First Parish of Watertown

“Unintended Wisdom” by Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - November 30, 2008

Call to Worship from East Coker, Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.


“Unintended Wisdom” - Mark W. Harris

This morning’s opening words remind me of some of Jesus’ parables. There is a kind of backwards, almost startling character to the nature of the words. You need to become like a child in order to enter the most exalted place of all, the last shall be first, the rich cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. “You must go through the way in which you are not.” I reread those words when I was glancing at an old General Assembly essay by my colleague Gordon McKeeman. You must see the sacred in the banal. You must find wisdom in the insult. Has anyone ever said something to you that seemed insulting or hurtful at first, but then you realized that it carried a great deal of truth in it? A few months back a friend was telling me how he had been present for the births of all his children, but he especially recalled when his son was born. Everyone in the delivery room was wearing scrubs and a mask, but he was not, and so he was concerned that he might get germs on the baby, and felt anxious about picking him up, and finally said, “I don’t have a mask!”. A bellicose nurse then bellowed back, “you have to take him home, you know!” This meant he was going to be exposed to lots of germs, and that babies are a lot tougher than we think, so he should pick him up already! Although the nurse was castigating him for not picking up his son, the wisdom he gleaned was that children are pretty resilient, and usually survive parenting that is never mistake or germ free.

It is curious how much wisdom we glean from life often comes in a backhanded or unintentional way, almost by accident. Perhaps the problem is that we expect we will learn great things from the experts, and can often be disappointed because their fame is part narcissism and self-promotion, and part publicity. When I was in graduate school in history, we had one of the best known colonial historians in the country on our faculty. When he moved through the corridors of the history building he always had this little retinue of devotees following in the footsteps of the esteemed master. It turned out that he was rather a difficult person to deal with, and he was mostly interested in his own research, and the book he was working on rather than helping his students. While my friends thought that worshipping the famous person would get them some where, I soon learned that he did not care about his students. I first thought it would be great to work with this famous historian, but the real lesson was, “Following the stars won’t bring you stardom.” Yet many of us still find it hard to believe that. I was deeply disappointed in a colleague who quit the ministerial support group I am in, so that he could be in the group with all those who are perceived as famous.

The truth is much of the wisdom we gain in life comes when we least expect it, or may not fit what we presume is true, such as, we will get more out of an experience if we work with the most famous people. There s a story about the Sufi fool Nasrudin, who was working in his garden one day. He became tired and sat down under a walnut tree, and soon began musing about the natural surroundings he observed around him. Allah, he said, your greatness is beyond dispute, and you have created a beautiful world, but your wisdom is not always apparent. I am looking at this wonderful, large pumpkin, and yet it grows on a spindly little vine. And conversely, the tiny, insignificant walnut grows on this massive tree that provides such lovely shade for me. If I had been planning things , he said, I would have hung the massive vegetable from the lordly tree, and then grew the tiny little walnut from the vine that clings to the ground. Then he closed his eyes, and dreamed of other things he might have done differently. A cool breeze stirred the branches, and soon a walnut fell and landed smack on his head. He rubbed the little lump, and as he did so an understanding smile crossed his lips. Oh Allah, he said, as he turned toward Mecca, thy wisdom is great. What if I had been hit in the head with the giant, orange pumpkin? Perhaps it is just as well that Isaac Newton was hit with an apple, rather than a blue hubbard squash, for civilization might have needed to wait a century or two for some other scientist to understand the universal law of gravitation.

In 1767, Joseph Priestley, the famous Unitarian minister and scientist, and his wife Mary moved to Leeds in the midlands of England where he took charge of the congregation known as Mill Hill Chapel.  Just by chance, they took up residence next door to a brewery and this soon led him to begin experiments on the carbon dioxide, that was produced in unlimited supplies in the brewing process.  Priestley later wrote of his efforts to “improve the water by impregnating it with fixed air”, and in 1772 he announced his invention of soda-water. Without this accidental bit of wisdom or knowledge gleaned from the brewery, we might still be waiting to drink our first Diet Coke. Of course history is filled with these kinds of unintentional discoveries from perhaps the most famous, that of penicillin, discovered because a fungal mold prevented a staphylococcus bacteria from growing, to the most refreshing, an ice cream cone, from a thin rolled wafer because they ran out of dishes at the World’s Fair in 1909.

We come to see that the expected or the obvious may not result in the greatest wisdom. On Thanksgiving I was speaking to Andrea’s brother about his seemingly miraculous cure from asthma. He has suffered form asthma his entire life, and had always been prescribed inhalers as the one true remedy from his affliction. He had gone to great lengths to try to have bedding he was not allergic to, and to have a home that was as clean of dust mites as possible, but he still continued to suffer. Things got so bad that he was struggling to breathe even with constant inhaler use. Finally, he went to a naturopath, not a famous asthma doctor. The first thing the naturopathic doctor did was test him for allergies. He immediately learned he had a severe wheat and dairy allergy. Now that he doesn’t eat either of them , he is breathing pretty well. When he went back to his asthma doctor, the physician said, “Hey, you don’t have asthma anymore. I don’t need to see you.” But he wasn’t willing to attribute the cure to diet. He’d rather believe it was a miracle. But Kevin knows the change in the way he feels is because of his diet. While the traditional or prescribed cure did not work for him, he had to experiment to see what would help. He said he just kept trying to learn as much as he could.

