as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, November 16, 2025
“The tragedy of life is not that … [people lose] but that … [we] almost [win],” the journalist Heywood Broun once quipped. It is not a bad summation of the human experience. Most lives, even lived poorly or amidst the greatest of hardships, contain at least some fragments of joy, some snatches of love.
The cartoonist Keith Knight has an ongoing bit in his comic strip “The K Chronicles” designated to sharing “life’s little victories.” These are those small moments of beauty, hope, inspiration, or satisfaction that burst forth unbidden. They include the mundane and possibly absurd–“#4155: Leaving a cup of java on the roof of your car & driving off … and it’s still there when you reach your destination”–as well as the extraordinary and perhaps profound–“#4159 Your teenager from … [heck] battles you every step of the way” [the panel shows a father crying “Where did I go wrong?” while his daughter screams, “Why can’t I sniff glue & date 30 year olds?!! everybody’s doing it! I hate you!”] “and then ten years later she lists you as hero on her … [social media].”
But, whatever wins there are, however little or big the victories, we all come to a different point. Mary Oliver, that poet beloved by so many Unitarian Universalists, invited us to face it well when she asked, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”
“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” Considering such queries, I am convinced that one of our true struggles is to hold on to the good–life’s little victories “#71923 turning on the shower … and the temp[arture] is perfect!”–while accepting that life is filled with loss and grief.
The two are often interlinked. In that powerful text, “Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake reminded us, in dated language:
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
Now, in recent months I have struggled. There has been rather more grief in my life than joy. It has been hard, at times, to recall the “silken twine” that Blake reminds us “runs” under every woe.
I suspect that the same has been true for many of you. I know that in our congregation there have been personal challenges in this last year: the dissolution of relationships; federal employees furloughed during the government shutdown; struggles with food insecurity as the President weaponized economic aid and turned a basic nutrition program into a bargaining chip; friends or family members kidnapped by I.C.E.; the deaths of loved ones; illnesses; and all the accompanying hardships of human mortality. I imagine that for some of you such things have made it a challenge to find that “silken twine.”
The matter has been made worse by the political cruelty of the President and his acolytes. Lavish parties at Mar-a-Lago while families line the streets seeking help from food banks, huge tax breaks that condemn some of the planet’s poorest to further ignominy and death, false promises of an end to genocide in Palestine, climate crisis denial, the administration’s most favored Afrikaner on track to become the world’s first trillionaire–we do not need billionaires, let alone a trillionaire–there is much in public life to grieve.
It is a central purpose of our gathering to hold us in both private and public grief, to help us recall the silken twines in times of woe. When we say we are building the Beloved Community we mean that we are devoting ourselves to, in the words of Sofía Betancourt, creating a space where “we are constantly connected to a hope-filled belief in human goodness and capacity for love.” The Buddhist tradition lifts up three jewels to assist us in our suffering, living through the inevitable grief of having lives in which we have almost won. One of these is the sangha, the religious community.
When you enter our sanctuary, or join us online, you are invited into a space where you can share your grief and work to sooth the grief of others. That is one way in which I interpret two lines from our covenant, “Love is the spirit of our congregation … and to encourage one another.” Such a spirit represents one of the great silken twines.
Like most authentic religious communities, we testify to our shared love through our ongoing ministries of compassion: the visits of the care team to sick and shut-in members, the aid we give each other when we are in need, the shared parenting of religious exploration, and the assurances, the celebrations, the joys, we offer each in worship, in small groups, and in all that is our life together.
At our best, we exemplify our shared love, as many religious communities do, when we live out that old socialist slogan, “from each according to [their abilities], to each according to [their] needs.” It is a slogan inspired, not coincidentally, by the Christian New Testament. In the Acts of the Apostles it reads, “the disciples agreed to make a contribution, each according to his means, for the relief of their fellow[s].”
Joining this community does more than just provide us with a way to accompany each other in our private griefs. It offers us a religious tradition from which we can understand our public griefs and even find sources of hope, silken twines, such that we might survive them.
Throughout this program year we have been turning to our history as a tradition of religious dissenters to aid us in our reckoning with that public grief. Writing immediately after the 2024 election, Rebecca Solnit offered us reflections on just how overwhelming that public grief can feel. Describing the attitude of the victors, the proponents of the politics of cruelty, she wrote, “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything.” But she observed in another essay, the “unforeseen regularly happens.” We are charged, in her words, not to take the “short-term view [which] breeds defeatism and despair.” Instead, we are called to lean into the long-term one in which we come to understand that “crucial change” is always possible, it just does not happen immediately, completely, or even permanently. “Once you create a new of what is possible and acceptable,” she observed, “the seeds are planted; once it becomes what the majority believes, you’ve created the conditions in which winning happens.”
The planting of seeds, the lifting of silken twines, the historian Robin Kelley names this work freedom dreaming, the act of seeing “life as possibility” even in times of defeat and despair. It is the work of proclaiming “the kind of politics” and building the kind of religious community that has “more to do with imagining a different future than being pissed off with the present.”
Such dreaming has long been one of the dimensions of our dissenting tradition. Each Sunday we say that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. The phrase comes from “A Letter to Hebrews” in the Christian New Testament where it reads, in part, “With the great cloud of witnesses around us, therefore, we must throw off every encumbrance … and run with resolution the race which lies ahead of us.” The words are a reminder
that Unitarian Universalists have long struggled to bring about our aspirations for a better world, to live in a society where, to invoke Cornel West, justice is what love looks like in public. One our great religious ancestors who invites us into freedom dreaming during times of despair, who points a way to sit with our public grief even as we hold all of our private griefs, is the poet John Milton.
