I Nature

It is the threshold of Summer. A few delicious days have sometimes fallen on Sundays, and sorely tempted you away from these pews, though you have never once succumbed to the temptation.

One July evening in 1838, a small audience packed into an even smaller chapel in Cambridge listened in astonishment to a description of the summer day just passed — and we may let the words take us somewhere the actual weather outside today cannot:

In this refulgent summer — refulgent means saturated with glorious sunlight — in this refulgent summer it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation.

I returned to New England because I need, I require this — this, what Henry Thoreau called "the tonic of Nature." I am a city boy but the endless expanse of poured concrete that is Chicago and its dreadful suburbs was a suffocation of the senses and the soul.

Yes. There is a correspondence between nature and mind, nature and soul. Nature draws us beyond itself to That from which it flows.

One day, years ago, sitting beside Great Pond in Connecticut, with its profusion of life, noble and great and glorious — even though I could never find the place again — my mind opened to Mind with a capital M. My life opened to Life with a capital L. Was I changed? What had until now been closed in me was opened wide. It was already there. I saw what I had not seen, felt it, knew it.

Young Waldo Emerson, ten years old, a student at Boston Latin School, walked one winter evening across the Boston Common and saw not a few stars, not a blanket of wet snow, but the Kosmos. He became an amateur scientist and remained one for life, a charter member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and he became a scientist of Spirit, the most brilliant, luminous religious thinker America ever produced. In the crowded chapel that night in 1838, hearing the great address, was Theodore Parker, who went home and wrote in his journal,

I shall give no abstract, so beautiful, so just, so true, & terribly sublime was his picture of the faults of the church in its present position. My soul is roused, & this week I shall write the long-meditated sermons, on the state of the church & the duties of these times.

Theodore Parker, who, two decades later, dying, left as a testament to what Emerson had meant to him, this:

The brilliant genius of Emerson rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great, new star, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along new paths, and towards new hopes. America has seen no such sight before; it is not less a blessed wonder now.

II Nature and Spirit

Theodore Parker well knew what this meant, this correspondence of nature and soul. This religion that Emerson preached, this religion of soul:— it led Parker to stand, alongside Emerson, resisting the Fugitive Slave Law, in the struggle to end slavery and ensure civil rights for black Americans, in denouncing the Mexican War and the savage mistreatment of native American Indians.

So Emerson said this: The mystery of Nature draws us into a quiet ecstatic awareness of that from which Nature flows. "The mind opens," he says, and we ask, "What am I? and What is?" — so "asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled but never to be quenched." There appears to us, then, "a more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty" when our heart and mind opens to the sentiment of virtue, and we are instructed in what is above us. We learn that our being is without bound. We cry: "I love the Right; Truth is beautiful forevermore; Virtue, I am thine." His moral vision and moral courage flowed directly from this ecstasy.

This was not the religion of his father, the esteemed minister of First Church in Boston, William Emerson. No, that was certainly a religion of culture and learning, but it was acutely uncomfortable with this bit about soul. The old New England Unitarians didn't want to get mixed up with passion or ecstasy anymore than the old orthodox Calvinists did. They were all about obeying the Bible, that external, presumptive authority — not soul, not intuition, not our own mind. These were dangerous.

Emerson came to call the religion of his fathers "corpse-cold Unitarianism." He'd been drawn away from it by his own revelatory experiences of Nature, and by some people in his life, among them, his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson who, though quite Christian herself, valued rapture and inspiration as the fountain from which eloquence must flow. She was interested in eloquence and poetry but warned her nephew never to write poetry that was merely pretty but did not come from the divine Muse, drenched in holy imagination. And then there was his friend Sampson Reed, whose little book Observations on the Growth of the Mind affected the young Emerson so much, and who drew him further away from the old religious authority to a wilder inspiration.

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I liked that about Emerson, too, when I started reading him, when I was a minister in a denomination devoted to the authority of the Bible and the concept that inspiration lay all in the past, sealed and complete. Emerson and his friend Thoreau opened up new continents in my mind. I had my own Aunt Mary Moody Emerson in the form of the Pentecostals who inhabited the earlier years of my life. Their theology was a mix of primitive mythology and superstition, but they were not afraid of Spirit and Passion.

Emerson, too, outgrew his aunt's theology, but would never settle for less than her live, first-hand experience of Spirit, in his own quiet way.

III ONE: — Spirit, nature, and moral vision

A wilder inspiration. So while the old-line Unitarians joined the Calvinists in sitting out the antislavery struggle, Emerson became a central light in it, its spiritual center. His speeches were sometimes drowned out by mobs, and sometimes, the authorities deliberatly let the mobs in to disrupt this dangerous revolutionary.

His was a revolution that began inside the heart of a person. He said that there are, at work in Nature, laws that execute themselves. There is, he said, "in the soul of man . . . a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted," made small and mean.

And why is this? because:

"The world is not the product of manifold[] power, but of one will, of one mind, and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool . . . whilst a [person] seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature."

