Those Silly Love Songs

The summer of 1976. It was half a century ago – can you believe it? – but in some ways, it feels like only yesterday. The Montreal Olympics were underway, although 29 African countries boycotted that year’s games in protest because New Zealand’s rugby team had toured South Africa, which was still governed by the oppressive apartheid regime – and would be for another 18 years. Bruce Jenner won the gold medal in the men’s decathalon – and tabloid readers have been paying for it ever since. The Concorde had begun transatlantic flights at supersonic speed and, six years after landing on the moon, two NASA landers successfully touched down on Mars

The United States was celebrating its bicentennial – a much better celebration than this year’s sad spectacle – and Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were the major party nominees in the presidential election that year. Along the way, while competing for the Republican nomination, Ronald Reagan announced that a liberal senator, Richard Schweiker, would have been his vice-presidential pick if he had claimed the nomination, a reminder that there was a quaint time when neither major party was captive to ideologues. Iceland and Britain had only recently reached a truce ending the Third Cod War over the extent of Iceland’s territorial limits and Sudan recorded the world’s first known Ebola outbreak and Legionaire’s disease made its first appearance, too. Here in Canada, the CN Tower opened in Toronto. The Eurovision Song Contest was won by the Brotherhood of Man, who had already achieved fame for the serious song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” (As I recall, my brother moved to the West Coast that year, and my sister played that song over and over and over again.) The Apple Computer Company was founded in March by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, while the Price Club, predecessor to Costco, launched operations – not in Seattle, but California – although few people really noticed either company. It was quite a year – and these are only the highlights.

And me? I was in love. A gangly, goofy sixteen-year-old with long, curly hair, I was dating an older women who would eventually become my wife, but who knew at the time? Cindy and I had been an item since March, when her twin sister had orchestrated a date for us, since I had been given not one, but two tickets to a Valdy concert on my birthday. My future sister-in-law didn’t want me to have to go alone, or worse yet, take someone she didn’t like. But Summer romances have a way of falling with the leaves of autumn, so we couldn’t have known – couldn’t even have imagined – that we would still be together all these years later. And in what may have been an omen for young lovers, Elton John and Kiki Dee released their duet, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” She didn’t, although she once came close before I reformed myself.

If we all had been sitting around together half a century ago, not here at church but lounging on the deck or sitting around a campfire in the summer of that year, listening to the radio, chances are we would have heard the band Wings with Paul and Linda McCartney singing “Silly Love Songs.” The song was released just after Cindy and I began dating, and it reached the top of the charts by summer, become Billboard’s number one song for the year. You remember it, don’t you? – If you were there?

        “You'd think that people would've had enough of silly love songs
        But I look around me and I see it isn't so
        Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs
        And what's wrong with that?
        I’d like to know.
        ’Cause here I go – again.”

McCartney later admitted that the song was a reaction to critics’ (and even John Lennon’s) dismissal of him as the creator of soppy, sentimental love songs. “I thought, well, I know what they mean, but, people have been doing love songs forever,” he said. “I like ’em, other people like ’em, and there’s a lot of people I love – I'm lucky enough to have that in my life. So the idea was that ‘you’ may call them silly, but what's wrong with that?” McCartney had the last laugh, though – “Silly Love Songs” was his 27th number one hit. As the song itself proclaims, “Love isn’t silly at all.”

Most people’s musical tastes evolve over the course of a lifetime, but love is a common theme in most, if not all genres of music. Our earliest musical memories are populated with playful, childhood melodies – lyrical fairy tales, counting songs, and songs meant to teach us. But love is there. After all, “Skinnamarink a dink a dink, / Skinnamarink a doo, / I love you.” As we grow towards maturity, whether or not we actually make it, our tastes become more refined and discriminating – or not! – and we embrace the music that speaks to our personal experiences. As teenagers, we may bop along to popular music, expressing our joy, or find ourselves drawn to punk, expressing our contempt for the status quo. As the punk band Chumbawamba sings in their hit, Tubthumbing:

        “Truth is, I thought it mattered,
        I thought that music mattered.
        But does it? Bollocks –
        Not compared to how people matter.”

If you were raised in the church – well, most churches, not necessarily this one – you will be familiar with the varied hymns of faith, hope, and love – yes, love – remembering that the apostle Paul noted that “the greatest of these is love,” and that the Bible itself proclaims that “God is love.” There’s nothing silly about either assertion. Indeed, they are among the most profound assertions of the Christian tradition, which has lost its way these days, as increasing numbers of so-called Christian nationalists proclaim a false gospel of hatred and indifference, prosperity and populism, when love was always meant to be the thing about the teachings of Jesus.

Country music is legendary for its love songs, of course, and it’s hard to name a country artist whose repertoire doesn’t lean heavily on songs of love and betrayal, romance and relationships. Some people may mock these songs, but countless more sing along, whether their hearts are bursting or broken. And they reveal more about everyday life than the volumes of supposedly more serious compositions.

My own tastes in music are eclectic – and they always have been. My strongest preference is towards folk music, even though it can be difficult to define exactly what qualifies as folk music, although I’m inclined to define it as music that tells a story about the common people. And I was raised on protest songs that have had a much stronger influence on my politics and ethics than I sometimes realize. I learned to sing my values before I was clear about what they even were – and when I feel the twinge of conscience, there’s often a folksong behind it.

I also love classical music – the great symphonies and sonatas – and choral music, both sacred and secular. These are genres that would typically be described as serious music, although there can be traces of silliness at times, especially when a choir is feeling playful. Most of the things I recall from the summer of 1976 lend themselves to serious tunes, although some might be better captured in folk, and the occasional love song. But love songs can be silly or serious.

When my mother died, I selected John Denver’s song, Perhaps Love, as one of the musical pieces for her memorial service, which was performed by a duet of my younger daughter’s classmates which included the grandson of a man whose butcher shop Mom had patronized since the 1940s, which added even more meaning to the selection. As the name declares, it is a love song – not a silly love song, perhaps, but a love song nonetheless.

        “Perhaps love is like a resting place, a shelter from the storm.
        It exists to give you comfort, it is there to keep you warm,
        And in those times of trouble when you are most alone,
        The memory of love will bring you home.”

And, as it happens, a love song is better than a “love sermon.” (I’m aware of only one of the latter.) I suppose that’s probably true about everything concerning love – love stories, love poems, love letters – they all trump love sermons. But that didn’t stop me from preaching a love sermon, “Faithfully Ever After,” when Cindy’s and my 18th anniversary fell on the first Sunday in June many years ago. I’ve always feared that Cindy was more embarrassed than impressed, so I’ve never dared to do it again, but that’s the way it goes.

I was inspired by a song by Jim Crocé:

        “Well, I know it's kinda late,
        I hope I didn't wake you.
        But what I gotta say can't wait.
        I know you'd understand.
        Every time I tried to tell you,
        The words just came out wrong:
        So I'll have to say I love you in a song.

From medieval tales of chivalry to the latest romantic film, love (and its heartfelt songs) still makes the world go round. And the love song is arguably the most enduring music of all.

At the end of the musical drama Adam Rush, the story of an 11-year-old who was separated from his parents at birth, which leaves a hole in the heart of all three, and who proves to be a musical prodigy, reflects on how music enriched the lives of each of them, eventually reuniting them in a fantastic but moving scene:

“I believe in music the way that some people believe in fairy tales,” he says. “I like to imagine that what I hear came from my mother and father. Maybe the notes I hear are the same ones they heard the night they met. Maybe that's how they found each other. Maybe that’s how they’ll find me. I believe that once upon a time, long ago, they heard the music and followed it.”

