A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
December 26, 2004
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
December 26, 2004
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
Christmas, which was, of course, yesterday, is supposed to be the birth of God-in-the-flesh, the perfect God-man, the sinless saviour who never, in all his life, failed to do any good that could have been done; never failed to do what duty required; showed, in every instance, his greatness of character; never did any wrong, not even anything a little naughty.
Hard to relate to somebody like that. How many people do you know who never trip over themselves, much less who are omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient?
And no, Unitarians never saw him quite that way, but some of the early Unitarians, and some even up through the 19th century, still thought that if he wasn't a God, he was a perfect, flawless human.
Unto you this day is born a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. UUs famously don't see him that way, but the birth of Jesus ordinarily overshadows a few other births at about this time.
So it's with a special pleasure that I introduce to you three more Christmas births. Unto you is also born Isaac Newton, Clara Barton, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. I made you a special wreath — there they are ranged around it!
Personally, I find them a whole lot more like me. Sometimes I can even think about them and think, They're as screwy as I am!
And look what they did — anyway.
Jesus of Nazareth is safely protected from the scrutiny of history. Since next to nothing is actually known about him, people have found him a fine mirror for the myth of the perfect human.
There's a real value in the myth of the perfect human with his divinity intact.
But I love these three. They, too, are incarnations of the Divine, just as you are, and the person next to you, and that stranger on the street.
And about these three, we know a whole lot more, and that includes their warts. Which is good, because the knowledge of what they achieved, together with the knowledge of what they struggled with and sometimes fell prey to, ought to give us a lots of hope and cheer. They all belong to our religious tradition of Unitarians, Universalists, and Transcendentalists.
The first two lived anguished and difficult lives; only the third ever seemed a particularly happy person, or was at all easy to get along with. It may provide us some comfort to know that, when the Divine life is incarnated — that is, the very Life of all things that is the substance of all that is — when that great sacred Mystery gets born into human form, — it is a human life that is born, looking quite a bit like us.
We sometimes want it otherwise. As you probably know, a great many gospels were written in the early decades of the Christian era, and in several of them, Jesus' birth goes without the least wrinkle of inconvenience. Mary is sitting in the cave gazing upward toward heaven and feeling no pain, and the wind stops and the streams stand still and then, Why look! — there is a fantastic bright light that shrinks into the shape of a baby that glows and the cave is filled with sweet fragrance and it's all over and many invisible beings say "Amen."
Somewhere in the backs of our minds I think some little part of us still thinks lives like ours cannot qualify for any real encounter with destiny. They're far too messy.
I have wanted for years of Christmases to celebrate these births and lives you never hear about at Christmas. The gospel of Unitarianism and Universalism is a spectacularly human-divine convergence that introduces into the world light and truth and beauty and a kind of salvation. But the stories you will hear today do not always sound like the lives of the saints.
They are the lives of saints.
The first was Isaac Newton, born on Christmas Day 1642. His father died before he was born, but then, Jesus' father seems to have disappeared, so they had that in common. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke trace Jesus' lineage two very different and contradictory ways, and so, too, there were two very different stories about Newton's ancestors. At any rate, in school, young Isaac distinguished himself in carpentry.
But then his stepfather died, too, leaving the family destitute, so he went to work on the farm until an uncle noticed he was awfully bright and insisted he be sent to Cambridge to study. We don't really know what happened there except that he bought a prism. He wasn't a great Cambridge student because his humble schooling hadn't been very good preparation. But by the time he was graduated at 27, he was good enough to be appointed a professor of mathematics.
For the next 27 years he hardly left Cambridge, devoting himself to studying and lecturing on optics, geometry, and algebra.
In 1692 there was a curious story that his dog had knocked over a lamp — though later it came out that the dog had nothing to do with it — and that 20 years' research in optics was destroyed. One story says he bore the catastrophe with complete calm. Another says he became insane.
During these years he was making great discoveries about light and optics and universal gravitation. But he had such an intense dread of criticism or opposition that he kept his discoveries to himself.
He began his work on gravitation in the 1660s and, after several years' effort, his calculations worked. But he didn't tell anybody.
