The Rev. Dr. Kelly Murphy Mason, Community Minister for Spiritual Direction, Arlington Street Church, Boston. File photo by Jeffrey Blackwell/Memorial Church Communications
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The Rev. Dr. Kelly Murphy Mason
Community Minister for Spiritual Direction
Arlington Street Church, Boston
(The following is a transcript of the service audio)
May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart, be pleasing in your sight, oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer. However, a few inclinations there are that along our stretch of New England, the first day of spring arrives tomorrow. Looking out the windows of this Venerable church, you will observe bare branches without a budding leaf to be found. To one side you see Harvard Yard and the clear blue sky stretching above it. To the other side, you see the cement courtyard of Canaday Hall surrounded by boxy brick buildings. Take in this view. What is there to see here? In my adult life, I've spent a lot of time gazing out the windows of churches, catching glimpses of the great beyond. Churches are particularly a good place to catch them, but I was not always comfortable in church. I did not always feel invited in or warmly welcomed there. By the time I started my first year as an undergraduate at Harvard College, I was already estranged from the religion of my upbringing.
I had been shamed and silenced by it too many times in my youth. I no longer wanted to go to the church my family did because I knew where I was not wanted. I knew where I did not belong. My freshman dorm room was located in Canaday A on the third floor of Entryway A, right over there. My single room off the hallway may have been the one closest to Memorial Church in all of Harvard Yard. Whenever church bells rang, my windows were verberated with their sound. I had such a beautiful vista. I came to know the gleaming White Steeple in all kinds of light. I studied it whenever I had trouble falling asleep at night and whenever I woke up early in the morning. As many students do, I struggled for months to make the transition to undergraduate life, so I knew the Steeple in various shades of dusk and dawn. The heavy metal door to my entryway could not have been more than a hundred feet from the entrance to this church on a wet day when the pavement was slick, I could have accidentally stumbled up its steps.
I could have found a way inside, but I did not. I thought that churches were for people who were more polished, more presentable than I was, who were ready to meet a waiting public in their Sunday best. Honestly, it never once occurred to me to set foot in this place. Four years later, my roommates and I traveled from our river house to Harvard Yard wearing our caps and gowns and joined, joined the rest of the class of 1992 for our College Senior Chapel led then by the late Reverend Peter Gomes. He was Pusey minister at the time, and the year before, he had come out as a gay Christian. In 1991, that was a far more controversial proposition than it is today. As an editor at the Harvard Crimson, I knew he made news, I had no idea that he could preach. That morning he delivered a lovely pastoral sermon sounding resident notes of assurance. Sitting in these pews, I suddenly had a moment of poignant recognition. My years at Harvard would have gone better if I had come to this church earlier.
Some of you may be familiar with the work of Professor Tyler VanderWeele who teaches Epidemiology in Biostatistics at the Chan School of Public Health. He also serves as director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. His research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of wellbeing. Time and again, he has found that participation in religious community supports fuller human flourishing across the lifespan. In one interview, he divined flourishing this way, "It's living the good life." In the interest of encouraging us living good lives, Professor VanderWeele has devised a flourishing measure that allows us to gauge our varying levels of flourishing at any given time. If you are interested in that, you can find it online very easily.
The measure asks people to consider 12 key questions, among them, how satisfied they are with life overall, how happy or unhappy they generally feel, how well they understand their purpose in life and find the things they do worthwhile. How often they act to promote good in all circumstances, even in difficult or challenging situations. How able they feel to give up some happiness now for greater happiness later, and how content they are with their friendships and relationships. These are questions we all need to be considering deeply. As a religious professional, I also believe these are questions our faith communities should be putting before us regularly. Last spring I began convening the Spirituality and Flourishing Interest group in the Harvard Flourishing Network, and now we are getting close to the end of the conclusion of our first program year. We define ourselves as a multi-faith, inter spiritual and cross-disciplinary gathering of individuals with members from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Egypt, participating in a global teaching learning community. Together we consider how we might foster flourishing through various spiritual and religious traditions, communities, approaches, observances, teachings and practices.