We can find cures or answers by experimenting, or by not following conventional wisdom. We can also find wisdom in balancing society’s conventions with assertions of our own integrity. When Theodore Parker published his “Experiences as a Minister,” in 1859, he told a story he remembered from his early days of ministry. He wrote, “A rough blacksmith once asked me in my youth, “Do you think a minister would dare tell his audience of their actual faults?” - “Certainly I do!” was my boyish answer. “Humph!” rejoined the smith, “I should like to have him begin then.” This came at time when Unitarian churches were sometimes the purveyors of wealth and high culture in greater Boston, and perhaps prone to accepting proper appearance as more important than truth.

Some of the wisdom we learn can not only be unexpected, but also quite painful. As many of you know, some years ago, a small group in my former congregation wanted to see me ousted from the position as minister. I think I naively thought that if you do the very best job you can do, always fulfill your responsibilities, and are rewarded with a good deal of success, that you cannot be fired from your job. Of course this is a ridiculous thing to believe. People have jobs taken from them all the time, and I know this. I have seen it happen to some of you. Yet I was still a bit stunned when this small group succeeded in convincing the Parish committee, and district and UUA representatives that because they wished for me to go, we should let them win, and they did. I remember my colleague Scotty McLennan saying, if they can do this to you, they can do it to anybody. While this affirmed that I was a valued minister, it didn’t change the bare facts.
Perhaps most grievous of all was the proposed acquiescence with a lie. Most of the congregation had no idea of any trouble, and these folks thought it best if it remained that way. The solution was simple. What the denominational authorities proposed to me was that I appear before a Congregational meeting, and pretend that I really wanted to resign. This was a bad idea. The ministry is a profession grounded in integrity. Do you want a minister who can lie successfully? But in my brokenness, I tried. And at the congregational meeting, I broke down into tears, and couldn’t. The parish chair was furious. What was my lesson? I could have taken some negative unexpected wisdom out of this, like always watch your back side, and don’t trust the people. But it was important for me to learn what life feels like; what can happen to us. Sometimes things don’t work out, and it is not necessarily your fault. But the larger wisdom was that you are not fooling anybody, most especially yourself, when you try to perpetrate a lie to save an image. Maybe we can’t save ourselves from pain, but we don’t have to lose the solace of the truth, too.

Another thing that may be unintended wisdom is when we discover the effect we have upon others. We sometimes forget the impact we have if we only focus on how we feel. Earlier this fall, my colleague Mary Harrington quoted from the book, My Grandfather’s Blessings by Rachel Remen. “It has taken me a long time to realize that I have an effect on the people around me. Like many people who were different when they were young, I suffered for years from shyness and a lack of self worth. All but invisible to myself, I believed I was invisible to others as well and that my presence or absence had little or no influence on anyone. In my early days I would often not respond to a written invitation or return a phone message. Sometimes I would leave a party without a word to anyone, including the host or hostess, It simply never occurred to me that anyone might notice that I had not responded or that I was no longer there, that it might matter. Years later I was stunned to discover that all those years I had been seen as aloof and rude. And that my behavior often hurt people.” There is wisdom in knowing that you leave a message in your comings and goings, in your hellos and goodbyes, that people notice you, that you count, and that people count on you to be respectful and understanding of their overtures and invitations and desire to be with you. But it is wisdom we cannot receive if we don’t believe in our own worth first. If we do not value ourselves enough to know that others like us and feel badly when we dismiss that.

The truth is around us all the time, and perhaps not in the most esteemed person, or the holiest of shrines. In the novel Brick Lane, the husband Chanu has decided that the family will return to Bangladesh from their London home. Nazneen, his wife, asks, “Is this true?” He then speaks of putting truth to the test. We accept so many things as true. That doing a good job means you will never be fired. That we are so worthless we can slip away without anyone really noticing us. That I can’t breathe without the inhaler. Put to the test and we find that the world is complex. You are intertwined with others. “When you feel something so strongly that it can't be questioned, you have to ask yourself - is this true?” In the book Yearnings by Rabbi Irwin Kula, he quotes his mother, who once said to him “When you’ve got an answer, it’s time to find better questions.” Underlying this matriarchal wisdom is the truth that no single story can capture the meaning. You may feel like walking out of a room, but doing so does not merely impact you or what you need to do, but it also impacts others. We find more wisdom the deeper we go. We find more wisdom when we hear more stories.

Stories remind us that everybody needs to be heard. Stories challenge us with new truths, new complexities; an angle that enriches us all. Here was the important professor who only cared for his research hounded by students who wanted to learn. Here, too was the woman who felt so badly about herself she thought she didn’t matter, and yet she offended others in her very attempt to be invisible. Wisdom is found in those stories that we find hard to embrace because they force us to go deeper into ourselves, and connect with those who have a claim on truth that is different than our own. An asthma doctor whose patient is cured, but not by the medicine he prescribed. Hearing this truth embraces a deeper wisdom about life. We must doubt our truth to enter a path to deeper wisdom, and we find the holy in these little kernels of truth - in the incidental and in the accidental stories we share. We find it in the rude nurse who says, pick up the baby already and stop being a wimp; in the willingness to experiment and test the truth; in the truth of knowing our impact on others. That is where we find love, in the most unexpected places. The season of Advent reminds us that we are about to retell a story where we find that holiest of feelings, not in the cathedral or the castle or in the realms of power and privilege, but in the person we think of as helpless, the baby, and in the place that is lowly, the stable filled with animals. May we reach deeper for that unintended wisdom that is waiting to be gleaned from our lives.


Closing Words from Tennessee Williams, Where I Live

The great and only possible dignity of man lies in his power deliberately to choose certain moral values by which to live steadfastly, as if he, too, like a character in a play, were immured against the corrupting rush of time. Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the greatest magic trick of human existence.

