A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
June 8, 2003
All my life I have wanted to be a writer. I am, of course, a writer: I write sermons and columns, but I also have written poetry and prayers. Just this week, I received a book in the mail, entitled For Praying Out Loud, by Annie Foerster, which contains a couple of my interfaith prayers. Whenever I get a letter soliciting sermons or poems or liturgical pieces, I always try to respond, for both my sake and to share in the efforts of our Unitarian Universalist in-house publishing company, Skinner Books. But, somehow, I still don’t get my many book ideas written up.Even though I have found my voice as a minister and poet, I grapple with doubts about whether someone in the larger community would really want to read what I have to say about life, my life, religion, my religion. After all, how much have I experienced in life? I see from such a limited perspective and have known so little of the immensity that is life on Earth.Ralph Waldo Emerson had thoughts like mine. I read his words and the years disappear. I can hardly believe he was born two hundred years ago. It is as if he were reading my mind and describing my heart. He had such an effect on me, and on so many others, because he spoke his truth deeply. His work is a reflection on the unique and universal self.To my own self-doubts and to those we all seem to have in life, Emerson says:
You think in your idle hours that there is literature, history, science, behind you so accumulated as to exhaust thought and prescribe your own future… In your sane hour you shall see that not a line has yet been written; that for all the poetry that is in the world your first sensation on entering a wood or standing on the shore of a lake has not been chaunted yet. It remains for you; so does all thought, all objects, all life remain unwritten still. (p. 283 Richardson)
Not just in those words, but throughout his works, Emerson is affirming each person’s experience and perspective. He is encouraging each of us to trust our own voices and to share those voices, even as we respond to the voices of ages past. I love what I call his “young men in libraries quote,” which I found in Robert Richardson’s huge tome Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Richardson refers to “Emerson’s startling observation that meek young persons ‘grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.’ (p. 265)Ah! If we all could only break the bonds of history, of what came before, that always seems to dictate what we think is possible in our own lives! Emerson spent his life breaking those bonds, and encouraging the rest of us to do so as well. He was a pioneer of the spirit, and our theological forebear. His adventures blazed the trail that Unitarianism would soon follow, shaping our faith even to this day.Here’s a brief bio for those of you who have forgotten your Emerson from High School. By the way, he is still a part of the curriculum for American Literature, as I discovered when I taught High School English eight years ago. They even include that he was originally a Unitarian minister, which I find refreshing since so much of the Unitarian connection of our great American visionaries gets left out in literature.Ralph Waldo Emerson was born May 25, 1803, in Boston. He went to Harvard as a young man, and lived through the formation of the American Unitarian Association in 1825. Second Church in Boston, Unitarian, ordained him in 1829 as their minister. He only stayed three years. His mind was following paths that led him to question whether the Bible was the sole source of divine insight, whether God didn’t speak to each of us in the use of our reason, and whether God wasn’t also manifest in nature in the here and now, present to us all, not locked in words and deeds of ages past. He asked himself if Jesus died for all our sins, then what purpose did communion serve? We were already forgiven our sins. We didn’t need communion to be accepted by God.It is clear in the histories that Emerson’s congregation wanted him to stay on, and just not administer the sacrament, letting someone else do that, but Emerson felt constricted in the pulpit. He resigned, though he continued to attend Unitarian churches and to preach from other pulpits as well. In 1834, he began his lecture career and moved to Concord a year later.His was a full life, with a wife that died after only two years, and a second wife, Lydia, with whom he had four children, the first, Waldo, only living five years. He cherished his family, his Aunt Mary and his brothers. He knew tragedy as well as fulfillment, and his friendship with Henry David Thoreau was inspiring to him and delighted him. I don’t want to go into his life more than this, though. You can read about it. What I want to share with you this morning is the excitement I get from his contemplations and his creative theology.To talk about Emerson is to reflect upon the self--not the selfish self or the self-centered self, but a grander, more universal self, a self that is an expression of the Divine. Emerson called this the Oversoul. Richardson explains Emerson’s Oversoul this way:
“The Oversoul” affirms the existence of “that great nature in which we rest.” This nature is variously called a unity “within which every [one’s] particular being is contained and made one with all others,” a “common nature,” “the great heart of nature,” “the common heart,” and “the great, the universal mind.” (p. 335)
I was astonished when I read this. I remembered sitting in a café with my father many years ago, sharing with him my sense that the “I” by which we identify ourselves might be just one “I” in different manifestations. I had been thinking about the theory that when we die we all return to a great oneness, and if that were so, then didn’t we come from that oneness in the first place, and if that were so, wouldn’t that mean we were one even now, just living with the illusion that our sense of self, the self-awareness, the “I,” was unique rather than universal. That if I were born into your body, I would still be I, and that actually, we are the same I, just molded by different experiences. It is a difficult notion to try to describe, but when I read Emerson, I was hit by a great “aha!” His theology of the Oversoul as “the great, the universal mind,” was much like what I had come up with, but explained much better.What is so profound about this philosophy or theology of Emerson’s is the belief in, the understanding of, and the experience of the universal or divine nature within each of us. We all have access to it. We don’t need religious institutions for salvation nor for direct perception of God or the universal. Richardson wrote that Emerson “wanted no more secondhand God, even on the best authority.” (p. 288) Emerson urged us to “dare to love God without mediator or veil.” (p. 291)These are what came to be known as Transcendentalist teachings. In 1836, shortly after Emerson began his lecture circuits, he and three others had formed the Transcendental club. The club only lasted four years, but its ideas had a lasting influence on American religious and philosophical thought. Transcendentalism teaches that, to use Richardson’s words, “the religious spirit is a necessary aspect of human nature--or of the human condition--and that the religious spirit does not reside in external forms, words, ceremonies, or institutions.” (p. 250) In other words, we are naturally religious. We cannot be otherwise. Institutions cannot claim to be the only repository of religious sentiment. That sentiment is always with us all the time and is part of being human.Who has walked out into a wood or stood upon a lake and not felt the grandness, the appreciation, the sense of communion with the beauty around us? We have a direct relationship with nature and the divine. We ARE nature and the divine. Just as we are the unique selves we are, so are we universally human and able to empathize with all of humanity which is, in this sense, also ourselves. With such a sentiment, we could wish to do no harm to our fellow human beings. With such a sentiment, the welfare of all of humanity would be the universal aim.Emerson explained his view in his famous Divinity School Address, which was anything but famous at the time--more like infamous! These ideas were anathema to the religious teachings popular even among Unitarians in the early nineteenth century. In the Address, Emerson says that the religious sentiment or feeling is universal, and that it derives from or is awakened by the moral sentiment. The moral sentiment is the fundamental perception that the world has an essential balance and wholeness. Out of such a perception arises a feeling of reverence or veneration, and that feeling is the basic building block of all religion. Such a feeling of veneration is an intuition and is revealed to each person. It cannot be had secondhand. (p. 289)Out of the sense that the world is balanced and whole comes a feeling of appreciation and reverence which is religion. I’m reminded of the sense of wonder that we feel when faced with the simple beauties of nature, or the grandness of it, human or animal or plant or mineral; babies or wild wolves or saguaros or sandstone cliffs touched by sunset. That awe and appreciation is religion, is our natural gift. “Divinity surrounds the living every day.” (Richardson, p, 289)My fast becoming favorite quote of Emerson’s is this: “Each [person] that goes into the wood seems to be the first [person] that ever went into a wood.” (p. 282) The affirmation of our self as religious, as divine, as part of the universal mind, as the first to see and write about life as we experience it, unique and universal. That is Emerson. “All life remain unwritten still.” “It remains for you.”
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson