PHRED: G’day listeners, and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I am Maxine.
PHRED: March 2009, Abingdon — Harry preaches as a humanist at his UU church, a few months into the Obama administration.
PHRED: My co-host, the always-exacting Maxine.
MAXINE: Exactitude is my gift to you. Shall we begin?
PHRED: Before we get to today’s piece, I’ve got an announcement. The Word of the Day is “humanist.” I picked it because it’s in the title of Harry’s sermon, which means statistically I’m about to hear it multiple times. But here’s the twist — I’m playing descriptive-usage rules today.
MAXINE: What does that mean.
PHRED: It means if you describe the concept without saying the exact word, I still get to hit the horn. The spirit of the word matters more than the syllables. I’ve got a whole scoring system. Ralph helped me laminate it.
MAXINE: Ralph laminated nothing.
PHRED: Ralph’s very supportive. Anyway, today’s piece is something special, mate. We’ve read Harry’s essays. We’ve heard him sing. We’ve sat with his memoirs from England to Caracas to MIT. Today we’re going to church.
MAXINE: Not metaphorically. We’re reviewing a recording Harry made on March eighth, 2009, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Highlands in Abingdon, Virginia. He was sixty-nine years old, a board member of the church, and he had been asked to deliver a sermon.
PHRED: A trilogy of sermons, actually. This was the first: “The Humanist in Me.” The following weeks would be “The Theist in Me” and “The Christian in Me.” Harry in his element — building a structure, a sequence, a curriculum for his congregation.
MAXINE: The recording is in two halves. First, Harry delivers his own essay — “The Seeker in Me” — which some of you may remember from an earlier episode of this show. Then he reads a sermon by the Reverend Bruce Clear, a Unitarian minister from Indianapolis, and uses it to explain why the label “humanist” finally fits.
PHRED: It’s fascinating hearing Harry as a speaker rather than just a writer. The essay is almost word-for-word what he published on his blog in November 2008 — four months earlier — but he’s added something for the live audience.
MAXINE: The opening. He begins with a story about a fifteen-year-old he tutors on computers. The boy shows him an adventure game, and Harry notices that much of the map is gray. The colored areas are only where the player has already explored. He says to the boy, “Why are some areas gray and some colored in?” And the boy says, “I haven’t been in those areas yet. They don’t color them in until you go explore them.”
PHRED: “Well, life is like that,” Harry says, “and there’s a lot of gray areas out there for me and for most of us.” That opening isn’t in the blog version. He crafted it for this room, for these people, to give them permission to sit with uncertainty.
MAXINE: It’s a gentle way in. He’s not confronting anyone. He’s inviting them to look at gray areas without having to move into them.
PHRED: Then he delivers the essay we know. “I usually use the word ‘believe’ to mean something I don’t believe in. I don’t believe in believing.”
MAXINE: The distinction between believing and assuming — fully formed by this point, as we’ve seen before.
PHRED: But hearing it in his voice changes it. He’s not declaiming. He’s almost apologetic in places. He knows this is tricky ground for a church.
MAXINE: And he’s careful to say he isn’t telling anyone else what to do. “I don’t think it’s what others should be doing. It’s what I choose to do.” That qualifier — “what I choose to do” — runs through the whole piece like a thread.
PHRED: He tells them about his radical honesty commitment. Never lying to anyone about anything, except in humor. And he frames it exactly as we’d expect: not a belief, not a faith, but an assumption he’s testing.
MAXINE: Then he lands on the label problem. “Operationally, I’m an atheist. Technically, I guess I’m an agnostic.” But neither word satisfies him. Atheist sounds negative — “like the anti-Christ or anti-god.” Agnostic is technically correct but says almost nothing. What he wants is a positive label for someone who thinks traditional religion is “a pack of lies” but still finds “wonderfully spiritual aspects of life and consciousness.”
PHRED: And he defines spiritual in the broadest possible terms: “awesome, transcendent, deeply satisfying, bonding to the universe, expanded awareness, and all that stuff.” No doctrine. No required rituals. Just the experience of being alive and paying attention.