During the 1680s the astronomer Edmund Halley was working on the same problem and somehow heard that Newton had already figured it all out. With great difficulty Halley managed to get Newton's astonishing manuscript and paid to have it printed, under the title Philosphiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It was the most important scientific work that had ever appeared, revealing the laws of solid and fluid motion with their application to the movements of the heavens, the tides, and the procession of equinoxes. "No work on any branch of human knowledge was ever destined to effect . . . such important consequences."1
Next he worked on differential calculus, or what he called Fluxions, but — as it happens — so did the great Leibniz. Leibniz, though, worked openly and announced his findings; Newton worked secretly. In the end, there was a big fight over who deserved the credit, and Newton behaved rather badly.
A morbid fear of opposition from others ruled his whole life. Even a little opposition was enough to drive him to secrecy or just to give up, and destroyed his peace. As one biographer put it,
A discovery of Newton was of a two-fold character — he made it, and then others had to find out that he had made it.2
In later years, he was elected and re-elected President of the Royal Society, which he ruled as a fearsome despot, unable to bear criticism. His loyal subjects were obsequious; the others he managed to exclude from the Royal Society. Yet there was no greater a mathematician or theoretical thinker.
I said he was a Unitarian, didn't I? He kept that secret, too; — but one must remember that throughout his life it was illegal to be a Unitarian. A man was hanged in 1696 for denying the Trinity. Then King William relaxed the penalties; now, for the first offence you were simply shut out from "holding any place of trust" and for the second you got three years' imprisonment.3 So the few who dared write against the Trinity — particularly the Unitarian pamphlets that were appearing in those days — published without even a printer's name, and always wrote in rather evasive terms.
Isaac Newton produced works of theology, and they were Unitarian in point of view, much like the writings of Joseph Priestley. His closest associates were Unitarian. But, like the rest of the light Newton shed on the world, he did his best to do a bushel-act with it.
John Locke sympathized with Unitarian views, too, so in the early 1690s Newton sent Locke a copy of a manuscript arguing for the Unitarian view. When Locke made moves to publish it, Newton got scared and withdrew it. There were bolder Unitarians then, like Thomas Fyshe Palmer, exiled for his views to Botany Bay, Australia; or Gilbert Wakefield, jailed at Dorchester. Isaac Newton was a cautious Unitarian, and a very, very nervous one, too. He saw more than he dared say.
Next, ranged about our Christmas wreath, is Clara Barton, born on Christmas Day in 1821 — into a solid Universalist family in Oxford, Massachusetts. In her home she heard tales of illustrious and progressive ancestors. She saw her own family's great generosity to the poor of the town, even though they themselves were hardly wealthy, and she saw when they took in an orphaned boy.
And at the Oxford Plains Univeralist Church she heard the gospel of universal love and of a God who writes nobody off but but finally, somehow, saves everybody. She heard about a God who wanted them to abolish slavery, and extend full rights and dignity to women.
But Clara herself was locked in a prison of morbid shyness. They tried putting her in a public school, and then a private one, only to have to withdraw her. So the family became her school, too, which was okay, because they did the job brilliantly. Her parents and two brothers and three sisters taught her taught her geography, literature, carpentry, the classics, horsemanship, sewing, Latin, and military strategy. As a result, for awhile —she came out of her shy shell.
But then a brother fell off a barn, and Clara was assigned the job of nursing him. She barely left his bedside for two years. The isolation revived her dread of other people, and she returned to her shell.
It took an outbreak of smallpox to pull her out of that shell. Since she fell sick early in the outbreak, she recovered, now immune to the disease, and became a kind of nurse to the whole town. That brought her out of her paralyzing fear of people or feelings of inadequacy — and now she could go to school, and soon she qualified to teach school, which she did with distinction.
Then in 1850, at 29, she headed off to Clinton Liberal Institute, which was a coeducational Universalist seminary in New York. After that her job was to organize a school in Bordentown, New Jersey. She recruited kids off the street — 600 of them — but was denied the principal's job because of her sex and fell into a depression as she watched an incompetent man run the school into the ground. Always lurking, there was the depression, driven aside only by some urgent mission. She quit and took a job at the Patent Office in Washington.