“Called Unto Liberty” - Mark W. Harris

(This sermon was purchased at a service auction. It is a look at the Mayhew family, as the member who purchased it is a direct descendant)

First Parish of Watertown - November 9, 2008

Call to Worship - from Thomas Traherne

Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in heaven; see yourself in a divine palace; and look upon the skies and the earth and the air as celestial joys; having such a reverent esteem of all, as if you were among the angels . . . You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world; and more than so, because men and women are in it who are every one sole heirs, as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in all that is holy, as misers do in gold, and kings in scepters, you never enjoy the world. Till your spirit fills the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all ages as with your walk and table; till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made; till you love men and women so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst to the zeal of your own; till you delight in God for being good to all; you never enjoy the world.

*Hymn #212 “We are Dancing Sarah’s Circle, vs. 1-2

Sermon - “Called unto Liberty” - Mark W. Harris

Reading - from Thomas Mayhew to John Winthrop - 1634

To the worshipful John Wynthropp this dd in Boston (spelling modernized)
Sir, -

I do hereby request your worship to deliver this bearer that hemp you spake of, for caulking the pines; and I do further intreat you to lend Mr. Cradock the help of your team, a day or two, to help carry the timber for building the mill at Watertown. I have sent unto Mr. Doomer, I hope he will afford me his help; that with the help of our own we may do it in two days. The reason I desire to have it done with such expedition is for that the cattle must be watched whilst they are about it, in regard they will be from home, and so doubtless otherwise would stray, or at least run home: I will at any time, if your worship have occasion in the like kind, fulfill your desire: the time we intend to go about it is the second or third day of the next week. Thus ceasing farther to trouble you at present, saluting you with all respect, committing you to the Lord’s protection, I rest
Your worship’s to command
Thomas Mayhew, June 12, 1634

1. Settling Watertown

The Mayhew family played a significant role in the early history of Watertown and its economic and political development. They were responsible for the settlement and governance of Martha’s Vineyard, and had a long and surprisingly positive relationship with the Native American population in a Christian mission. Finally, another member of this family was a crucial player in the upsurge of political fervor against the English monarchy, and his longings for political liberty went hand in hand with his religious beliefs that the true salvation of ourselves and the communities we create depends upon a faith founded upon a desire to strip religion of all superstition and sham so that people might serve God in pureness of character and integrity. These are the stories of five generations of Mayhews, who were directly related to one of our current members. The tradition of community building and faith formation lives in the world then as now. We are here because of the struggles they endured, the lives they lived, the communities they built, now ours to inherit.

Thomas Mayhew came to Watertown in 1635 from nearby Medford, a settler there four years before, another émigré from England in the great Puritan migration. He had been widowed from his first wife Anna who was from Southampton, England, where the Pilgrims had left from in 1620. She was the mother of Thomas and Robert. Mayhew was a merchant from Tisbury in Wiltshire, a mere 30 miles from Southampton on Salisbury Plain. He was not one of the mostly East Anglians who settled in Watertown, but it did not seem to matter, for he was an agent for a London investor, Matthew Craddock, and earned the respectful title of Mister. After Anna died, he married Jane on a return trip to England in 1634, and settled with her near what we now call Watertown Square, a stone’s throw from here. In fact we might say he helped create the Square. Beyond the end of Spring Street, emptying into the Charles, Mayhew built Watertown’s first Mill. It was powered by that force of nature that was not yet dammed, but soon would be. Our own Mt. Auburn Street was then known as the Mill road.

Thomas had an agenda for his life, and as an agent for Mr. Craddock was in the business of managing properties, ship building and trade. He was from the first able to fulfill his goal to be a successful businessman. He stayed for a time and with ingenuity engaged in this wilderness work. Mayhew became part of the inner circle along with others with merchant backgrounds, who knew the business of trading. While a little younger than many of the other elders, Thomas’ initiative overcame his youth, and he was drawn in, at least for a time. Yet in the end, his days of success were short lived. In a decade, his family departed for a new start on Martha’s Vineyard. There was potential for agriculture and fishing there, and here his investments led his family to the verge of financial ruin

After Watertown was first settled, the people began to raise wheat and corn and rye. A mill was needed to grind the crops, to make possible the daily grind of feeding all those mouths. The populations increased by leaps and bounds, naturally and flowing in from their native land. Mayhew beseeched Mr. Winthrop to lend his team of cattle to haul the timber to Watertown to build that mill, of which his agent held half interest. Let it be done, quickly, he said, and pray that the cattle do not wander. It went up, and the dam was built along with a water race. The miller, Mr. Cakebread, oversaw the work. There were many anxieties that year of 1634. Land values were skyrocketing, and if they did not distribute the lands among themselves, and limit who could inherit, their offspring might lose out, and they would profit not at all. There was also a fear of starvation, as populations bulged, “perchers” settled in for the winter, and crop yields were often less than desirable. If wheat was set without fish for fertilizer, it was a poor crop. The soil grew barren, looking like winter in summer. More seasonal weather changes brought a drought, a hurricane, and some of the coldest winters of the decade, as the bay froze, and cattle died. Because his mils could not provide enough sustenance, Thomas Mayhew even took to sail in 1635, and 1636. He brought back potatoes, corn, pork and oranges from Bermuda, but could not find much at all when he sailed north to the Isles of Shoals.