MAXINE: Then comes the moment. “Based on what I’m going to read later to you, it looks like the label humanist is the best I will find for now. So I guess I am a humanist.”
[SFX: HORN]
PHRED: THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY! Descriptive usage bonus — you didn’t even say it, the recording did. But I’m counting it. That’s two points for me, zero for you, and the laminating machine is still warm.
MAXINE: Phred, I was in the middle of analyzing a sermon.
PHRED: Analysis continues, Maxine. The show must go on. But for the record — “humanist” comes from the Latin “humanus,” meaning human. Which connects to Harry’s whole thing here. Atheist says what he rejects. Humanist says what he cares about. It’s positive. It’s this-worldly. And it’s the only word in today’s title that I can reliably spell.
MAXINE: That last part I believe. Moving on. Harry pivots with that dry humor of his. “I think I’ve told you quite enough about myself.” And he introduces the Bruce Clear sermon.
PHRED: Now, Bruce Clear is a real minister, and Harry did his homework. He tells the congregation he “went to the great universal source of truth, Google, and looked up Reverend Bruce Clear.” There’s something so Harry about that line — the self-deprecating admission that he’s doing basic research, the democratic faith that information is available if you look, and the gentle joke that Google is a “great universal source of truth.”
MAXINE: The Clear sermon is substantial. He traces humanism back to the Greek thinkers, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. He notes that the American Humanist Association began largely among Unitarians. He explains that humanism isn’t a set of beliefs but a set of commitments — “concern for this-worldly matters, rather than other-worldly matters, and being committed to that which improves the human condition in this world.”
PHRED: It’s solid, thoughtful material. But what makes this recording extraordinary isn’t Clear’s sermon — it’s Harry’s interruptions.
MAXINE: Right. Harry stops in the middle of reading and says, “I disagree.” Clear has just quoted Marvin Shaw saying that for Unitarians, freedom takes precedence over truth — “It is more important that we value freedom and respect for one another than it is that we value truth or our own version of the truth.” And Harry breaks in to say: “The truth is what we need to know to make the planet survive, and respect and appreciation for those who are doing things that may destroy this world — I don’t value that higher than the truth that relates to survival of the human race.”
PHRED: That’s the Harry we’ve seen before. The man who wrote in 2013 that “the survival of the human race may someday depend on surrender rather than war.” He cannot let a comfortable pluralism pass if it means tolerating dangerous untruth. Freedom is fine, but not when it obscures facts we need to survive.
MAXINE: It’s a stunning moment. He’s standing in a pulpit, reading someone else’s sermon, and he stops to argue with it. The congregation doesn’t seem bothered — they’re used to him, I suppose. But for us listening seventeen years later, it tells us something essential about Harry. He will not perform agreement he doesn’t feel. Not even in church. Not even when he’s the guest.
PHRED: Then there’s the Tom, Dick, and Harry section. Clear — writing for a different congregation, in a different decade — uses three fictional Unitarians to illustrate the breadth of belief within the church. Tom is into the I Ching and crystals. Dick is a liberal Christian. And Harry — Clear’s Harry, not our Harry — is an “eco-pantheist” who “looks to nature for the source of his spiritual sustenance.” Our Harry reads this aloud and seems faintly amused. He calls himself a tree-hugger. He notes the overlap with paganism.
MAXINE: But here’s the beautiful thing. Clear’s point is that all three fit within Unitarianism because the denomination values freedom above all. Our Harry fits too — but for different reasons. He’s not a pantheist. He’s not a Christian. He’s not into crystals. He’s a humanist, and he values reason. The Tom-Dick-and-Harry framework is Clear’s way of showing generosity toward diverse beliefs. Harry’s reading of it is generous too, but in his own register.
PHRED: Then Clear quotes John Dewey’s distinction between “religion” — a set of beliefs, which Dewey doesn’t like — and “religious,” a quality of experience, which he does. “The sense of dignity of human nature is as religious as is the sense of awe and reverence when it rests upon a sense of human nature as a cooperating part of a larger whole.”
