Sermon: "Ours is No Caravan of Despair" (Rev. Danielle)

As most of you know, I just got back from 10 days away, leading a group from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis on a pilgrimage along the St. Cuthbert’s Way, a 62.5 trek along the Scottish/English border. Now, generally on a walking pilgrimage, there is no wheeled transportation involved. Medieval pilgrims would have walked from town to town, carrying very little and relying on the hospitality of strangers. Modern pilgrims walk from town to town relying on booking.com reservations at local hotels. But with a group of 19, like I had, sometimes that’s not even a possibility in these small Scottish towns. So, at the end of some days of walking, we relied on a bus driver named Gary who would pick us up from the trail and transport us to a slightly bigger nearby town with room to accommodate our full group.

It is not the traditional pilgrim experience, but what we lose in authenticity we make up for in the unique and particular pleasure of a group bus ride as adults. In my experience, nothing brings out the inner child like having to count off for a group leader while you wait to be driven to your destination. It feels like a field trip. We resort to our middle school bus behavior and there’s often giggling and singing and a general air of mischief. Sometimes light ribbing of the stressed out “adult” in charge, in this case me.

But there is also something profound in the bus rides. Pilgrimage is a journey and often used as a metaphor for our larger journey through life. But so often on a pilgrimage, one finds themself walking alone. But when you are all on the bus, it’s impossible to forget that we’re on this journey together. That we’re getting there as a group or not at all. One day, I got the text I dread as a group leader on these trips, a group member was struggling along the trail, tired and injured and unable to make it the last few miles. Before I could begin to formulate a plan on my own, Gary was in the driver's seat, heading down the road to look for our struggling comrade. One of our fellow pilgrims who happened to be a doctor sat next to him in the front seat, messaging about symptoms and ready to help if needed.

Once we had all 19 of us on the bus, safe and more or less, sound- laughing, joking, sharing candy bars and cheering for Gary and his heroism, I was reminded of the lyrics from our opening hymn.

“Ours is no caravan of despair.”

I’ve preached about the “who” of these famous lines from Rumi. The wanderers, worshipers, and lovers of leaving. Those who have broken their vows a thousand times. I’ve preached about the message it offers of grace and forgiveness and radical welcome.

But it occurred to me I hadn’t given much thought to the where and the how- to that line that rang through my head on the bus. “Ours is no caravan of despair.” Where is this caravan headed? When we tell people to come, come, where is it we’re asking them to journey with us? And how do we get there?

I will not lie to you. There are plenty of reasons for despair in our world today. Despite advancements in science and medicine, average life expectancy in the US has fallen back to the level it was at nearly 20 years ago. Scientists predict temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise. Almost 14% of children in the US live in poverty. And those are just the big picture things, I won’t even begin listing the 27 horrible stories from this week's news cycle. In a world that gives us every reason to despair, what does it mean to invite people to join a caravan of hope? Are we being delusional when we sing, “our is no caravan of despair?”

I don’t think that we are. And I’ll get to why in a minute. But first we’re going to take an interlude for a little theological education.

Does anyone know the word, “eschatology?” I’m guessing you either took a theology glass or grew up in a tradition that read The Book of Revelation a lot? So eschatology is the theology of final things. Where does this all end up? What’s our human destiny? It is our ultimate vision of the universe. It gets a bad rap because it’s so often associated with end times theology- cults that try to predict the exact date of the end of the world, or the Left Behind books about the rapture that traumatized generations of evangelical children.

But that’s such a small sliver of eschatological theologies. Our own tradition has been deeply shaped by eschatology. Our Universalist ancestors wrestled with the concept, arriving at the idea that a loving God wouldn’t let people face an eternity of torment. We talked a few weeks ago about the cyclical nature of Buddhism. The idea that there are endless cycles of creation rather than a single line with an apocalyptic end point is a very different kind of eschatology than what we’re used to, but an eschatology none the less. And then there are lots of eschatologies that believe our destiny is human flourishing, justice, or reconciliation with the sacred. The Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam is an eschatological commitment. It holds that our broken world can ultimately be repaired to wholeness, but humans must do the work, even though we will not see it complete in our lifetime.

And in some ways, we all have an eschatology, whether it is explicit or implicit. We’re all operating with certain ideas about the future and those ideas impact how we behave in the present. Religious scholars would say that our eschatology informs our ethics.

Let’s take a modern, non-religious example to help demonstrate this idea: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and other silicon valley billionaires invested in artificial intelligence. Sociologist Liz Bucar wrote recently about how their eschatology was made blatantly clear in court filings related to Musk’s lawsuit against Altman and Open AI. Those court documents spoke explicitly about the inevitable dominance of AI. Their eschatology, she says, is that AI will surpass human intelligence, and humans will become obsolete as a species. And this is the eschatology that informs their ethics. Remember how Musk once called empathy the fundamental weakness of our civilization?

Bucar writes, “If you genuinely believe that human extinction is coming, why would you feel any obligation to the people around you right now? Why invest in public health, housing, schools, or anything that requires imagining a collective human future? The tech bros’ eschatology doesn’t just fail to motivate ethical behavior, it actively authorizes its absence.”

Where we think we’re going impacts how we act now. So you can get a pretty good idea of where someone thinks this caravan is headed by paying attention to their current actions. That’s true of Musk and Altman and Theil. But it’s also true of us.