Despite their anxieties, these were relatively good years as new settlers flowed in, but then the political climate in England changed. A king, Charles I, lost his head, and a Commonwealth heralded a new reformation, and immigration dried up. The heavy purses stayed home in that green land, and soon a scarcity of money occurred, and debts could not be paid. Mayhew’s mill mortgage was foreclosed. Just as the dam he had built had stopped the fish from running, so his life came to a stop. He began to sell what he could salvage. He had to provide for Hannah, and Mary, and Martha and Bethia all born in the new world. By the end of this decade of change, his second spouse Jane was gone, and he was married anew in 1647 to Grace. He had achieved much in this new community - a selectman in town, a representative to the General Court, but the crash ended it all. In 1642, he received a land grant on Martha’s Vineyard, and he sent his son, Thomas Jr. to settle Great Harbour, what became Edgartown. Thomas Jr. was a preacher and then Senior followed in 1645. Before he departed for the island, Thomas Mayhew had established a few firsts. The mill was one, bringing all commerce in town to the Square and changing the location of the center of town, with its dam forever changing the course of the Charles. He also built the first bridge a footbridge across the Charles in 1641, what now centuries later is our crossroad to Newton Corner with the Galen Street Bridge. It gave Mayhew access to the 150 acres he was granted on the south side of the river, where he built a house just off Washington Street over by the Catholic church in Nonantum. And finally, he built a weir, a special place to catch fish. It was order by the legislature and then rented to Governor Dudley for a period of four years. The abundance of this commodity was too much to neglect. As Frances Higginson had reported, “The abundance of sea fish are almost beyond believing and sure I could scarce have believed it, except I had seen it with mine own eyes.” Did the Natives teach Mayhew how to build the weir and catch a fish? And were these relationships helpful on the Vineyard, where he encountered the Native cultural shadow, and tried to spread the Christian faith?

2. Encountering the Other

Reading - The Story of Hiacoomes by Experience Mayhew

“This Hiacoomes was an Indian of Great Harbour, . . .where a few English families first settled in the year 1642. . . . The Rev. Thomas Mayhew, who was then minister to the few English inhabitants in that new plantation , . . . was at the same time contriving what might be done in order to the salvation of the . . . Indians round about him, whom he, with compassion, saw perishing for lack of vision. . . Hiacoomes . . . conversing with, and hearkening to the English, was soon noised about among the Indians; and the news of it coming to the sachems, and powwows of the island, they were , as obscure a person as Hiacoomes was, much alarmed at it; and some of them endeavoring with all their might, to discourage him from holding communication with the English, and from receiving any instruction from them. But all that these could say or do to this end, was to no purpose . . . There was this year 1643 a very strange disease among the Indians, they ran up and down as if delirious, till they could run no longer; they would make their faces as black as coal, and snatch up any weapon, as though they would do mischief with it, and speak great swelling words, but yet they did no harm. Many of these Indians were by the English seen in this condition. Now this, and all other calamities which the Indians were under, they generally then attributed to the departure of some of them from their own heathenish ways and customs; but Hiacoomes being built on that foundation that standeth sure, and being one of those whom God had set apart for himself, and knew to be his, none of these things moved him; but the things which he had heard and learned, he held fast. And that he might be in a way to learn more than he had done, he now earnestly desired to learn to read; and having a primer given him, he carried it about with him, till, by the help of such as were willing to instruct him, he attained the end for which he desired it... In this and the following year . . . Hiacoomes begins to be so far from needing to be taught the first principles of the oracles of God that he becomes a teacher of others’ communicating to as many as he could the knowledge he himself had attained.”


Settlers were often fearful of Native Americans - miserable savages they called them. Yet the mission to Martha’s Vineyard had a different tone than most of the others. Yes, we look back from our vantage point, and call much of the treatment of Natives genocide. This Christianizing mission of the Mayhews was the first in New England. Thomas Mayhew Jr. went there in 1642 with other families from Watertown. He labored to create the community that was called the Praying Indians of Martha’s Vineyard. Thomas was devoted, as his father said, this work was followed “when ‘twas bare for him for food and raiment, and when indeed there was nothing in sight any ways but God’s promises.” The Pokanaukets, a branch of the Narragansetts, converted in larger numbers as time passed. First there was an epidemic that brought in some members after their own healing powwow proved ineffective, and then one of them scoffed at the first Christian convert Hiacoomes. When the scoffer was struck by lightning, they saw God’s providence in this judgment. The man said of Hiacoomes, He loved the English, and forsook the powwows. But the white settlers proved the truth of their proselytizing ways when Mayhew reported of the one who laughed at Hiacoomes when he was, “By the hand of God terribly smitten with thunder, and fell down in appearance dead.”

One can only find relative understanding of the other in the context of these times. When the other or the stranger has completely different ways of living, a completely different faith, and all the reasons in the world for being suspicious, we can end up with terrorism on both sides. Yet we can find some measure of listening to and understanding of the other when we consider the case of the Mayhews. It was Thomas Sr.’s great-grandson Experience who published the biographies of 126 Natives who had converted to Christianity. Hiacoomes was the first. Growing up on that island with a Native American community all around, Experience learned the local dialect, and he preached to the Native congregations. He was part of a project to translate a number of religious books into the Native language. In fact his Psalms and the book of John had parallel columns in Native and in English in order to learn both. Many of the pressures to change and subvert the Native communities on the mainland, did not exist on the island. By the early 1700’s the Christian community there had five congregations with all native ministers and elders and musicians, and home worship was directed by the women in a family-centered community, and it was reported on both sides of the Atlantic that they said grace before each meal.. Martha’s Vineyard was relatively free of the cultural imperialism and violence that was so common elsewhere.