Together we explore the sorts of interventions and involvements that could allow us to tap the spiritual and religious resources available to us individually and collectively, and develop further our human capacities for connectedness. It is timely and important work. At a recent Harvard alumni event, a woman asked me a series of probing questions about this group. She objected to almost all of my answers. She took issue with a central finding in Professor VanderWeele's work, that involvement in religious community offers protective and salutary benefits on a number of physical and mental health measures. As she grew more upset, I asked her to help me better understand the nature of her resistance to this information. She told me that she had been searching for years for a religious community that she and her family could call home and never found one that felt comfortable to them. Immediately, I appreciated the depth, the gravity and the merit of her lament.
In the story we heard from the Gospel of John this morning, Jesus is once again working as healing ministry in yet another unlikely place. This healing story differs from other gospel accounts, in crucial respects though we do not hear Jesus asking the blind beggar if he wants his sight restored, nor do we hear him telling the man that he has great faith. Instead, we witnessed Jesus staging a fairly immediate intervention. In response to this question, the disciples posed to him, "Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?" To their minds, disability is a divine judgment that results in earthly punishments such as this. Jesus replies with a pithy neither nor response. He insists that the man was born so the glory of God could be revealed in him. "We must work the works of the one who sent me while it is day," Jesus tells them, preparing a healing balm of mud for the man's eyes.
Later, the local religious authorities refused to accept the formerly blind man's first person report of this miraculous healing because by their own accounting there are too many sinners involved in it. The blind man born in sin, his sinning parents and the sinning healer who healed on the Sabbath day. The prejudices that they express in this story sadly persist to this day. Too often we are told that those who struggle or suffer are providing the world with evidence of their personal shortcomings, not our systemic failings, not that they are calling out all of us for greater support. What I admire so tremendously about the formerly blind man is how stubbornly his not knowing resides alongside his personal certitude.
He will not puzzle out the riddle the local authorities opposing to him because he rejects its foundational premise. Here is an astonishing thing he tells them, "You do not know where Jesus comes from, and yet he opened my eyes." To borrow from our contemporary parlance, the formerly blind man has a clinical sensibility. He knows when something has demonstrated its effectiveness even if he does not understand its mechanism of action. Here is an astonishing thing he declares, implicit in his declaration is an invitation for all of us to be similarly astonished. Over the years, I have had the remarkable privilege of working multi vocational ministries as an ordained minister, licensed psychotherapist, spiritual director and educator, I have been given so many marvelous opportunities to notice very many astonishing things. Several years ago, I was director of a pastoral care and counseling training program in New York City, and the vast majority of our students were international.
They came from Asian countries, Caribbean and Latin American nations and Eastern Europe. They served churches with immigrant populations and stressed urban environments, and to an extent, my ministerial colleagues in my denomination have never been asked to. They were providing frontline mental healthcare and social services. Whatever hesitation they might have had initially about Western psychology, they were eager to gain helping skills and master counseling techniques. They were willing to do whatever worked for those who came to them for support. They would do anything to witness an astonishing thing. In its last years, that program was gloriously ecumenical and pulled pastors from a range of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches. In my office I had framed a passage from Ireneaus of Lyons, "The glory of God is the human person fully alive." That statement of belief was the beating heart of the religion that we all shared. A couple of years later, I was teaching spiritually informed treatment to graduate students in a specialized psychology program at a major university, most of them recent graduates of four year colleges.
They were reluctant to mix religion with their spirituality, preferring instead to have spirituality in its purest form, unadulterated by tradition. They had difficulty accepting findings like Professor VanderWeele, that it was specific religious involvements and commitments such as regularly attending services at house of worship that were most beneficial to people's mental and physical health because such findings posed us with an ethical dilemma of sorts. With such robust findings, clinicians by right could recommend worshiping and community to their clients with the same confidence they recommended having a exercise routine, say. Only none of the clinicians I knew ever did. What each of us distrusted was the kind of religious community our clients might connect to. In that process, we had a concern not to promulgate religion that harmed instead of healed. Any religion that was shame-based and preoccupied with sinfulness and depravity instead of our human capacity for wholeness and our native inclination toward flourishing. The sad reality is that bad religion gives all religion a bad name. As a clinician, I am called to address barriers to treatment, as a clergy person, I am called to address barriers to entry into our faith communities.