As Peggy Noonan observes: “We’re locked in a funny arc ... When you are goony and fourteen years old you think the most important thing in life is love. Then you mature, become more sober and thoughtful … And then you get old and realize … the most important thing in life is love.” That truth is reflected in the songs we sing, for I believe that we sang like the birds before we learned to speak, that language was born in our hearts before it entered it minds, and that love songs – silly or otherwise – still represents the most meaningful music to human beings. We were born to love. We were born to sing. And our songs echo the gladness of our days.

A sermon delivered at the Gimli Unitarian Church.

Work Cited

Peggy Noonan, Simply Speaking (1998).

The Limits of War

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good,” declared Jimmy Carter when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. “We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children,” he lamented. 

I am not quite a pacifist, but I am close to being one. I can imagine circumstances where it would be justified to take up arms, but I cannot think of a single war during my lifetime that can be clearly demonstrated to have been worth the terrible cost. I readily concede that, just as individuals may need to defend themselves from bullies, nations may need to defend themselves from aggressors, but a righteous defence doesn’t justify the war itself, even if it’s a legitimate reaction to aggression. Every war in human history has had at least one side – and often both – that cannot claim to have been justified in their actions. And while it seems true to say that passive inaction in the face of grave evils and injustices may be an even worse injustice than war, that doesn’t obviate the fact that war is always evil.

So it seems to me that we should strive to be a peacemakers, and work quietly for peace in whatever ways are available to us, since pacifism seems to be a luxury that the world allows only to those who live far from the world’s conflict zones. I hadn't thought much about this until I was studying at Menno Simons College and one of my professors shocked his class, which consisted primarily of Mennonites and me, by declaring that he was not a pacifist. Growing up on the Ukrainian steppes as World War II raged back and forth across the Mennonite settlements, there were times when pure pacifism just wasn't an option. But he had committed himself to being a peacemaker. And so he was. I admired his honesty about the moral ambiguity of warfare, coming as he did from one of the historic peace churches. And I appreciated that he was willing to concede that he didn't always live up to their professed doctrine.

Pacifism is an ideal that is easier to practice in remote places that others don’t covet, although we live in a time when even Greenland isn’t remote enough to be beyond the grasp of those who wish to take it – and by force, if necessary.

Living in Canada, we have become accustomed to thinking that, whenever our own nation has found itself drawn into war, we’ve at least been on the side of the good guys. And while our neighbours to the south may have sometimes gotten it wrong, we’ve generally found a way to see why they might feel justified in their foreign misadventures, even if we were doubtful about their merits. But that has changed in recent decades – and it changed dramatically during the past year or two. In hindsight, it is easy to see that America and its allies, including Canada, were misled into the Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan, even though the justifications may have seemed reasonable to most people at the time.

During the past couple of years, though, we have seen Western powers stand mostly silent in the face of Israel’s military excesses in Gaza, we have seen U.S. forces storm the capital of Venezuela to kidnap its president, who is admittedly a thoroughly unlikable fellow, bomb boats in the Gulf of Mexico for alleged (but undocumented and doubtful) criminal activities, and most recently, attack Iran without provocation. The United States has crossed the line from somewhat overzealous defender to an outright aggressor, seeking to impose the will of its leaders (if not necessarily its citizens) onto other countries through the raw exercise of military power. The masks are off. The alliances are tattered and hanging in threads. The pretexts of decency are gone. The belligerence is on full display for all to see.

And we have witnessed the spectacle of Vice President JD Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson, both professed Christians, invoking just war theory in support of the Trump administration’s reckless actions without having any real clue about what it means. But why should they? As part of the perverse political movement known as Christian nationalism, they seem equally clueless about the teachings of Jesus. They use their faith to try to justify their actions after the fact, as opposed to drawing on the teachings and traditions of their faith to inform their actions beforehand. It’s all window dressing, not conviction.

Meanwhile, America’s self-styled secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, describes existing rules of engagement as “stupid,” revealing the naked aggression behind that window dressing. With their roots in just war theory, rules of engagement seek to define the standards by the military conducts war, and Hegseth seems them as “stupid” because they set limits to what the military can do in combat as well as expectations for war’s aftermath – and such limits are inconvenient to brutal men like him. From the president on down, the U.S. administration teeters on the brink of war crimes waiting to happen.

Their exploitation of doctrine as a convenient excuse did draw some momentary media attention to just war theory, an ancient religious principle honoured more often in the breach than in its observance.  Simply put, just war theory seeks to articulate the conditions under which war may justly be waged – that is, the conditions under which war may be justified. Now, in absolute sense, the notion of a just war is an illusion.  There is no such thing as a just war. There may be a more just side in a war, but war itself is never just. It is always an evil.

Many of us who can’t quite bring ourselves to completely embrace pacifism have a complicated relationship with war because we have loved someone who has served in the military with honour and devotion – sometimes many such loved ones – and in some cases, they may have paid the ultimate sacrifice. And if we haven’t enjoyed a personal connection with a soldier, we may have admired a political leader or historical figure who distinguished themselves in wartime. We naturally admire their service and their dedication, and this may lead us to be circumspect about what we say, even if we may detest the fact of war itself. It’s complicated. Indeed, it’s more complicated than simple labels allow.

Looking back in history, it’s possible to find discussions of just war, or righteous war, in the philosophies of China and India, but our modern ideas of just war, which inform international humanitarian law, can be traced back primarily to the teachings of the saints Ambrose, Augustine, and Thomas Acquinas, who were, in turn, influenced by the Greek and Roman philosophers before them, especially Aristotle. That’s pretty august company for to argue with this morning, so I will restrain myself. It was Aristotle who argued that war must always be a last resort, which seems sound to me, and that its sole legitimate purpose was defensive, aimed only at restoring peace. Later Roman thinking expanded the understanding of defence to include retaliation for pillaging or the violation of treaties.

Building on the philosophers, Ambrose limited war to defence and the punishment of wrongdoing, while maintaining that enemies should always be treated with mercy. Augustine went further by articulating four conditions that must be met for a war to be considered just. Firstly, there must be a just cause, which includes defence, protection of others, or redress of serious wrongdoing. Secondly, those waging war must have legitimate authority – that is to say, only the civil authority may wage war, not private individuals or groups. Thirdly, war must be pursued with the right intention – that is, guided by goodness and proportionality, not revenge, anger, or greed. (Imagine sitting down leaders at the table or pushing them into the corner and saying, ‘You know what? If you’re going to go to war, that’s fine, ut do it after you've gotten over your anger.’ I wonder how many wars would begin in such a circumstance?) Finally, war must be a last resort, and its ultimate goal must be the restoration of peace. This is the paradox of just war theory. Thomas Aquinas refined Augustine’s conditions further, presenting them more systematically, while emphasizing the need for restraint in the use of violence.

The Renaissance scholar and humanist Erasmus considered just war theory to be a smokescreen, believing that the princes of his era invoked it to try to justify their oppression of others while extracting resources from their own subjects. And that’s precisely how it’s being used today. Erasmus believed that war is inherently wrong, that it is forbidden by Christian teachings, and that because “just cause” is inevitably claimed by both sides in an armed conflict, the theory is functionally worthless.

