A BELATED BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION FOR WALDO
October 19, 2003
The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
May 25th of this year marked the 200th birthday of the man for whom this congregation named: Ralph Waldo Emerson - or Waldo, as he became known during his college years and beyond. So it seems fitting - albeit a bit late - to remember who he was, and why this church might bear his name
As I began reflecting on this morning's sermon, I wondered how the founding members of the church decided on Emerson as our "patron saint." I wondered what kind of conversations they had amongst themselves. What about the man drew them toward him, rather than toward some other Unitarian or Universalist - say, Thomas Jefferson or George deBenneville? Why were we not named the "Susan B. Anthony Unitarian Universalist Church?" or the "James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Church?" The possibilities are almost endless!
But I imagine that the founders of our church might have related to Emerson's appreciation of nature; his writings are filled with its imagery. The Rev. Forrest Church said that Emerson was "intimate with nature," calling him the "poet laureate of our Interdependent Web."
Emerson did indeed believe that we are connected to all of Creation. In fact, upon hearing Emerson lecture in 1845, the Rev. Thomas Starr King wrote: "He proved conclusively that humanity is only a higher kind of corn,…a squirrel gone up into the first class,…a liberated oyster fully educated,…a spiritualized pumpkin, a thinking squash, a graduated sun-flower, and inspired turnip….I have the most profound respect henceforth for every melon-vine as my ancestor. I look now upon every turtle as of kin."
But much of Emerson's allusions to Nature were by way of demonstrating his profound belief that God could be directly apprehended and understood through the natural world; that the Divine could be "intuited," without intercession by a minister or other religious authority. It is this aspect of Emerson with which the founders of our church may have resonated most deeply.
In his famous address to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School in 1838, Emerson proposed a new theology, based on one's own experience of God in Nature - "the doors of whose temple," he suggested, "stand open night and day" for each of us.
He admonished the students to seek their God within themselves, "not in persons of bygone ages….Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past?" he asked. "The sun shines today also."
The example he gave of this idea was in the person of Jesus! He told the students that Jesus "saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul; he lived in it….He saw that God incarnates Himself in us. He said, 'Through me, God acts; through me, God speaks. Would you see God, see me, or see thee.'"
"But what distortion did Jesus' doctrine and memory suffer!" Emerson went on to say. Jesus "spoke of miracles, for he felt our life was a miracle, and all that we do, and he knew that this daily miracle shines….But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches…is Monster! It is not one with the blowing clover and falling rain."
Emerson was adamant that we should not look even to those in our own time who are deemed to be "authorities" in matters of the spirit; everything must be measured against our own mind, our own soul. The moral sentiment, he said, "is guarded by one stern condition; namely: it is an intuition. It cannot be received second-hand.
It was this idea - that one must rely only on oneself and one's "intuition" of the Divine - that not only brought him great disdain from the Unitarian clergy at the time (after speaking at a literary society in Middlebury, Vermont, a colleague got into the pulpit and prayed, "We beseech thee, O Lord, to deliver us from hearing any more such transcendental nonsense as we have just listened to from this sacred desk!"); it has also garnered much criticism of him today.
I was speaking to a colleague earlier this week about today's sermon, and the abundance of material on Emerson I was trying to absorb. My colleague said he's never liked Emerson, citing Emerson's essay on "self-reliance" as being the forerunner of the "rugged individualism" that haunts our nation, as well as our denomination, today.
And that has been the criticism of many. One of the leading UU scholars on Emerson, Wesley Mott, wrote that Emerson's "Self-Reliance" "has been employed as a homegrown rationale for rugged individualism and aggressive foreign policy. It's been invoked…as philosophical justification of unbridled capitalism and predatory business practices."
Which is unfortunate, since that isn't what Emerson had in mind at all. In fact, in the 1850s, Emerson often attacked the excesses of capitalism and consumerism. "It is the vulgarity of this country," he wrote, "to believe that naked wealth, unrelieved by any use of design, is merit."
Forrest Church suggests that if Emerson were alive today, he would "recoil at the tyranny of modern American individualism." After the publication of "Self-Reliance" in 1841, Emerson actually stopped using the term, because it so often became confused with an insular self-sufficiency that he had not intended. Rather, his concept was that each of us is "an inlet" to the "one mind" of Creation. Instead of insulating us, Emerson believed that through authentic self-development, we would discover this "mind" -- this "Oversoul" -- and be united with others in "shared creation." True individuality and "self-reliance" would bring the individual into relation with all creation. "The heart of thee," he said, "is in the heart of all."
There might be additional reasons why the founders of this church chose Emerson as our "patron saint." For while he's known primarily for his love of Nature and his Transcendentalist philosophy, he also developed strong positions on issues of social justice.
In addition to speaking out against materialism and militarism, he was a strong opponent of slavery. In response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a crime to assist fugitive slaves, and compelled people to return such slaves to their owners, Emerson said: "This is a law that no one can obey or abet without a loss of self-respect….I will not obey it, by God….If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens around your own."
He also became a champion of women's rights before many others did. Of course, how could he not, being friends with the likes of Margaret Fuller, an intellectual equal and strong feminist?
So it's not surprising that our founders - people with a sensitivity towards peace and social justice - might choose the name of Emerson as ours.
Or perhaps it was his intellectual curiosity and love of ideas that imbued our founders with respect. Robert D. Richards, Jr., author of the book, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, wrote: "Emerson lived for ideas, but did so with the reckless, headlong ardor of a lover. He hated the passive notion of the mind as a blank slate, and concentrated instead on an individual's…access to the central fires that ignite the mind."
For Emerson, "ideas weren't abstractions, but 'perceptions, laws, templates, patterns, and plans' - no less real than the physical world." Indeed, ideas were what created and explained the physical world.
