The Road Ahead ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
November 8, 2026
I’m hoping that everyone here is feeling relieved this morning as a result of the midterm elections held this past Tuesday. Regardless of your political party affiliation, anyone who genuinely cares about our country and our democratic norms should find it affirming that so many people got to their feet and let their voices be heard. I know I’m smiling more the past few days, as my jaw has relaxed the clenched position it’s been stuck in for the past several years.
It’s great to take a break from worry and grief. But we know that the work is not yet done. The current administration is already letting us know that they will try to ignore our clear message.
I’ve heard it said before and will say it here: democracy isn’t something we have. It’s something we do. It’s easy for us here in the United States to be lulled into a sense of complacency about authoritarianism; that it can’t or won’t happen here. We rely on our structures and our laws to prevent that, but often we think that we, the people, don’t have to get personally involved. But what we have seen over the past few years is that it really isn’t all that hard to dismantle the norms, to tear up the fabric of all that we take for granted, all that we believe is holding us together. For someone like me, who has studied government, these past 10 years have been disheartening, and frustrating, and so very sad.
The poet Walt Whitman once wrote a poem called States. It begins:
“Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?”
The answer to those questions posed by Whitman, of course, is ‘no’. As hard as the lawyers and courts have worked in the past two years to uphold our Constitution, clearly we need more than that, more than them. We have seen that we are far too vulnerable, far too complacent. We’ve been forgetting to ‘do’ democracy.
Our theme this month is Healing, and so, while this morning is partly about celebrating, enjoying all the good news we’ve heard in the past five days, it’s also a time to begin to take stock, to look at how we begin to confront the great work of healing that our country needs to do to recover from the past ten years.
Before we talk about what the road before us looks like, we’re going to take a step back – far back, as it happens. We’re going to take the Way Back Machine all the way to the 1830’s, when our country was brand-new and the novelty of the world. In 1831 a French political philosopher named Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to the new United States and recorded his impressions into a book titled Democracy in America. This book proved to be prophetic, and is still regarded as an important contribution to our political history almost 200 years later.
De Tocqueville was trying to answer some very basic questions about our new democracy, including what made the United States unique, and how the new form of government could be sustained into the future. He posited, as did Walt Whitman, that this new system would be sustained by habits and beliefs, what the author Parker J. Palmer calls ‘habits of the heart’, rather than by laws, as vital as they are.
What I have found sad has been having to watch as those habits, or mores, and the beliefs that we have aspired to together for so long have been systematically attacked in recent years by people who would much rather break things than build them. It has been hard to watch and listen and realize that not everyone shares these beliefs and these mores.
In his book Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker Palmer noted that “of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, only 39 signed the final document. The remaining 30% disagreed so deeply with one part or another of the Constitution that they took a pass on posterity. That 30 or 40% has always been with us…we’ve lived to tell the tale because a majority of Americans – not always but often enough – have seen the light and helped keep the country moving toward it in our unending quest for a ‘more perfect Union’.” (Healing the Heart of Democracy, 2024 edition, p. 19.)
How many times have we asked ourselves in recent years why we can’t seem to speak with one voice? We look at polls and wonder ‘who are the 30% of people who still approve of the president?’ Having asked myself that many times, Palmer’s comment about that 30 or 40% resonated. There are people who simply choose not to accept the American experiment. Either they disagree, or they simply don’t care.
I bring this up because often when we talk about healing the country, we feel that we should begin by reaching out to that 30-40%, to try to understand, to compromise, perhaps, to make sure they feel heard, and seen, and understood. And according to Parker Palmer, that is simply not going to work. We will not change their minds or hearts. Palmer advocates that instead we focus our attention on healing ourselves, and as he put it, “strengthening the bonds of civic community among the remaining 60-70%.” (Ibid.) And so he proposes, in order to heal, that we cultivate the habits of the heart that will strengthen our democracy and help our country to meet the endless challenges that confront us.
So the question for us today, then, is what do we have to do in order to heal?
For starters, we should nurture the associations we form, which is where we can practice these habits: our schools, local government, religious communities, clubs, and community groups. We need places to practice, to ‘do’ democracy and civic engagement. I’m thinking about our Gloucester Meetinghouse Foundation, and the symposia it has sponsored over the years to give people a chance to come together, ask challenging questions, and listen to the answers. Places such as these are our training grounds. After all, we are proving daily that we can’t do this work on the Internet.
Parker Palmer sets forth five habits of the heart for us to cultivate if we want to strengthen our country and our form of government. First, he wants us to truly understand that we are all in this together. We are deeply interconnected, across nationalities, even across species.
In order to understand our interconnectedness, we have to develop the second habit of the heart, which is appreciating the value of difference, of ‘otherness’. Palmer urges us to think of one another as ‘us and them’, not ‘us vs. them’.
The third habit of the heart is learning how to hold the tension that inevitably arises; to accept the contradictions and the differences and to allow our hearts to expand and to open.
Fourth, we have to be able to learn to speak; to raise our voices, to remember that we are not simply an audience, but active participants. As I’ve repeated here, democracy is something we do. It’s not a spectator sport.
And finally, to heal our country, we need to focus on creating community; to create spaces where we can come together, to bolster each other’s courage and convictions, to learn how to speak and to act, to practice the skills of good citizenship with one another. We know this already: that we can do so much more together than we can by ourselves. (Ibid., chapter 2.)
This all makes quite a lot of sense, really, and it probably sounds quite familiar to a number of you. Frankly, it should sound familiar, because it sounds a lot like church. As I read Palmer’s habits of the heart, I realized how much we work to cultivate these habits right here in church. Let’s think for a minute about our Unitarian Universalist principles: believing in the worth and dignity of all, caring for our planet, seeking justice for the oppressed, affirming democratic values. And we name our shared values: Interdependence and the role of community. Pluralism and the welcoming of new voices, new traditions. Transformation of ourselves and the world we live in. Equity: making sure that everyone has what they need in order to flourish.
And of course, all these values are held at the center by our faith in Love as the force that creates us and holds us and binds us together.
We are right to celebrate in this moment, to be grateful to see that our country can still rise up and demand that we return to our mores, our habits of the heart. And in the days ahead, we must begin to ask ourselves what we should do to heal, and to protect our country, and to move forward into a different future than we have been offered these past few years.
We should ask, and we can see that the answer is right here in this room, right now. We know the answer. It is to continue the work we have been doing all along: the work to answer the call of Love, to Side with Love. We don’t really have to do anything new, or different. We know the work: to strengthen our communities, to protect the vulnerable, to guard the health of the planet, to ask what Love is challenging us to do every day.
We know the work. We also know that it is not easy. But as Unitarian Universalists we are called to respond, to each do all that we can to heal the world around us.
Earlier we heard the words of our UUA president Sofia Betancourt:
“Unitarian Universalism is a faith of courage, of resilience, and of moral witness. No matter the outcome of any particular electoral race or ballot measure this year, our work will continue: we will resist fascism in all its forms, we will protect our communities, we will care for one another, and we will build a future where all people can thrive. Hold fast to one another in the coming days, beloveds, and we will meet this moment courageously, together.”
Hold fast, beloveds. The circumstances change, hope rises and falls, but the work does not change. We know who we are, and what we need to do along the road before us.
May we meet the road, and our work, with hope, and joy and conviction, and never stop having faith in the Love that centers and holds and grounds us.
Amen.