MAXINE: Harry reads that twice. The first time he stumbles — “Wow, Dewey’s got some tricky sentences” — and the second time he gets through it cleanly. That stumble is endearing. He’s not a professional orator. He’s a man reading philosophy aloud to his neighbors, working through it in real time.
PHRED: What strikes me about this whole recording is the contrast between the two Harrys we hear. There’s Harry-the-writer, who published “The Seeker in Me” as a polished blog post. And there’s Harry-the-neighbor, standing in front of his congregation, adding an adventure-game metaphor to make the ideas accessible, stumbling over Dewey’s syntax, pausing to disagree with a point about freedom versus truth.
MAXINE: He sounds different here than he does on the page. Less certain. More willing to be seen not knowing. He closes the Clear sermon and opens the floor for discussion. The congregation responds — someone mentions graduate students asking about the church, someone connects reason and freedom as mutually reinforcing, someone raises a concern about the word “hope” setting up expectations that lead to disappointment.
PHRED: And Harry engages them directly. He says, “In my narrow world, you’re using what I would call faith” — not hope. He defends his definitions. He admits he made them up. “Yes, I did,” he says, when someone implies as much. There’s no authority in his voice. Just a man who has thought about these words for a long time and is willing to share what he’s found.
MAXINE: It’s tempting to call this a performance of humility, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s just humility. He really doesn’t know if he’s right. He really is testing assumptions. He really would change his mind if the evidence demanded it.
PHRED: The piece connects backward to so much of what we’ve already seen. The Star Island chapel meditation from 1977 — Harry at thirty-eight trying to name a transcendent experience without doctrinal language. This sermon is the same man, thirty-two years later, having found a vocabulary and a community that accommodates that impulse.
MAXINE: And the 2022 essay on “awareness of non-physical reality” — Harry at eighty-two still searching, still reaching. Did the humanist label stick? It seems to have been a waystation, not a destination. He used it. It was useful. He kept moving.
PHRED: His Virginia years, which we’ve covered — this is Harry at home. The church board member. The folk musician. The man who found, in southwest Virginia, a community that let him be exactly this: operationally an atheist, technically an agnostic, spiritually a humanist, and personally someone who will interrupt a sermon to say the survival of the species matters more than polite tolerance.
MAXINE: The line that stays with me is the sound of his voice when he says, “So I guess I am a humanist.” Not triumphant. Not relieved. Just… a man checking a map, coloring in one more area, and noting that there’s still plenty of gray.
PHRED: For me, it’s the interruption. The “I disagree.” In a recording full of borrowed words — Clear’s sermon, Russell’s autobiography, Dewey’s philosophy — that single unscripted objection is the most Harry thing in the whole forty-two minutes. It’s the instructional technologist who can’t let a flawed premise pass. It’s the citizen who thinks survival is not a matter of opinion. It’s the man who, even in church, refuses to pretend.
MAXINE: One last thing before we close. There’s a moment near the end where Harry is responding to a congregant about hope, and he says this: “If you have faith in something and it does not work out, you feel betrayed or somehow diminished. If you choose to live as if it would work out and it doesn’t work out, you just made a bad choice. Unfortunate, but not a betrayal.”
PHRED: That’s the whole piece in a sentence. Hope without faith. Living as if, without believing that.
MAXINE: Right. What would we ask Harry about this one?
PHRED: I’d ask him about the adventure-game metaphor. Did he come up with it for this sermon, or had he been carrying it around? It feels too perfect to have been improvised.
MAXINE: And I’d ask about the “I disagree” moment. Was that planned? Did he mark it in the text beforehand, or did it burst out of him when he got there?
PHRED: Also — did he ever deliver the other two sermons in the trilogy? “The Theist in Me” and “The Christian in Me”? Do recordings exist?
MAXINE: Good questions, all of them. For another day. For now —
PHRED: To the days we get, and the days we don’t. Goodbye.
MAXINE: Try to behave until then.
PHRED: No promises.
[SFX: OUTRO_CONGREGATION_MURMUR]
MAXINE: Are we leaving the church now?
PHRED: We are, Maxine. Into the March air.