as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, December 14, 2025
“‘Oh! It is only a novel!…!’ In short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.”
Only a novel, the best-chosen language, we begin our sermon with words from Jane Austen. Today, we celebrate her 250th birthday. So, just for a bit of good humor, can I get a “Happy Birthday Jane?”
Only a novel, Austen penned our opening words in defense of her chosen vocation. They appear in her posthumously published text Northanger Abbey.
It is neither her finest nor her best loved work. But the sentiments she expressed about the nature of literature within it offer us an orienting point as we embark upon the difficult task before us. That task is to reflect upon the legacy of one of the true masters of the English language while considering our present moment of danger.
Our present danger, in these times it can sometimes feel like we live amidst what the poet Kenneth Rexroth once named “the permanent emergency.” Look at social media, turn on the news, read a newspaper or a magazine–I still subscribe to a solid dozen print publications–and you might well feel like you, as the philosopher Susan Sontag put it, a constant “spectator of calamities.”
In these times, as she observed more than twenty years ago, “[a]n ample reserve of stoicism is needed to get through the [news] … each morning, given the likelihood of seeing … [images] that could make you cry.”
Tears certainly seem warranted this morning as we gather after the seventy-fifth school shooting of the year, this time at Brown University. Eyes wet, we recoil when we learn that eleven people have been killed by gunmen in Australia as they gathered to celebrate the beginning of Hanukkah. Hearts rendered, we lament the deaths of at least 383 Palestinians from Israeli attacks since the ceasefire took effect. Downcast, we hear news from Ukraine (a million without power following the most recent Russian attacks) and Sudan (attacks on a hospital and kindergarten earlier this week left more than a hundred dead). Revolted, we learn of I.C.E. rendering families, deporting children, leaving migrants to die in custody, and sending refugees to almost certain death.
An ample reserve of stoicism is needed to move through a list of such horrors. But the news of the hour, which I know weighs on many of us, is not the principal aspect of our moment of danger I invoke. Instead, I turn to something that I suspect but cannot prove. It is that such violence is linked to a failure in empathy.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It comes, often, when we are able to imagine someone else’s experiences–to recognize their tears as our own. Empathy fails when a shooter sees targets rather than people and cannot see find in their pain his own. Empathy is lacking when the Israeli solider shoots a Palestinian child and does not hear in the youngster’s screams the wails of his own children. Empathy is absent when I.C.E. agents drag a mother off the streets in full view of her family and do not experience in the howls of her horror pain like their own.
Empathy, I invite you to consider how it operates in your life. Are there people whose pain you find it easy to imagine? Others whose emotional experiences are more difficult to understand? The decision of who is worthy of our empathy and who is not is one of the most moral decisions that we will make in our lives. Can you extend your empathy equally to all humans or even to all beings? It is the spiritual task placed before us in religious teachings like the Metta meditation and the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. In the first we find the words: “May all beings in the universe be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.” In the second, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love.”
Empathy, we are winding our way back to Jane Austen, “[i]t is only a novel.” With the author we encounter her descriptions of her characters. In one her titular character, Emma, can be found wondering “what might be expected from … knowing” another. Considering one of her many interlocutors Emma ponders “whether his compliments were to be considered as marks of acquiesce, or proofs of defiance.” She seeks “to understand his ways.” She attempts to provoke empathy in herself for another.
This provocation of empathy of is one of the great gifts of the novel. Not the novel in particular–Northanger Abbey or Emma–but the novel in general–that genre that through the written words invites us to regard the pains and pleasures of others across human time and geography. The novel, that literary object which we lift up when we celebrate Jane Austen’s 250th birthday–can I get another “Happy Birthday Jane?”–and her insistence that in it are “greatest powers of the mind … displayed.”
The novel, the present moment of danger, the decline of empathy that I fear, seems to be connected to a global deterioration in literacy. Signs of it abound. In the New York Times, Dana Goldstein warns that in high schools in the United States “the age of the book may be fading.” Twelfth grade reading scores are at historic lows. In school districts across the country teachers are increasingly reluctant to assign whole books. Here in Houston Mike Miles has pretty much forbidden including whole books in the district’s curriculum. In many classrooms he has replaced novels with short passages on PowerPoint slides designed to increase test scores but not literacy.
A recent report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has found that literacy levels are “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. One historian has argued that literacy was higher in eighteenth century France than it is in the United States today. Reflecting on the situation, the journalist James Marriott has observed that “[o]nce upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.” “What happened,” instead, he observes, “was the smartphone.”
Now, I am not going to deliver some kind of anti-technological screed this morning. Though at some point religious leaders like me across the world are going to have engage in deep, collective, reflection on how technology is changing our spiritual lives. However, I do think it would be remiss not to discuss the decline of literacy on a Sunday when we celebrate one of the world’s favorite authors.
This decline in literacy appears to be connected to a decline in empathy. While correlation is not causation, it is notable that there is direct relationship between TikTok usage and the number of votes that far-right political parties receive. TikTok favors short, emotionally charged, content that often as not seems algorithmically designed to provoke fear of rather than empathy for others.
While the same can be true for some books–Mein Kampf or the unfortunate oeuvre of the Frenchman Renaud Camus come to mind–it is also true that literature is an invitation into the world of others.