In 1659 Thomas Mayhew Sr. our Watertown millwright, assumed leadership of the mission after Thomas Junior died by drowning, when a ship that had set sail from Boston, returning to England was lost at sea. The father felt he had to turn from his entrepreneurial ways at the age of sixty, and take up the ministerial work of his son. Walking twenty miles at a clip to preach, he established Indian congregations on the Vineyard. Right from the start, Native life was different from the mainland, where there was eventually great bloodshed. Here the Natives did not lose their land, their identity, their leadership or their culture. They outnumbered the whites in the 17th century, and maintained some degree of autonomy. Encountering the other is never an easy proposition. There are issues of power and control, maintaining one’s own integrity and cultural differences. We all want to be right. We all want something we call our own. We all want something for our children. The Mayhews fought for survival in difficult economic circumstances. They were parents who wanted to build homes and make a life for their family. When disaster came, they started over, ever resilient, ever willing to believe that the divine spirit can create a new life for us. Even as he tried to create a new life on the island, Thomas Mayhew, Sr. was the recipient of a petition against him for autocratic usurpation of power. Larger forces of political, economic and religious power can try to exert degrees of control over us, and when it becomes unbearable, or we fear losing our reason, our livelihood, or our freedom, we must assert our independence. Here a Mayhew led the way.

3. Freedom and Truth

Reading - from Jonathan Mayhew, “A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission.” 1750

"If we calmly consider the nature of the thing itself, nothing can well be imagined more directly contrary to common sense, than to suppose that millions of people should be subjected to the arbitrary, precarious pleasure of one single man; (who has naturally no superiority over them in point of authority) so that their estates, and every thing that is valuable in life, and even their lives also, shall be absolutely at his disposal, if he happens to be wanton and capricious enough to demand them. What unprejudiced man can think, that God made ALL to be thus subservient to the lawless pleasure and phrenzy of ONE, so that it shall always be a sin to resist him! Nothing but the most plain and express revelation from heaven could make a sober impartial man believe such a monstrous, unaccountable doctrine, and, indeed, the thing itself, appears so shocking - so out of all proportion that it may be questioned, whether all the miracles that ever were wrought, could make it credible, that this doctrine really came from God. At present, there is not the least syllable in scripture which gives any countenance to it. The hereditary, indefensible, divine right of kings, and the doctrine of non-resistance, which is built upon the supposition of such a right, are altogether as fabulous and chimerical, as transubstantiation; or any of the most absurd reveries of ancient or modern visionaries. These notions are fetched neither from divine revelation , nor human reason; and if they are derived from neither of those sources, it is not much matter from whence they come, or whither they go. Only it is a pity that such doctrines should be propagated in society, to raise factions and rebellions, as we see they have, in fact, been both in the last, and in the present, REIGN. . . No civil rulers are to be obeyed when they enjoin things that are inconsistent with the commands of God. . . disobedience to them is a duty, not a crime.”

In 1682 Experience Mayhew was led to the bedside of his great grandfather Thomas, who was deathly ill, but was described as “well contented therewith, being full of Days, and satisfied with Life”. Experience was eight years old at the time, but felt as if he had received a blessing from the old man “ in the Name of the Lord.” His son Jonathan once wrote that God speaks to us daily in all times and experiences of the common life, that we might be excited to realize a reverence for life in all its goodness. This son was born on Martha’s Vineyard, a fifth generation American. There had been the hope of a new start, painful adaptations to a new world - success and failures, births and deaths, dreams of a place to call your own, acres and acres of an enduring family enterprise, almost feudal in nature until in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, its was taken to be part of Massachusetts. Yet the mission continued. Experience, who bore the female name as he was not the expected sex, remained in the Indian mission for 65 years, the fourth generation to do so. He chose the work with Natives over an English church. When he was invited to give the Great and Thursday Lecture in Boston, he said of the Natives, “they are as capable Subjects of good impressions, as the People of any other Nation.” This was 1722

Jonathan was four that year, the youngest of five that his mother named Remember had borne. She was Experience’s second wife. That year another baby was born, but did not live, and soon he was followed by Remember, who died the next afternoon, a cold March day. Experience never remarried, and it was the older sister Reliant, that Jonathan depended upon as a surrogate mother. Experience kept busy writing his biographies of natives, soon to be a colonial bestseller. Death was a regular visitor to the homes of one and all. Yet in the very days of growing up, learning new things, and even having fun in the new days of summer, time passed.

For Jonathan there was hunting on the island, playing football with his native friends, fishing in the fresh water, swimming in the salted surf, and times of occasionally being rebuked in church for profane walking or being irreverent. Some things never change. He entered Harvard at the age of seventeen, and graduated in 1744. He had always shown a great desire for learning . Who knew he would become such a radical, an agitator. Like others though he shot firecrackers in the yard, and sent out freshmen to procure some rum. Soon he would shoot explosives into the world of religion and politics.

A revolution was taking place in religion. Some ministers shouted that the old faith had died, and there needed to be a revival. While Jonathan affirmed a balanced search for truth, using the reason of his own mind in conjunction with the revelation of the Bible, he read that some of the enthusiasts were fanatics who manipulated the masses. While there was strong emotion in him, he turned it toward usefulness in the world. He said his preaching must be used to expressed true sentiments, and not disguise what was true. And truth to him meant resisting both religious and political tyrants. He embraced his life’s calling when he accepted the pulpit at the West Church in Boston.

