A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence

October 10, 2004

Out of the cast of characters in the saga of Unitarian Universalism is somebody so little known that, if he is ever mentioned at all, it's necessary to point out that no, it's not that Samuel Johnson, it's another one who lived a century later, not in London but in North Andover, Massachusetts.

Lost to history. I had to search hard and pay $110 for a rare reprint copy of his biography, written by his longtime companion, Samuel Longfellow, who you've never heard of because he himself lived in the shadow of his famous brother.

Of course, our hymnal is full of their hymns, and I sometimes reprint some that aren't there and use them here.

But Samuel Johnson carried out his remarkable life-work in the shadow of obscurity and somehow that didn't seem to stop him. He pursued his lonely work of study and writing like some kind of spring that was going to uncoil of its own force just because it has to.

He wrote and published — and led his congregation in Lynn until he couldn't anymore. It never appeared in the listings of Unitarian congregations because in those days the Unitarians were a pretty nervous, cautious bunch and Samuel Johnson was way too radical for them. His antislavery preaching got him fired from his first church, a Unitarian one, within a year.

But he went about his work. To fill his pews, he could only get laborers from the shoe factories because, unlike the other churches then, he didn't sell pews to the wealthy. There were just open pews for anybody who walked in the door, and there weren't many wealthy or influential folks who were willing to sit next to laborers.

He wrote a series of massive studies of world religions which nobody bought because who cares about the religions of the heathen when God has revealed to us the one true religion of Christ? I also managed to get hold of a reprint of part of that series: Oriental Religions, Volume 2, Persia. Wasn't easy finding it. Yet it's still regarded as brilliant. But it seemed to appear before America was quite ready. The publisher of this paperback reprint is "Kessinsger's Rare Mystical Reprints."

He puts me to shame. Despite my intentions, I've published almost nothing, achieved little.

But most important, Samuel Johnson followed Emerson in further developing the most luminous and creative contribution America has made to religious and spiritual thought. He and a few comrades like Theodore Parker and, of course, Emerson, stung Unitarianism out of its complacent, cautious torpor and reawaked its radical soul. In the unlikely event that there's a heaven, he's who I'll look for first. I feel oddly like I know him.

In fact, he had his influence here. If you don't know it, the Free Congregational Society of Florence, which is one half of this congregation's history, was a vital part of Samuel Johnson's spiritual network and was affiliated with his church, and that of Theodore Parker. When its great Cosmian Hall was dedicated in Florence Center — it's gone now — but on that day in 1874, Samuel Johnson was one of the speakers, and he composed a special dedicatory hymn.

We inhabit a spiritual space made possible by this obscure man. He inhabits it, too.

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Somehow he knew what he had to do and, whether or not there was anybody cheering him on, some inner engine fired his lifelong work. He never really got to see the magnificent consequences.

He thought a lot about these two words, Duty and Destiny. We have come to despise the word Duty because it has served as the wrapping for somebody else's demand that you live up to their expectations. Things somebody thinks you're supposed to do. In fact the real thing is often in conflict with obedience to anybody else. "Duty," he wrote,

means the essential allegiance of the [person] to his own proper integrity as in accord with the spiritual universe. What the consequence of following the right with loyalty may be, it may not know nor ask. `There is a sweet and holy blindness in its love . . . '

To him, it was pretty much that simple. It had nothing to do with calculating results, or apparent success or failure, or popular opinion. Duty flows from fidelity to what we are, and where we find ourselves in this world. It flows from an inner necessity, a furnace inside you.

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"The unfolding of who we are," Johnson wrote, "takes this concentrated sense of will. Unfolding and developing character takes discipline and mastery, a concentrated force of purpose or love of an ideal applied to what you most want." What you most want. And then he asks, "What have you done with your will? What is it about? That is the first question. . . ."

It's free because it flows freely from our innermost self, not compelled by some force outside you, but there is something commanding about it.

There are moments

and seasons

when you know that to sit around and weigh options, appoint another study commission, think it over — only corrupts the soul

deflects us from right action.

There are times when, to a spiritually authentic person, there is no choice; when, if you would make the moment into the good it has the potential to be, something inward commands what must be done, and if you don't do it, you have violated that moment, and with it, your soul. Sometimes you know what it is right away; sometimes it takes time and reflection — but when you arrive at it, it commands.