This is the case with Austen. She invites us into the parlors and the dining rooms of wealthy English women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She bids us to travel with them on their walking paths and in their carriages as we consider their concerns. Some of us might response to such an invitation the way her friend Mr. Fowle is purported to have when he responded to Emma. He is said he “read only the first and last chapters because he had hear it was not interesting.” Others might find themselves more in agreement with “Mr. Jeffery, of the Edinburgh Review, [who] was kept up by it for three nights.”
Whatever our reaction, the invitation remains and in it we find the opportunity to contemplate the detailed portrayals of the lives of others. These others are not like us. That was part of the point of Austen’s efforts when she was writing. It is what gives her work something of a subversive quality in places. At a time when women were largely treated as passive property by their male relations, Austen insisted on portraying them as people full human agency.
That said, there is much reasonable criticism to be had of how Austen left whole categories of people out of her novels. Working class characters rarely appear with much development. It is rarely mentioned that the fortunes of most of the heroines are tied up in the slave trade, the forced labor camps euphemistically called plantations, or the brutalization of London’s poor.
But the desire of characters like Emma to secure a good martial match even as they are seemingly, perhaps willfully, oblivious to the sources of their wealth is its own invitation. It challenges us to ask what we are willing to put out of mind as we further our own pursuits.
Emma, like Austen’s other novels, is something of a comedy of errors. It depicts the maturation of the exceptionally rich, surely spoiled, Emma Woodhouse as she moved from matchmaker and meddler to married. Throughout the novel Emma is constantly trying to imagine the needs and desires of others–to practice empathy–so that she can provide them with happiness by helping them find the ideal mate. She helps arrange a wonderful match for her governess. She almost ruins a friend’s prospects when she convinces her to turn down a seemingly ideal suitor because she imagines him to not be her friend’s “equal.” The novel ends, as most such texts do, with the satisfying conclusion of all rightly married and in love with Emma herself experiencing “the perfect happiness of … [her] union.”
If you have not read it, or if you have, I invite you to join me this coming Thursday at 7:00 p.m. for a discussion of the text. I would also encourage you to attend the arts forum today where renowned scholar Helena Michie will be reflecting on the importance of Austen’s legacy.
Whether you participate in either event, I hope that the summary I have provided will be at least have piqued your interest in what is by turns a humorous and insightful novel. The humor is reflected in its widespread popularity as a source for film, television, and even other novels. There is the 1995 Alicia Silverstone vehicle “Clueless.” The BBC has made a seemingly infinite list of adaptations.
The insight is found in the way the novel serves as a constant source scholarly exploration. While it is a classic text, professors of literature are not the only ones who probe it. The economist Thomas Piketty has used to it to marshal his analysis on the nature of inequality. The political scientist Michael Chwe has found written an entire book in which he explores how the love lives of Austen’s characters might help us better understand game theory.
The richness of her texts is directly tied to the way in which she built them out of her own experiences. Like most of her characters, Austen was born into a family of the landed gentry. Her father, however, was a clergyman–the profession often of the poor relations in such families–and her parents lived on the edges of the upper class.
It is probably due to this precarity that she developed such an insight into the nature of marriage amongst the wealthy English people who surrounded her. Her own love affair was deemed to be futile because neither she nor her potential suitor had sufficient financial resources to support a life together in the manner that their families and social circles expected.
So, she turned her attention to writing. Three of her novels were published anonymously during her lifetime, female authorship was then largely a thing not to be done, and the other three came to print only after she died at the young age of 41.
I could recount more of her brief life and stunning literary output. But that would take us far beyond the bounds of this sermon. Instead, I hope that on this anniversary of her birth–can we get one more, “Happy Birthday, Jane?”–I have a prompted a little interest in what is to be found in her texts. There is much richness there.
But more than that, I hope that, in these days of declining literacy, I hope that I maybe have encouraged you to read just a little bit more. It will, I suspect, help you improve your empathy–your ability to consider the lives of others–and expand your understandings of the world. For, as we find in Austen’s work, a novel or any other text rarely just a text. It can be an invitation into all sorts of things: economics, game theory, or even the love lives of English women more than two hundred years ago.
Mostly, though, I want to encourage you to read. We lift up reading this morning because there is perhaps no other spiritual practice more central to the Unitarian Universalist tradition. Indeed, our religious tradition can be understood as emerging from disputes about the interpretation and nature of texts. But that is a story, for another Sunday. Instead, I invite you ask yourself, here at the close, how has your theological development, your spiritual development, been influenced by reading? Has it helped you to understand something of the lives of others?
In asking those questions, I offer you a gentle spiritual challenge for the coming year. Find time to put down your smartphone and read one more book–all the way through–over the coming year than you would otherwise. If you do not read often you can begin with the discipline of just reading something at the rate of a page day. Before you know it you will be all the way through a book. If you read often, well, then… maybe see how much more you can read!
In doing so, I suspect that you might help encourage others to read and, in your own way, inspire them to imagine the lives of others. That is certainly something we do through our work with the little libraries project and efforts to reverse the state takeover of HISD. Today, we might do it not just because it is a good thing to do but in honor of Jane Austen, a writer long dead, who encouraged her readers to have a bit more empathy for those around. May we, like her, do what we can to imagine the lives of others.
That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
