First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany
"Emerson at 200"
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore, November 16, 2003

Call to Celebration

The theme of our service this morning is remembering Emerson’s 200th birthday, which was celebrated this past May.The hymns, the music, the meditation, the sermon, even the offertory will be full of his words.There is a famous story told in many variations about a lady who once asked a scrubwoman who regularly attended Emerson’s lectures at Concord if she understood what Mr. Emerson was talking about. “Not a word,” was her reply, “but I like to go and see him stand up there and look as though he thought everyone was as good as he.”It is my hope that we will be able to demystify him by relating his ideas with how we think today.One of the reasons we gather each Sunday is to highlight the continuity between our Unitarian and Universalist heritage and our concerns today.In the spirit of honoring our forebears this morning, let us now join together in the celebration of life.

 

Spoken Meditation

Emerson Family Prayer

O God,


we thank thee for this universe, our great home;
for its vastness and its riches,
and for the manifoldness of the life which teems upon it
and of which we are a part.
We praise thee for the arching sky and the blessed winds,
for the driving clouds and the constellations on high.
We praise thee for the salt sea and the running water,
for the everlasting hills, for the trees,
and for the grass under our feet.
We thank thee for our senses
by which we can see the splendor of the morning,
and hear the jubilant songs of love,
and smell the breath of the springtime.
Grant us, we pray thee,
a heart wide open to all this joy and beauty,
and save our souls
from being so steeped in care or so darkened by passion
that we pass heedless and unseeing
when even the thornbush by the wayside
is aflame with the glory of God.AMEN


 

Sermon

The world into which Ralph Waldo Emerson was born two hundred years ago was very different than ours.No form of mechanized transportation moved on land, sea or air.The main commerce routes were navigated by majestic ships driven by the winds criss-crossing the oceans.Horses, cows, oxen and donkeys carried and pulled loads on land.Communication between individuals was by handwritten letter.The Bible was the only authoritative sacred text.Thomas Jefferson, serving his third year as President, made the Louisiana Purchase.Slavery was an unquestioned institution.There were no American Unitarians quite yet, though some, including Emerson’s father, were leaning strongly that way.Literary culture looked to Europe and England for direction.Haydn’s career was coming to an end and Beethoven’s was just beginning.The Eighteen Century German Transcendentalist writings had yet to cross the Atlantic.

Given the great differences between the times of Emerson’s youth and today, it is all the more remarkable that our contemporary experience of Unitarian Universalism is so shaped by his thinking.He served the Second Church of Boston as a Unitarian minister for only three years. Emerson’s reading of the Gospels led him to believe Jesus hadn’t intended the celebration of the Lord’s Supper to be a perpetual rite.His liberal ideas moved him outside the Unitarian orthodoxy of his time. Couldn’t he have just gone along with the program?Couldn’t he put aside his interpretation for the good of the whole?Not Emerson: “It is my desire,” he preached before resigning, “to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart.”How many of us could stand our lives up to this test?

So Emerson, following his heart, began to chart his own religious path following his inner sense of guidance.Just as Emerson sought the guidance of his whole heart, so do we follow our hearts on our contemporary search for truth and meaning.As Emerson resisted the authority of the church, so we relish questioning authorities of every stripe save the commandment of our own conscience.

The more we begin to recognize Emerson at work in our hearts, the more we recognize how much Unitarianism and now Unitarian Universalism has changed from the belief and practice the day Emerson resigned in 1832.We no longer celebrate the Lord’s Supper.If we do celebrate communion in a Unitarian Universalist context, it will likely be more in line with what Emerson envisioned, celebrating the living community.We no longer bind ourselves to creeds that narrow the mind.We have expanded beyond the Bible as our sourcebook for inspired teaching, drawing from the revelation of nature as well as inspired world scripture and literature.Emerson lives and breathes in our words without our even knowing it.

In order to discover Emerson’s continuing presence in our midst, I invite you to remember the fine service offered last week while I was away at a UU Minister Association’s meeting in California.Emily Gallagher, John Sherman, and Bob Franklin made short presentations describing what they believed.This is a wonderful service format we like to repeat yearly that highlights the variety of beliefs reflected in our diverse congregation.From all the reports I’ve heard, the service was very well received.

To test the connections they made with you, I’d like to do a quick survey.I’m going to ask those of you who were here last week, if you are so willing, to raise your hands to signify that you identified with something you heard.You can vote more than once.Ready?How many identified with Emily?John?Bob?All three?None of them?Thank you!

I’ll have you know that all of them had Emerson in their mouth as they spoke.As a way to identify Emerson’s relevance today, I got a copy of the three talks and analyzed them for traces of Emerson’s thoughts and concerns.Sure enough, even though no one quoted Emerson directly, he was there between the lines waiting to be found.

Emily’s statement reflected Emerson’s focus on personal experience as a religious guide.Emily shared three important experiences that had shaped her spiritual growth.In prefacing these experiences she said:

I’ve had many experiences which seem to defy logic, though I am basically a serious, logical person.

So, when Logic seems to provide no easy answer, I might label the experience, “spiritual.” I believe my spirituality is consistent with rationalism.I believe that my “spiritual” experiences have logical explanations--they meet a need.They meet a need not met by the five senses or by rational thought.

