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

November 21, 2004

In the early years of Puritan rule, besides the main Thanksgiving Day, many Thanksgiving days might be declared in a single year — and Fast days, — and you had to go to church or you'd be fined. There's nothing like obligatory gratitude!

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Most of that was gone by 1831, but the a lot about the Thanksgiving observance hadn't changed much. One Thanksgiving day that year, Margaret Fuller went to church. The service left her cold. But the day changed her life.

This was before anyone had heard of Margaret Fuller.

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Well, so, here it is, Thanksgiving. Margaret goes to church.

Now Thanksgiving had been a tradition in America ever since the Pilgrims helped themselves to a Continent on the theory that the Indians didn't have a right to it. Governor Winthrop had figured out that the continent was legally a "vacuum" because the Bible said to Subdue the Earth, and the Indians had not subdued it, so it was a vacuum to which the Indians had no legal right. Besides, the Puritans, not the Indians, had the true religion. Already Margaret was finding that this just didn't settle well with her conscience. There was plenty more troubling her that day.

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And here's what she got at church: the equivalent of "Smile!", "Cheer Up." She heard that we are all obliged to be grateful to Almighty God and that's that. The people seemed to look right past her. She wondered: are all these people filled with gratitude or are they just pretending?

The superficial words only jarred her more, deeply, bitterly; oppressed her spirit. She was twenty-one, facing a hopeless future, and she goes to church and gets superficial cheer and obligatory gratitude because it was Thanksgiving.

The service mercifully ended and she left the church in a turmoil. Hurried over the bleak fields. She sat down next to a cold, dark pool of water in the woods.

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Margaret Fuller was raised in the traditional way by a stern and icy father and a very, very docile mother.

Timothy Fuller was a decent man of conscience, a Congressman representing Massachusetts merchants who profited from the southern slave trade, yet he dared to oppose slavery.

Many of the Cambridge and Boston boys were reading Virgil in Latin at the age of six. But girls — why should they learn such things? Their role was to be housewives. Yet Timothy Fuller insisted that his daughter Margaret learn, learn the classics, learn language and history. She studied pretty much all her waking hours, and she always seemed to have a headache.

In Cambridge where they lived, Margaret at least had some close friends, young men studying at Harvard for Unitarian ministry. But they finished their educations and moved into their careers, far away, leaving Margaret at home with all this learning, but there is no place for women in the world these friends of hers inhabit.

Parts of Margaret Fuller's life read like a pathetic soap opera or sitcom: Next, she found herself exiled even from her beloved Cambridge. This had to do with the 1828 Presidential election. Congressman Fuller had supported John Quincy Adams, an abolitionist and a Unitarian — and apparently hoped for an ambassadorship in Europe. But, eh, Andrew Jackson won the election. Timothy Fuller was disgusted with politics and decided to move to the country. He chose Groton, Massachusetts.

In Groton, the fall came, and then the winter, and the roads were sealed by snowdrifts, and only the sledges, driven in convoys by the farmers, still driving their produce to market, could pass.

At least she saw her own words in print for the first time. Of course she hadn't used her own name — who would take a woman seriously? Anyway, subsequent submissions to publications were all rejected.

The spring came, with its mud and black flies, and then winter — and it scared her and though she loved to read Goethe and his vision of life as a changing, organic thing in which no experience was wasted, all the words Goethe ever wrote couldn't comfort her now. But she faced nothing but the unending beating of carpets and mending of stockings.

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Well, so, here it is, Thanksgiving. Margaret goes to church. She goes to church and gets superficial cheer. The talk of gratitude left her cold.

The service mercifully ended and she left the church in a turmoil and hurried over the bleak fields and she sat down next to a cold, dark pool of water in the woods. And — these are her words:

Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. I saw that there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the All, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God.

A light so sweet, so absolutely overwhelming in its strength and brilliance as to sweep away the muck and sorrow and selfishness and fear. What was this light that shone through everything in that moment? How does it happen that a person comes to feel, and really to know, that their life is really one with the Great Energy that is Life Itself, that flows as a great ocean, unspent, creative, bountiful?

It came to her alone, by that dark pool, not mediated by any a church, not by anybody. It came to her as it always comes, from somewhere both inside and beyond, as — it came as what Emerson could call "an original relation to the universe" — opening up inside her great stores of vision, and hope, and energies of joy.

Nobody else, not a church, not anybody, can give you that.

What she did have a right to expect at her church was a community of people who understand that, who trust that divine essence in each other, who share life's struggles in that faith and in solidarity with us. She didn't find it there. I hope that, if she entered these doors, she would find it. I hope that we always can find that here. But nobody else can give you religious experience, an original relation to the universe.

Wherever they meet us, those transcendent moments are of more worth than all the sermons and committee meetings and all our best efforts. Several times in her writings she describes the exalted state she experienced that day and subsequently on other occasions, too.