And Ours, well, ours is no caravan of despair. Ours is a caravan of hope.

I know this to be true because we’re acting like it.

We are still in the process of shaping our mission and vision as a congregation, but I can see the shape your vision is taking based on how you’ve shown up this year.

You are open to new ideas in worship and willing to engage with me in real conversations about what worship means to you. That tells me you have a vision of worship that both embraces pluralism and honors tradition. That both welcomes and challenges. That enriches our imaginations and spirits.

You reinvigorated our social justice ministry and are weekly inviting one another into small, concrete actions to protect our neighbors, our democracy, our earth. That’s not something you spend time doing if you don’t believe another world is possible.

You ran an unprecedented stewardship campaign and put so much time and energy into the tour and parking fundraisers. That tells me you believe this is a community that’s worth growing and sustaining into the future. When news articles and pundits try to tell us that the church is dying and religion is becoming obsolete, it tells me you believe in a future where communities of radical belonging, mutual support and spiritual nourishment are cornerstones of our shared life.

You’ve cared for our children and youth, encouraging their leadership and answering their questions and welcoming them so fully and joyfully into the life of this congregation. That tells me you believe in a future where they will grow and thrive, inherit what we’ve built, hopefully improve on it and become stewards of this church, this community, our world.

You’ve provided meal trains, and rides to doctors appointments for members of our community. You’ve assisted at memorial services of departed beloveds and held one another in grief and fear and loss. Just this week you rallied around Billy in his time of need. That tells me that unlike the silicone valley billionaires we talked about earlier, you believe in a future where every human being is valued and cared for and holy.

Ours is no caravan of despair.

An eschatological vision of justice, equity, wholeness, and flourishing for all creatures is a hard sell these days. It seems improbable to many, a naively optimistic vision nearly impossible to achieve. But see, I don’t think we have to sell such a grand vision. When eschatology feels too hard, too impossible, too big to grasp, we can lead with our ethics. Because this caravan of hope is as much about how we get there as where we’re headed. Through small, everyday acts of kindness and goodness we can show, concretely, that we haven’t given up on that future vision. Every time we drive the bus down the road to get a struggling pilgrim back onboard the caravan, we show that we’re headed to a destination where everyone matters, everyone is valued, and no one gets left behind.

Liz Bucar writes, “We do not know what the future looks like. And yet, we have to act as if there is some version of us that endures, don’t we? As if what we do today will matter to people we will never meet? As if the world is worth repairing even though we won’t finish the job? Because if we don’t, the machines deserve to take over.”

Every time we write a poem, or plant a tree, care for our neighbor, teach our children we are showing that we are invested in a beautiful future, full of unrealized possibilities.

That’s what it means to be a people of hope. To behave, even in the face of uncertainty, like there’s a better future ahead of us. Like there will be a world worthy of our children’s inheritance.

And you are already doing it, fondly and locally, regularly and profoundly right here at First Church in Salem. I’ve witnessed it all church year and I’m so glad to be on this caravan with you.

Next week, we will wrap up our official church year with a service led by our children and youth and a celebratory picnic. Then our pace will slow, committees will take a break, we’ll head off on vacations and rest up for the year ahead. But let us commit now to returning, again and again, to this caravan of hope, where with every small act of kindness, justice, and love, we travel one mile closer to the future we believe is possible.

May it be so.
Amen.

© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026

Sermon: "Holy, Gratuitous Beauty" (Rev. Danielle)

A few years ago, when I was living in Portland, we were treated to an unusually bright and southerly appearance of the Northern Lights. You might have experienced this here too. 2024 and 2025 were years of elevated solar activity, where many of us living in the continental US were able to glimpse this phenomenon usually limited to more northern locations. This particular night, the forecast was for an intense solar storm and a particularly clear sky, so I stayed up past my bedtime and ventured out into the dark to try and catch a glimpse, for the first time, of the aurora borealis. My social media feeds were filled with people as far south as Florida posting stunning pictures of green, blue, and pink hued night skies. As we walked our neighborhood, trying to get a good view, we met neighbors equally filled with wonder. From one street over we heard hushed but excited midnight exchanges “I decided I do want to drive out somewhere darker to see it. Do you want a ride?” There was a collective joy that is rare for a suburban street past midnight. An energy that was more reverent than Halloween or a 4th of July block party. Perhaps best described as awe. “It’s so beautiful,” people whispered. It was.

And it served no practical purpose. In fact, I think it wreaked a bit of havoc on satellite and cell communications. It was difficult to monetize. Unlike the solar eclipse, the forecast was too last minute for hotels or travel agencies to create vacation packages. As far as I know, it didn’t have any immediate health benefits. It didn’t solve any of our social crises or improve productivity. We didn’t invest anything in it except for maybe a few lost minutes of sleep or a little gas to get out to a dark area. And the return on that small investment was only wonder. It seemed to sit entirely outside any of the systems we have for calculating value.

My sermon title is borrowed from essayist Annie Dillard, who says beauty is a grace, wholly gratuitous. A grace. Something entirely unearned, but with salvific power. She writes, “I think grace and beauty are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

And that’s what me and my neighbors and maybe some of you were doing that night of the solar storm. Trying to be there. But if someone asked me why the northern lights were so beautiful, I don’t know that I'd have an answer. It just…was. Maybe someone more well versed in color theory or something could explain why it was pleasing but even that isn’t a very satisfying explanation for why we judge it beautiful.