In 1833, the young Emerson had gone to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to serve temporarily as minister of the Unitarian Church there. And there he had met Mary Rotch. She was a Quaker, an elder of the conservative New Bedford Meeting, a leader in the New Light movement among the Quakers, who said that the inner light in each person is the primary thing, not the record of other people's inner light such as you find in the Bible. The Bible, they said, is secondary to the inner light from which the Bible comes. For this she and her friends were voted out of the Quaker meeting, and so they joined the Unitarian Church en masse.

Here is what she had learned, and taught to their young interim minister, Rev. Emerson: that it is possible, as the great Quaker George Fox had taught, to find a state of quiet clarity in her inner life, — and in that state she learned that sometimes there was only one authentic course of action, — and, having her ear close to her soul, she knew what it was for her: — utter devotion to the ending of slavery in America.¹ There was nothing to decide.

That is echoed more recently in so much of what Krishnamurti had to say. Here is what he said in a talk at Brandeis University:

Wherever there is disorder there must be choice and conflict. It is only the mind that is confused that chooses, but for a mind that sees everything very clearly there is no choice.²
When there is a choice, there is confusion. . . . Only when you are clear, there is no choice.³

Of course, not every situation is that clear. But — maybe you can think of moments of that kind of clarity. You could have made it complicated, but only by compromising your purpose, your integrity. You would have had to leave some part of your whole self behind.

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And here's another thing about that inner necessity: there is something at the core of us that cannot be satisfied with the state of things as they are. We live into a future and we know we belong to it, we are one of its original powers — as German philosopher Johann Fichte put it.⁴

There is something in all this universe that strives and creates, that cannot be satisfied with the state of things as they are. And you are part of that creative universe. You are one of its original powers.

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But — you cannot be or do just anything: there are limits, the limitations of moment and time and place, or circumstance and capacity. It's in the confluence of that inner engine, and our outward circumstances and abilities, where our destiny lies. It is for that alone that we are responsible. That is destiny, and if we cannot know just what it will be, still it draws us.

For some there is a moment when a lifetime of willing, working, reflecting, committing, and loving come into relationship with some outward circumstance that requires — just that person, right here, right now, and they are up to it.

You cannot guess when the moment will come. You will not know in advance precisely what it is that you will have to do, but you know enough; and you know that eventually the rubber will hit the road, and you are going to be the rubber.

For others there is no dramatic Moment, capital M, but a lifetime of presence in the world that brings some light, some strength of character, some genuine care; that factors, into countless moments, the chemistry of love.

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What if we don't pursue our destiny and inward duty? There are a few consequences we can bank on.

James Hillman suggests that parents who have not discovered their own destiny and haven't made friends with the duty that commands from within them — those parents are likely to shift the energy in their lives away from answering the call in their own lives to the child, who then has two problems: one, she's got no model of an adult making friends with his or her own destiny, and two, she's got a parent who is trying to raise the perfect child instead of understanding the child's own inner meaning and destiny. That parent may not be able to bear the child's natural idealism, sense of fairness, clear-eyed sense of beauty, and interest in big questions. And because each is deprived of their own inner meaning, each resents the other.

Speaking of a young person in this world, Johnson writes, "He has before him continually the spectacle of successful shams and ill-bestowed offices and rewards; honors for lip or hand services, however impurely, insincerely, sensationally done." So this kid wants to know if that's all there is. He is watching you.

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Duty and destiny. A few years ago I attended the annual Chicago area district ministers' retreat. The speaker — the author Robert Inchausti — announced his lecture to an exposition of his hero Emerson. But after reading a couple of fine passages from Emerson, all he talked about for the remaining two hours was a heroic sixth-grade teacher in a corrupt Los Angeles school system. And that is how he taught us Emerson's lesson of true greatness.

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What is your work, and mine? I don't mean who pays you, or if you pass your days in an office or at home or wherever. You needn't look for some grand scheme. Look only for the thing, right there, that calls to you to do, that is yours to do. Take the next step. Only from there can you discern any grand schemes. It's right here.

That work can only flow from the deepest soul of yourself — as it meets the world that stares you in the face today. There it is. That is the work that has lasting consequences — like Samuel Johnson's work — who wasn't nearly as well known as the famous ministers of the big wealthy churches of Boston; — who, when their fine occasions came around, wasn't invited.

But he knew. He had a kind of confidence that nothing could shake, or at least, shake very much!