Her fear and gloom would sometimes return, but the memory of that moment never left her. Margaret Fuller was incapable of being superficial. And eventually she worked her way through to a profound acceptance of everything in her life, both good and evil, as having some integral place in an overall meaning and purpose, and for which she could be thankful.

To the bafflement of many, she became famous for declaring:

I accept the Universe!

Her statement that she accepted the Universe was eventually repeated to Thomas Carlyle, who remarked, "Gad, she'd better!"

But Carlyle hardly understood the depth of what Margaret Fuller had said. Do you understand what she was saying? In her journal, probably from 1835, she wrote this:

This is my ideal — the soul that, capable of the most delicate and strongest emotions, can yet look upon the world as it is with a free and eagle gaze, and, without any vain optimism or weak hope of a peculiar lot can . . . accept life.¹

Now, as for the great Carlyle — yeh, he sometimes seemed to acknowledge or tolerate the Universe, which is different. For him sometimes, it was a grudging toleration. As William James reminds us, we may tolerate the Universe only grudgingly, or in part; or we may accept it heartily and altogether.

And for an individual person, it means nothing to accept the universe in general until you can accept your particular place in it. Not the misplaced sort of place where others might have tried to pidgeonhole you, as they tried to do with Margaret Fuller. Your place, your calling in life.

And — this Universe of Life is pretty mysterious, and sometimes we're scared. Is the Universe kind and benevolent? Will my friends be taken from me by disease and death? What is my life becoming? We tremble.

I need to come to terms with the Universe — come to an original relation, a fresh and authentic relationship with it, to learn to love it and forgive the shadow side of it and know my part in it.

The question comes to us all as it came to Margaret:

Can we say to this whole roaring, shining, aching Universe:

I love you?

That's where thanksgiving begins. Like Margaret by the dark pool of water in the woods, we can feel a sense of belonging, and inexplicable joy, and inexpressible love, and a certain trust. We can learn to love the Universe as it is, and forgive it, not as victims in it but as a creative force.

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Her life didn't get any easier. But look how Margaret Fuller composed it, from the apparently dubious material given, into a great symphony:

Somewhere she met the great English abolitionist Harriet Martineau, who believed that women should assume leadership, defying social convention. She came to see Margaret's promise and who invited her to Europe to finish her education in the England of Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; in Greece and Rome and Germany.

In Boston, she joined Bronson Alcott in his breakthrough educational experiment, the Temple School, where eight-to-ten-year-old children learned to draw their own meaning out of the great classic myths and Gospel stories — often doing so with great understanding and profundity — and setting the prevailing assumptions about education on their head.

And then Emerson made her editor of his great Transcendentalist journal, The Dial, and then the distinguished Universalist newspaper publisher Horace Greeley hired her as the first literary critic in an American newspaper, the New-York Tribune. And then he made her foreign correspondent to cover the 1848 Italian Revolution. What an opportunity!

These were spectacular successes. But I did mention that her life had that soap-opera quality so familiar to many of us sometimes.

The wonderful European education with Harriet Martineau never happened because Margaret got sick and then her father died and she had to manage the household and farm because her mother was pretty hapless and her brothers had gone off to pursue careers.

And the great Temple School she and Alcott ran was forced to close when Margaret's book about it hit the streets and people realized how radical it was, plus the fact that one of the little girls was black. The Boston Advertiser attacked it as a mischievous invitation to ignorant children to express their "crude and undigested thoughts" upon "the most solemn of all subjects — the fundamental truths of religion as recorded in the gospels of our Savior." The daily Centinel and Gazette warned of the "blockhead" behind this visionary pedagogy and the Boston Courier warned that if the conversations were taken seriously, they would undermine the foundations of religious sentiment. Most of the students were withdrawn.

But what a triumph they had achieved! Education could never be the same.

It all happened because she couldn't go to Europe with Harriet Martineau. When that fell through, staying in Massachusetts meant that she met Emerson and Alcott. Waldo and Lydian Emerson welcomed her as part of the household. The Concord house became her retreat and library just as it was becoming the gathering place of that truly awesome, incendiary company of people called the Transcendentalists.

And when the Temple School closed, Margaret took its conversational style of education to another public that needed it as much — adult women, who had been shut out from serious education. She began conducting a series of Conversations-style classes for them.

She saw women struggling to acquire — alone and in odd hours — the knowledge of languages, literature, and history which was available as a matter of course to men with the same aptitude. She saw them slip farther and farther behind, their tentative self-confidence undermined by the solitude and difficulty of what they were trying to do. She saw them give up. She turned that anguish into a groundbreaking, earth-shaking book titled Woman in the Nineteenth Century, considered the first serious piece of feminist writing in America.

And consider her great success at the New-York Tribune. Margaret Fuller saw this opportunity differently than you might think because defined success differently, in a Transcendentalist sort of way: She didn't just report the Italian revolution: she joined it! There is a painting of her addressing an audience in the Papal Palace after the Pope was driven out: perhaps a lecture on revolutionary thought. Now — what would you give for that moment?! But it's yours, and mine, because it's our religious heritage.