That's when things on the national scene started heating up. The Taney Supreme Court ruled that black people have no rights that a white person is obligated to respect. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner began his heroic campaign against slavery. He and a bunch of abolitionists, Transcendentalist-types, and reformers organized the Republican Party, which she joined immediately. The Southern states seceeded.
Clara Barton was in Washington when Abraham Lincoln delivered his inaugural address.
It was the sight of wounded and dying soldiers that finally sealed her mission. There was not, in the United States, one single trained nurse. It was her moment. She had to argue hard with the Surgeon General to get recognized as the first, and to get the neccesary documents and supplies, but at last she arrived at Culpeper, Virginia, where a bloody battle had been fought, and began caring for the wounded of both sides. And then Alexandria, and Fairfax, and Bull Run, and Harper's Ferry and Sharpsburg and Antietam. She gained renown as the Angel of the Battlefield.
After the war she located thousands of missing Union soldiers, living and dead. And she entered the Lyceum circuit, delivering hundreds of lectures.
Unlike Isaac Newton, Clara Barton was free to speak her views without fear of hanging or imprisonment. Which she did.
In Iowa once, in 1867, the poster advertising her lecture described her as "not after the style of Susan B. Anthony and her clique; Miss Barton does not belong to that class." Clara Barton saw that poster and ended her address with this:
That paragraph . . . does worse than to misrepresent me as a woman; it maligns my friend. It abuses the highest and bravest work ever done in this land. You glorify the women who made their way to the front to reach you in your misery, and nurse you back to life. You called us angels. Who opened the way for women to go and made it possible? Who but that detested 'clique' who through years of opposition, obloquy, toil and pain had openly claimed that women had rights, should have the privilege to exercise them. . . .And, soldiers, for every woman's hand that ever . called back life to your perishing bodies, you should bless God for Susan B. Anthony, Cady Stanton, . . . and their followers. . . ."4
"And," recorded Miss Barton later, "the very windows shook in their casements."
She was never so fulfilled as when caked with blood saving lives. The war's end brought back the depression and she set out for Europe. And there she met members of the International Red Cross. And listen to this: They wanted to know why the United States was refusing to sign the Geneva Convention! — A treaty that provided that ambulances and field hospitals, and the personnel involved with them — would be treated as neutrals, and that the wounded should be cared for whether they fell in hostile or friendly territory. She learned that 32 nations had signed on. Now she had another mission, which she pursued through the administrations of three presidents until America signed the treaty and an American Red Cross was established, and its first president was Clara Barton.
In later years she became President for Life of the Red Cross, and, in that position, was quite an insufferable autocrat and grew suspicious and rigid.
Finally she let go — resigned, in 1905, and her last years were passed in peace, the rivalries ended, and in these eight years of quiet and happy contemplation and writing, the depression finally was banished. She died in 1912, at ninety. It took her a lifetime, but Clara Barton finally achieved peace; the great nurse finally healed herself.
But who is this third, seated round the wreath? That's Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Born on December 23, 1823. You will not likely have heard of him anywhere except this pulpit. He went to Harvard and became Unitarian minister in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Now that was the biggest and richest port after Boston, home of great shipbuilders and merchants.
While he was in Newburyport, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed into law and fugitive slaves escaped from the South were captured in Boston. Higginson joined Theodore Parker's Vigilance Committee, set up to rescue the fugitives and send them along the Underground Railway to Canada. He wrote abolitionist columns for Newburyport and Boston newspapers. This made his wealthy congregation nervous.
Then there was his Thanksgiving sermon in 1848. They didn't like the part where he said:
Another presidential election has just passed. The plans I spoke of long ago . . . to place another slaveholding president at the head of this nominally free republic have been . . . consummated . . . with the consent and approval, nay the enthusiasm, of a majority of you. . . . Do you not see that by your expressions of delight at the result of the election, you have voluntarily foregone all the defense you had when you endlessly lamented for the "necessary evil, . . ." you have accepted the triumph as your triumph, and rejoiced over it and for that you are now to be held accountable.