One will, one mind. One. This word one leaps from the pages of almost everything Emerson said. Like this, from his essay, "The Over-Soul":

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every [one]'s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart . . . Within [us] is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

What does this word, one, signify, and why is it so prominent in our Unitarian Universalist religious language? The Unitarians were thinking of it when they chose their name. Quite separately in history, the Universalists, too, were thinking of it.

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You cannot listen to the divisive rhetoric of the new Christian right or of the Islamicist fundamentalist rhetoric of division and separation without longing again for the sense of this great word, One.

It is a slow and uncertain evolution that replaces in human consciousness the sense of division and separation with the sense of One. But I do not believe that human civilization on this planet has very many years to survive unless we come to that unitary consciousness.

The lack of it is the product of our cosmology, it is the religion of a dying order: the religion of separation, of alienation. It pervades the atmosphere and is embedded in our bones. Children grow up into violence and alienation, sick at heart and mind.

It sickens us with fear of violence on the streets or finally raining on us from the skies. We have lost our sense of the kosmos, and, said the great cultural and psychological thinker Otto Rank, when humanity lost the kosmos, lost the awareness of our integral part in it — when we lost the kosmos, we became lost.

Our popular religions bear some responsibility for bringing us to the edge of this precipice. Theirs is a legacy that we must now recognize as outmoded and destructive, that cannot help us now; a universe where, above, are the Shining Gods, and below, his obedient subjects, and under their feet, the earth, just a bunch of dead rocks and dirt with no life in it, no divinity about it.

And the human part of that hierarchy — some of them were God's special chums, the specially chosen elect. All the other were just heathen.

Under that vision, the earth's human inhabitants have sectioned off the planet into 160 or so nation states, and these nations exist in an abiding sequence of conflicts that have grown more and more threatening as we have gained increasing control over the powers inherent in the physical structures of the earth.

Now from the frontiers of science comes an understanding of the nature of the Universe that sounds like the Transcendentalism of Mr. Emerson.

The great physicist David Bohm was among many in our day speaking of a new approach to reality, an imaginative view of the relationship between mental and physical, between mind and matter, two aspects, finally, of one reality. Matter and Spirit, or Matter and Energy, if you prefer: Energy enfolds Matter and Meaning; while Matter enfolds Energy and Meaning. Space and time all seem to flow from a universal, unbroken field, a ground beyond time.

And David Bohm wrote,

The mind may have a structure similar to the universe and in the underlying movement we call empty space there is actually a tremendous energy, a movement. . . . [G]etting to the ground of the mind might be felt as light."¹

IV Where to start: Self

Coming into that inner light is an ecstasy. That is where the ecstasy of Nature's beauty naturally draws you. But then, another revelation: This perception awakens in the mind what Emerson calls the religious sentiment, and he says,

Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. . . . It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. . . . This sentiment is divine and deifying. . . . Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from another,— by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every other, is an inlet into the deeps  . . . When he says, "I ought;' when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship.

It sounds so lofty, so unattainable, so immediately he corrects the mistaken fear that all this is above you, beyond your reach. He says we've fallen into superstition, been conditioned by the kind of religion that seals us off for our own souls, yet this sublime religious experience is never far from any of us, and is greater, and stronger, than all our errors and missteps. Whoever you are, wherever, in whatever state: The doors of the Temple stand open.

They stand open before everyone, and the oracles of this truth are guarded by just one condition: this is an intuition, it's got to be your own and first-hand. "It cannot be received at second hand."

You come here not to get religion, not to get spirituality, but to be provoked to open yourself to something that you cannot get from another soul, you must find it just where it is, in your own soul. And so you have to judge, judge for yourself, judge between what is real and what is false. I must speak my own truth with passion and so must you. We must be open to inspiration from the only place it ever comes, from the deep wells of our Selves.

V Religion

Now he is going to speak directly to the graduates. Did I tell you? The occasion for all this is that he has been invited to speak to the graduating class of what is now Harvard Divinity School. It's 1838. Seven graduating students, plus a bunch of faculty and townspeople and one of last year's graduates who has walked all the way to Harvard Square from West Roxbury because he knows his walk is going to be worth it, Theodore Parker. And Waldo Emerson is going to tell these new ministers about religion and being ministers of religion.

You are going to be preaching from pulpits, he tells them, that have been devoted to the idea that all these grand splendors of the soul apply only to one person, Jesus, and in this narrow, self-dismissive delusion, men and women have long been shut off from their fullest, divinest selves. You must correct the delusion.

Jesus saw with open eye the mystery of the soul and was ravished by its beauty and lived in it and had his being there just as you might. He said:

One man was true to what is in you and me.

This he said in the hearing of all the old doctors of religion at Harvard, and they shuddered, and began to formulate their articles refuting him. Blasphemy! Heresy! Infidelity!

But calmly, with the sweetest of smiles, Mr. Emerson went on, he wasn't finished. It was getting quite warm in the chapel.