“In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents, which is in itself a violation of the beliefs of all religions,” according to Jimmy Carter. “Once we characterize our adversaries as beyond the scope of God’s mercy and grace, their lives lose all value. We deny personal responsibility when we plant land mines and, days or years later, a stranger to us – often a child – is crippled or killed. From a great distance, we launch bombs or missiles with almost total impunity and never want to know the number or identity of the victims.”  This is modern warfare, a kind of coward’s game.

The cynical and calculated decision to attack Iran sought to take advantage of such great distance, both geographically and philosophically. We’ve spent decades dehumanizing the Iranian People. It’s easy to loathe the heavy-handed, theocratic regime that has dominated Iran for most of our lifetimes, and it’s not hard to imagine that Donald Trump, a supreme narcissist, didn’t compare that regime’s unpopularity with his own.

Credible reports in the media suggest that Benjamin Netanyahu tried to bait previous presidents into joining him in a war against Iran, but it took someone as vain, as ignorant, and as foolhardy as the current president to do so. It was going to be two weeks long. Remember that? Eight weeks ago. Or is it nine? Two weeks long because everything in Donald Trump's life is two weeks from now – the current episode of a reality TV show and the next episode. That is his attention span. Yet here we are.

The United States currently has a president whose sole familiarity with war – and life in general – comes from the movies, and he is currently pursuing his war with Iran, which seems clearly illegal under both international law and the laws of the U.S., as though it were some idiotic reality TV show. But there’s nothing that’s realistic about reality television, although the consequences for the people at the other end of the bombs is very real. The president and his cronies deal in dehumanization of others on a daily basis, and they value life so little that they seem to think it’s worth going to war not for a just cause, but to boost popularity ratings. It hasn’t worked.

It’s easy enough to get just war theory wrong – or allow it to separate us from our humanity. A couple of years ago, I heard an eminent theologian in this city, whom I like and admire, profess an understanding on Augustine’s position that struck me as pure sophistry. While dancing around the question of whether or not what was then happening in Gaza could be called a genocide, a bit of needle-threading that was hard to square with the sheer carnage, he suggested that a proportionate response was defined not by its proportionality to the original offence, but by its relationship to the military goals of the side that imagines itself to be fighting for the just position. While that may appear to fit Augustine’s theory on the surface, I’m confident that the saint himself would protest, if he were around to do so, since the military goals cannot exceed the other limits he articulated. The extermination of the enemy is not a legitimate goal, for if it were, it would mean there’s literally no limit to war. And just was theory says there is.

Unitarian Universalism is not one of the historic peace churches, like the Quakers or Mennonites, but just war theory likely isn’t limiting enough for us today. Just as during the First World War, when there was serious dissent within our movement about the advisability and the ethics of participating in that war, there is among us today division and dissent about war in general. But for the most part, if you look at our Unitarian Universalist history, we have tracked pretty close to a very narrow reading of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas' notions about just war. We've almost followed them to the letter. We can see it, war after war, in Unitarians’ and Universalists’ responses to armed conflict. There were really only two that Unitarians and Universalists seemed to embrace wholeheartedly: the Civil War and the Second World War were the two that found a large measure of support in our tradition. Well, I suppose three – they mostly supported the Revolutionary War. Every other war has been, to some degree or another, beyond the pale.

Umberto Eco said that, “War cannot be justified, because – in terms of the rights of the species – it is worse than a crime. It is a waste.”  That’s not a rule, it’s not a limit – it just strikes me as common sense. Warfare is the height of folly, yet we cannot point to any time in history when war wasn’t raging somewhere on earth. So it is evidently a fact of life. We would put an end to it altogether, if we could.

Eleanor Roosevelt advised us that, “It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.” And so that is the work we find ourselves engaged in, at this moment: seeking to create a world at peace, even while the world is at war; seeking to impose limits upon those who believe that war can be justified, to draw people back from their worst instincts and encourage them to follow their best. It isn’t enough to talk about peace, as we have been doing this morning, even while talking about war. We must work at it. And so that is the work we find ourselves engaged in at this moment: seeking to create a world at peace, even while the world is at war; seeking to impose limits upon those who believe that war can be justified, to draw people back from their worst instincts and encourage them to follow their best. It isn't enough to talk about peace, as we have been doing this morning, even while talking about war. We must work at it.

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.

Works Cited

Jimmy Carter, The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (Simon & Schuster, 2002).

Umberto Eco, “Reflections on War” in Five Moral Pieces, trans. Alastair McEwen (Harvest Books, 2002).

Eleanor Roosevelt, Voice of America (November 11, 1951).

An Ode to the Open Air

If we can learn anything from monarchies and autocracies, not to mention the worship of corporate executives, it is that many people – perhaps most people – are comforted by the thought that someone (generally someone else) is in control of things. That means the rest of us can relax somewhat, since someone else can be counted on to keep things on track, or make corrections when they leave the tracks. The world is a big, complicated place, and since most people can’t even balance their chequebooks anymore – assuming they still have chequebooks, those artifacts from the past – it’s nice to know that somebody else is in charge.

This is why gods are so comforting – whether singular or plural – since, in addition to helping us explain why things are the way they are, and helping us make choices through the various scriptures that are purported to reflect their will, not to mention the prospect of punishing those we don’t like, deities reassure us that things happen for a reason but everything will be all right in the end. They offer ultimate security and certain benchmarks in an often-uncertain world.

“God is our refuge and strength,” proclaims Psalm 46, “a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.” There is a sense of comfort in these words. Or later, in Psalm 107: “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad because they had quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven.” It is interesting how often the psalms invoke nature.

These may be comforting thoughts in the springtime, when the river reaches flood stage, or in the summer, when torrential storms bring tornadoes, or during the forest fires of autumn, or in the midst of the fierce blizzards of winter. Many look naturally to the heavens in the face of death, seek divine inspiration in the depths of despair, or welcome an unseen hand when the burdens of everyday life overwhelm them. Who doesn’t want a friend in life’s difficult moments? Even an invisible friend?

But what if life’s trials and tribulations simply flow from the same natural laws that bring us our blessings and bounty? What if the natural worlds in which “we live and move and have our being” is all that there is – the sum total of existence? Well, for some, that is enough. 

“I have opened my mind to the open air of the universe, to things as they are,” affirmed naturalist John Burroughs more than a century ago. “Our life depends from moment to moment upon the air we breathe, yet its winds and tempests may destroy us; it depends from day to day upon the water we drink, yet its floods may sweep us away. We walk, climb, work, and move mountains using gravity and yet gravity may break every bone in our bodies.  We spread our sails to the winds and they become our faithful servitors, yet the winds may drive us into the jaws of the breakers.  How our lives are bound up and identified with the merciless forces that surround us!” 

The faith of a naturalist accepts the world as it is, grateful for how nature nourishes us – celebrating the improbable gift of life itself – without the need for supernatural explanations or justifications, recognizing that nature’s blessings and blows, possibilities and perils, are woven together in the interconnected web of existence. That’s not to say that religious naturalists accept society as it is, for society is the result of human action, both individual and collective, and it is well within our power to change it for the better. We may even feel called to do so.

“In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing,” observed Carl Sagan. “But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed.”

