not have a job, have money or need a little more. Mairs believes that this happiness we are always waiting for is literally nowhere, and that we need to live our lives in the present tense. The poet Charles Baudelaire agrees by saying, “In order not to feel the horrible burden of time which breaks your back and bends you down to earth, you must be unremittingly intoxicated. This sounds like eat, drink and be merry in a Roman Bread and Circus. He says, “never ever be sober! Use wine, poetry or virtue, as you please.” And he says if your intoxication becomes diminished, then it is time to become intoxicated again.
In my own case, I, too, felt like I had spent my life planning for the time when I would be happy. This involved getting through school, and always waiting for the time when the relationships and the jobs would be just right. We are culturally trained to believe that the job either needs to pay more or be better in some way, so that even if we can’t be happy with it now, it will pay us enough so that we can financially plan for the day that we will be happy to be not working at all. I picked this topic partly because they are a number of recent books on the subject, including The Happiness Myth by Jennifer Hecht, and Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. As I indicated in the newsletter, my study group was attracted to this topic, and we will be addressing it next spring. You may hear Sermon, part 2 then. My initial inclination was to emphasize finding happiness with the circumstances we have in our lives right now. It is impossible to predict whether we will achieve a longed for or expected happiness that we have concocted for our futures. Always waiting for happiness in the context of time means that we are never settled in the present, and thus never, ever happy, but then Daniel Gilbert made me reconsider.

Gilbert says that all psychologists take a vow to publish something that finishes the sentence, “The human being is the only animal that . . . (blank)” Gilbert completes his version as follows: “The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.” In the context of thinking about happiness, this contradicts those of us who believe we can never feel happy because we spend so much time thinking about what will make us happy in a future state. We never appreciate the present. So, which is it, present or future that will make us happy? Many of you have probably noticed that baby boomers can now hear their favorite rock and roll songs as musical accompaniment to television commercials. If we sing along, we may soon be buying the product. A certain bank gives us the Rolling Stones’ road to happiness with “I’m Free.” And then the Lovin Spoonful croons in with “what a day for a Day Dream, thinking about my bundle of joy.” Gilbert says the brain insists on projecting us into the future, and so we daydream about the future where we see ourselves “achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing.” We imagine ourselves with our bundle of joy. He says we find thinking about the future so enjoyable, we would rather do that than actually be there in the future, which of course turns out very different than what we imagined.

Even though I had been convinced that living in the present was the way to happiness, Gilbert began to convert me to a different perspective. I see this sometimes with party planning. My boys always have a lot of excitement and anticipation thinking about a big birthday party, but then when it actually arrives, the excitement has turned to anxiety, and they cannot enjoy the actual experience. This is also true for many adults, too. Many of us have fun dreaming about an ideal vacation or going on a date with the person we have had our eye on for some months, but then when the event actually takes place, we wonder where the attraction or the desire came from in the first place. What was I thinking? Andrea often says this about any household projects she undertakes, whether it is designing a new room, or planning interior decorating changes from painting to window treatments. The planning of a new project like this is always very exciting to her, she says, but then the actual execution may be a bit of a bore, and then the final product is never quite as good as what she envisioned in the first place.

Of course it makes sense that we would imagine a happy future. Anyone who sits around dreaming about disaster is much more likely to be and remain miserable. This changes the whole way of being a Boston Red Sox fan. For 86 years all we did was predict disaster. Despite the interpersonal relationships we shared and our passion for the game, we knew it would end badly. Now things are quite different. We know that 2004 was no fluke since it has been followed up with 2007. What does it mean now that we expect to win? You might say that we will be happier and more assured fans. Jesus knew it when he said to those who have, more will be given. So part of being happy is planning for happiness, and for doing what we like to do. We would have happier children if school offered them what they love - drawing, science labs, or making maps, rather than taking a test. Another part of being happy is feeling some control over the outcome. Taking the Red Sox metaphor one step further, we find that many of us felt like we had to watch every game to the bitter end, which meant that we ended up feeling sleep deprived. One could say that this was born of our old Calvinist skepticism and fear that the baseball Gods would destroy us again, but I think it more directly relates to a need to have some control over our circumstances. It sounds superstitious, and is I suppose, but I think we feel like we have some kind of vicarious control over a game if we are actually watching it, and cheering with each pitch. Any measure of control we give to our loved ones helps them feel happier, too.

Daniel Gilbert tells us that the word happiness is used to indicate three related things- emotional happiness, moral happiness and judgmental happiness. Emotional happiness is what feels good to us, and is a happiness that we find in the present that is understood by visceral experiences that many of us recognize. We say that feels or smells or tastes good; kissing our lover, smelling a rose, eating chocolate. By and large we can agree that these things make us feel happy. This is where the brain that wants a quick happiness fix can go, as we all have special activities that make us feel happy. If we feel depressed on a cold winter’s night, we may curl up in front of a fire with a good book. We all like feelings of pleasure, but many of these fleeting emotions that make us feel happy have longer term implications. We may enjoy eating all the Halloween candy, and while it might make us temporarily happy, our awareness of future happiness may emerge to stem the tide of momentary ecstasy. If we eat all the candy we will get sick as a dog and gain a zillion pounds.