Truth, goodness, and beauty are often grouped together by philosophers and theologians as transcendent values. And while all three are fairly lofty and nebulous, I think truth and goodness are a little easier to pin down. We can point to scientific methods of verification to help us define truth and there are whole histories of law and ethics that define good behavior. Not perfectly and not with universal agreement, but there’s at least a starting place. But beauty is more elusive. What makes something beautiful? What do the northern lights, an ocean sunset, bright purple irises, a well-crafted line of poetry, a moving piece of music, a sparrow’s song, or the face of a beloved have in common? Even neuroscientists who study brain activity of people viewing images they consider beautiful have difficulties defining the commonalities and characteristics of beauty.

And yet, for something so nebulous, something so impossible to define, beauty seems to be absolutely necessary to our surviving and thriving. It seems to be something our souls innately long for. Psychologists and medical researchers write about something called “aesthetic deprivation.” A lack of access to beauty, like natural vistas, art, music, etc. has measurable negative physical and emotional health impacts on inmates, those who are hospitalized, and those working in those facilities. In this way, access to beauty is sometimes even framed as a human rights issue and there are a number of advocacy organizations that work to improve access to green spaces, art, and music for low-income communities, unhoused populations, and those who are incarcerated. Access to green space and nature videos have been shown to reduce violence and self harm in prisons and music therapy improves health outcomes for patients after a stroke or brain injury. There are many examples, but this isn’t something we need science to prove because it’s something each of us has firsthand experience with. Imagine a life deprived of art, music, tall trees, colorful flowers, poetry. We already know this deeply, innately. Our souls long for beauty and our most eloquent poets and theologians describe our encounters with it as nearly divine.

And I think it’s these qualities of beauty, that it is both absolutely necessary for the well-being of our souls and almost impossible to define, that make it so ripe for exploitation and commodification. Think about it, if you can be the one to define it, package it, sell it for a price, you can become quite a powerful person. And that’s exactly what our social, economic, and political systems have done for centuries. We hold up beauty as an ideal and then define it in such a way that only a select few have access to it. Our modern standards of physical beauty value thin, white, able bodies. And this isn’t about aesthetic merits, it’s entirely about hoarding power. Upholding beauty standards that value whiteness is one way of upholding systems of white supremacy. And weight loss is a $90 billion industry in the U.S. That’s a lot of money riding on us believing thinness is the standard for beauty. And while physical beauty is often the most egregious example, it isn’t the only one. And I say this as a fan of home improvement shows, but Chip and Joanna Gaines were able to build a small empire in Texas by convincing us all that what our lives were lacking was shiplap in our kitchen. John O’Donohue writes about how urban planning strategies have doubly impoverished the poor, with the least aesthetically pleasing buildings and facilities being placed in the lowest income neighborhoods. Those who try to define and box in beauty can amass power and money. Idolatrous beauty standards help prop up racism, patriarchy, ableism, and capitalism.

And it works. Often. But not always. Because that’s the thing about beauty. The qualities of mystery and transcendence that make it ripe for exploitation also make it more powerful than our attempts to confine and control it. It always finds a way to break through. A flower grows through the cracks in a concrete sidewalk. A song drifts through a neighbor’s open window stopping you in your track, bringing you to tears. It’s Norbert Capek holding flower communion in a Nazi concentration camp. It’s Dan Berrigan, in prison for burning draft files during the Vietnam war, writing poems about tulips in the prison yard. Those are the moments of beauty we can’t buy and no economic or political power can take them from us. They are moments of grace.

So I think our task then, is to make a spiritual practice of noticing and relishing in as many of those moments as possible. In our reading, John O’Donohue calls this the work of “Beautifying our gaze.” Training our eye to see the grace of hidden beauty, the beauty that already exists in everything around us. And I think we can take O’Donohue’s use of the term gaze to mean more accurately and inclusively, attention, not just physical sight but whatever senses and tools you use for observing and interacting with the world. Beauty does not wait for perfection, O’Donohue tells us but is present already secretly in everything. Learning to notice that kind of beauty is both a form of resistance and a means of salvation.

First, noticing beauty in this way can be a means of resisting a culture constantly focused on productivity, monetization, shares, and likes. It is a reminder that life has meaning beyond what we can do and produce and measure and that we can find value and nourishment outside of our capitalist systems. It takes the needs and delights of the soul seriously. For example, I love when I glimpse a brightly colored hummingbird and go very still and quiet. I don’t move to take a picture for Instagram, worried my reaching for my phone will scare it off. It’s a brief moment of wonder appreciated only for its own sake. Even if just for a second it lets me escape our transactional society and just rest in the grace of the world.