If individuals think they can only come to church by putting their best foot forward, they may never set foot inside. Why should they if those are our expectations? Those of us in churches today are challenged to take Jesus at his word. He tells his disciples, "I am come, that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly." Whether we call it having abundant life or living the good life as Professor VanderWeele says, we are still describing human flourishing. What if we as people of faith actively sought to support one another in those domains, enumerated in flourishing research, happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, material security and close relationship. In his writing, Professor VanderWeele reminds us that simply asking a question is staging an intervention. At the outset of all my sessions of spiritual direction, depending upon the directee I am working with at the time, I will ask one of two questions, "How is it with your spirit or how is it with your soul?"
Curiosity always marks our point of departure into deeper spiritual exploration. Today in this church, because I am wondering, I ask each of you, how is it with your spirit? How is it with your soul? Turn within for just a moment. Let your spirit and soul know that you desire their counsel. You may not have definitive answers at the ready just yet, but trust me, they are worth seeking. The meaning that you make in of with your life matters tremendously, not only to me, not only to the congregation gathered here this morning, not only to the clergy and the chancellor, but to the wider world and to your God. I can say these sorts of things with some degree of confidence because people for reasons that still remain inscrutable to me, keep inviting me into their pulpits.
When I was a young Harvard student taking in that panoramic view with the church Steeple as its soaring centerpiece, I knew it signified some paramount principle that I needed to grasp for myself even if I never ventured inside or attended a single Sunday service. Hearing the choir sing that beloved psalm earlier this morning, we listen for echoes of the timeless word of a psalmist, surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. Surely, goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. Surely? Surely. Sitting here together, we are tempted to believe that with all our hearts and souls, and mind and strength. Here too is an astonishing thing.
My dear friend, the Reverend Carl Scovel, minister of Emeritus of King's Chapel in Boston is an evangelist for what he calls The Great Surmise. In a 1994 address he declared, "The Great Surmise is simply this: At the heart of all creation lies a good intent, a purposeful goodness from which we come, by which we live our fullest to which we shall at last return and this is the supreme reality of our lives," he insists. Adding that we must know first of all, the love from which we are born, which bears us now and which receives us at the end. Our work on earth is to explore, enjoy and share this goodness, to know it without reserve or hesitation. What he terms The Great Surmise is an indispensable article of faith for any ministry of human flourishing. The human flourishing program at Harvard garnered a great deal of media attention a couple of years ago when in the midst of the pandemic. There was considerable justified worry about how many Americans were languishing or worse, despairing of their lives.
This week marks the three-year anniversary of widespread closures nationwide. In March 2020, the university closed its dorms. This church closed its doors. Students were sent home, and thus began semesters of online instruction. In the aftermath of our long pandemic years, we are feeling keenly, the need to do more than survive. We hope more and more of us can actually thrive. Hearing the Reverend Gomes preach his sermon to the class of 1992 in this very sanctuary was a pivotal moment for me personally. But then it took me a couple of years of searching before I found a religious community on my ow, and I was welcomed when Palm Sunday into church membership. Ask me what he said at that senior chapel and I will be able to provide you with only the broadest outlines. I do not remember a single scripture read in the service, yet I remember vividly how I felt when he gave the final benediction, which is how any of us should feel at such a moment. I felt blessed.
Like many churchgoers, I believe I was profoundly changed by words I can no longer remember. I resembled the formerly blind man in that respect. My not knowing resided alongside my certitude. Now, I understand better and better that people come to churches to receive the blessing of their being. Of course, we need to open our doors to them. When I came to Memorial Church this morning, the temperature was below freezing, in all likelihood, you too brought your winter coat with you today. Despite this being the tail end of spring break at the college, there is no foliage peeking out at us. Our days may not be warmer for a while yet. The perceptible shift at this time of year is only in the sunlight. It has begun brightening as our side of the earth starts its sunward tilt.
Tomorrow evening will mark the vernal equinox and soon our days will be more light than not. In that gorgeous passage from the epistle of the Ephesians, we are told, "Live as children of light for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true." Just as our eyes must adjust to darkness, so too must they adjust to light, so look out and up in the coming days and notice the way things here have already become lighter. This Lenten season will soon lead to Holy Week, which will then lead to Easter with its flowers in full bloom. As spring begins in earnest, our stretch of New England will get its green at last. When the seizing of flourishing finally arrives, we will not question it. This Sunday, all we can do is anticipate it and for now, that may be enough.