We can see that happiness as pure emotional pleasure must have limits. This is where moral happiness comes into play. It is generally agreed that striving after happiness is how many of us see the purpose and intention of life. While we may enjoy the pleasures of life, if we enjoy them too much they will surely kill us, or at least shorten our life considerably. We may enjoy smoking, but it will hardly give us the longer , healthier life we may desire. This may be a form of happiness that we would associate with virtue. If you live a caring life that is centered upon giving to others, you will achieve happiness. This is what Whitehead implies in our opening words - the more you give out, the more you will receive. Are good people happier? We may think of someone who serves others as virtuous, but they may not be what they would call happy. There is a hymn (#135) we did not sing today that begins “how happy are they born or taught who do not serve another’s will.” In other words, you are happy if you keep your personal integrity, but not if it is as a slave to another person or group. It is good to have a higher purpose to your happiness, but also make sure it gives you some kind of emotional reward. We want jobs where they compensate us with a pay check, but more importantly where they value what we do, and tell us so. If may be good for your place of employment if you give all your energy and skill to them, but if you don’t receive accolades, then happiness will not be present. And money, at least lots of it, does not seem to buy happiness.

I found moral happiness expressed in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s passage from Gift From the Sea. She indicates there are paths we can choose that will yield a life of happiness. She suggests that simplification is one of them. In a culture where shopping is often the antidote for lethargy and depression, this seems like good moral advice. Simplify your life with fewer gadgets and fewer purchases. Yet the moral implications of happiness soon border on the judgmental. Some may say that shopping at the mall is a good communal activity, and it keeps the economy from collapsing, but others of us say it diverts us from deeper emotional values, and the larger happiness of the society as whole. We have already filled up our landfills with junk. Can we afford any more?

It soon becomes apparent that my equation equaling happiness may be quite different from yours. We often judge whether someone else is happy by our own standards. We see a mother with 13 children and say there is no way she can be happy. We think one formula will be the silver bullet for everyone. Sylvester Graham once invented a cracker that he thought would be the dietary highway to heaven. Eat a graham cracker and you will be liberated from all desires for meat or sex. That was his secret to happiness, but then again, some of us want those things that he judges as detrimental to happiness, and would include them on our list of necessities in our own happiness formula. Fundamentally we have to choose for ourselves rather than accept others assumptions about what constitutes happiness. We have to ask, is happiness present for me? Time is a factor here, too. It is not merely finding happy experiences now, or planning or imagining a happy future. We seem to need a little of both. There is another aspect of time that has to do with context. Some of us may have been happy once innocently hitting a baseball or painting a picture, but then it may have become a competition, or even a profession, and we lost sight of the fun in the game or expression of ourselves, and it became a drudgery or a bore. Sometimes those things that made us happy at one time in our life, no longer do so at another time. So we also need to judge whether they still provide emotional and moral happiness for us. Is it still a joy? Are we contributing to something larger and feeling a return from that commitment? Happiness means passion and joy, relational affirmation and nurture, and continuing meaning, or else we need to find new relationships and new joys to find happiness again. We may also be able to enjoy happiness more in the present when we are accepting of ourselves, and who we are, and not anxious about a mental list of what we need to have or be in order to find happiness.

In the fifth book and now movie in the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, Harry and his fellow students at Hogwarts are threatened once again by Voldemort, but in this installment, the teenagers are left to their own devices more than ever before. Harry must take on the leadership role of training his fellow students at Hogwarts with defending themselves against the forces of evil. What do you do when a Dementor comes upon you and proceeds to try to suck your soul out? To defend themselves against this horror, Harry has them practice what will be their most effective defense. He tells them to think of the happiest moment of their life. Stop. Think of the happiest moment in your life. Could this be enough to ward off evil or at least keep depression from entering your heart? Do you have images of going up in the air in a swing, eating chocolate, or kissing your one true love? The great Universalist preacher always told his parishioners, God wants you to be happy. Your salvation is in your happiness. Happiness is in enjoying the pleasures we have been given in life - laughter, love and libation. Happiness is finding greater meaning together in relationship so that even more of us can enjoy the life we share. Remember Ballou said that no one is saved unless all are saved. Happiness cannot be achieved alone. And even if you are planning to be happy by saving every cent you can towards that pension, ultimately we need to embrace whatever happiness we can right now. In Buddhism, happiness is achieved by letting go of all those things we are attached to, and realizing the happiness we have in this eternal moment together. And so happiness means we must make the best of what we have and who we are. We make this life happy. Even if life is difficult, we understand how much happiness we have. We imagine that right now is the culmination of all we are, and essentially it is the happiest moment of our lives because that swing, those chocolates, that kiss, that integrity, that love - those things that make us happy are with us now and always.

Closing Words - from Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.