I also think that making a practice of noticing beauty, especially looking for the places where it's hidden in plain sight, can help us develop an alternative vision of the kind of world we want to inhabit. We are constantly bombarded with images of war and destruction on the news, images that highlight our inhumanity, images in magazines that purport to exemplify beauty but only serve to remind us of what we lack. Journalist Krista Tippett talks about a conversation she had with a Rabbi and an Imam that turned to the topic of the salvific power of beauty. Beauty, they said, is creative, not destructive. It is of wholeness, not fractionalizing. When we make noticing beauty a spiritual practice, we counter those images of destruction with images of wholeness. This doesn’t mean entering a state of denial and turning away from the images that are unbeautiful. They are important to see. But by attending to that which is beautiful, especially making an effort to notice the beauty of the overlooked or unexpected, we can begin to expand our vision of what’s possible, deepen our love for our communities and our world, thus deepening our commitments to saving them, and grow in our appreciation for the gifts already present in our midst. It is from this place of possibility, love, and abundance that we commit to the work of transformation and justice. Theologian and anti-apartheid activist John. W. de Gruchy writes, “The beautiful serves transformation by supplying images that contradict the inhuman, and thus provide alternative transforming images to those of oppression. We are, in a profound sense, redeemed by such beauty, for art does not simply mirror reality but challenges its destructive and alienating tendencies, making up what is lacking and anticipating future possibilities.”

Activist and social reformer Dorothy Day is a personal hero of mine. Day was an ardent pacifist and advocate for improved working and economic conditions for the poor. She was a co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement and spent her whole life providing food and hospitality to the most marginalized in society. Among the many wonderful books about Day is a biography written by her granddaughter entitled “The World Will be Saved by Beauty.” It’s based on a quote from Day’s favorite author, Dostoyevsky. This struck me as such an eloquent but odd title. It seemed to me more fitting for a biography of maybe Rachel Carson, Thoreau, or John Muir. Someone committed to preserving natural landscapes. Or perhaps a famous artist. Day spent her life in urban landscapes, poor neighborhoods, looking at vistas not particularly known for their beauty. But Day had, in the words of John O’Donohue, a graced eye. She saw the image of the divine, the face of God in everyone she encountered. She glimpsed a beauty in the people she served that was invisible to so many others, and that ran counter to the images of destruction, deprivation, and isolation that shaped so much of the society she was living in. It was this alternative image, this image of wholeness and blessed divine creation that drove her work and guided her life. When we learn to beautify our gaze, when we observe those we meet and the world we walk through with love, reverence and appreciation. When we train our sense and attention to see wholeness rather than lack, we participate in a kind of re-creation, a restoration. It becomes a salvific act, piecing back together a fractured world.

The theology of beauty may feel academic or esoteric but the living into it is so concrete, so simple. Putting yourself in the presence of beauty for beauty’s sake is deep spiritual work and never frivolous. So stay up past your bedtime to see the northern lights or a meteor shower. Revel in the sound of laughter. Read poetry and linger in the garden. Find value in that which can not be bought or sold. Train your senses to notice the wholeness and holiness inherent in everything. Fill your moral vision with images of creative possibility that remind you another world is both possible and already present. Let the grace of hidden beauty become your joy and your sanctuary. It just might save the world.

May it be so. Amen.

© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026

Sermon: "Wayfaring, or finding the way when there is no road" (Tiffany Magnolia)

Call to Worship:
“When I am with you, everything is prayer.
I prayed for change,
so I changed my mind…”
-Rumi

First Reading: Psalm 121

Second Reading:
“Arise, oh Cup-bearer, rise! and bring
To lips that are thirsting the bowl they praise,
For it seemed that love was an easy thing,
But my feet have fallen on difficult ways…”
-Hafiz

Sermon:
I have a confession to make: I live next to the ocean and I know absolutely nothing about boats. I know, shocking right? I mean those of us who have lived here for a while have seen our fair share of flooding alone that such an omission seems foolish, if not downright dangerous. Yet, I persist in my daily awe at the ocean every time I travel from place to place knowing that the fight isn’t fair, that the ocean would win every time.

This understanding I have about the limitations of my knowledge is a fairly new phenomenon, and it sits quite uncomfortably in my mind. You see for years, I spent much of my time and energy putting all my effort into if not outright mastery, at least competence in the skills I deemed necessary for survival. Need to remodel my 1850 house without much money? Learn carpentry, and while maybe not excel at it, become at least competent enough to compensate for a house that is neither level nor plumb. Grow up without functional parents? Read every book, listen to every podcast, and take every piece of advice about parenthood, so that at least if I mess up, I have references. This attitude is so championed by our culture that we even have a name for it: bootstraps mentality. It is so useful for those of us who have grown up with severe deficits, but it doesn’t allow for that most fundamental of human needs: mystery. It turns out one can’t just read a book about faith and then have it. Faith requires a different set of skills, ones that might surprise you.

Both of the poets/mystics we have read in our service, Hafez and Rumi, have taught me almost all there is to know about mystery. Being as I experience the divine through literature first and foremost, contemplating the way they capture the divine has opened my perspective far beyond the limitations taught by my Catholic education. Hafez was a Persian (modern day Iran) mystical poet of the 14th Century. Hafez wrote in a traditional form known as the ghazal, a poem that expresses love for the divine. This love, though is represented in such a way that the difference between what we would call romantic love and spiritual love is blurred beyond recognition. This is a uniquely Persian form, but it has spread throughout the Islamic world in such a way that Islamic poetry is often spiritual and passionate in equal measure. Rumi, on the other hand, was a 13th century mystic from present day Afghanistan, who eventually settled in Turkey. He is known almost entirely as a spiritual teacher, poetry being secondary. Rumi spent his early life following a script: marrying, taking up the position of authority in his city and ruling in local matters. But then he met Shams e-Tabrizi, and Rumi became a mystic and ascetic. From that meeting on, all of his writing is infused with profound love for all things created by God. From Sufi functionary to Sufi mystic in short order, Rumi became a disciple of all things. His writing speaks of the “oneness” that is God and faith. And for those of us who have been deeply steeped in the Christian traditions, these approaches to poetry and faith are at the very least eye opening.