When the Unitarian Universalist Association adopted our beloved Seven Principles in 1985, it was no accident that they concluded with “respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part,” which arguably marked a landmark in how we speak about the metaphysical – language that could be accepted by both the theists and atheists among us. (Well, in one sense it was something of an accident, since the Seventh Principle, as it came to be known, was almost an afterthought – not only the last one to appear, but also the last one to be proposed after those crafting the statement had more or less settled on six.) Beginning with an affirmation of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” and concluding with the “web of existence,” which is not so much a metaphor as a vivid description of how we see the universe, the principles were arranged from the most particular to the most universal. The Seventh Principle reflected the shift of Unitarian and Universalist thinking over the course of two centuries from the theological to the cosmological, from a faith devoted to the worship of God to one that acknowledged Nature itself as the source of our existence. It reflected a new consensus in Unitarian Universalism. What we call the interconnected web of existence marks the zenith of religious naturalism among us. In the midst an “impersonal universe,” the interdependent web displaced what Burroughs called “our petty anthropomorphic views of things.” 

Religious naturalism rebels against a worldview that sets both God and humankind apart from Nature, instead affirming a monistic view of the oneness of creation. Some might embrace Spinoza’s God, which understood divinity and nature as one, but that’s more a semantic assertion than a theological one, while others would affirm that Nature alone is enough. Some use the poetry of theological language when talking about nature, while others content themselves with using scientific language.

“Amid the decay of creeds, love of nature has high religious value,” declared John Burroughs. “This has saved many persons in this world …  It has made them contented and at home wherever they are in nature – in the house not made with hands. This house is their church, the rocks and the hills are the altars, the creed is written in the leaves of the trees, in the flowers of the field and in the sands of the shore. A new creed every day, new preachers and holy days all the week through. Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth. There are no heretics in Nature’s church; all are believers, all are communicants. The beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time; you do not have to seek it far off in myths and legends, in catacombs, garbled texts, miracles of dead saints or wine-bibbing friars. It is of today, now and here; it is everywhere.” 

Burroughs’ temple was in the great outdoors, where the towering trees offer as majestic a setting as any great cathedral, where all that is essential is expressed in the rocks and hills, streams and flowers. Nature has its own stories to tell and its own truths to reveal. “Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious court?,” asked the duke when he and his men arrived at the forest of Arden Shakespeare’s As You Like It. “And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” For the religious naturalist, Nature offers as much mystery and meaning, beauty and inspiration, as any sacred text or religious creed.

“We separate ourselves from Nature and flatter ourselves that we belong to another and higher order; that we alone are of divine origin, and not involved in the fate of the rest of Creation,” observed Burroughs, while noting that we are composed of the same minerals, or elements, that constitute the physical universe, deriving our lives from the same “cosmic dust and solar radiations” that make up every other species of life on Earth. “Why should we put on superior airs when no one atom of matter will turn aside for us, not one law of physics cease to operate to save us from destruction?” he asked. 

On balance, Nature has been favourable towards us as a species, one might even say kind – as favourable and as kind as any beneficent deity can be said to have been. Some may invoke deities and demons to explain why things sometimes go awry, in order to explain life’s disappointments and disasters in the face of our experience that life is generally good to us. Even most of our bad days are pretty good, once we get over our complainte du jour. Most human beings seem to prefer to believe that ill fortune is a punishment rather than concede that our lives are filled with random events over which even the gods have no control, that an element of chance defines of our existence when it comes to our individual lives, even as we see the magnificent order of Nature all around us.

We need to believe that our lives have a purpose external to ourselves, rather than accept the terrible responsibility to shape the meaning of our own lives, when we can scarcely explain why we hold the values and beliefs that we do, the preferences and tastes, the urges and instinct. So we separate ourselves from Nature, rather than embracing our place within it, and we create mythologies and theologies to explain why we fancy ourselves to be something more than the intelligent dust of the universe. We look for a plan where there is only natural law; we look for a creator rather than acknowledge that the universe is self-creating and self-perpetuating. There is a comfort in anthropomorphizing Nature since doing so tames the natural world, explaining its apparent affections and tempers, domesticating it in human terms, making it more relatable and seemingly more controllable. Many find comfort in a deity with a human face, who has created us in their image, as preferable to an impersonal collection of forces and laws, and I wouldn’t deny them this comfort. But for me, Nature is enough – the Earth is my everlasting home – and I am content to rest in its bosom. An infinite and eternal universe is as satisfying to me as an infinite and eternal deity – as Carl Sagan noted, its saves me a step – an in theology, as in life, my capacity for laziness knows no bounds. Yes, let me rest in Nature’s bosom.

“But we are here, the world is beautiful, life is worth living,” Burroughs proclaimed. The world is beautiful. Life is worth the living. “Nature serves us when we know how to use her; when we plant and sow wisely. More things have been for us than have been against us; more winds have blown our barks into safe harbors than have dashed us upon the rocks. There are more refreshing showers than devastating tornadoes; more sunshine than forked lightening; more fertile land upon upon the earth than parched deserts; a broader belt of genial climates than of frigid zones. … Nature as it is; the chances of life have been in our favor; the stream makes its own channel; the waters find their way to the sea; they do not stagnate on the way.” 

So, whether you still draw your faith from ancient scriptures, and well-worn and time-tested traditions, or whether you seek “sermons in stones, words in the babbling brooks” – either way, may you, from time to time, take your faith out into the open air, to test it against the refreshing breezes of the natural world, and see if the winds might not bring you something that refreshes you, that rejuvenates you, that reminds you our lives are worth the living.

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.

Works Cited

John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe: Essays in Naturalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920; repr. Moore Haven, Florida: Rainbow Books, 1987).

Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (New York: Random House, 1979).

Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980).

Rise Again!

“My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” (Song of Solomon 2:10-12)

This passage from the Song of Solomon speaks to us of rebirth and resurrection as surely as any passage from the Gospels that is likely to be read this morning in churches around the world. It is no accident, I think, that the Christian story of resurrection is set in the springtime, when the whole world conspires to burst forth in the renewal of life. It is, however, an accident of geography, I suppose, since this linkage of springtime and resurrection only works in the northern hemisphere. And it works best in those latitudes and years where the first buds and blossoms emerge right around the time of Easter itself, which is a variable celebration, occurring anywhere from March 22nd to April 25th, depending on the timing of the paschal full moon. (The range for Passover is nearly as long at 30 days.) This is what happens when theologians and astronomers hang out together and compromise: it’s scheduling chaos, or at least confusion. While the spring equinox has only varied by four days since the implementation of the Gregorian calendar, Easter can fall on any day over a five-week span of time, which is more or less one-third of a season, if you’re under the illusion that the seasons are of equal length this far north. So the warmth this day brings generally depends upon how late it falls.

Still, I can feel springtime in the air, and I sense that nature is rising again from its winter rest, although the Earth is never quite dormant – not even in winter. But the snow is melting, the air is warming, sap is surely beginning to rise in the trees, the birds are returning from their winter nesting grounds, and the first crocuses will soon lift their heads above the ground. The winter is not quite past, but it’s losing its grip on this part of the Earth and the weather seems increasingly fair.

“I will wax romantic about spring and its splendours in a moment,” wrote Parker Palmer, “but first there is a hard truth to be told: before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.”

Whatever else it may mean to is, springtime is the season of resurrection in both the popular imagination and the history of our religious culture, whether or not you believe the biblical account of the death and reputed resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Like springtime itself, the final days of Jesus were something of a “muddy mess” before they were a triumph. He sank as low as it was possible to sink before achieving victory, whether we consider the story history or folklore, literal fact or literary device. The power of familiar stories to inspire and motivate, to stir our hearts and minds, is not dependent on their historicity. Sometimes we abandon ourselves to imagination because our aspirations transcend everyday experience, whether at the cinema or in the church.