If you travel down Cambridge Street today, you can still see that West Church, a newer building than the one Mayhew served. He was ordained on the site, but his theological beliefs had become so liberal that only two other ministers came. They boycotted Jonathan’s big day. His evolution had begun on the Vineyard. If God really intended that only a few be saved, then why was their life’s mission to bring Jesus to the Natives? Couldn’t the hearts of all be turned to God, and did they not have the free will to make a choice to turn? All are capable of using their reason to love and reverence God. And as for creeds, they are tyrannical forcing others to mouth such words, as may impede the freedom of conscience of each and all. Freedom was sacred, and nothing more foolish or superstitious than ancient doctrines that clearly are false. Mayhew was a forerunner of our modern Unitarianism. But it soon became more than that, for religious freedom ultimately led to political freedom, at least in his mind. Jonathan was annoyed at the annual Anglican practice of celebrating the anniversary of the death of Charles I at Puritan hands. He was no martyr or saintly hero to Jonathan. Unlimited submission and Non-Resistance to Higher Powers became fighting words to Mayhew. Soon enough he was a leader against the Stamp Act, and was thought of as a prophet of the revolution. It was a Christian duty, he said to obey good rulers, but to rebel against those who are tyrants and oppressors. In old age John Adams said of Mayhew that the true “principles and feelings which produced the Revolution” could be found by investigating his oratory.

The Mayhews are our ancestors in faith; our ancestors in living. We are here as a religious community because they were here. Times and cultures change, tools and energy to do our work, too, but there is also a sameness - we weep at losses, as markets crash, and loved ones become ill; we laugh in celebration as homes are built and babies born to begin our life anew. They were products of their time in believing in the inferiority of other cultures, and in the power of God, but they also rose above their times with openness to new friendships, and openness to the life of the mind. We learn from them as we see them welcome the strangers they had feared. We learn from them by the renewing hopes that all can embrace new freedoms of heart and mind. Our continuity is felt by the reverence with which we hold the institutions we inherit. We seek new ways, and express new hopes, but we do so by building with gratitude upon that which we inherit. In this place today we have recalled a bit of the struggle of one family to construct a way of life - they built, they suffered, they endured, they lived with gratitude, they found hope that tomorrow would herald a new dawn of freedom and truth.



Closing Words - from Orlanda Brugnola

Memory is an incredible gift
but sometimes it seems to be a burden -
it calls us to obligations we didn’t want
it can remind us of beauty we never expected -
it’s so complex -
what should we remember?-
what should we do about the past?-
what should we do about the future? -
There are no set answers-
each time we ask ourselves, we start again-
to challenge our assumptions-
to challenge our hearts-
to become the best we can be-
May we have the courage to look back-
May we see clearly-
May we gain the wisdom to choose well-
May our remembering teach us to be just-
May our remembering teach us to be kind-
May our remembering help us to be whole

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Let us all stand fast in the liberty . . .{that } makes us free; and
not suffer ourselves to be entangled with any yoke of bondage.” - Jonathan Mayhew.

“Living By Imagination” - Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - November 2, 2008

Call to Worship - from Franz Kafka, Diaries

If we knew we were on the right road, having to leave it would mean endless despair. But we are on a road that only leads to a second one and then to a third one and so forth. And the real highway will not be sighted for a long, long time, perhaps never. So we drift in doubt. But also in an unbelievable beautiful diversity. Thus the accomplishment of hopes remains an always unexpected miracle. But in compensation, the miracle remains forever possible.

Reading - from The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Sermon - Living By Imagination” - Mark W. Harris

Would the congregation please speak the appropriate AMEN, after each of these prayers: In the words of 19th century evangelical preacher Lyman Beecher: Lord, grant that we may not despise our rulers; and grant Lord, that they may not act so that we can’t help it. (Amen) And in the words of Congregational minister, Samuel Eaton, Lord, thou hast commanded us to pray for our enemies; we would therefore pray for the President and Vice President of these United States (Amen). Lord, we remember Henry Ward Beecher’s words when President Buchanan departed from office: Thank you Lord for removing rulers imbecile in all but corruption. (Amen), and again Mr. Beecher, when Andrew Johnson left office: Lord, accept our thanks that he that now is the President hath done so little mischief. (Amen) And finally, we pray for all leaders in the words of that good Boston minister, who was forced to pray for King George in 1776: O God, Bless thy servant, King George, and grant unto him wisdom, for thou knowest, Oh Lord, he needs it! (Amen)

Welcome to Election Sunday 2008. I think it is safe to say, that for many of us, this election on Tuesday carries with it a sense of urgency and hope like no other in recent history. We are holding our breath in anticipation. What can I, a minister of a church, say about the forthcoming election though? The relationship between church and state has always been a sensitive one in our country. Roger Williams wanted to separate the two because he feared the corrupt state would besmirch the pure church. Thomas Jefferson wanted to separate the two because he feared the authoritarian, dogmatic church would control the state, and creeping priestcraft or the assertion of religious views has concerned many of us in recent years. Where is the wall of separation, that Jefferson referred to, positioned for us? In the past two weeks, parishioners have questioned a couple of items sent out by the church office. One person invited others to canvass with her for a particular candidate. Was the church inadvertently endorsing a particular candidate by sending out this invitation? I don’t think so, because the invitation to canvass came from one person, and was certainly not organized by the church. Also we would always be happy to air opposing views. As a minister who is called to preach from a free pulpit, I assume I can speak forthrightly on any issue, but if you disagree with my view, for example, on the conduct of a war, abortion rights, or capital punishment, then I would always give you space for a pulpit response. Please know that I would be happy to send out a notice about canvassing for a conservative, as well as a liberal candidate. We cannot assume that everyone believes the same thing politically or theologically.

