“We Live More Deeply Than We Think”
A Sermon on the Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson
October 19, 2003
West Seattle Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
Rev. Peg Boyle Morgan
Cornell West, esteemed African American Harvard Historian called him the American Socrates because he exhorted people to “examine yourself”; West also called him the American Hamlet—because Emerson had to grapple so much with death.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, 200 years ago. By the time he was 8 he lost his father. His first wife died within 16 months of their marriage of TB. This loss—as you would expect, left him with desperate grief, deep and lasting.
His grief sent him searching and questioning God, and he found himself reading for the first time Bhagavad Gita, the mystical scripture of the Hindus. Once delving into the Gita, he shed the widely held western prejudice that eastern scriptures were primitive superstitions. He found in the Gita what he already had a growing sense of –a sense of the unity of all life.
Emerson quickly concluded that the Bhagavad Gita was equal in importance to Christian scriptures. By this time he was already a parish minister, fulfilling the wishes of his beloved aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. She was proud of how there had been seven generations of ministers in the Emerson family, and called upon Ralph Waldo to continue this tradition. A graduate of Harvard, Ralph received the honor of being class poet, which was really where his heart was, more than academics or formal ministry.
Being a parish minister was challenging for him. Actually, I don’t know anyone for whom it isn’t. One time he wrote: “I fear nothing now except the preparation of sermons. The prospect of one each week, for an indefinite time to come is almost terrifying.” I feel your pain Ralph.
A second time he was very discouraged when he said: “Finney can preach, and so his prayers are short. Parkman can pray, and so his prayers are long. Lowell can visit, and so his church service is less. But what shall poor I do, who can neither visit, nor pray, nor preach…?”
The best indication of a minister’s calling often comes from our own parishioners’ assessment. Once while visiting a dying Revolutionary War veteran, Emerson could think of nothing to say to the man. Looking nervously around the room he spied a collection of bottles on a dresser and launched into a discourse on the art of bottle making. After a few minutes, the disgusted gentlemen bluntly said, ‘Young man, if you do not know your business, you had better go home.’
Emerson decided fairly early in his career to leave parish ministry.
He launched a lecture career, his first big lecture being in the Masonic Hall of Boston. Well, now…how’s that!
He was extremely popular in his lectures, partly because of his authentic humanity. A reporter asked a washerwoman, who regularly attended his lectures— what she understood of Emerson, “Not a word,” …“But I love to see him standing up there thinking everyone else is just as good as he is.”
Emerson did remarry, and was devoted to his growing family. But his experience with death would bring him to his knees again, when his little five year old son Waldo died. Emerson would ask his close friend Margaret Fuller: “Shall I ever love again?” His strong calling as a poet helped him express his grief in his poem Threnody. Here are just the first few lines:
The south-wind brings
Life, sunshine, and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire,
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost he cannot restore,
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.
Spiritual Ideas
Despite his grief, Emerson had to work. He continued to develop his religious ideas and to publish them. Emerson threatened the establishment, not only the conservative Calvinists against whom the Unitarians were pushing, but also the Unitarian establishment. A primary focus of Emerson’s religious ideas was that the divine was not supernatural, but was incredibly natural, to be found in nature, all around us and within us. God was not above us nor separate from us. Divinity was not found in dogma but within each of us. (Nature)
If that wasn’t pushing the theological envelope enough, he also espoused that Jesus was totally human, which allows us to identify with him and to follow in his footsteps. The miracle of Jesus was that he was a human who fulfilled his spiritual capacities, and his message was that we could DO the same. The divinity of Jesus was no different than the divinity within ourselves and within all of nature. It was a perversion of truth to say that divine nature was attributed to one or two persons and denied to all the rest.
So Emerson was a mystic. He believed that we have direct connection with the divine, that we do not need priests to be intermediaries. The feeling of “oneness” is open to everyone who has ever sat beneath a tree on a spring day and looked out at the world with a sense of momentary peace and awe—a commonly occurring sort of mysticism.
He sensed that “Within man is the soul of the whole [of existence]; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”
AND I LOVE THIS NEXT LINE—ABOUT THE ETERNAL ONE—
“When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.” That’s what the divine was to Emerson—genius, virtue, love.
Emerson often went out into nature to discover the divine in everything he saw. He was criticized for this practice, which is why he wrote this poem about how he receives revelation from nature—LISTEN TO WHAT HE IS SAYING ABOUT WHAT HE GAINES FROM NATURE—
The Apology
Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.
Tax not my sloth that I
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book.
Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.
But’t is [but what’s] figured in the flowers;
Was never secret history
But birds tell it in the bowers.
One harvest from thy field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song.
Religion, says Emerson, is found in each of us enjoying an original relationship with nature. Rather than relying on tradition and the history of other people, we have direct access to continuing revelation in the here and now, through our own internal senses.
“Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, … why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade … of … faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship…”
This was his first statement of essential philosophy—he called it idealism. It would become known as transcendentalism.