Christ is risen! say our dear neighbours, and so, too, our Universalist and Unitarian forbears. Earth is rising again! say most of us today. And we are rising, too. When we speak of resurrection, today, we do so as a dream, a possibility, an aspiration.

“To be [resurrected] in the noblest sense is to undergo that transformation of interests and loyalties by which one can live not only for the highest fulfillments of [their] own time, but for the highest fulfillments of all time,” wrote Henry Nelson Wieman and Regina Wescott Wieman in their landmark work, Normative Psychology of Religion. “It is that reorganization of the personality which enables one to live for those unexplored possibilities which transcend all time, but are nevertheless, real possibilities of existence …” They are real possibilities because we can approximate them, to greater or lesser degrees, as individuals and even as whole societies. In past centuries, this unrealized possibility was called the kingdom of God; in the twentieth century, advocates of the Social Gospel saw this realm of possibility as a redemption to be achieved in this world through human effort, some calling it the Cooperative Commonwealth while others named it the Good Society.

“Jesus stands out in human history preeminently as living for a realm of value called the kingdom of God,” declared the Wiemans. “It was highly impractical. His highest loyalty was given to values which cannot be actualized in any one particular form of existence or any one epoch of history, …  Nevertheless, the kingdom of love for which he lived was and is a possibility of existence in the sense that it can be approximated to some indefinite degree.”

Even though it may be quite impossible for us to accept the physical resurrection of Jesus as a fact of history, we may yet embrace the Easter myth as it has come down to us – a curious mix of pagan rites and Jewish festivals, Christian legends and folk traditions – as a reminder of the everyday resurrections we experience: the constant rebirth of the world and its creatures, the cycles of life which assure us of the unending possibilities for beginning anew, our daily rising above despair and defeat and, yes, even death.

There are countless when we may burst forth with a new sense of being alive following a period of difficulty, even despair. And while we commonly think of Ebenezer Scrooge as a character who belongs to Christmas, did his transformation at the end of A Christmas Carol not bear the marks of a resurrection? His encounters with spirits through a frightening dreamscape led him to become a new person, a restored soul, a man who transcended what he had become to emerge as someone else, someone better.

Most of us live through challenges and changes, difficulties and despair, disappointment and defeat, many times through the course of our lives – and more often than not, we emerge clearer, wiser, stronger than before. Sometimes the change in us is so dramatic, that we emerge on the other side feeling almost as if we had become a different person that the one whom we had been. Or perhaps we simply come to know how blessed we are for the experience, even if we wouldn’t have chosen it, and wouldn’t want to live through it again. What is true for individuals can be true for whole societies.

There is nothing quite like the experience of rising again after some great difficulty or disappointment. We have faced a trial, we have been tested, we have endured, and then we rise again. When the muck can no longer suck our boots off, or when we have developed the strength to resist it, we rise again and move forward.

In a documentary about the late Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers, One Warm Line, Robert Cusick, told the story of the sinking of the S.S. Marine Electric, a cargo ship that went down off the coast of Virginia in February of 1983. Cusick was the chief mate aboard the 605-foot vessel and one of only three out of 34 crew members to survive the disaster. Passing through a fierce storm, the crew noticed the vessel going down by the head and radioed for assistance. After a couple hours, the ship to broke up and rolled over. Hitting the four-degree water, Cusick swam had and fast to avoid the ship’s vortex, eventually reaching a swamped lifeboat. But even in the boat, he was far from safe. “As the night wore on, and the seas kept smashing down on top of me, and I finally got the feeling that I just couldn’t make it anymore. And I was just about ready to give up when all of a sudden the words came into my mind, ‘Rise again, rise again.” … He sang it and shouted it in between the waves that crashed over the lifeboat, this song by Stan Rogers that he had learned only the year before.

Rise again, rise again—

Though your heart it be broken
And life about to end;
No matter what you've lost,

Be it a home, a love, a friend:
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again. (Stan Rogers)

Bob Cusick later reflected, “I firmly believe that, if it wasn’t for that happening to me, I just was in a position where I couldn’t have come through. And that song made the difference in me living through that night. There isn’t any question in my mind whatsoever about it.”

Another Maritimes songwriter, Leon Dubinsky, captured the essence of the human triumph over adversity when he composed this morning’s anthem, “Rise Again,” for the Cape Breton Rise and Follies some four decades ago. Seeking “to inspire resilience and solidarity” during a period of economic upheaval that was faced by the people of Cape Breton Island. Dubinsky sought to remind folks, in his own words, of “the cycles of immigration, the economic insecurity of living in Cape Breton, the power of the ocean, the meaning of children, and the strength of home given to us by our families, our friends, and our music.” The song took on a life of its own beyond the Follies – and far beyond Nova Scotia. It became part of the repertoire of Anne Murray and Rita MacNeil, the Rankin Family and Men of the Deeps, and has circled the globe in its appeal to a remarkably diverse group of people.

If “The Mary Ellen Carter is a sailors’ song, then “Rise Again” drops us into the midst of nature and the cycle of the seasons, finding meaning in our children and companions, even in the face of stormy skies and the unrelenting forces of creation.

As sure as the sunrise,

As sure as the sea,

As sure as the wind in the trees. (Leon Dubinsky)

And this brings us back to springtime, the season of song and renewal, resurgence and resurrection, a reminder the life eternally begins anew and our lives are but a single generation within the sweep of time, all the more precious because we are each unique and unrepeatable.

“Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me,” wrote Parker Palmer. “The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again. The crocuses and snowdrops do not bloom for long. But their mere appearance, however brief, is always a harbinger of hope, and from those small beginnings, hope grows at a geometric rate. The days get longer, the winds get warmer, and the world grows green again.”

For us, the resurrection within is an everyday experience: as common as mud and as refreshing as a spring stream. And beyond our individual experiences of renewal, which can come to us at any time, we are best reminded of the resurgence and renewal of life each year in the springtime, when the green Earth returns following the winter and the great outdoors beckons us to leave our burroughs and our homes to venture forth into the world, embracing all that life has to offer. We rise again – day in, day out – in the renewal of our lives, and of life itself.

We rise again in the faces of our children;
We rise again in the voices of our song;
We rise again in the waves out on the ocean,
And then we rise again. (Leon Dubinsky)

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.

Works Cited

Leon Dubinsky, "Rise Again" (1985).

Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 2000).

Stan Rogers, "The Mary Ellen Carter" (1979).

Song of Solomon 2:10-12.

Henry Nelson Wieman and Regina Wescott Wieman, Normative Psychology of Religion (New York: Crowell, 1935).

Wise and Otherwise

In the view of the Roman philosopher Seneca, the great end in life is the achievement of wisdom. As anyone who has ever been fooled, or simply foolish, knows, this is more difficult to achieve than we may imagine. Who hasn’t been impulsive, making a hasty choice prematurely – such as a marriage, or a new car, or a house, perhaps? Who hasn’t suffered at the hands of someone who was more cunning and clever in the moment? Who hasn’t embraced an idea that they later discovered to be false? Sometimes embarrassingly so. Who hasn’t overlooked shortcomings in others – or themselves? Who hasn’t allowed someone else to live inside their heads rent free, as we like to say? I’m guilty on every count – except marriage, just to be clear.