At this point, you are probably wondering what on earth these two things have to do with one another, interested as you may be in Persian poetry and the bootstraps mentality. I promise you, they are connected. Just hang in there!

The title of this reflection today is wayfaring, literally to journey on foot. In our modern age, to journey on foot always has some sort of path already established. It could be a hiking path or a modern road, aided by google maps, but we need do little to cut a swath through Salem unaided. That is, there are many paths laid out for us, and we have the opportunity to choose them, but they are there nonetheless making themselves known. Spiritual journeys, though, are made of entirely different stuff altogether. They are not the roads and sidewalks of a modern city. Instead, they are the ocean, stretched out in front of us, filled with currents, eddies, sandbars, and signs that only some of us can read. Navigating this world has no Google maps, though there are tools that can assist like depth meters and GPS. Interestingly, enough, though, this bootstraps mentality can be put to an entirely different use in place like the ocean.

This is where the poetry I reference has been my guide. Hafez and Rumi have nothing to teach me about the ocean, but they are enormously helpful in wayfinding, using signs as guides. Wayfinding is the companion to wayfaring, and it is the word I hope you take with you today, lover as I am of metaphors that guide us. Rumi and Hafez celebrate the mystery of this existence in all its forms. One of my favorite verses of Rumi reads:

“I died to the mineral state and became a plant,

I died to the vegetal state and reached animality,

I died to the animal state and became a man,

Then what should I fear? I have never become less from dying.

At the next charge (forward) I will die to human nature,

So that I may lift up (my) head and wings (and soar) among the angels”

I find profound comfort that if I turn all my attention, all my “bootstraps mentality” towards wonder, towards mystery, I will find a way forward that will be the path of a lifetime. And here is where it all ties together. The tools at our disposal are almost never the ones we think we need. We haven’t been born into knowledge of the tides. The level and the square require practice and precision. Instead, we have been born into wonder and mystery. We trade these things at our peril, but we do so with such encouragement that it seems hardly a tragedy. To do more than survive, to thrive, we must find our way back to that first state, that journey with no end but endless delight along the way. We already have what we need to navigate through uncharted waters, we need only be reminded that others, too, are taken up in the project, and through that we find our comfort along the journey.

© Tiffany Magnolia, 2026

Sermon: "Can I Pray for You?" (Rev. Danielle)

Many of you know that my call to ministry came mid-life and I was not religious as a young person. I was adamant in my atheism and found it unbearably embarrassing when my grandparents would make us pray before a meal in a restaurant. It felt, as the kids say these days, extremely cringe. We all have our own brand of religious baggage and associations depending on where we grew up and I grew up in the south in the 90s, in the age of What Would Jesus Do bracelets, brightly colored Teen Bibles, and christian clubs with hip sounding names that met in the cafeteria before school. Those were the people I know who talked openly about their faith, wondered about how they could get closer to Jesus and who would offer to pray for me (always with a hunt of judgement in the offer). And teenage Danielle wanted nothing to do with that.

Even as my faith evolved and I discovered Unitarian Universalism, it was easy to avoid extemporaneous prayer or overtly public displays of faith. Sure, I was happy to go to a protest and talk about how my values called me to act in the world. But no one asked me who or what I thought God was and if I talked to God or what I thought happened when I did. Community, social justice, putting faith in action all felt fine but talking about religious belief, or prayer, or my relationship to the divine still felt embarrassing at best and offensive at worst.

So it was unexpected when I found myself as a chaplain in a hospital room, holding the hands of a woman I had just met and praying “Lord Jesus we ask that you lower gas prices.” She was the only visitor for a friend of hers who was dying. She was not especially well off and lived quite a ways away and the regular drives there were a financial burden. I did not believe, in the literal post-enlightenment sense of that word, that Jesus is sitting up in the sky at some kind of cosmic control board regulating the international oil market. But I knew this was not the time to say to this person in pain, “ I believe in praying with our feet. Here are the most politically effective ways to impact economic policy.” She had both deep faith and deep need, so I prayed with surprising earnestness, for Jesus to ease her burden. I can’t say if it actually did anything. I honestly can’t remember what happened to gas prices that summer. But I saw how her request was one borne of deep love for a dying friend,I saw her love for her God and the truth the Christian story held in her life, and I wanted to hold and honor all of that with her in the most sacred space we could possibly create in that hospital room. Prayer was the scaffolding for that space.