Yet a church I believe would not be true to its mission of calling the people to a world of peace and justice and equality, if it, and its minister did not speak out on important political issues in our time. It would become an irrelevant social club serving its own needs, and not the larger vision of a world made beautiful and fair and true. In colonial times, ministers were expected to preach sermons in which they brought their best Biblical and theological training to bear in a homily where they said publicly whom they would vote for in the forthcoming election, and parishioners could also speak out their beliefs as well, either in support or in opposition. Today we would consider partisan support for a particular candidate in Sunday worship or by the congregation in a vote of acclamation a violation of the separation of church and state. So I will not tell you whom I am going to vote for, but I do have strong opinions, and I am voting to win. I hope you do the same, no matter who you vote for. It is that important. I don’t have to remind you that these are perilous times - of war and fear, climate change, and economic chaos. You vote because you believe we can change the course of history. You vote because you believe that with imagination we can forge a new world.

What was always true in our tradition is that the minister would remind the people that they had agreed to a covenant between themselves and with God, and the election day sermon was a call to keep the covenant that bound the people together in the unity of the community, but it also reminded them that they were were part of a larger mission and experiment. What was especially telling about the Puritans is that even hundreds of years ago the sermons exhorted them, not to rely on God, or be passive, but that God expected them to look to themselves in obedience to him. They said Moses was a great leader because he had learned how to be a leader through experience and training, and knowledge of people and things, and not because God spoke to him through a bush.

What speaks to us? Not long ago Harold Bloom, who teaches at Yale, had a column in the New York Times called “Out of Panic, Self Reliance.” While Bloom is usually not my favorite commentator, I took note because his focus was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emerson’s response to the financial panic of 1837. Of the 850 banks in the USA then, one half either closed or partly failed. I grew up hearing about the crash of 1929 from my father. His father’s success in business became a dismal failure because of the crash, and my father grew up poverty stricken. He stood in welfare lines to get free shoes. No one gave him a free lunch, and he learned Emerson’s self-reliance by figuring out how to build a successful business based on society’s need for a particular service, and his ability to respond to that need. These kinds of dire family circumstances are depicted in a recent movie “Frozen River” that I saw not long ago in West Newton. The film takes place on the northern border of New York State, and is about a down at the heels mother named Ray, who works part time at the Family Dollar Store. She ends up driving illegal immigrants across the “frozen river” between the US and Canada to raise the funds to avoid financial disaster. Ray’s husband, who has a gambling addiction, has absconded with all their money, and Ray has to figure out how to make payment on the double wide trailer that is her vision of the bountiful life come true, or else she will lose everything. The movie does not sentimentalize the chaos that is her life, but it does remind us how much grit and courage is needed to get by, and her fortitude to endure all kinds of defeats and humiliations is admirable. While I believe individual economic self-reliance is not the key to helping us emerge from financial chaos (an unregulated free market has failed), I was struck when Bloom quoted Emerson’s vision of how much virtue existed in the world to respond to the disasters around us; this inevitable feeling of despair in these times of economic depression that consume us all. Emerson wrote: “Young men have no hope. Adults stand like day laborers, idle on the streets. None calleth us to labor. The old wear no crown of warm life on their gray hairs. The present generation is bankrupt of principles and hope, as of property. I see man is not what man should be. He is the treadle of a wheel. He is a tassel at the apron string of society. He is a money chest. He is the servant of the belly. This is the casual bankruptcy, this is the cruel opposition, that the ideal should serve the actual, that the head should serve the feet. Then first, I am forced to inquire if the ideal might not also be tried. Is it to be taken for granted that it is impracticable?”

Of course Emerson lived in a time when the imagination or the ideal was given a central role in brain activity. Then in the 20th century the imagination and creativity were given a secondary role in philosophical speculations about humans. We came to fill specialized roles we are trained for, and it sometimes seems we serve no larger vision other than personal competition and success. Today we save our most exuberant applause for when a politician says he will not tax us. What if you imagined a society where there were more taxes? If we imagine a world where everyone has proper medical care, good public transportation and public schools that are properly funded, we think it must mean totalitarian socialism, and react with fear and trembling that someone is going to take our freedom away. Emerson followed Kant in believing that imagination was fundamental to the human mind. I would agree. If we live without imagining what is possible in our lives, without imagining what it is to walk in the other person’s shoes, then we become selfish drones, who do live as Emerson says, by our bellies. When J.K. Rowling spoke at Harvard in June, she said “imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation, in its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

It could be that imagination is alive today in the virtual world of computers. Here we cannot only travel everywhere and see and learn many things, we can also experience what it is to be another person. At a recent study group retreat, I was talking to a colleague who is part of the virtual UU congregation that meets in cyberspace. Here she gets to try on different looks and different clothes, and be something totally other then who she normally is. While I did not rush out of the meeting to sign up, it was a reminder in a metaphorical way that we do not have to consumed by all that is plaguing us in life. It says that no matter how I feel about my life, there is a way out of the trials I am going through right now. There is another side. While pretending to be someone else may not be the answer for most of us, it does say that even for five minutes or fifty, we can imagine another way to look, or be or do, if our present life has become intolerable. We remind ourselves with imagination that there is life beyond this financial problem, this relationship, this job. Emerson wrote, “I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born.”