As the 19th-century Scottish physician, poet, and satirical novelist Tobias Smollett quipped, “Some folks are wise, and some are otherwise.” Truth be told, most of us are “otherwise” more often than we care to admit, but that doesn’t mean that we are incapable of cultivating wisdom over the course of our live, even if doing so is difficult and the achievement rare. When the 19th-century Unitarians emphasized the pursuit of what they called self-culture, they were really pointing towards the cultivation of personal wisdom – and they believed that it was a possibility for everyone, the desired end of the spiritual quest – not success, not salvation as their neighbours understood it, but wisdom. In this, they echoed Seneca when he declared, “They who have attained wisdom have reached, not the furthermost, but the most important goal.”

“No one is ever wise by chance,” he maintained. Wisdom is something that is nurtured, which demands effort on our part, and comes to us as the fruits of a lifetime of study, reflection, and discernment. Wisdom, if we achieve it, is a state in which we are both self-aware and aware of the world as it is – able to acknowledge our own imperfections while embracing all that we can learn from others, including those with whom we may, at first, disagree. That can be hard – moving in the direction of a position or idea we once dismissed, but have since come to recognize its merits.

The wise person takes time to reflect on their thoughts and actions without becoming obsessed with them, balances socializing with solitude, chooses both their sources of information and their friends prudently, and prepares to endure both successes and adversities with grace. In short, Seneca held that a person who is truly wise is able to live in the present, enjoying what the present moment has to offer, without fixating unnecessarily on the past or depending on an imagined future.

If Seneca was mistaken about wisdom at all, it was that he assumed that wisdom and happiness go hand in hand, that perfect wisdom and perfect happiness are identical, and that wisdom makes life easier for us. Ha! Wisdom does not promise that we will be happier than others; it does promise that we may be more fulfilled in our unhappiness. While wisdom may lead to a degree of contentment, it seems to me that it correlates with heartbreak as much as happiness, and that the path of wisdom can be arduous rather than easy. In this regard, Seneca allowed his own social status to cloud his estimate of the fruits of wisdom. I’ve known too many wise, working class souls whose lives were marked by unhappiness and hardship to believe that wisdom necessarily leads to good fortune, although it may well have mitigated their difficulties and suffering. There are wise people who dwell on the streets, living lives of quiet desperation – individuals whose wisdom helps them make it through the day, but does not necessarily give them much happiness.

Even so, while Seneca’s claim may not be strictly accurate, or universally true, I think that Krista Tippett echoes his assertion, albeit more temperately, when she says: “I’ve yet to meet a wise person who doesn’t know how to find some joy even in the midst of what is hard, and to smile and laugh easily, including at oneself.” In doing so, the wise person declines to let immediate circumstances have a total say over their mood, robbing them of whatever slender joys and delights they possess. Indeed, wisdom helps them to understand that immediate circumstances may be fleeting, and that deeper joys and deeper possibilities may yet await them.

Many speak of the wisdom of Solomon, including many people who have never read a word about him, but entertain vague Sunday school memories about him being wiser than most. He was the original philosopher king, at least the oldest found in literature, although he has rivals in China and other places. And when people mention his name, they typically mean the judgement of Solomon, which is recorded in the First Book of Kings, not the biblical Book of Wisdom associated with him.

You know the story, I’m sure. There are two mothers living in the same house, and when one of their infant sons dies, both mothers claim the remaining boy as her own, one accusing the other of having swapped the two boys. In order to resolve the dispute, King Solomon orders that the living child be divided in two, giving each mother one half. One mother accepts the decision, declaring that if she couldn’t have the boy, neither would, while the other mother protests, saying, “Give the baby to her, just don’t kill him.” At this point, Solomon declares the second woman to be the boy’s true mother, granting her custody. Similar stories appear in the folktales of many cultures, so it’s almost certain that this story is an old folktale that came to be woven into the Bible and attributed to Solomon, but this served to preserve the tale and secure the king’s reputation as an exceeding wise ruler. And that may be a reasonable assessment, but it overlooks the wisdom of the mother, who, grasping the enormity of the consequences, intervened to prevent a second tragedy. Is she not as wise as Solomon? Would the king not have appeared to be a fool – and a reckless one at that – if both women had said, “Sure. Let’s get this over with.” Obviously not.

Clearly, Solomon possessed keen psychological insight, a genuine quality of wisdom, but the success of this tactic depended upon an equally wise mother, whose wisdom was shown by her compassion, whether or not she knew the boy to be hers. As Kathleen McTigue says, “we must remember that the truest wisdom comes laced through with compassion, as we come to know how alike we are – each of us doing our best to find the path ahead and to keep walking with our fragile, broken hearts. And all of us in deep need of each other’s kindness.”

As it happens, the Bible personifies Wisdom in the form of a woman, especially in the Book of Proverbs, and both the Hebrew and Greek words for wisdom are feminine, which is reflected in the use of female pronouns – something that must drive religious fundamentalists crazy. Long before the idea of the Trinity was invented to explain away the contradictions of the Bible regarding God, Wisdom – Sophia in Greek – personified God’s presence and was clearly a vestige of earlier female deities who were believed to exist before the Hebrews adopted radical monotheism. Today, wisdom is commonly defined as “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment,” but millennia ago, Wisdom was seen as a manifestation of the divine, and it was natural to identify Wisdom’s creative and harmonizing qualities as feminine.

It would be a mistake to confuse knowledge with wisdom; although they may be related, they are not the same. I’m sure you’ve all heard the old saw, “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” I have witnessed many knowledgeable people – great intellectuals with brilliant minds – who have ultimately shown themselves to be fools of one kind or another. Far too many leaders in the field of information technology fall into this category, I’m afraid. Or overspecialized academics who are unable to connect their esoteric and often idiosyncratic studies with useful purposes. Of course, some theoretical physicists were able to create bombs, which was arguably a special kind of folly, so not every practical application is necessarily a wise one. It’s possible to absorb vast amounts of knowledge without having the capacity to arrange it usefully and distill it through the lens of experience. Trivial Pursuit and chess are different games. Data and discernment don’t always mix easily. A command of sports statistics is unlikely to make you better at playing baseball. If the accumulation of knowledge titillates the intellect, we don’t yet arrive at wisdom until we get past our dopamine high and turn our knowledge into insights and behaviours with practical application.

If knowledge is the rock on which we build, then experience is the organic matter that, when blended with the sand, creates the soil in which we live. We test what we know – or think we know – through lived experience, where we often learn as much from our foibles and mistakes as we do from our successes. I’ve learned a lot over the years because I have made a robust number of mistakes in life – some almost legendary, but most simply mistakes of an everyday variety. In that sense, wisdom is often a byproduct of folly. So sometimes we should be gentle with the fools we know because they may be working on their own personal wisdom project. The more mistakes we make in life, we more wisdom that may result – that is, if we’re paying attention and learning from our mistakes rather than ignoring them or covering them over. Of course, we can learn from others’ mistakes as well, which is generally more pleasant, if we’re curious and engaged with our companions – and not too given to gossip and airs of superiority. The popularity of Mr. Bean as a character is partly related to how much entertainment value we receive from others’ foibles. And when it’s harmless, that’s not a problem; but when it’s hurtful, it may be. Learning for the experiences of others works best when approached with a healthy sense of humility. “Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much,” declared the poet William Cowper; "Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”

Without experience, it’s possible to be smart without being wise. My father, who was eminently wise, in my view (although I do sometimes wonder in my mother surpassed him), used to observe that young people were mistakenly called mature when they were simply sophisticated, a thought that was echoed by Stephen Colbert when, speaking at a commencement, he suggested that those who appear young and wise are more likely just cynical. Neither were seeking to be critical of youth, but were rather pointing to the importance of experience in the development of maturity and, ultimately, genuine wisdom. We don’t expect people to become wise simply from readings textbooks or watching the right documentaries. They need to experience something of life to be able to put that kind of learning to use.