You might not think of him as a Unitarian. His name rarely gets dropped in the rarified circle of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, or Mary Wollstonecraft, that collection of eighteenth and nineteen century divines that we often think of as our religious ancestors. But Milton was a religious dissenter who held distinctly anti-trinitarian views, conceiving of Jesus not as the same entity as God but as “a distinct being from God.”
William Ellery Channing, the nineteenth century Unitarian theologian to which our tradition owes so much, thought so highly of Milton that he wrote a short book titled “Remarks on the Character and Writings of John Milton.” In it he not only lifted up the poet’s “constant attachment to liberty” and detailed how he was devoted “freedom of thought …, of conscience and worship, freedom to seek, profess, and propagate truth” but emphasized Milton’s Unitarianism. Channing held the poet to be one of our greatest forebears and his poem “Paradise Lost” to be “perhaps the noblest monument of human genius.”
It is possible that you have heard neither the poet’s name nor thought of his poem before. Milton was a seventeenth century political and religious radical as well as a writer. Educated at Cambridge, he was a defiant believer in the importance of the separation of the church and the state. He defended freedom of speech and freedom of the press when such positions bordered on heresy. An opponent of the Church of England, he mocked bishops, and took the revolutionary cause during the English Civil War. A staunch supporter of republics–res publica, the people shall rule–he wished for no kings in England, made no apologies when Charles I lost his head, and served the Commonwealth as a chief propagandist for those opposed to monarchs.
But opposition to monarchs did not long endure. The king was beheaded. The people ruled. Then a king was restored. Milton’s friends were imprisoned, tortured, and executed. He escaped the noose or the blade. A wanted man, he hid while his writings were burned.
Isolated, alone, impoverished, his beloved wife recently dead, the light gone out, born with sight he died blind in both eyes, pushed to the social margins, all his cherished causes in retreat, the poet summoned his genius and composed his great text as he struggled with private and public grief:
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
The poem, you might recall, recounts the tale of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Elaborating greatly on a text found in the Hebrew Bible, Milton recounts how, tempted by the fallen angel, they eat the fruit of knowledge, anger God, and are expelled from paradise.
Their tale of loss an original story of public grief. Once humanity had utopia, the story goes, all was right with the world, all the freedom dreams had been realized. There was universal healthcare, quality education–Mike Miles and Mike Morath had nothing to do with our schools, children who needed special education received it–mass transit worked, everyone who wanted to work could find a job with grace and dignity, there were homes for all–no one struggling on the streets of Houston–and everyone had an abundance of the good things in life. Eden was supposed to be something like that. But humanity strayed, and lost it all.
The poem was, no doubt, an allegory for all that Milton thought had been destroyed when a king returned to the English throne. Written in the midst of his grief, though, he did not proclaim an ending that imagined the permanent victory of monarchs. Instead, he invited his readers to dream with him of future possibilities. Pushed out of the garden, the temporary utopia of the republic that flourished without the king gone, Milton did not close his poem with a note of enduring despair or overwhelming grief. Instead, he encouraged his readers to understand that the possibility of freedom still lay before them. Its penultimate verses read:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide
Such thick history may sit ill on a Sunday morning. But within it I think can be found some hope and assurance that together, amidst the greatest of difficulties, we might say with the playwright Samuel Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Being religious dissenters, in time when Christian nationalists seek to merge reactionary theology with law, means consistently proclaiming the importance of the separation of the church and the state. In Greg Abbott’s Texas it might even mean invoking the words of the late poet Gil Scott-Heron who said, “Especially … [that] church and that state.”
It also means proclaiming the right to conscience. When they try to require public schools to post the ten commandments it means saying, religious choice is a matter of private conscience. When they outlaw women’s reproductive health it means saying, reproductive choice is a matter of private conscience. When they oppose gender affirming care, target the transgender community, seek to strip crosswalks of rainbow beauty, it means says that gender identity and consensual love are private matters of the heart.
Our tradition, Milton and so many others remind us, calls us to say loudly, clearly, no religious community should use the law to dictate morality for everyone. This the poet knew, writing in the seventeenth century, that “freedom … consists either in spiritual or civil liberty. … who can be at rest, who can enjoy anything … who hath not liberty to serve God … according to the best light God hath planted … [inside] to that purpose?”
“The best light God hath planted,” aged words that remind us that our tradition calls us to look first to the divine spark, the power to leave each other and the world around us, that leaps from each to each, first for religious authority. We seek validation in scriptures, from the law, from philosophers, from theologians, from poets, from preachers only second. First though, it is always, the “likeness of God,” as Channing preached, or the “best light God hath planted,” as Milton put it. First the love found in each of our hearts, second everything else.
In the midst of our griefs, private and public, the love inscribed in each breast and proclaimed in our covenant, “Love is the spirit of our congregation,” should cause each of us to always ask two questions. First, how can I demonstrate my love to others? Second, how can I carry on the tradition of dissent–where justice becomes what love looks like in public?
The answers to such questions are never definitive. “The world was all before them, where to choose,” the poet told us. But they can be found, in part, here and in other religious communities where, during times like these, when it feels as if we live in the midst of defeat, when it appears, in Solnit’s words, that those who “want … [us] to feel powerless and to surrender … [as that they might] trample everything” are winning, when we seek to actualize love together in our shared work of compassion and when we invite each other to dream of freedom, of what will come after this time of public grief.
Our tradition invites us into such imaginings, such dreamings. They are found in “Paradise Lost.” They are also encountered in the words and actions of so many of our other religious ancestors who lived during times of public grief and yet still managed to proclaim that another world is possible. This Sunday, and every Sunday, let us invite the dreams of our religious ancestors, our dissenting forebears, to be with us so that they might inspire us, even in the most difficult of times, to speak not of paradise lost but of paradise found.
That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