A great Constitutional Assembly now proclaimed democracy in the new Roman Republic. And there she finally met the love of her life, a revolutionary leader named Giovanni Ossoli.

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I don't want to leave you with the impression that from that Thanksgiving Day on, life got easy for Margaret Fuller.

The Roman revolution didn't go well: the exiled Pope appealed to the powers of Europe — which were pretty much heavily Catholic — to restore his temporal sovereignty. Louis Napoleon responded with 12,000 French troops and held Rome under siege. Margaret Fuller wrote to Emerson that even in the terrors of war she found great cause for thanksgiving:

I received your letter amid the round of cannonade and musketry. It was a terrible battle fought here. . . .

Since the 30th April I go almost daily to the hospitals, and though I have suffered — for I had no idea before how terrible gun-shot wounds and wound-fever are — yet I have taken pleasure, and great pleasure, in being with the men; there is scarcely one who is not moved by a noble spirit. . . . the palace of the Pope . . . is now used for convalescents. In those beautiful gardens I walk with them — one with his sling, another with his crutch. . . .

I know not, dear friend, whether I ever shall get home across that great ocean . . .

The revolutionaries were routed. Pope Gregory returned to his Palace, and Margaret and Giovanni Ossoli and their year-old son Angelo set sail for New York. On the 19th of July 1850 the ship hit a sandbar in a hurricane and broke up just a few hundred yards offshore at Fire Island, New York, while a helpless crowd watched from the shore.

Margaret and Giovanni could have saved their lives by clasping timbers and letting the waves wash them ashore, but they preferred to remain with little Angelo. But she wasn't afraid of death: she'd already faced it when, once, very sick and near death, she had felt herself "disengaged" from any pain, "hovering and calm".²

Henry Thoreau was sent from Concord to search the beach for any remains; he found nothing.³

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The outward facts of her life never lost the quality of struggle. But after that Thanksgiving Day in 1831 her inner life was revolutionized; and that inner revolution drove her amazing and revolutionary life. If you want to know, pick up the anthology of her writings at the bookstore. It will inspire you.

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And, I say — we need those Thanksgiving moments when, on an unkind cold autumn day, suddenly the sun shines out with that transparent sweetness and power and we are overcome with a sense of the All, and know that all is ours, and, as Margaret Fuller puts it, the truth comes to us and we receive it unhesitatingly so that we are for that hour taken up into God.

It was a matter of finally, one day, accepting, embracing — the Universe — and with it, her place in it, her inescapable calling. Life somehow requiring her being there. In 1843 she wrote:

Whatever is, is right, if only [we] are steadily bent to make it so, by comprehending and fulflling its design.

Where there is no acceptance of the Universe in its wholeness — there comes the resentment, the fear, and the greedy hoarding, taking the easy way out, taking on the duties of life in a joyless sort of way.

But when I understand Nature to be uncontainable, flowing — and myself a part of it all — then, with transformed vision, I can see the depths and richness of the material given, and trust the never-spent energies at work in it all, and give thanks.

Her four closest confidants put together her memoirs. Emerson was moved to write:

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends . . . Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? . . . and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and . . . we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in [the old].

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We gather in the hallowed company of great souls who went before us and we gather in the hallowed company of the great souls your eyes behold here today. Let us give thanks for those who, from the core of themselves, have come to accept and with grateful hearts to embrace this Universe of life — are at home in this world, and who create the world new.

Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.

¹ Houghton Library, Harvard University, Works, box III, c ited in Paula Blanchard, Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987, p. 87.
² Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Riverside, 1889, p. 100.
³ Only Angelo's body washed to shore. He is buried under the monument to Margaret Fuller Ossoli at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge; it's worth a pilgrimmage.

Reading

— William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New American Library edition. New York: Mentor Books, 1958, p. 49.

Meditation

In this quietness we gather so that we might hear silent music, and, beneath the turmoil, a voice with purer clarity.

In times of great wrong, we would find a ground more holy and know that it is home.

In days of cold and grey we gather so that all that has lain cold and silent might rise and live and sing.

Let the pores of our inmost being lay open to feel the current of the divine wind.

Let us see the light that inhabits the darkness and illuminates it.

Great Energy of Life: you lift us up and carry us gently along with the strength of Being Itself:

May we trust you
May the Beauty at the heart of life ravish us
May we, with love, embrace Life, this world of Life
And stand in the place we are given to stand,
in peace,
in joyful and sacred struggle,

Sounding new harmonies made of the dissonant roaring tumult we have mastered by the energies of love

in this silence . . .

Parting

Bronson Alcott

So fine, so sublime a religion as ours, older than Christ, old as the Godhead, old as the soul, eternal as the heavens, solid as the rock, is and only is; nothing else is but that, and it is in us and is us; and nothing is our real selves but that in the breast.

—A. Bronson Alcott, At the first annual meeting of the Free Religious Association, 1868.