One of the things I love about this congregation – about being a Unitarian Universalist and having engaged with dozens upon dozens of congregations across the continent and having participated in seemingly endless denominational activities – is the number of wise people I came to know. At its best, a congregation is a school for wisdom, as surely as the gardens of the philosophers were such schools. Now I can’t possibly ame all of the wise people I have encountered during my lifetime as a Unitarian Universalist, but there are a few that I had in mind while preparing this sermon.

One of them was Marg Redston. She was president of this congregation when I finally made the decision to join. She was calm and composed about everything she encountered. And it’s not like there was a shortage of calamities in the life of the congregation while she was its president. There were several, but she remained poised and graceful whenever she dealt with them. She was a model of the kind of emotional maturity found in the wise.

Or Ruth Pierce, with whom I went on a pilgrimage to Transylvania, who had the wisdom to decide, when we reached the foot of the mountain  beneath Castle Déva, that she was walking up the path around the mountain. While others decided to take the funicular up the side, I joined her as did one other Manitoba Unitarian. And we made our way up, all the way around the mountain before reaching the castle where Francis Dávid was martyred in 1579. Now, I have to tell you, if I had seen the sign that said, “Vipers Beware,” on the way up and I had thought about it, I may have taken the funicular (as an evidence of my own wisdom) but instead we made the pilgrimage up the mountain. And Ruth had a colleague here in the church, Harold Robson, with whom she once formed the “Ruth Harold Committee” when there were problems in the church and wise elders were needed to address them.

Or I think of my friend Don McKinnon, whom I loved deeply – my Grade One school principal who became my best friend in midlife, and who was eminently wise about things based on his own lifetime of experience as an educator. But the wisdom I encountered was not just here in Winnipeg. Over in Thunder Bay was Beverly Lehman, who was active in the Canadian Unitarian Council and the Western Canada District. She showed me how to be loving to everyone, even when it was difficult. She had a patience and a nurturing quality that was the first among people I’ve known. Or Stan Calder, a member of the Unitarian Church of Edmonton, who promoted a consciousness of the experiences of LGBTQ+ people, and who led programming to bring the wisdom of his own experience to bear in every congregation in this region. And finally, John and Drusilla Cummins, a ministerial couple down in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who were my guides and mentors, who had lived through it all – through our theological changes and the different emphases of social justice, through all the changes in worship and music in our congregations, but who decided to stick with it because they could see the thread that led from where we were to where we might be. In the view of the Roman philosopher Seneca, the great end in life is the achievement of wisdom. As anyone who has ever been fooled, or simply foolish, knows, this is more difficult to achieve than we may imagine. Who hasn’t been impulsive, making a hasty choice prematurely – such as a marriage, or a new car, or a house, perhaps? Who hasn’t suffered at the hands of someone who was more cunning and clever in the moment? Who hasn’t embraced an idea that they later discovered to be false? Sometimes embarrassingly so. Who hasn’t overlooked shortcomings in others – or themselves? Who hasn’t allowed someone else to live inside their heads rent free, as we like to say? I’m guilty on every count – except marriage, just to be clear.

As the 19th-century Scottish physician, poet, and satirical novelist Tobias Smollett quipped, “Some folks are wise, and some are otherwise.” Truth be told, most of us are “otherwise” more often than we care to admit, but that doesn’t mean that we are incapable of cultivating wisdom over the course of our live, even if doing so is difficult and the achievement rare. When the 19th-century Unitarians emphasized the pursuit of what they called self-culture, they were really pointing towards the cultivation of personal wisdom – and they believed that it was a possibility for everyone, the desired end of the spiritual quest – not success, not salvation as their neighbours understood it, but wisdom. In this, they echoed Seneca when he declared, “They who have attained wisdom have reached, not the furthermost, but the most important goal.”

“No one is ever wise by chance,” he maintained. Wisdom is something that is nurtured, which demands effort on our part, and comes to us as the fruits of a lifetime of study, reflection, and discernment. Wisdom, if we achieve it, is a state in which we are both self-aware and aware of the world as it is – able to acknowledge our own imperfections while embracing all that we can learn from others, including those with whom we may, at first, disagree. That can be hard – moving in the direction of a position or idea we once dismissed, but have since come to recognize its merits.

The wise person takes time to reflect on their thoughts and actions without becoming obsessed with them, balances socializing with solitude, chooses both their sources of information and their friends prudently, and prepares to endure both successes and adversities with grace. In short, Seneca held that a person who is truly wise is able to live in the present, enjoying what the present moment has to offer, without fixating unnecessarily on the past or depending on an imagined future.

If Seneca was mistaken about wisdom at all, it was that he assumed that wisdom and happiness go hand in hand, that perfect wisdom and perfect happiness are identical, and that wisdom makes life easier for us. Ha! Wisdom does not promise that we will be happier than others; it does promise that we may be more fulfilled in our unhappiness. While wisdom may lead to a degree of contentment, it seems to me that it correlates with heartbreak as much as happiness, and that the path of wisdom can be arduous rather than easy. In this regard, Seneca allowed his own social status to cloud his estimate of the fruits of wisdom. I’ve known too many wise, working class souls whose lives were marked by unhappiness and hardship to believe that wisdom necessarily leads to good fortune, although it may well have mitigated their difficulties and suffering. There are wise people who dwell on the streets, living lives of quiet desperation – individuals whose wisdom helps them make it through the day, but does not necessarily give them much happiness.

Even so, while Seneca’s claim may not be strictly accurate, or universally true, I think that Krista Tippett echoes his assertion, albeit more temperately, when she says: “I’ve yet to meet a wise person who doesn’t know how to find some joy even in the midst of what is hard, and to smile and laugh easily, including at oneself.” In doing so, the wise person declines to let immediate circumstances have a total say over their mood, robbing them of whatever slender joys and delights they possess. Indeed, wisdom helps them to understand that immediate circumstances may be fleeting, and that deeper joys and deeper possibilities may yet await them.

Many speak of the wisdom of Solomon, including many people who have never read a word about him, but entertain vague Sunday school memories about him being wiser than most. He was the original philosopher king, at least the oldest found in literature, although he has rivals in China and other places. And when people mention his name, they typically mean the judgement of Solomon, which is recorded in the First Book of Kings, not the biblical Book of Wisdom associated with him.

You know the story, I’m sure. There are two mothers living in the same house, and when one of their infant sons dies, both mothers claim the remaining boy as her own, one accusing the other of having swapped the two boys. In order to resolve the dispute, King Solomon orders that the living child be divided in two, giving each mother one half. One mother accepts the decision, declaring that if she couldn’t have the boy, neither would, while the other mother protests, saying, “Give the baby to her, just don’t kill him.” At this point, Solomon declares the second woman to be the boy’s true mother, granting her custody. Similar stories appear in the folktales of many cultures, so it’s almost certain that this story is an old folktale that came to be woven into the Bible and attributed to Solomon, but this served to preserve the tale and secure the king’s reputation as an exceeding wise ruler. And that may be a reasonable assessment, but it overlooks the wisdom of the mother, who, grasping the enormity of the consequences, intervened to prevent a second tragedy. Is she not as wise as Solomon? Would the king not have appeared to be a fool – and a reckless one at that – if both women had said, “Sure. Let’s get this over with.” Obviously not.

