First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington

February 8, 2026

Reverend Karen G. Johnston, Senior Minister

We have not come here alone
We carry our people in our bones
We have not come here alone
And if we listen we can hear them in our souls (Peace Poets, Lu Aya)

These words from the author and “soul activist,” Francis Weller:

Grief and loss touch us all, arriving at our door in many ways. They come swirling on the winds of divorce, upon the death of someone dear, or as an illness that alters the course of a life. For many of us, grief is tied intimately to the ravages we witness daily to watersheds and forests, the extinction of species, the collapse of democracy, and the fading of civilization. Left unattended, these sorrows can seep underground, shadowing our days. It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left untouched, block our access to the vitality of the soul. To be able to freely move in and out of the soul’s inner chambers, we must first clear the way. This requires finding meaningful ways to speak of sorrow. It requires that we take up an apprenticeship with sorrow. Learning to welcome, hold, and metabolize sorrow is the work of a lifetime.

Heads up: this sermon contains spoilers from the book and movie Hamnet. The book has been out since 2020 so I’m not going to worry too much about that – either you’ve read it or this sermon might inspire you to do so. The movie follows the book nearly exactly, except for one moment, at the end, of which I will speak. Since the movie came out not all that long ago, and is up for Best Picture at the Oscars, I thought it best to forewarn you.

A quote from that book, soon after the young child, Hamnet, son of Agnes and the famous Will Shakespeare, has died. It is from the grieving mother’s point of view:

She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were.  She wishes to scratch the ground, perhaps with a hoe, to score the streets beneath her, so that there will forever be a mark, for it always to be known that this way Hamnet came. He was here.

We have not come here alone
We carry our people in our bones
We have not come here alone
And if we listen we can hear them in our souls

I remember when my mother died. It was a welcome relief after twelve years of dementia, the last seven in a memory care facility. Regardless of that relief, it was grief. Regardless of the complicated relationship we had most of our lives, it was grief.

I remember feeling that my faith tradition ~ our faith tradition ~ does not have sufficient shared customs that guide us in marking such losses, either communally or individually. Not enough customs that make it visible to the world that I was in mourning. I was thankful that my brother, one of the most observant Jews I know, insisted on sitting shiva for my mother, even though she was not Jewish. And that I got to take part.

It was decided that I would NOT be allowed to wear a rent (torn) garment, the Jewish sign of someone in mourning, since I’m not Jewish. I abided by this decision, but I coveted that outward sign of mourning. 

I wished I was part of a community, religious or secular, that had more ways to communally acknowledge grief. I wished I was part of a society that did not privatize grief and loss in the way that ours does.

Another passage from Hamnet the book. It is Agnes’ mother-in-law, who has, over the course of her lifetime, lost three of her own children. This is her perspective as she watches Agnes tend to the very, very sick daughter, Judith, twin to Hamnet:

Agnes is gripping the child’s limp fingers, Mary sees, as if she is trying to tether her to life. She would keep her here, haul her back, by will alone, if she could. Mary knows this urge she feels it; she has lived it; she is it, now and forever. She has been the mother on the pallet, too many times, the woman trying to hold on, to keep a grip on her child. All in vain.

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play.

Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.

That gripping of the limp fingers – does that not sound like Kisa Gotami? The one who could not accept the death of her child, who clung to her child’s lifeless body, stuck in her grief. So it goes for Agnes when Hamnet dies of the plague. Grief becomes her world and she is alone within it.

We have not come here alone
We carry our people in our bones
We have not come here alone
And if we listen we can hear them in our souls

I want to introduce you to the work of Francis Weller: author, retired psychotherapist, and self-identified “soul activist.” I spoke some of his words at the start of this sermon. 

He has two books, the first one published just over ten years ago. Called The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, his writing and attention are exquisite. In this first book, he names five gates of grief:

·      First Gate: Everything We Love We Will Lose. This grief is our experience and understanding that grief is universal and impermanence is the nature of reality.

·      Second Gate: Places Within Us That Have Not Known Love. This grief is for those aspects of ourselves that have been neglected or rejected.

·      Fourth Gate: What We Hoped For and Did Not Get. This grief centers on our disappointments and the loss of dreams, as well as our experience of longing to belong.

·      Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief. This grief comes to us, recognized or not, from the pain we carry from our ancestors and histories, existing in our bodies and psyches.

I saved the Third Gate for last:

·      Sorrow For and Of the World. This is the grief rooted in sorrows that are communal, cultural, ecological, and global. This pain is where we experience the soul of the world within us, as we remember and affirm that we are part of the interdependent web of all creation, not separate from it.

That’s a lot of grief. No wonder some days feel so heavy.

We have not come here alone
We carry our people in our bones
We have not come here alone
And if we listen we can hear them in our souls

I want to touch a bit more on that Third Gate: Sorrows for the World. Often associated with what we have destroyed through the climate crisis – the book was first published ten years ago – right now we can add our grief for what is being destroyed through authoritarian movements, here and globally. Weller, in his second book, adds our collective trauma and grief at the rise of authoritarianism around the world.

Add to it the grief – now, five years ago, ten years ago, a hundred, four hundred – for the ways in which white supremacist imperialism brought about indigenous genocide and the enslavement of African peoples.

When I was in Minneapolis, grief was one of the nearly palpable presences. Grief for neighbors and friends, how they had been abducted, or so terrorized, they would not leave their homes. 

