The dedication, this afternoon, of a monument to Sojourner Truth has me thinking about the history of a great public lie, the Southern institution of slavery by which one person might be held by another as property. And it has me thinking about truth, to use Erik Erikson's term, the leverage of truth.

Odd, isn't it, really, to think about the concept, truth, during a campaign season, especially of campaigns not just for candidates, but for war. What we learn in any campaign season is that the first victim of the campaigns is truth. Even the very concept of truth comes into question.

Yet I am about to say that there is truth, and that there are kinds of truth. Sometimes in the midst, and in spite, of the tenacious force of a public lie, we observe some intimation of the strength of truth; at other times we must maintain a wise trust in the durable leverage of truth.

But if we are wise, and if we are observant, there are such intimations of the strength of truth. I want to recount such a moment.

Now, slavery was a Southern institution but the whole of the nation was in thrall to it. The few real foes of slavery in the United States Congress were ridiculed and shouted down, and branded as shrill-voiced radicals. Among those at the intellectual center of this greatly outnumbered Abolitionist movement were, as you may know, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker.

But in an effort to maintain peace, the Congress had virtually agreed not to discuss the abolition of slavery. A shameless Unitarian president, Millard Fillmore, signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law, forcing the recapture of escaped slaves and their return to the South. And what was the role of religion in this time? Theodore Parker and his Transcendentalist friends, along with some Quakers and some anti-Calvinist evangelical Christian followers of the evangelist Charles Finney, formed a vocal religious minority against the evil. From the rest of the pulpits, an ear-shattering silence, or outright support for slavery. The Catholic church told its followers to obey the fugitive slave law. The Calvinists found some divine purpose in slavery, or perhaps some divine punishment. And throughout the South, ways were found — it wasn't so hard, after all — to show that the Bible actually supported slavery, to show that abolitionism itself was the sin. The argument went that it was God's purpose that the superior should rule the inferior, and with a straight face, Southern clergy preached as much.

There was, in Virginia, a slave-holding Methodist preacher named Moncure Daniel Conway. Conway, too, preached all this, and saw the institution as benign. For awhile he believed a new idea worked out between some handy theologians and handy scientists that proposed separate divine acts of creation for the separate races. Only the white folks were actually humans with souls, they said.

Now, throughout the North, nobody believed in this unique dual-creation theory. In theory, they thought slavery a bad thing. But not their concern and not particularly important. They looked the other way as the evil continued unchallenged, and they didn't mind that Southern postmasters were permitted and even expected to burn any mail from northern Abolitionists that might pass through their post offices.

And so I want you to note a piece of mail that made it through. Why, after all, would a postmaster in Stafford County, Virginia, question a letter from Rev. Moncure Conway? Still, he might have wondered why it was addressed to Mr. R. W. Emerson.

Quite simply, he wrote:

I will here take the liberty of saying what nothing but a concern as deep as Eternity should make me say. I am a minister of the Christian Religion, — the only way for the world to reenter Paradise, in my earnest belief. I have just commenced that office at the call of the Holy Ghost, now in my twentieth year. About a year ago I commenced reading your writings. I have read them all and studied them sentence by sentence. I have shed many burning tears over them; because you gain my assent to Laws which, when I see how they would act on the affairs of life, I have not courage to practise. . . . I sometimes feel as if you made for me a second Fall from which there is no redemption by any atonement.¹

I was touched by that letter before I knew the rest. Three years later, two neighbors of Rev. Conway showed up in Boston. He knew both of them. One was a Captain Suttle, a well-respected politician and slaveholder. The other was Anthony Burns. Anthony Burns, the escaped slave, captured under the Fugitive Slave Law and held at the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston, which had been taken over for the purpose by the federal government. Charles Suttle, his owner, come to demand his return in a kind of mockery of American justice in which the accused was not permitted to speak and was automatically guilty, an affair that was presided over by a United States Fugitive Slave Bill Commissioner.

By and large the people of Boston were enraged that their Court House, the court house of a free people in a free state, should be used as a prison for a person who, under Massachusetts law, should be a free man, and who, here, in the cradle of liberty, was being held as property.

Five thousand people gathered at Fanuiel Hall, where Theodore Parker challenged his hearers to go to the court house and forcibly rescue Anthony Burns. Among them was a young divinity student at Harvard, Moncure Conway of Stafford County, Virginia.