The chaplaincy work all ministers are required to do is ostensibly to sharpen our pastoral care skills, but I think one of the great gifts that it gave me was that it forced me to take other people’s faith seriously. Not to pick it apart academically or poke holes in the theology but to sit with them in the depths of it, the strength it gave them, the language it provided when words were hard to find, and the questions and doubts that are its regular companions. So often it took the form of prayer. I came to see prayer as a kind of sacred vessel for holding all of that. A way of saying, these questions and hopes and longings, this relationship you have with the divine, these things are so very precious, let us place them here in this place of safety and reverence. I realized that what made prayer so powerful wasn’t its utility but the way it honored that part of a person’s life. The way it made space for the questions the doctor’s didn’t have an answer for, the hopes that were too fragile to speak aloud, the truths that can’t be proven scientifically. To pray with someone was to let them know their soul deserved care in the same way their mind and body did. I begin to understand “Can I pray for you,” not as a condescending judgement but as a tender offer to help someone hold something very precious. UU minister of worship arts, Erika Hewitt writes. “Prayer is a way to connect and reconnect to ourselves and to that which is life-giving; the mechanics don’t matter as much as the intention: remembering ourselves as magnificent, fragile vessels of love, sometimes with intimates and sometimes with strangers, and affirming our choice to remain connected so that we’re not lost in the vastness of space and time.”

Two years after I prayed for Jesus to lower gas prices, I let down my guard enough to pray for myself. Not meditate or contemplate a poem or read a devotional, but pray in a child-like, petitionary, ask God for something kind of way. I had just returned, exhausted from a cross country trip for a family member’s funeral. And I was on the way to church to preach what I knew would be a difficult sermon in the life of that congregation. As I drove over the drawbridge crossing the Willamette River, I prayed simply, “God, give me a steady voice today.” It was a small ask and spontaneous. The prayer over before I even reached the other side of the river. But it was a vulnerable moment, an admission that I needed support from something greater than myself, a recognition of my own human limitations, and a way of honoring that what I was carrying that morning was precious enough to hold in sacred space. It was, as a recovering atheist, still, deeply embarrassing. But beautifully, powerfully effective.

Now, I am not just trying to convince you to start praying—for yourself or others. Not exactly. Although I wouldn’t be sad if that was the outcome. What I am trying to do is convince you to treat that piece of yourself and others, that we honor in prayer, with care and attention. To recognize that just like our bodies and minds, our souls also deserve tending. I want to normalize prioritizing our spiritual lives and spiritual growth, normalize supporting each other on that journey, and normalize talking about it with one another. Because our faith matters. What we believe matters. And how we stay in touch with and nurture those things matters. Always, but especially right now.

It’s only been two months since ICE agents murdered two unarmed American citizens in Minneapolis. It probably seems like longer because since then the news cycle keeps bringing us increasingly upsetting, major stories like the release of some of the Epstein Files, and a war with Iran that some conservative leaders are framing in Biblical and apocalyptic language. Meanwhile, we’re grappling with things like the ethics of emerging technology and AI, having conversations that make us question our definition of truth and reality and what it means to be human. We live in times that ask with new urgency old questions about who we are and whose we are, where we come from and where we’re going, and what moral obligations we have while we’re here. And we live in times that weigh heavily on some deep part of our souls, times that threaten to disconnect and isolate us from one another and our inner voice. Wrestling with those questions while staying tethered to both our humanity and to what’s transcendent is spiritual work. It’s soul work. And it needs space separate from the other facets of our lives. Prayer, silence, reading sacred texts, deep discussions like soul matters or the anti-fascist theology reading group here at the church.

So often when I counsel people, and ask them about their spiritual lives, they will admit to letting their spiritual practices be one of the first things that slips when life gets busy. And when I say people, I mean me. Or they’ll double or triple up for maximum efficiency. Well, I’ve heard meditation is good for your productivity and health so that’s my spiritual practice. I was in a recent training with other Unitarian ministers where the leaders shared that families consistently rank church low in their list of obligations, skipping church before they skip sports, school clubs, and music lessons. I once taught an adult class at church on building your own theology and one of the participants was stationed there in the military. They were supposed to be on duty the night of one of our classes and asked for a religious exemption. You should have seen the rest of the classes faces when they heard that. It had never occurred to them that anything related to Unitarian Universalism would carry that kind of religious or spiritual weight!

Raise your hand if, in the past let’s say 6 months, you’ve asked someone else in the congregation how they are feeling physically maybe after an illness or surgery? Have you asked someone in the congregation how they’re job is going? In the last six months have you asked anyone, “how’s your spiritual life?” Even in church we don’t do a great job of prioritizing prioritizing the spiritual life.

For those of you who are a bit more utilitarian, who maybe have a harder time justifying tending to the spiritual life for it’s own sake, I’ll close with an interesting conversation between journalist and comedian Trevor Noah and NY mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani was talking giving his diagnosis for the failure of the political left in America, which he ascribes to a lack of imagination, saying, “we are robbing ourselves of ambition and imagination, and we’re telling people that their choice is between settling or sacrifice. And neither of these are enough. You have to have an affirmative vision of how life can be better than this, because this life already is suffocating people.”

Trever Noah responded, “I sometimes think it’s because of the decline of religion on the left.” He continues, “One of the things that faith requires of you is the ability to believe that this current state that you are in is not the end. There is a possibility that something can be greater. And even though you cannot see it, you believe that it can happen.”