I was struck by something Ed Manwell said about his twenty volunteer stints doing medical work in third-world countries and even helping with a harvest in Central America, all of which he did without being paid for it. You shouldn't think of it as a sacrifice — it wasn't, he said. He was doing what he loved.

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It's that that keeps us to our task: we love the work that is really our work. We trust its ultimate efficacy whether or not we get to see the results. We prize it for its own sake. It's this inner necessity and inner rewark that, as Johnson put it, "will conquer temptation [to do or be anything less]; for this is master of the field before it comes, and orders [the temptations] off by right of eminent domain. If there be a hope or a dream in you that makes life look richer and nobler, lay your hand in that, just as you would in the open hand of God. Seek those who neither mock nor distrust it."

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Seek those. Even Samuel Johnson had a community — and what a community — that believed in him, supported him in obeying his heart and his conscience, in becoming and being what he ought to be and could be. Who could reflect with him and remind him of his own truth.

And that, friends, is one of the great and urgent reasons that we are here. That is our destiny and our duty. With unstinting devotion, with our whole being, let us be about that work. Samuel Johnson asks

when there was ever a church, whose creed so defined the purpose of religion, — as the full development of human nature, in each and every one, in accordance with his capacities, and their relations with the Infinite of truth and good?

May it be that today, he would find the answer right here. May we be that place.

¹ Frederick B. Tolles, "New Light Quakers of Lynn and New Bedford," New England Quarterly, Sept. 1959, 307; and JMN 4:263.
² K, You Are the World, 21 (Talk at Brandeis).
³ K, Meeting Life, 158.
⁴ Johann Fichte. The Vocation of Man. Trans. Peter Preuss. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacknett, 1987, p. 94.

Reading:

Marge Piercy, "To be of use" —

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hope vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Emerson, in Representative Men:

It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and, sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote "Not transferable," and "Good for this trip only," on these garments of the soul.

And in his great essay "Self Reliance," he wrote:

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No [one] knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. . . . Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. . . . Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart . . .

Meditation

We gather in this sanctuary
away for awhile from the demands of everyday
and we contemplate the work of
our hands and
our minds.

So often thwarted, distracted, compromised, stifled

Undermined by doubt and fear

And so we come with these gifts of our works and words
to offer them before the Mystery of Life
that they might be lifted and refined as the offerings of our lives
the sacred work of our days.

Let there be renewed in us
a trust in the deeds and labors that flow from the heart of us
a trust in these hearts of ours from which our work flows
for good done without recognition
in doubt and uncertainty
Yet we trust our labors
as we trust a harvest we shall not see.

Let there be renewed in us

faith
in the just and the compassionate and the true

In the silence.

The Edward and Claire Manwell Award for Generosity of Spirit

If you didn't know it, we're celebrating a birthday this weekend. Ed Manwell will be a hundred years old in a few days. And against a hundred years, what's a few days? We're celebrating it now.

Ed has been a member of this congregation for 45 years. Once, long ago, he heard of a new medical school about to open and, since he'd always wanted to be a physician, he thought he might be able to get into the school. He entered Rochester Medical school and right away met Claire.

In Northampton, he was the only certified surgeon at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, and Claire was the only pediatrician in town.

Eventually the two began travelling once a year to perform volunteer service: in 1962 it was Kenya; then there was the Hope hospital ship, in Central America; with CARE in Afghanistan; Nigeria with the Quakers after a war — where there was starvation, and many refugees; he did surgery in a hospital that had been ransacked by occupying troops, there was no running water, women brought water on heads from a well a quarter mile away. They did volunteer medical work in this country, too, on Navaho & Crow reservations. I can't list all the volunteer medical work.

They also volunteered with the Harvest brigade picking coffee and cotton in Nicaragua and Guatemala during the Sandanista war.

He's pretty amazing. At the age of 60, Ed learned to fly. And until only about four or five years ago he did his routine errands by bicycle.

And all these years he has been a faithful and generous member of our congregation. One day last winter there was so much snow we weren't sure whether or not to hold a service, or whether just to sing a couple of hymns and drink coffee. But then Ed Manwell turned up and then I knew that not having a service was just unthinkable wimpery — and we proceeded.

In honor of Ed and Claire, we will, each year, present this award for Generosity of Spirit. And we are very honored to announce that the very first Manwell Award for Generosity of Spirit is being awarded to Dr. Edward Jones Manwell!