In his autobiography, he writes:

The Southern students at Cambridge assembled to offer their sympathy to the owner of Burns. I was notified, but replied that my sympathies were with the fugitive.²

But his mind wasn't settled yet. He went to an abolitionist rally in Framingham and heard Henry Thoreau. He heard the Unitarian minister from Worcester who displayed a facial injury he had received in the failed attempt to rescue Anthony Burns from the slave power. And then he noted, in his words:

A very aged negro woman named "Sojourner Truth," lank, shrivelled, but picturesque, slowly mounted to the platform, amid general applause, and sat silently listening to the speeches.

Conway was still listening when William Lloyd Garrison, who presided at the rally, invite a young Southern heckler to the stage to speak his mind. Conway describes it this way:

The young man complied, and in the course of his defence of slavery and affirming his sincerity, twice exclaimed, "As God is my witness!" "Young man," cried Sojourner Truth, "I don't believe God Almighty ever hearn tell of you!" Her shrill voice sounded through the grove like a bugle . . .³

I found Moncure Conway again later. In Concord, a regular visitor and trusted friend of the Emersons. In Boston, with Theodore Parker. And then in Washington, D.C. as minister at the First Unitarian Church, where his preaching drove the spineless former president Millard Fillmore to abandon his specially-cushioned pew and quit the church. And then I found him in London, where he preached at South Place Unitarian Chapel for 33 years.

His calling and destiny would exact a price, a wrenching away from hearth and home and inheritance, the loss of associations and employment, and years of struggle. And the cost went beyond Monc Conway himself.

Sometimes, it seemed to Conway, the women of the South tended to hate this institution that enslaved people, because these very people had become part of their homes and lives and they had naturally come to love and respect them; but women had no voice. The wives of slaveholders wept when a family was broken up forever by the sale to separate buyers of various family members. But it was part of the culture and the religion that women had no voice. It was the women who cared enough, and dared enough, to violate the laws against teaching slaves to read. And Moncure Conway's own mother was one of those whose soul would be tried in the balance by the higher law that had overtaken her son. After the War began, Margaret Conway, too, left home, moved North, joined the abolitionist movement, leaving husband and fortune and enraging her entire family and endangering herself.

But my story is not about Moncure Conway.

It is about the leverage, in this world, of truth. What was happening within Moncure Conway was happening within others. Visiting Concord to tell the good Mr. Emerson of the deep changes his writings had wrought, he was told, "When the mind has reached a certain stage it may be sometimes crystallized by a slight touch." The Truth was in the air and, one by one, a multitude understood it.

And the sermon is about the leverage, in this world, of truth. But perhaps you see the problem with this. What, after all, is truth?

So let me tell you what I mean by truth.

I don't mean it in the way that a scientist means it, even though the pursuit of the truth I am speaking of requires accountability to scientific truth. Scientific truth is the domain of objective realities that can be detected and measured, from atoms to brains to rocks, things that can be described in "it" language.⁴

Where a society's definition of truth does not include objective, empirical, scientific truth, there, scientists and discoverers get burned at the stake. Individual whim, or perhaps the church or the state, decides what is objectively true and to hell with the evidence.

But that is not the sense in which I mean to speak of truth. I mean a kind of truth that can be described in "we" language and "I" language.

I mean the kind of truth Whitman spoke of when he said

We consider bibles and religions divine — I do not say they are not divine; I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still.

I mean truth in the way Emerson meant when he said,

The truth is in the air, and the most [sensitive] brain will announce it first, but all will announce it a few minutes later. . . . [The mind of the morally sensitive person] is righter than others, because he yields to a current so feeble as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised.⁵

Or think of Gandhi, whose autobiography is entitled The Story of My Experiments With Truth. He was finding his way, and he knew it could not be long until the way he was finding would ring true with many others, who would come with him. His truth was something that unfolded in a moment of history, in a place among people, flowing out of a particular encounter. But it was something substantial, because for Gandhi, the only real test of whether it was really the Truth with a capital T was a person's willingness to die for it.

It emerges out of the life of a person, out of the life of a people or a race or the whole world of life. A life of contradictions and disparate parts and you have to make life one and whole, and so out of your living there comes a new synthesis, new truth.

My friend Phil Luing wrote these words for me in 1982, and I still have them:

The God-stuff of which we and our world is made
is old and wise,
so we listen to its wisdom,
and share with it what we have learned
that our God might become
more wise and not grow senile.

This growing God-stuff, this new Truth: Was it there all along, and it's just that nobody ever saw it? Or is it new? But there it is.