Clearly, Solomon possessed keen psychological insight, a genuine quality of wisdom, but the success of this tactic depended upon an equally wise mother, whose wisdom was shown by her compassion, whether or not she knew the boy to be hers. As Kathleen McTigue says, “we must remember that the truest wisdom comes laced through with compassion, as we come to know how alike we are – each of us doing our best to find the path ahead and to keep walking with our fragile, broken hearts. And all of us in deep need of each other’s kindness.”

As it happens, the Bible personifies Wisdom in the form of a woman, especially in the Book of Proverbs, and both the Hebrew and Greek words for wisdom are feminine, which is reflected in the use of female pronouns – something that must drive religious fundamentalists crazy. Long before the idea of the Trinity was invented to explain away the contradictions of the Bible regarding God, Wisdom – Sophia in Greek – personified God’s presence and was clearly a vestige of earlier female deities who were believed to exist before the Hebrews adopted radical monotheism. Today, wisdom is commonly defined as “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment,” but millennia ago, Wisdom was seen as a manifestation of the divine, and it was natural to identify Wisdom’s creative and harmonizing qualities as feminine.

It would be a mistake to confuse knowledge with wisdom; although they may be related, they are not the same. I’m sure you’ve all heard the old saw, “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” I have witnessed many knowledgeable people – great intellectuals with brilliant minds – who have ultimately shown themselves to be fools of one kind or another. Far too many leaders in the field of information technology fall into this category, I’m afraid. Or overspecialized academics who are unable to connect their esoteric and often idiosyncratic studies with useful purposes. Of course, some theoretical physicists were able to create bombs, which was arguably a special kind of folly, so not every practical application is necessarily a wise one. It’s possible to absorb vast amounts of knowledge without having the capacity to arrange it usefully and distill it through the lens of experience. Trivial Pursuit and chess are different games. Data and discernment don’t always mix easily. A command of sports statistics is unlikely to make you better at playing baseball. If the accumulation of knowledge titillates the intellect, we don’t yet arrive at wisdom until we get past our dopamine high and turn our knowledge into insights and behaviours with practical application.

If knowledge is the rock on which we build, then experience is the organic matter that, when blended with the sand, creates the soil in which we live. We test what we know – or think we know – through lived experience, where we often learn as much from our foibles and mistakes as we do from our successes. I’ve learned a lot over the years because I have made a robust number of mistakes in life – some almost legendary, but most simply mistakes of an everyday variety. In that sense, wisdom is often a byproduct of folly. So sometimes we should be gentle with the fools we know because they may be working on their own personal wisdom project. The more mistakes we make in life, we more wisdom that may result – that is, if we’re paying attention and learning from our mistakes rather than ignoring them or covering them over. Of course, we can learn from others’ mistakes as well, which is generally more pleasant, if we’re curious and engaged with our companions – and not too given to gossip and airs of superiority. The popularity of Mr. Bean as a character is partly related to how much entertainment value we receive from others’ foibles. And when it’s harmless, that’s not a problem; but when it’s hurtful, it may be. Learning for the experiences of others works best when approached with a healthy sense of humility. “Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much,” declared the poet William Cowper; "Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”

Without experience, it’s possible to be smart without being wise. My father, who was eminently wise, in my view (although I do sometimes wonder in my mother surpassed him), used to observe that young people were mistakenly called mature when they were simply sophisticated, a thought that was echoed by Stephen Colbert when, speaking at a commencement, he suggested that those who appear young and wise are more likely just cynical. Neither were seeking to be critical of youth, but were rather pointing to the importance of experience in the development of maturity and, ultimately, genuine wisdom. We don’t expect people to become wise simply from readings textbooks or watching the right documentaries. They need to experience something of life to be able to put that kind of learning to use.

One of the things I love about this congregation – about being a Unitarian Universalist and having engaged with dozens upon dozens of congregations across the continent and having participated in seemingly endless denominational activities – is the number of wise people I came to know. At its best, a congregation is a school for wisdom, as surely as the gardens of the philosophers were such schools. Now I can’t possibly name all of the wise people I have encountered during my lifetime as a Unitarian Universalist, but there are a few that I had in mind while preparing this sermon.

[The vignettes of the individuals named have been omitted here, but the full version of this sermon, including these vignettes. is available to members and friends of the congregation upon request.]

All of these people were wise, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. One of the things that characterized all of them was a quality of emotional maturity.

Emotional maturity that may be the most important ingredient of all. Wisdom arguably has as much or more to do with what we call emotional intelligence than intellectual intelligence. It involves a quality of intuition and insight that escapes many people until they’ve reached the point in their lives where they begin to let go of of their personal preferences, all of their personal hubris, and learn to accept the world as it is, while nudging it lovingly, ever so gently, in the direction of what it could be.

As it turns out, true wisdom might be compared to a fine whiskey – its quality arises from distillation and blend. In the case of wisdom, it is distilled knowledge blended with life experience. Or, as Alice Bailey put it: “Knowledge differentiates whilst wisdom blends.”

Knowledge lets us know about tomatoes; wisdom reminds us how to make a good fruit salad. And so there’s a practical element: wisdom involves taking what we know, and what we have experienced, and turning it into something useful. That’s why the wise are never ideologically pure; it’s why we never agree with the wise, each and every time. They are using the best of their whole selves, grounded in emotional maturity, so that their wisdom and their insight may be valuable in the world. Just as wisdom blends together “experience, knowledge, and good judgment,” the formula also includes compassion, intuition, and emotional intelligence.

When all is said and done, I agree with Seneca that the fullest span of life is defined not by its length but by its quality. The fullest span of life is living until we possess wisdom, and then to carry on long enough that we pay back nature more than we have received as good citizens, good friends, and good stewards of the things around us. It is then – when the sum of our days is judged by its weight rather than its width – that our lives may be said to be complete.

“To finish the moment,” asserted Ralph Waldo Emerson, “to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” of these people were wise, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. One of the things that characterized all of them was a quality of emotional maturity.

Emotional maturity that may be the most important ingredient of all. Wisdom arguably has as much or more to do with what we call emotional intelligence than intellectual intelligence. It involves a quality of intuition and insight that escapes many people until they’ve reached the point in their lives where they begin to let go of of their personal preferences, all of their personal hubris, and learn to accept the world as it is, while nudging it lovingly, ever so gently, in the direction of what it could be.

As it turns out, true wisdom might be compared to a fine whiskey – its quality arises from distillation and blend. In the case of wisdom, it is distilled knowledge blended with life experience. Or, as Alice Bailey put it: “Knowledge differentiates whilst wisdom blends.”

Knowledge lets us know about tomatoes; wisdom reminds us how to make a good fruit salad. And so there’s a practical element: wisdom involves taking what we know, and what we have experienced, and turning it into something useful. That’s why the wise are never ideologically pure; it’s why we never agree with the wise, each and every time. They are using the best of their whole selves, grounded in emotional maturity, so that their wisdom and their insight may be valuable in the world. Just as wisdom blends together “experience, knowledge, and good judgment,” the formula also includes compassion, intuition, and emotional intelligence.

When all is said and done, I agree with Seneca that the fullest span of life is defined not by its length but by its quality. The fullest span of life is living until we possess wisdom, and then to carry on long enough that we pay back nature more than we have received as good citizens, good friends, and good stewards of the things around us. It is then – when the sum of our days is judged by its weight rather than its width – that our lives may be said to be complete.

“To finish the moment,” asserted Ralph Waldo Emerson, “to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.