The problem with the church now, he says, is that it exaggerates the importance of the person of Jesus and made him a demigod, and has set up a kind of religious monarchy, built on power and fear that injures the soul. And religion ought to be about soul.

So Mr. Emerson has to declare:

That is always best which gives me to myself. . . . That which shows god in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.

Isn't Mr. Emerson just a bit optimistic about humanity? We have lived through and after the Holocaust, and Saddam Hussein, and on a lesser scale of wrong, lived through Enron and a government that belongs to the oil industry, careless of its destruction of nature.

But writing this I just saw, on the BBC World News, a man in East Timor whose neck was nearly severed by an axe wielded by the Indonesian army during one of those waves of repression. With his misshapen neck bearing witness to what he had undergone, he said he was willing to let the Truth and Reconciliation process go forward and to forgive those who hurt him, so the new nation might have freedom and independence. How is this possible?

The primitive tribal behaviour of war and cruelty we understand well, it is before us and below us and still a part of us, but how do we understand the noble and the good? how do we understand forgiveness, or love? But that is why we are human, Nature's highest achievement to date. We are capable of self-reflection, contemplation, and moral inquiry and vision. It is to that that Emerson calls us, and the highest insights in most of the world's religions call us.

So Mr. Emerson declares a religion of inspiration now, or, as he says it, "Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done," and this he calls an injury to faith. No, it is with the beauty of the soul that they must begin, and if they do, it will beget a need to impart the love and beauty they see. "Always," he says, "the seer is a sayer." However you express this beauty, this truth, this love, you will becom its priest or poet.

Now he turns to the church as it is now. Oh oh.

In how many churches [he asks], by how many prophets, tell me, [is a person] made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds the persuasion that by its very melody imparadises my heart . . . ? Where shall I hear words that in [earlier] ages drew [people] to leave all and follow? . . . Where shall I hear these august laws of moral being so pronounced as to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost action and passion?

Breathtaking — a high and demanding standard; and what intuitions will we dare to trust? what risks will we dare? It challenges every one of us to ask, what kind of religious community, what kind of spiritual center, do we mean to run here? What is supposed to happen to people when they come through these doors? What do we think is even possible here?

Risk — indeed. Is it safe to trust your intuition? No, of course it isn't safe, but what's the alternative? The alternative to trusting our intuition and to daring is to just start digging our graves because we're gonna need them pretty soon when we realize we haven't even begun to live! Henry Thoreau said he wasn't willing, when he came to die, to discover that he had not lived. "I did not wish to live what was not life," he said, even if it cost something, even if it cost everything.

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He will conclude now. His final plea is this:

Now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar. The evils of the church that now is are manifest. . . . The remedy . . . is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul.

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That is it; there you are. The most influential of Unitarian theologians, a member of that Cambridge faculty, published a few pamphlets calling Mr. Emerson's remarks "the latest form of infidelity." The religious world shook and rattled for awhile as Mr. Emerson retired to Concord to continue his quest for farther reaches of truth, and to write some more. In his parlour would gather a truly radiant assortment of men and women who might have remained obscure, but for their having been kindled in that flame; but they were drawn into that fire, and they changed the world.

Mr. Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard, not until 1865, 27 years later. It didn't matter. Divinity school students, and ministers, and throngs of laypeople were reading his essays, going to hear his lectures. For most of the rest of his life he lived on the outskirts of Unitarianism, quietly, powerfully, by the force of soul, drawing the Unitarian movement, and with it the Universalist, up a more daring pathway, igniting a new and transforming fire on its altar. Within a decade of his death in 1882, the names of those who had been horrified, scandalized, by his bold words, were not remembered; no one could tell you who that theologian was who called his gospel "the latest form of infidelity," there were no monuments to those who had ridiculed him. Unitarianism and Universalism too were born anew, rekindled.

It is two hundred years today since Emerson's birth. And still there is no more urgent message for this world: we must arrive at this sense of One, this sense that we all participate in one great Over-Soul, or human civilization on this planet cannot have very many years to survive.

The road to that consciousness of One, —

That road — is the soul within us. The remedy to the greed and the division, to the exploitation and the threatening annihilation of life, is nothing less, nothing more complicated, nothing other than what, that day in Cambridge, Mr. Emerson said it was: it is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul.

© Copyright 2003 F. Jay Deacon

¹ Quoted in Renee Weber, ed., Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 48.

Readings

From Emerson's Divinity School Address of 1838:

Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every [one], and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. . . . The doctrine of the divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution. . . . And because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices, usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul.

And from his essay, "The Over-Soul":

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every [one]'s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within [us] is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. . . . Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind.

And finally this, from Hafiz,
a 14th-century Sufi poet loved and translated by Mr Emerson:

Meditate

As coming summer

In this gathered silence
In this sacred space, in the quiet amid turmoil —

Here, now —

Let our eyes be opened
That we may See
what might be and must be and shall be

Let our ears be opened to hear silent Music
whose harmonies shall resolve the dissonance into strains that shall be great & sublime.