Sometimes we say that the life we wish were ours is a figment of our imagination. That our boss could treat us better than he/she really does, or our partner could share the load more than is true. We are deluding ourselves. While the imagination may bring us pure fantasy, it also brings us another way of seeing our future, when what we have is so uncertain, unhappy or filled with foreboding. Not long ago I had a phone call from a woman who told me she was going to be paid in a couple of days, but right then she was without cash. She went to say that her daughter was very ill at college in Salem, and that she needed some money for gas so she could go take care of her daughter. More often than not, clergy would respond to a story like this by believing that it was a ruse meant to convince us to give out money, probably to support a drug habit. I normally would not give out cash because of my suspicions, but I was meeting with someone, and could not go out to get the woman a gas or shopping card, so when she came, I did indeed give her money. My suspicions were fed by the smell of stale cigarettes. I could have just as well have said no, because there was no imagination working in me that she was anything but a liar looking for money. I did not put myself in her shoes, even though there were my father’s stories in my memory, and knowledge of many who battle economic hardship, like the cinematic woman on Frozen River. Then one Sunday, the week following, there was an envelope in my box at church. She had returned to give back the money, and to reiterate her story that she was true to her word. While she had suffered many defeats, and struggled to get by - marginal jobs, illness suffered through and now were chronic - she wanted to say I am honest. I am a good person. I want to gain your trust. And that one act of hers transformed years of suspicion. Now when someone comes, I might imagine them as a good person who is struggling mightily to make ends meet. I might imagine her as different than my prejudged stereotype. I might imagine myself just getting by. I might see her in me.

Having the defeats of the world transformed by imagining one person to be different than what I would normally perceive her to be was revelatory. In Tillie Olson’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing,” she speaks about being poor; and how she could not afford for her daughter, “the soil of easy growth.” She says how hard it was to give her daughter what she needed to flourish. She calls her “a child of her age; of depression, of war, of fear.” Olson realizes that much of the imagination or creativity in her will not bloom, but that there is still enough left to live by. Finally, she concludes, “Only help her to know - help make it so there is cause for her to know - that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.” In other words, don’t force her to conform to the societal forces that stifle her ability to make her own creative and imaginative choices about life and love, and to find her own talents and passion to live in the world. When J. K. Rowling spoke at Harvard, she recalled the transforming experience of working with Amnesty International when she was young. Once a young man who had endured incredible brutality in Africa heard his mother had been killed, and Rowling tried to provide support. Every day, she said she witnessed examples of the evils humans inflict upon one another, and it gave her literal nightmares. Yet in her job she also saw how human empathy leading to collective action, could save lives. She said, that like no other creatures on this planet, we can imagine what it is like to be in another’s mind, in another’s place, and we can use that understanding as a force for goodness. We know it is possible to transform that life.

It takes imagination to change our thinking. It takes imagination to put ourselves in the shoes of those who suffer such indignities, and do not know the privileged life we have of living with freedom in a democracy. At the end of the summer, the Sunday Globe had an article on the power of daydreams. While I sometimes gaze off into space, and seem totally spaced out to Andrea, this article reaffirmed that I am really taking some space to use my imagination to envision greater things for my life. The article said we must take time in our lives to let our thought processes allow the brain to make new associations and connections. We must go beyond the immediate to respond to our present life, and imagine things that either don’t exist or find new ways to respond to a serious problem in our life. The psychologist, Jonathan Schooler, says, “If your mind didn’t wander then you’d be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now. “ With daydreams we can see “what ifs” about our world, and envision how we might behave in the future. But we can also leave behind the world as it is, and imagine the world as it might be in the future. This election has been characterized as pitting the party of memory versus the party of hope. Like Emerson said about 1837, we can either immerse ourselves in more of the failed past, or we can touch that power within us that can imagine the ideal, a new future of hope where we do not live by fear, or being more powerful than the next, but by understanding the other and working together for a common future of peace and justice.

In our reading today we saw that it takes imagination to think of God in a new way. Even Unitarian Universalists who reject the traditional father God have a difficult time moving on to a new concept of God. God for them can only be that God of their memory, and so we often wrestle with the past, but never really find a path to imagining something new to connect us to a deeper source of universal truth. Even though we reject the old God, we can only focus on that one same way of conceiving God, and so we cannot fashion another notion of divinity. Celie and Shug personify this inner struggle in our reading. How do you get beyond the diversions of life, or the fear of the man, as they say, to a deeper interconnected feeling for all of life. When do we awake to notice the color purple? We live in a time like Emerson’s, where economic chaos reigned, and it would be easy to allow ourselves to be consumed by despair because of what has happened in these last eight years, in these last few months. But we each have a choice. We can live from the history that is failure and fear, or we can live from the imagination that offers deeper community and hope for a brighter tomorrow. “I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born.” There is a wind of imagination in the air telling us to victory we are born, and it is up to each of us go forth, and claim it.


Closing Words - from Marcel Proust, By Way of St. Beuve

Come now! . . . Were everything clear, all would seem to you vain. Your boredom would populate a shadowless universe with an impassive life made up of unleavened souls. But a measure of disquiet is a divine gift. The hope, which, in your eyes, shines on a dark threshold does not have its basis in an overly certain world.

Meditation by Jack Reimer (adapted)

We cannot merely pray to You, to end war, for we must find our own paths to peace within ourselves and with our neighbors.

We cannot merely pray to You,to end starvation, for you have already given us the resources with which to feed the entire world, if we could only use them wisely.

We cannot merely pray to You, to root our prejudice, for you have already given us eyes with which to see the good in all persons, if we would only use them rightly.

We cannot merely pray to You, to end despair, for you have already given us the power to clear away slums and to give hope, if we would only use our power justly.

We cannot merely pray to You, to end disease, for you have already given us great minds with which to search out cures and healings, if we would only use them constructively.

Therefore we pray to You instead, for strength, determination and will power, to do what we can, to do what we must, to do instead of just to pray, to become instead of merely to wish.
For Your sake and for ours, speedily and soon, that our land may be safe, and that all lives may be blessed. Amen.