What greater document is there than the one that declares "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness"? Yet already you could rephrase it just a bit and find it even more true. All men? And indeed, only men could vote until 1920 and only men could speak before a legislature.

But these immortal words express Truth with a capital T, and so great was the force of it that its 56 signers couldn't know with what pathos and agony the young nation would have to struggle to find its meaning, a struggle that would have to take it through a civil war to free those enslaved under outmoded notions of Truth that many took to be the purpose of God as revealed in Scripture. And even then, it didn't mean you could vote in Mississippi.

Such Truth never really exists in the abstract. Its meaning is found in action or it is finally lost to you. In action it grows, deepens, and extends into new realms.

Truth of this kind sings. It always does. Just at this moment of history when Moncure Conway was struggling with the meaning and the action of Truth, many of the hymns in our hymnal were given birth. James Russell Lowell was writing this:

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though its portion be a scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong.
Yet that scaffold sways the future.
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth.
They must upward still and onward who would keep abreast of truth.

It sings, and it commands. To Gandhi, the proof of a new Truth was that there were those ready to suffer and even die for it. But how can you be ready to die for a new Truth? Erik Erikson called this quality in Gandhi a mystical blend of detachment and commitment. To be ready to suffer for what is true now, even though it is not a sealed Revelation or the final Insight, even though you know there will be more to come — to be willing to die for what is true now is to grasp the only chance we have to live fully. Something more may be true for another time and generation, and that truth will be their burden. This is ours.⁶

Gandhi and Conway and Sojourney Truth — they all knew a moment of truth had arrived, and he knew that the moment of truth comes silently and is suddenly there. But it comes only to those who are prepared for it: those who have lived with facts and figures and factors in such a way that they are ready for a sudden synthesis. And, Erikson argues, if you act on the inner voice, you will do so with the knowledge that it will involve others, and that others, too, are ready.

"The truth in any given encounter," says Erikson, "is linked with the developmental stage of the individual and the historical situation of his group: together, they help to determine the . . . potential for unifying action at a given moment."

And that unifying action involves both clear thinking and passion, and it is guided by what is most genuine in yourself and in the others. This is the Truth that points to the next step in the evolution of life and it is our only chance to transcend the littleness and meanness of what we have been until now.

Jenkin Lloyd Jones calls this kind of Truth Prophecy:⁷

There is a pre-vision that belongs to the faithful heart, a foresight that is born of insight; there is a light of heaven blazing up from within in every soul. . . . The hopeful may . . . be mistaken, but . . . the timid, the faithless, those who are afraid of innovations, whose persistent plea is to tradition and precedent, and who distrust the validity of all lamps except the flickering, smoking, and oftentimes dying lamp of their own [past] experience, — necessarily part company with the . . . more forceful leaders of the world. . . .

Prophecy calls for sweat and self denial; it summons us to uphill tasks, bids us to die trying.

Do you ask for the sources of prophecy, the spring out of which flow the promises of life that so sustain the soul? . . .

Prophecy is the unconscious witness of uninvested energy; it is the expression of that potency of the universe back of all our plannings, behind all our arguments, greater than all our schemes. . . .

There are tides, fixed currents and gulf streams in the ocean of soul as in the waters of the deep, prophetic visions in the realm of spirit . . .

Prophecy witnesses to a divine potency in the universe, the coiled spring at the core of things. Prophecy is not mere longing; it is striving. . . . Prophecy is energetic, executive, initiative. There is an element of divine audacity in prophecy. They are the children of God who, fearless of consequences, plunge forward, who take up hard tasks, who break with convention and grapple with the ideal; who dare launch forth in the interest of untried verities, forming new runlets in the tissues of brain for the currents of life to run in. . . .

May that quality of Truth

in whose name we gather

command our energies

inform our loving

and guide our living.

¹ Moncure Daniel Conway. Autobiography: Memories and Experiences. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company/Riverside, 1904, vol. I, pp. 109f.

² Conway, Autobiography, I, p. 175.

³ Conway, Autobiography, I, 184.

⁴ For this idea I am indebted to Ken Wilber in his The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion. New York: Random House, 1998, pp. 49ff.

⁵ RWE, "Fate." In Library of America edition of Essays and Lectures, p. 965.

⁶ Erik H. Erikson. Gandhi's Truth. New York: W.W. Norton, 1969, pp. 411ff.