He went on to ask in effect — And hey, merchants, how about the cargo your ships are carrying that nobody's supposed to talk about — I mean, the human cargo?
In Higginson's day you could speak your views without fear of execution or imprisonment, but you could get fired.
As yourself: if you had been sitting in those pews — where would you have stood? would you have found Higginson's message too "dark," not "spiritual" enough" — or would it have renewed your faith in your church to have heard that?
He was too much for the merchants of Newburyport. He knew he had no prospect of work, but it seemed that fear never stopped him.
And whaddayaknow, a new independent congregation of Transcendentalist bent, was being formed in Worcester, one of those congregations of Unitarians who had been thrown out of the American Unitarian Association and were affiliated with Theodore Parker's church. These were known as "Jerusalem Wildcats." They called Higginson to Worcester to be their minister.
While he was there, the fugitive Anthony Burns was seized in Boston, and held at the Federal Courthouse. With Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, Higginson organized a mass rally at Fanieul Hall. Right in the middle of the rally a signal was to be given and everyone was to rush the Courthouse and rescue Anthony Burns. It all went wrong; the signals got crossed and the rescue failed. But throughout his life Higginson would proudly wear a facial injury he gained in the attempt.
The Kansas War drew Higginson from Worcester to lead hundreds of men as "brigadier-general" of the "Free State Forces of Kansas." He raised money and armaments for John Brown, for which he was almost imprisoned, and surely would be today. He commanded a black regiment in the Civil War.
In later life, he poured out a stream of books and established himself as a major literary figure.
I was taught that the problems of the world, and of the soul, were solved once and for all in that one birth, and life, and death, two millennia ago. But the struggles of the world, and of our lives, continue and confront us still.
And we, with our own ragged lives, may find some comfort in idealizing the life of Jesus — or, perhaps, as surely happened in their time, those of Newton or Barton or Higginson. But the truth is, the more we know of them, the more we may see ourselves in them, and themselves in us.
There is light in us which, for our own reasons, sometimes not at all healthy reasons, we may seek to hide. Why did Isaac Newton so doubt his own work that he so feared contradiction? There is darkness in us, and we have our anguished moments. Why did it take Clara Barton so long to find peace? There is truth and passion in us, and a vision we earnestly want to make real in our lives and the world. Why were our own fellow Unitarians so afraid of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, so nervous about his campaigns against the greatest wrongs of his age?
But here we sit, people trying to find the meaning and purpose of our lives, trying to figure out what we are meant to be, to reckon the cost of being what we ought to be, hoping we don't too much stumble over our own dark shadows to be able to fulfill our particular calling in life.
We're quick to dismiss ourselves and dismiss each other. Or so afraid that our own work and thought is not sound that we sometimes feel threatened by the work and thought of others. The fears, the depressions, the jealousies, the hesitation and anxiety — these are not our finest qualities. But if we own them, hold them lovingly — they need not disqualify us from the race we have to run. For Newton, Barton, and Higginson — it was their very wounds and vulnerabilities that opened their hearts and fired their brilliant visions that drove their work.
And sometimes it's good — on a day like this one — to celebrate. Celebrate these lives of ours. Celebrate our anguish-ridden sister Clara, our suspicious, fearful brother Isaac; celebrate the happy, daring life of T.W. Higginson — and, seeing all that they were in ourselves, and ourselves in them — celebrate these lives of ours — what they have been, and are, and shall be.
Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
On this winter's day between times, we gather here to be renewed, to claim to ourselves meaning, and comradeship, and hope.
Before us is a new year demanding choices, requiring discernment, a weighing of ultimate commitment.
Behind us are achievements and failures, fulfilments and disappointments, joy and pain.
All these things we bear within ourselves today.
Let some light, some holy fire, stir among this baggage we bring, and make of this menagerie of strength and vulnerabilities the very resources for our living into this future where now our paths lead.