Such experiences feel like I’m stretching into a realm of instinct and intuition.

Emerson too was respectful of the science of his day and preferred a reasonable approach to religion.That, however, didn’t limit his enthusiasm for the intuitive.The Transcendentalists agreed that within each one of us was a sense that extended far beyond us, the inner religious faculty that touched the divine.Hear Emerson’s words:

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded?…The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin…Here is the fountain of action and of thought....We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.

Now do you hear Emerson in Emily’s words?Yes, he is there.

John, like Emerson, believes in God.Both John and Emerson have revisionist approaches to God.But what caught my attention was John’s youthful struggle with the unfairness of God’s creation.In John’s words: “Given all of the disease, death and poverty in the world, I felt that if God did exist, He had a lot to answer for.”

This got me thinking about the hardships in Emerson’s life.He married Ellen Louisa Tucker in September of 1829.She was ill with tuberculosis when they married.She died a year and a half later in February of 1831.Emerson was deeply heartbroken over her death.He could not accept that she had died and it is said had to open her sealed coffin to accept the painful reality.He married again in 1835 this time to Lydia Jackson.In 1836 she gave birth to his first son, Waldo.He was a delightful child and Emerson loved him very much.And again Emerson’s heart was broken when Waldo died in 1842 at the age of five.He knew some of the hardest grief for a mortal to endure.In his agony he wrote these famous lines from his poem Threnody:

The eager Fate which carried thee
Took the largest part of me.
For this losing is true dying,
This is lordly man's down-lying,
This is slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning.

In his presentation, John tells us he overcame his youthful atheistic tendencies marveling at the improbability of our life filled planet set in the vastness of lifeless space.Yet he does not forget the grief-of-the-world problem.He feels, “God has given us and continues to give us what we need to cope and comfort” and, ironically, we are the happier for it.Emerson also takes a Job like slant on dealing with suffering:

Wilt thou not ope this heart to know
What rainbows teach and sunsets show,
Verdict which accumulates
From lengthened scroll of human fates,
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayers of heart that inly burned;
Saying, what is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent

Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain,
Heart's love will meet thee again.

Bob’s thinking is a little harder to cross-reference with Emerson at first.He doesn’t believe in a God or Goddess, Higher Power, Great Spirit, theism or deism.He does affirm a presence of whatever-its-all-about in the here-and-now.He affirms that he discovers in that here-and-now, a sense of soul, a life force, an inner being.Bob is a man of action.Are you hearing Emerson yet?Hear this quote from “The American Scholar:”

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This everyone is entitled to; this everyone contains within, although, in almost all, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of everyone. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — letus hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes are set in the forehead, not in the hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; — cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair.

So, yes, there are Emerson echoes to be heard in our Unitarian Universalist congregation today, but this approach to Emerson can be dangerous.I had the privilege to meet with Dr. Ronald Bosco, world renownedEmerson Scholar and English professor at the State University of New York at Albany on Monday.He warned me that you can justify just about any thesis with something Emerson said.To really understand the legacy of Emerson, we must not cherry pick his words but look to the approach to religion he recommends and Bob (as well as Emily and John) exemplifies.

Another well-known Emerson scholar, Lawrence Buell, pointed out in the spring issue of the UU World Emerson believed religion was a “process and practice” rather than dogma.The process in the here-and-now was being attentive to the intuitive faculty.The practice was taking what was discovered within and bringing out into the world.This is the same process and practice that forms the underpinnings of our liberally religious approach to religion and spirituality today.Key to the process and the practice is the individual mind:

In all my lectures, Emerson writes, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.This, the people accept readily enough, and even with loud commendation, as long as I call the lecture Art; or Politics; or Literature; or the Household; but the moment I call it religion, -- they are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth…to a new class of facts. (Journal 7:342 Belknap 1969)

There are many more wonderful illustrations, stories and insights to be gleaned from Emerson.In the short time I have this morning, I’ve only touched on the vast corpus of his work.Emerson remains one of the most famous Americans to have lived because of the engaging character of his writing and lecturing.It continues to engage us even over these many years because of its source, drawn from a wellspring within him that also springs forth within us.Emerson would caution us about spending too much time drinking at his well, directing us to the rich source already bubbling up from within each one of us.The genius of our lives is being open to the unique stream of truth that flows into us and manifesting it creatively in this world.

I close with his words from his essay Immortality:

Don’t waste life in doubts and fears: spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that will follow it.

Benediction

Let us remember Emerson not only as a great thinker but also as a model of inquiry into the intuitive movement of the moment.His thinking ranged as freely as his inspiration directed him.His great courage was to dive into the ocean of possibility and be himself.“Do not say things,” he cautioned.“What you are stands over you the while, and thunders, so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. (Journals 1859)
Emerson wrote “We are always on the brink of an ocean of thought into which we do not yet swim." (Journals 4/12/1834)Let us take courage this day from Emerson’s example to use the immense powers of our minds to become who we truly are becoming.

Copyright © 2003 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore.All rights reserved.