Grief (and shock) at the murder of Renee Good. Then of Alex Pretti. And as activists of color reminded the wider (whiter) world, all the others, mostly Brown and Black, who have died at the hands of ICE agents. Thirty-two last year, the most in two decades. And so far this year, including the night of New Year’s Eve:

Keith Porter Jr.

Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres

Geraldo Lunas Campos

Víctor Manuel Díaz

Parady La

Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz

Heber Sánchez Domínguez

We have not come here alone
We carry our people in our bones
We have not come here alone
And if we listen we can hear them in our souls

Grief in Minneapolis and outrage and rage and terror and shock. And the amazing companions whose names are Deep Community Care, Relentless Creativity, and Communal Singing. Generosity and Abundance the likes of which I had not personally experienced in such a dire way.

Weller’s more recent book, published last August, is called In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty.  Doesn’t that title make you want to run down to the Fletcher Free? It was from this book those first words at the start off my sermon came.

I want to share this one passage which took my breath away.

One of the essential movements that made us human was our ability to hold one another in times of grief and trauma. This skill has, for the most part, been lost under the extreme weight of individualism and privatization. This has had a profound impact on how we process and metabolize our personal encounters with loss and intense emotional experiences. 

This rings true to me, this privatization into silos of isolation and sometimes shame; this fit grief into whatever timeline capitalism imposes upon us; this don’t be too emotional or mystical or take too long.

And also, as counterpoint, strangely, magically, it’ss when our communities can make room for the inconvenient, no-sense-making, sometimes shattering versions of grief, which seems to happen at the most unexpected times and are welcomed by the most surprising people in our lives, that I think there is hope for us, both individually and as a society. 

When I was away last week at the Institute for the Learning Ministry, sponsored by the UU Ministers Association, open to all religious professionals (and thus, Erika and Christina went, too), in the class I took, one of the ministers mentioned that they have three ways in which they, as a congregation, acknowledge when someone from among them dies. Two of them were things we do: an annual service of loss and remembrance and at their last Sunday service of the congregational year, they speak aloud the names of members who have died (I do that as part of my report at our Annual Meeting). The third thing they do is something I would like for us to begin to do.

On Sundays after a member has died, in addition to lighting their chalice, they light a dedicated candle. In this way, there is a communal experience of grief, rather than the more isolated one that happens when all that happens is you receive an electronic announcement from us, reading it on your own wherever it is you when you click on that particular email. We won’t be stopping sending out announcements, but we are going to begin announcing the deaths of members and active congregants while lighting a special candle: this candle.

And, in fact, we are going to practice because this week, we experienced a death in the congregation. Here is where you get ready, to hear sad news, to hold sad news.

Ron Williamson, Jr., a member since 1984, died suddenly last Monday. Not only was Ron a member here for forty years, his mother, Brenda, was much beloved by many who remember her as well. We hold all of Ron’s family, including his sister, Joan, in our hearts at this time of deep loss. We light this candle for the light that was Ron’s life.

We must find ways to make sure that grief is not a private enterprise. Grief as private enterprise makes us un-well and is a sign of a sick society.

We have not come here alone
We carry our people in our bones
We have not come here alone
And if we listen we can hear them in our souls

The historical record shows that, in fact, Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died young. The rest, in the novel by Maggie Farrell, is utterly believable, and yet mostly fictional.

At the very end of the story, years after young Hamnet died of the plague, and his father has experienced success as a playwright, “Hamlet” the play, debuts. Agnes is estranged from her husband whose grief is expressed quite differently and quite separately from her (she in Stratford, he in London).

She is enraged that her husband should name a play after their dead son. She travels to London in order to confront her husband. Before she can do so, she is drawn into the play. Her anger (one of the many faces of grief) shifts as she encounters the story of ghosts and dead fathers.

In the book, at the moment her grief shifts from resistance to acceptance, she reaches her hand out to the actor playing the grieving Hamlet. It is, in my mind, the same moment that Kisa Gotami experiences when she gently lays down the corpse of her dead son and decides to bury him. This moment when the grief does not stop, but the fighting, the resisting, does.

And here is that spoiler from the movie: it is not only Agnes who reaches out her hand to the actor Hamlet. The actor Hamlet, surprising himself, reaches back. And then all the playgoers – across all the classes, the peasants and the aristocracy, the poor ones standing in the open-air pit and the rich ones watching through timber-frame columns in the high-up balcony bays – they, too, reach out their hands. The whole of humanity reaches out, recognizing themselves in the grief that belongs to us all.

We have not come here alone
We carry our people in our bones
We have not come here alone
And if we listen we can hear them in our souls

May we all belong not only to grief, as we cannot but help do, but belong to spaces and people who make room for grief.

May we recognize that personal grief need not be privatized, should not be privatized, for when it becomes so, the burden is too heavy to bear and the heart begins to believe it is alone.

May we let go of a need to have the right words or to fully understand the meaning a loss holds for someone else – or even ourselves – as we offer a loving companionship.

May our tender curiosity let the necessary stories unfold at a pace that makes itself known beyond the narrow constriction imposed by capitalism or awkward human discomfort.

May we lend our hands, our hearts, and our loving presence to this sacred task of tending to our sorrows and our souls.

May we all find our way to be apprentices to sorrow.