Sunday, January 11, 2026
Reading followed by the Sermon, text is below the video.
READING
Read by Rev. F. Vernon Wright V, Excerpts from Spiritual Freedom (1830), by William Ellery Channing
SERMON
Of Mind, Matter, and the Pursuit of Justice, by Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Reading: Spiritual Freedom by William Ellery Channing
READING LINKSermon: Of Mind Matter and the Pursuit of Justice, by Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
My great aunt Peggy, on my mother’s side, was a Christian Scientist. Raised in a Protestant Irish immigrant family, which was subjected to a fair amount of trauma, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy set her mind on fire. The notion that the mind steadfastly situated in Christ could control matter appealed to her.
My great uncle Herb, her husband, was an impeccable dresser, and a full on germaphobe. Visiting our home where we raised chickens, had no running water, and an outhous,e was a real stretch to him. He followed us around with hand wipes the whole time he was there. It didn’t occur to me until this year that his germaphobic mindset may have indeed been inspired by the reality that medical help was verboten.
And of course, there was a time when my mom didn’t believe in modern medicine either. We had our own version of mind over matter. Good gardeners, who were super tuned into nature, could become healers. One time, I slipped on a dock, skinned my ankle, and it got infected. I spent hours bathing it in a comfrey solution mixed with golden seal, all grown on our property. The red line shooting up from my infected, swollen ankle, going up to my groin, and the intense fever made her relent. We went to our homeopath, and he had the good sense to suggest that sometimes antibiotics could augment the more homeopathic, and herb-based remedies. After four days of antibiotics, I was well on the way to recovery. A crack began to appear in the idea that modern medicine was bogus for us, NH woods hippie Wrights.
It’s not that I think that positivity has no role in healing, or, for that matter, prayer. It’s not that I don’t think that carefully gardening herbs and using them in the early stages of a cold, or maybe to wind down a little after an anxious day, is a bad idea. No, what I object to is this kind of misunderstanding of what the free mind truly is, what critical thinking really is, and how it has more power to shape matter than most other ways of thinking.
When William Ellery Channing, the man most responsible for the creation of the Unitarian tradition in the United States, talks about the free mind, even today I am both challenged and inspired; we began the reading with the dire predicament of humanity, crooks and narcissist most benefit at the expense of others, and the material nature of our very bodies, seems to conspire against us, and end the reading with a warning about how hard it is to change the deluded mind… But the mid part! The mid part invokes a mind so free and so capable, even the stars themselves should shudder at least a little!
It should inspire us! This is the man who contended against the more orthodox and legalistic minds of the very tradition I served before coming here! “Yes, speak all you wish about liberal ideas of social justice, and fairness and equity, but each sermon must organize itself around the teaching of Christ or the wisdom of an ancient prophet!” Really? Is that the best we can do? What does Christ himself reveal, other than that we are so close to God and so beloved that the wisdom of the cosmos is ours, what we bind in heaven is bound, and what we loose is loosed, and each of us capable of our own private hell, or public one, or paradise, or Idaho even if that’s what you want. In other words, the mind itself- the mind of every man, woman, or them, is so rich and so strange and so freeing, to seek to confine it would be a crime. Just listen again to his words:
I call that mind free, which escapes the bondage of matter, which, instead of stopping at the material universe and making it a prison wall, passes beyond it to its Author, and finds in the radiant signatures which everywhere bears of the Infinite Spirit, helps to its own spiritual enlightenment.
I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man mater, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad, not to supersede but to quicken and exhalt its own energies.
Matter and the material universe was important. You had to know it and master it. But you also needed your imagination and ability to dream about it and be able to contemplate it for the purposes of enlightenment. He also says that no person should be viewed as mater: as an object to manipulate or destroy on a whim for some greater purpose, but someone who might be a able to teach and inspire you and broaden your view of culture, history, and the world.
And what if Channing, who came of age in the last decades of the 1700, had been able to look through the Webb telescope, and to understand the mathematics and insights of an Einstein or a Heisenberg, or ponder the event horizon of a black hole, or plumb the depths of the nature of dark matter? What then? Yes, he may indeed see the signatures of the infinite Spirit, and love the mind even more.
The scientific method and critical thinking, whether applied to religion, or culture or history, or race, or gender, helps distinguish the knowledge of tradition from the new truth emerging, waiting to be embraced and sparked into life. Critical thinking and the scientific method helped us see that racism, sexism, homophobia is a disease that deprives individuals of their full potential. Critical thinking and the scientific method helped us see that the plant and animal kingdom contribute more to us and are more precious and special than we ever knew. We now know that the human mind and body is both more capable of more than we thought, and also more fragile to toxins than we thought. Critical thinking and the scientific method revealed that the planet is more fragile and beautiful, and the amount of carbon dioxide we produce matters. And yes, we can still protect it, so that it will flourish, and the diversity of species will continue, and the oxygen on it will be breathable, and the giant cities across the globe won’t all be completely flooded. Critical thinking and the scientific method has revealed that we can work together in a democratic way to achieve these goals. We can use government to help better lives, not just the very rich lives of the ruling class.
The mind can change matter, just not the way my great aunt Peggy or my parents or people like RFK JR thought. The mind is not something you impose on the material world to shape into your vision of what it should be, it is something you use like a lens to see more clearly, more carefully to understand the details you couldn’t at first see.
Ah, yes, the mind is so beautiful… And so ugly too… I mentioned how Channing would have felt being able to encounter the James Webb Telescope. But what if he saw the more ugly side of the twentieth and twenty-first century? What if he pondered the horrors of Auschwitz, and Nagasaki, and murder of Renee Nicole and the defense of the shooting by the President of the United States himself, yes, what then? What if this same president, when asked by the New York Times, what would limit his power and he said “I guess it would be my own mind.” I mean, not the Constitution of the United States, though?
To understand the stakes of our planet, the fragility and beauty of it, the preciousness of each human life, and say yes lets take a bulldozer to all of it, only me, Donald Trump gets to say what is fair that is one very ugly thing. As Channing says
I know how little this freedom is understood and enjoyed, how enslaved men are to sense, and passion, and the world; and I know, too, that through this slavery they are wretched, and that while it lasts no social institution can give them happiness.
Oh yes, and think of the way a fascist tyrant imposes his mind on matter, to destroy dissent, to lie about events, and to impose only his own ego upon the world? Conventions here might say that I should include the female gender in this, but even a Majorie Tyler Green wouldn’t go that far!
Who in this nation shall devote itself to the free mind instead of the shackled, raped, imposed upon mind? I stood shoulder to shoulder with many of you yesterday as we remembered the life of Renee Nicole and so many others in detention camps illegally, or who’s lives were destroyed because perhaps they had brown skin and they didn’t happen to have a real ID or a passport on them.
I know many of you are so angry you could scream. And your ability to use your critical thinking skills and to trust the scientific method, has brought you to this anger because you see the same stakes as clearly as I do. I myself was so overwhelmed I could scarily concentrate or sleep the other day. But I read something that had a profound effect on me. When Thich Nhat Hanh decided to leave the monastery in Vietnam to work for peace, he said this: “It is not enough to work for peace, you have to be peace.” And so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not going to just work for the free mind and stand up for it, I’m going to be it, live it, and I invite you to do the same! There is a relationship between this mind and this matter and this pursuit of justice, and we can not only desire and long for it, but we can become it! Let us continue to write and share our ideas, let us continue to inspire and protest, but also let us continue to meditate and contemplate the very values of the free mind we wish to embody. And when we become what we most long for, I wouldn’t want to be the one in the bulldozer seat, driving the engine to destroy the best institutions of our democracy!
Blessed Be!