Some have concluded that Emerson was against community and for a strident individualism. This is not the case. For Emerson “self-reliance” was about cultivating a faith in our intuition or Inner Light as he called it from his study of the Quakers. Religion “cannot be received at second hand.” Faith must be primary, personal, and proven by one’s own experience and no one else’s.
SO HERE IS THE ESSENCE OF HIS THOUGHT--Each of us, through our intuition and openness to wonder, can come to our own understanding of what is true and ultimate. THAT understanding is our compass, rather than relying upon popular opinion. I respect your attempt to come to the ultimate understanding and to touch the depth of your soul. We support each other, and through our differing understandings and respectful dialogue of strongly-held ideas and commitments--we take our inner light to each other, contributing our truth, being influenced by others.
This is community, …not conformity, …not separateness.
Emerson said that Christianity was guilty of two idolatries—it worshiped the myth of Jesus’ miracles rather than the truth of his teachings, and it worshiped scripture instead of “the eternal revelation in the heart.” He thought that Christianity was right to say Jesus was divine, but wrong to say that you and I are not. “That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.”
Emerson’s study of the Hindu faith influenced him greatly. For Emerson we each have a Soul --called Atman in Hinduism. Our soul is a specific expression of the larger essence found in and relating together all of existence, a larger essence which Hindus call Brahman, and Emerson called Over-Soul. In his soul and Over-Soul we hear our principle of the interdependent web of all existence.
Poets
As I said earlier, Emerson really wanted to be a poet. Emerson believed that WE LIVE MORE DEEPLY THAN WE THINK, (On Reason) and therefore the poets among us do us an immense favor to transcribe our experience. In seeking answers, Emerson cautions us to not expect them solely in words—the real answers may only come in experience which may be ineffable—unable to be described. Poets choose the best possible words to express our inexpressible—describing those moments when we do feel mystical connection, when we feel as if the divine flows through us with words we say during a tough situation, and we do not know from whence they came. Poets represent us and liberate us by naming our experiences at our deepest, and I would call it “soul” level. The deeper the poet goes into our experiences, the more universally true is the message. . The deeper the poet goes into our experiences, the more universally true is the message. Yes!!
Political Action
Emerson took his beliefs in our close relatedness to nature, in each of us being divine, and in the interconnectedness of all—and translated them into speaking for justice.
He supported and loved strong women, opening doors previously closed to them, including Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Sara Ripley.
But abolition was his passion. He gave fiery lectures against slavery. “No man can hold property in man…Reason is not a chattel, cannot be bought and sold; and every pretended traffic in such stock is invalid and criminal.”
He was outraged that free blacks working on ships in Southern ports were seized and sold into slavery. When an African-American was captured in Boston and returned to slavery in Georgia—he was again outraged. He demanded the abolition of slavery and called for defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. He opened his own home to the underground railway. This was the greatest passion of his public life.
Once while in Washington to speak at the Smithsonian, he called on President Lincoln. Emerson was much more impressed with Lincoln than he expected to be. He took encouragement from hints of the President when Lincoln said: “I am not without hope that something of the desire of you and your friends may be accomplished.”
Emerson also spoke up for free speech after Abner Kneeland, a former Universalist minister and biblical scholar was jailed for atheist blasphemy.
And he was greatly a pacifist, calling war “an epidemic insanity,” and looking forward to a “Congress of Nations” to settle international disputes.
Emerson also spoke up for the rights of the Native Americans. He wrote to President Martin Van Burin who ordered the relocation of the Cherokee nation, a civilized tribe of farmers and artisans, forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Alabama and Georgia—He wrote “such a dereliction of all faith and virtue, such a denial of justice, and such deafness to screams for mercy were never heard …since the earth was made.” In his journal he confessed his efforts “ineffectual blows” yet he spoke out “for the sad reason that…if I do not, why it is left undone. The amount of it, to be sure, is merely a scream, but sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”
Conclusions
Emerson has had a powerful influence over western culture for 200 years. It may be that the rise of fundamentalism in early 1900’s was not only a reaction against a faith-threatening science of reason, but also a power struggle of orthodoxy against the core of Emersonian belief-- the inner directed source of spiritual authority.
He never tried to present a complete systematic theology, some finished and consistent set of beliefs. That would assume that truth is sealed, that nothing would be discovered tomorrow. He was never fazed by criticism of his inconsistencies and contradictions. He urges us to view our lives as life happens, realize that tomorrow we may perceive differently, place no bounds on self-discovery, have no need for foolish consistency. He is famous for saying “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Emerson’s voice echoes throughout the sources of our faith--
Emerson continues to remind us:
He calls us to open our souls to the larger essence in all of life, so that we may be strengthened to carry the message of our principles out into the world.
His ideas remain fresh and challenging even to this day, basic to our understanding of who we are.
Lending us wisdom so that we might-- today and every day—
DISCOVER THE TRUTH AND THE PATHS TO DO THE RIGHT THINGS. So be it.