Not that everyone could understand his ideas, mind you. Wesley Mott tells us that "people went away (from Emerson's lectures) tremendously uplifted, and had no idea what they'd just heard!" And there are stories of people outside the usual circle of scholars who loved to listen to him - such as the cleaning woman who's reported to have said, "I didn't really understand his lectures, but I liked to go and see him stand up there and look as though he thought everyone else is as good as he is!" And the farmer who said, "We don't know what he said, but I'm sure he's giving us the best there is." Must have been something about the passion with which he spoke, and the sincerity of his message.
But of course, Emerson wanted to be understood, and I'd imagine it would have pained him to think people couldn't grasp his ideas. For he believed that the aim of preaching and writing was to present what he called "the unsettling experience of being provoked." And provoke he did!
Emerson disdained the status quo (which is perhaps another reason the founders of this church were drawn to him!) - particularly within the church. In an article in a recent New Yorker, John Updike writes that Emerson's priorities were "spontaneity over convention, vitality over formality, luck and newness over system. (In other words), out with what is dead!"
But this did not sit well with his fellow Unitarians. For while in the early part of the 19th century, Unitarians were considered by many to be, as one clergyman put it, "the halfway house to infidelity;" by the time of Emerson's Harvard Divinity School address, the movement had become much more cautious and conservative, with little appreciation or tolerance for the Transcendentalists. Emerson's sermon didn't help.
In it, he rejected the notion of a personal God, and lashed out at the church for "suffocating the soul through empty forms and lifeless preaching." "Courage, piety, love and wisdom can teach," he said; "and every man (sic) can open his (sic) door to these angels, and they shall bring him (sic) the gift of tongues. But the man (sic) who aims to speak as books enable, as fashion guides, (merely) babbles. Let him (sic) hush!" he said.
He implored the graduates to "let the breath of new life be breathed" by them into the church, insisting that the role "of the teacher is to show that God is, not was; speaks, not spoke….The…true preacher," said Emerson, "deals out to people his life - life passed through the fire of thought." And this he was not finding in most pulpits.
As you might imagine, none of this went over well with the established Unitarian clergy, who no doubt took some of it as a personal affront. But Victoria Weinstein, UU minister in Norwell, Massachusetts, points out that Emerson's Divinity School Address was really "a loving charge," for in it he was saying, both to the students and to the church: "I want you to be everything you can be, to know all the beauty of who you are." Ultimately, his was a message of reform - a message to awaken the church from what he called, "indolent sleep."
All these parts of Emerson - his love of Nature, his call for "self-reliance," his sense of social justice, his love of ideas, and his desire to breathe new life into the church - could have been reasons why the founders of our church named it after him. Surely those would be reasons enough.
But it is his surprising humanness that in the end draws me to him, and his insistence on the benevolence of Creation, in spite of everything.
Emerson did not have an easy life. When he was only eight years old, his father died, leaving his mother to raise him and his seven siblings by herself. They had to sell all his father's books and take in boarders to survive. During these years, two of his brothers also died.
When was in his mid-20s, he met and fell in love with Ellen Tucker, who was only 18. They married a year later, but within 18 months she had died from Tuberculosis. Emerson was so distraught that his mother eventually wrote to one of his older brothers, asking him to come and look after the younger Emerson.
Every day he would walk from Boston to the cemetery in Roxbury to visit Ellen's grave. One day, he actually opened her casket, to see for himself that she was really dead.
But finally he was able to move through his grief, and in a few years married Lydia Jackson, with whom he bore four children. But again tragedy struck, when their first child, Waldo, died from Scarlet Fever at age five. Louisa May Alcott would later write that she came by their house the next morning - then only a child of 9 years -to inquire how Waldo was doing. "He's dead, child," said Emerson. Alcott described Emerson as "so worn with watching and changed by sorrow that I was startled. That was my first glimpse," she said, "of real grief."
Emerson's grief was indeed real. He wrote to Margaret Fuller, "Shall I ever dare to love anything again?" His wife said of him: "How intensely his heart yearns over every memento of his boy….Never was a greater hope disappointed - a more devoted love bereaved."
The Rev. Jack Mendelsohn points out that despite these and other tragedies, "the upbeat still broke through…" Emerson "believed that life could be an endless renewal, a constant becoming, and he made it just that."
Emerson was a devoted father, a good neighbor, and an active participant in the life of the Concord community. It has been said that he had "more friends than anyone in America."
And like us all, he tried to live his religious ideals - to translate them into everyday life. And, like us all, he did not always succeed. Out of a concern for animals he became vegetarian, but the lack of meat made him weak, so he had to stop. Out of a belief in equality, he invited his servants to eat meals with his family; the servants objected, so that never got started. And out of a belief that "the scholar must be a whole person," he engaged in manual labor in his yard. However, this tired him to the point where he could do nothing else; he concluded that, "The writer shall not dig!"
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a lover of Nature, a poet, a resister, a loving husband and father, a devoted friend, a prophet, an activist, and most importantly, a very human being. The photo of Emerson that's sitting in front of the pulpit has been hanging for I-don't-know-how-long over the copier in the office workroom. He is our "patron saint," however, and as such, I think he deserves to be seen. My hope is that we will find a more public place to hang his picture, so that all may see the kindness in is face, and the wisdom in his eyes.
The world was once graced by the presence of this great man, as we are now graced by his memory, weaving who he was into who we are becoming. Yet as our patron saint, I suggest he'd remind us not to look to "persons of bygone ages" for truth - even him. Nevertheless, we are blessed to have his name adorn our building, and his life adorn our souls.
May it help us to shine always.
© 2003 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