Viewed in this light, someone asking me to pray for lower gas prices isn’t just an amusing or touching anecdote about my faith evolution. That prayer was her affirmative vision of a better life. It represents the possibility that something can be greater. It was a powerful vision of equity and ease and the ability to care for one another. A vision of a society that values being present with the dying and doesn’t erect barriers that would prevent such an act of love. For Noah and Mamdani, faith is necessary to the political work of sustaining a vibrant democracy, of building the beloved community, of imagining a world centered on love and liberation.

Our spiritual lives are worth tending to. Our faith is worth being taken seriously. So lean into your role as spiritual companions to one another. Be accountability partners and help one another stick to spiritual practices or show up to church events that are important to you. Talk about what you believe and what you aren’t sure about. Talk about who or what God or goddess is for you. Read sacred texts together. Talk about why you pray or don’t and what it means to you. Ask each other to pray with you and for you. Ask me. I know you’re New Englanders and I know it might feel awkward or embarrassing but this is how we tend our soil so the sowers’ seeds take root. There’s no short cut.

This is how we deepen our faith and we live in times that require a deep faith: a faith that helps us hold one another’s pain and tender hopes, a faith that buoys us in trying times, a faith that brings us moral clarity in the face of injustice, and a faith that allows us to imagine a better world.

May we never consider time spent tending to our souls, to one another’s souls, time wasted.

May it be so. Amen.

© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026

Sermon: “The Fast Before the Feast” (Rev. Danielle)

Friends, for the first time in weeks, I wrote this sermon without wondering whether or not we were going to have to cancel in-person church service. It has not been an easy winter and I know we are all looking for signs of spring in the air. We are waiting for the ground to thaw. I always feel like I see the light at the end of the tunnel when pitchers and catchers report. So my mind has been drifting towards dreams of ballpark hotdogs, but as a reminder that we don’t always get we want, but sometimes what we need, this week in the liturgical calendar of two religious traditions, we enter a season of fasting. This Wednesday marks the beginning of the Muslim observance of Ramadan, as well as Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian liturgical season of Lent. They are very different observances, of course. Ramadan, which honors the revelation of the Quran and all holy scripture, has a more celebratory nature, with communal pre-dawn and evening meals bookmarking the daily fasts. Lent, the 40 days in the Christian calendar leading up to Easter is more solemn, focused on prayer, sacrifice, and almsgiving as observers prepare their hearts to hear the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection. But both call for practices of self-reflection, fasting and restraint. Both ask observers to give something up in order to make room for the holy.

As an atheist teenager, I was terribly judgy of my friends who observed Lent. The giving up of sugar and junk food felt like a way to reinforce diet culture and cloak it in piety, which was an affront to my feminist values. I am embarrassed now to remember how, full of teenage bravado and scorn, I declared, “I don’t think Jesus cares if you drink diet coke.” As I matured and my relationship with religion changed, I discovered Lenten traditions that weren’t based on sacrifice. Lent became a season for focusing on practices that brought me closer to the sacred and sometimes those practices can be additive; for example, a new spiritual practice, a new book of devotional readings, doing one act of justice/resistance a day, posting an inspirational photo or quote on social media daily, etc.

This made me more comfortable with the season for a while, but this year, I’m not sure comfort should be the goal. I don’t know about you, but I could use some help figuring out how to give things up. Because I can think of so many recent examples of when I’ve refused to sacrifice my comfort for the collective good. The Amazon boycotts that lasted until an “emergency” requiring overnight delivery. The Disney+ boycott that lasted until my desire to see the Taylor Swift eras tour documentary won out. The single use plastics, and red meat, and international flights that are increasing carbon emissions. And heck, forget the collective good for a minute, there are so many times where I’ve refused to give something up for my own good. Scrolling on facebook and instagram even when I can feel it ruining my attention span, making me angry, dissatisfied, and numb to name just one example.

We humans are not good at giving things up. We are not good at choosing discomfort and inconvenience, even when it might be in our best interest. We are hard-wired to want to have our cake and eat it too. Ask any minister what church attendance is like on Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday or Good Friday versus Easter morning. We want the joy of resurrection and new life without the loss and death. We want the health benefits of meditation without the hard hours of practice and boredom and learning proper posture. We want the solace of community without the discomfort of conflict. We want better schools but we don’t want to pay higher taxes. We want to save the earth, but at the end of the day, aren’t we all kind of hoping someone invents a machine that will magically reverse climate change without us having to drink out of paper straws?

But friends, the stakes these days are too high to rely on magical thinking. The truth is, living our values, really putting our faith into action, might mean giving things up. It might mean sacrificing some temporary comfort, and abandoning old habits and old ways of living that aren’t centered on love, that don’t serve our neighbor or our planet, that don’t serve collective liberation. Shopping habits that exploit workers, convenience products that destroy the earth, tech platforms that threaten democracy and further enrich the powerful.