Let what must be remember rise in our awareness, and let what must be forgotten fall away, and let the true, and the right, and the good, and the holy win our assent and claim our fidelity
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1899 —
"Oh, why," said an exhausted American wife to her husband, "why do the insane so cling to you?" This tendency of every reform to surround itself with a fringe of the unreasonable and half-cracked is really to its credit, and furnishes one of its best disciplines. Those who are obliged by conscience to disregard the peace and proprieties of the social world, in the paths of reform, learn by experience what a trial they are to their friends by observing what tortures they themselves suffer from those who go few steps farther. They learn self-control by exercising moderation toward those who have lost that quality. Thomas Hughes, in his letters from America, describing some one whom he likes, adds, "He is doubtless, however, a cracked fellow, in the best sense," — showing that, without a little crack somewhere, a [person] could hardly do his duty to the times. Thus it is that the insane cling to those who, though really sane, are content to be called crazy, — "fanatic named, and fool," as [James Russell] Lowell wrote of [Wendell] Phillips in a sonnet.
Dryden wrote: —
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide."
The early anti-slavery meetings in particular were severely tested in respect to patience by those who might almost be called professional lunatics, as for instance Abby Folsom — Emerson's "flea of conventions" — with her shrill climax of all remarks, "It's the capitalists!" I have seen Abby Folsom led from the hall, courteously but decisively, by Wendell Phillips on the one side and a man yet living on the other, — she still denouncing the capitalists as she reluctantly came towards the door. To the occasional policeman present, for whom the abolitionists themselves seemed as much lunatics as their allies, the petty discrimination of putting out only the craziest must have appeared an absurdity; Wendell Phillips at that very meeting had to explain the real distinction, — namely, that he and his friends were not the object of persecution because they were crazy, but because they were known not to be.
Another striking figure on the platform, who always attracted the disapproval of the profane, was Charles Burleigh, who wore not merely long curls on his shoulders, but also a long and rather ill-trimmed beard, and had distinctly that Christ-like look which is often to be found in large gatherings of reformers. Burleigh was undoubtedly one of the ablest people in the anti-slavery conventions. Lowell, in one of his letters, describes him as "looking like one of the old apostles who had slept in the same room with a Quaker who had gone off in the morning with his companion's appropriate costume, leaving him to accommodate himself as best he might to the straight collar and the single breast of the fugitive." His eloquence had every essential except this, as his personal appearance had every quality of distinction but neatness.
In truth, even to this day, one rarely finds a country town in which there is not some . . . person . . . who is so near the verge of sanity as rather to rejoice in the freedom of observation and speech that it implies. "I am," said a lady of this description to me, "the only person in this place who can afford to tell people the absolute truth."
The Women Who Went to the Field
by Clara Barton
The women who went to the field, you say,
The women who went to the field; and pray,
What did they go for?—just to be in the way?—
They'd not know the difference betwixt work and play,
What did they know about war, anyway?
What could they do?—of what use could they be?
They would scream at the sight of a gun, don't you see?
And thus it was settled by common consent,
That husbands, or brothers, or whoever went,
That the place for the women was in their own homes,
There to patiently wait until victory comes.
But later, it chanced, just how no one knew,
That the lines slipped a bit, and some `gan to crowd through;
And they went,—where did they go?—Ah; where did they not?
Show us the battle,—the field,—or the spot
Where the groans of the wounded rang out on the air
That her ear caught it not, and her hand was not there,
Who wiped the death sweat from the cold clammy brow,
And sent home the message;— "`T is well with him now"?
Who watched in the tents, whilst the fever fires burned,
And the pain-tossing limbs in agony turned?
They would stand with you now, as they stood with you then,
The nurses, consolers, and saviors of men.
Sri Aurobindo
[We are meant] to grow more and more until we grow into our own fullness of self; all birth is a progressive self-finding, a means of self-realisation. To grow in knowledge, in power, in delight, love and oneness, towards the infinite light . . . , to universalise ourselves till we are one with all being, and to exceed constantly our present limited self till it opens fully to the transcendence in which the universal lives . . . , that is the full evolution of what now lies darkly wrapped or works half-evolved in Nature.6