⁷ Jenkin Lloyd Jones in the sermon, "Faith Reinforced by Prophecy," May 7, 1905.

Readings

A letter from a slave-holding Methodist preacher in Virginia, addressed in 1851 to Mr. R.W. Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts:

About a year ago I commenced reading your writings. I have read them all and studied them sentence by sentence. I have shed many burning tears over them; because you gain my assent to Laws which, when I see how they would act on the affairs of life, I have not the courage to practise. I sometimes feel as if you made for me a second Fall from which there is no redemption by any atonement.

Moncure Daniel Conway. Autobiography: Memories and Experiences. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904. I:109,114.

And from a sermon by Jenkin Lloyd Jones at All Souls Church in Chicago, 1905:

There is a pre-vision that belongs to the faithful heart, a foresight that is born of insight; there is a light of heaven blazing up from within in every soul, and the greater the soul the clearer is the light. . . . The hopeful may . . . be mistaken, but the fact remains that the timid, the faithless, those who are afraid of innovations, whose persistent plea is to tradition and precedent, and who distrust the validity of all lamps except the flickering, smoking, and oftentimes dying lamp of their own experience, — in short, the faithless, — necessarily part company with the . . . more forceful leaders of the world. . . . Those whom the ages unite in calling prophets are they who are buoyed by a faith in the future that seems unwarranted by the facts of the present.

Prophecy calls for sweat and self denial; it summons us to uphill tasks, bids us to die trying.

Do you ask for the sources of prophecy, the spring out of which flow the promises of life that so sustain the soul? The sources of all springs are subterranean. No one can trace the river to its beginnings . . .

Prophecy is the unconscious witness of uninvested energy; it is the expression of that potency of the universe back of all our plannings, behind all our arguments, greater than all our schemes.

There is a gravitation of soul as of the atom. . . . There are tides, fixed currents and gulf streams in the ocean of soul as in the waters of the deep, . prophetic visions in the realm of spirit . . .

Prophecy witnesses to a divine potency in the universe, the coiled spring at the core of things. Prophecy is not mere longing; it is striving. . . . Prophecy is energetic, executive, initiative. There is an element of divine audacity in prophecy. They are the children of God who, fearless of consequences, plunge forward, who take up hard tasks, who break with convention and grapple with the ideal; who dare launch forth in the interest of untried verities, forming new runlets in the tissues of brain for the currents of life to run in. . . .

— Jenkin Lloyd Jones in the sermon, "Faith Reinforced by Prophecy," May 7, 1905

Meditation

In the quiet of this moment we hear a great tumult of nations and the anguish of an aching world, and we come with strife and tumult in our hearts, as well.

Yet a sublimer silence draws us in, and bids us be at peace. Let us enter the temple at the soul of us, in the core of our being, where our deepest inwardness opens out into an Immensity from which all things flow. We enter that place and the noise and tumult die at its sacred door.

And in its clear and finer air we may see more truly, this world of life as it is, as it might be, as it must be; and know our place in it, and dare to take that place, and rise renewed, and healed; -- bearing, into that world of tumult, a very great peace.

Breathe afresh the breath of life. Let us say, Shalom, Salaam, I give you peace, to friend and to enemy. Let us now speak peace in the deep center of our selves. Listen in the silence and know what is true, and real, and holy.

Gather

There is a . . . foresight that is born of insight; there is a light of heaven blazing up from within in every soul. . . . The hopeful may . . . be mistaken, but . . . the timid, the faithless, those who are afraid of innovations, whose persistent plea is to tradition and precedent, and who distrust the validity of all lamps except the flickering, smoking, and oftentimes dying lamp of their own experience, — necessarily part company with the . . . more forceful leaders of the world. . . . Those whom the ages unite in calling prophets are they who are buoyed by a faith in the future that seems unwarranted by the facts of the present.

Prophecy is the unconscious witness of uninvested energy; it is the expression of that potency of the universe back of all our plannings, behind all our arguments, greater than all our schemes.

Prophecy witnesses to a divine potency in the universe, the coiled spring at the core of things. They are the children of God who, fearless of consequences, plunge forward, who take up hard tasks, who break with convention and grapple with the ideal; who dare launch forth in the interest of untried verities, forming new runlets in the tissues of brain for the currents of life to run in. . . .

—Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Unitarian minister, Chicago, 1905

Parting

Albert Camus:

Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every [person], on the foundation of his [or her] own sufferings and joys, builds for all.