This is what feminist eco-theologian Sally McFague argued. Towards the end of her life, McFague made a move unusual for a liberal theologian. She began writing passionately about the Christian concept of “kenosis,” or self-emptying. The act of letting go of ego and power and like Jesus committing to acts of self-sacrificial love. You don’t hear a lot of feminist theologians talk about self-sacrifice. For good reason! But McFague cared deeply about creation care and economic inequality and she worried our habits of overconsumption were killing one another and the earth. The only way forward was to practice radical restraint and humility. To give things up. McFague writes, “This ‘crisis’ has to do with how we live on a daily basis—the food we eat, the transportation we use, the size of the house we live in, the consumer goods we buy, the luxuries we allow ourselves, the amount of long-distance air travel we permit ourselves, and so forth. The enemy is the very ordinary life we ourselves are leading as well-off North Americans.” The kenotic paradigm, she says…includes the recognition that life’s flourishing on earth demands certain limitations and sacrifices at physical and emotional levels. The realities of our time mean that the vocabulary and sensibility of self-limitation, egolessness, sharing, giving space to others, and limiting our energy use no longer sound like a special language for the saints, but rather, like an ethic for all of us.” Pope Francis echoed this call in his 2019 Ash Wednesday address when he said, “We need to free ourselves from the clutches of consumerism and the snares of selfishness, from always wanting more, from never being satisfied, and from a heart closed to the needs of the poor,”

I hear them. I do. But then I remember my many failed attempts at an Amazon boycott. It’s hard! Our brains can be frighteningly simple sometimes, wired to desire instant gratification and to avoid discomfort. Sometimes self-denial feels like trying to overcome our very nature.

But this, this is what religion is good for. Some scholars say all theology is really anthropology. Religious traditions understand the best and worst of human nature and offer us stories and tools and frameworks for dealing with all the limits and possibilities of our humanness. There are ancient spiritual technologies that help us grapple with the idea that sometimes we need to let go of something, go without, give something up for our own good or for the good of our shared life together. Observances like Lent and Ramadan that give us a chance to practice this hard work. Now, I know these practices have caused a lot of harm for folks, and I do not want anyone to engage in a practice that might be physically or emotionally damaging. If you remember from our second reading, a fast can take many forms that aren’t just about food. So my goal isn’t to convince you to observe fast or ramadan, but to contemplate some of the ways these practices can be informative or instructive as we figure out how to live our lives in ways that lead to collective flourishing.

And there are three things about these practices that I want to lift up. First, they remind us, in Omid Safi’s words, that “Our Bodies Are Means by Which We Live Out Our Faith.” There is a materiality—and embodied quality to both Lent and Ramadan that reminds us that our bodies and souls are deeply connected. We can’t just think our faith, we have to live it, in the real world with the flesh and bones and earthy resources we’ve been given. Fasting or giving something up for 40 days helps remind us of the agency and power we have to express our faith in tangible, embodied ways. We might think it’s silly when our friends give up diet coke or chocolate for Lent, but that practice serves as a reminder that what we consume, when, and how is an expression of our faith values. These practices help strengthen that soul, body connection for us. They create short cuts in our brain that remind us that what we eat and how we travel and where we spend our money and how we spend our time are not disconnected from what we hold most sacred.

Second, these practices bring us deeper into community. They remind us we don’t and can’t do this alone. Whether it’s reducing our consumption and changing our habits to combat climate change, boycotting a business that’s supporting harmful policies, or better distributing our wealth and resources to care for the least of these, it’s going to take a critical mass to be successful. One person reducing single use plastics or refusing to shop at Target until they stop cooperating with ICE won’t have much of an impact. We need all of us. Lent and Ramadan invite us to practice fasting as a communal endeavor. We enter these seasons knowing generations of ancestors have already tread these spiritual paths. We know we have companions for the journey to hold us accountable and provide us encouragement, and we get to remember that the feast is that much more delicious when we’ve shared in the fast together. I love Omid Safi’s warm memory of his Arabic professor taking a group of students to Waffle House for the pre-dawn meal. The experience of living our embodied faith collectively is powerful.

And finally, and most importantly, these observances help reframe practices of self-restraint or sacrifice, seeing them not as pious acts of willpower done for their own sake, but as steps towards greater joy and wholeness. Sally McFague writes that we are called to “restraint, not for the sake of ascetic denial of the world, but in order that “abundant life” might be possible for all.” The work of achieving abundant life for all should be joyful work! If we’re going to stick in the fights for justice and equity for the long haul, we need to find pleasure and meaning in making decisions that serve our neighbor and care for the earth.

Ramadan and Lent remind us that there can be joy, richness, and spiritual fruits in practices of restraint. After all, Lent comes from an Old English word meaning “spring season.” It ends on Easter, with the promise of resurrection, of new and abundant life. Ramadan is a celebratory month, with each day’s fast ending in an iftar, a communal meal. Many people who celebrate these sacred practices will tell you that what is gained is far more than was given up. A deeper relationship with God or the sacred, a better understanding of what’s most important in their lives, a new sense of spaciousness when they let go of something that is no longer serving them.

Ramadan and Lent are reminders that restraint, denial, and sacrifice do not always look like loss. They are reminders that sometimes in giving something up, we can gain something more beautiful, more lasting, more worthwhile, more holy. And I don’t know about you, but I need those reminders. Because they will help give me the courage to let go of things that are no longer serving me, to give up the things that are no longer serving my community or the planet, even when it’s hard and uncomfortable and inconvenient.

During this season of fasting, this season of embodied, communal, joyful, faithful restraint, may we, in the words of Walter Bruggemenn, find ways to depart from the greedy, anxious anti-neighborliness of our economy, departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, depart from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And arrive in a new neighborhood.

May it be so. Amen.

© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026