First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Canton, Massachusetts

The Transcendentalists and Us Today

Rev. Cricket Potter
May 16, 2010
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton  

This spring, we have been exploring the history of our Unitarian Universalist tradition.

When we left off several weeks ago, the widening gap between liberals and conservatives led to a complete falling out over their understanding of the Trinity.

Right here in this sanctuary, a congregational vote in 1828 led to the splitting up of what was then called the First Congregational Parish.

A majority of liberals voted to officially become Unitarian.

Those on the opposing side, the more conservative Trinitarians, left to establish the Orthodox Congregational Church which is now the church across the street.

This same scenario played itself out all across the New England Congregational Church.

With the formation of the American Unitarian Association in 1825, Unitarianism was now becoming an institution.

The leaders of this growing institution took pride in their ongoing search for truth as found in careful historical analysis of scripture and as discerned through the power of human reasoning.

They were done with the emotional outbursts of the earlier century with the evangelical Great Awakening movement and its effort to stir people up and bring them to God out of fear for God’s damnation.

Rationalism and empiricism were the only way to a true Christianity in their minds.

But, soon another rebellion was brewing - this time within the Unitarian ranks.

A younger generation of Unitarians was now criticizing the older generation for – guess what? - its seemingly undue focus on empiricism and rationalism.

They voiced a hunger for a religion that embraced the spirit and touched the soul.

For these “infidels” as they were labeled by their opponents, intuition and personal experience were what mattered, not historicism and doctrine.

In a sermon delivered before the Harvard Divinity School Senior Class in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson had this to say about the “corpse-cold religion” of Unitarianism:

“Men have come to speak of the revelation (of God) as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead….The soul is not preached….The worshipper (is) defrauded and disconsolate….Tradition characterizes the preaching of this country…it comes out of memory and not out of soul….it aims at what is usual and not at what is necessary and eternal.

“My friends,” he summarizes, “I find…a decaying church and a wasting unbelief.”

Looking with hope to the future, Emerson then went on to say:

“The time is coming when all men will see that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, over-powering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness… that so invites (us) to be and to grow.”

A quick note about language.

The gender-inclusive language we use today is a very modern phenomenon.

Back in Emerson’s time, he and others used the words “man” and “mankind” even if they were being so expansive as to be thinking of men and women.

I have left Emerson’s and others’ language as they used it in their time hoping that you can discern their inclusive spirit amidst the strictures of their culture.

What Emerson centered his faith and writings on was a religious sentiment that he believed lies deep within each heart, a sentiment that arises from an abiding union between God and humankind.

As he later describes in his essay entitled “The Over-Soul”:

“Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments!”

Thus, Transcendentalism came to life in New England.

This movement gave voice to a passionate belief in a transcendent Goodness and Soul of which we are all a part.

No longer was humankind just a “likeness to God” as offered by the Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing a decade earlier.

Rather, humankind was considered a “part of God” by the Transcendentalists.

Accordingly, each individual carried the potential for giving life and form to God if given the right circumstances to grow into their full being.

This belief in turn led to a growing voice for those groups who had been pushed aside or pushed down by society, for in such marginalization, humankind was going against the very nature of God.

The Unitarian minister Theodore Parker perhaps best embodied this voice, particularly concerning the abolitionist movement.

Drawing on his deep faith in the divine that resided within each person, he became a tireless crusader against slavery even as some of his Unitarian colleagues and other Bostonians wavered in their anti-slavery stance.

Invoking what he called the “Higher Law” or God’s law, Parker offered this indictment of laws upholding slavery:

“When rulers have…enacted wickedness into a law which treads down the inalienable rights of man to such a degree… then I know no ruler but God….I tear the hateful statute of kidnappers to shivers; I trample it underneath my feet, I do it in the name of all law, in the name of justice and of Man, in the name of the dear God.” (From Theodore Parker, Yankee Crusader by Henry Steele Commager)

Not stopping with his speeches and writings on the matter, Parker walked the walk.

He was the go-to person for Boston’s fugitive slaves serving as their minister-at-large in whatever way he could.

He served on the Boston Vigilance Committee that sought to aid fugitive slaves to freedom as they escaped their southern owners.

And he even resorted to writing his sermons with a loaded pistol in his desk to protect the fugitive slaves he harbored in his home.

Parker was also a strong advocate for women’s rights at a time when women still had essentially no rights regarding education, employment, voting, or owning property.

In many ways, women, like the slaves Parker aided, were considered the property of the men in their lives.

They were viewed as fragile, emotional creatures with limited strength of body and mind.

Parker on the other hand, had this to say:

“Woman I have always regarded as the equal of man…and of course entitled to just the same rights as man.” (www.alcott.net/alcott/home/champions/Parker)

What began as a religious rebellion within the ranks of Unitarianism, thus spread much farther.

Both as a religious - and later, literary - movement, it criticized the ills of its time be they industrialism, materialism, slavery, or the plight of women.

Hardly the quaint flowering of thought that many of us studied briefly in high school or college, Transcendentalism, in one historian’s mind,

“was the most energetic and extensive upsurge of the mind and spirit enacted in American until the intellectual crisis of the 1920’s.” (From The Transcendentalists: The Classic Anthology, Perry Miller, ed.)

I can’t speak of an upsurge of the mind without mentioning Margaret Fuller.

One of the notable female figures of Transcendentalism, Fuller was an author, editor, journalist, literary critic, educator, women’s rights advocate, mother, and life-long Unitarian.

Here was a woman subjected to the stifling limitations all women of her time faced, and yet she held dear to the belief that the purpose in life is to grow and develop - not just for oneself, but also for the good of society.

Next Sunday, by the way, is the 200 th anniversary of her birthday.

She was born on May 23, 1810, right in Cambridge.

For better or worse, Fuller had a father who had hoped for a son but ended up with a daughter, and so he took to educating her with an unbending determination.

He taught her the classics, and soon she was reading Latin and studying French and German.

No author or philosopher was beyond her intellectual reach by the time she was a young woman, with Goethe and Emerson being two that greatly influenced her.

Educated, ambitious, and yet frustrated with her lot in life as a woman, Fuller later observed of this early time:

“I felt within myself great power, and generosity, and tenderness; but it seemed… is if they were all unrecognized, and… impossible that they should be used in life.” (The Spirit Leads: Margaret Fuller in Her Own Words, Barry Andrews, ed.)

She soon came to the conclusion that the object in life is to grow in spite of the obstacles one faces.

So, she left her home to teach at several progressive schools before delving more into the women’s advocacy work she became known for.

In 1839, she began conducting a series of Conversations with women in an effort to promote their development.

Using classical mythology and current literary themes as a springboard, Fuller encouraged this growing group of women to raise their consciousness, think for themselves, and express their opinions – things not encouraged in their domestic roles of the time.

She also became the only regular female member of the Transcendentalist group that included Emerson and Parker and many other Unitarians.

Soon she served as the first editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial.

In that role, she published an article about the state of 19 th-century women that she later developed into the radical and groundbreaking book for her time, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Published in 1845, this book had a significant and lasting effect on the nascent women’s rights movement.

This no-nonsense book raised, and faced head-on into, questions concerning love and marriage, woman’s mission in life, and relations between the sexes.

As Fuller proclaimed, no longer was woman meant to be the property of, or ornament for, man.

Rather, woman is meant to be man’s partner, friend, companion, and equal.

From her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century:

“(Woman) needs now to take her turn in the full pulsation (of life), and… improvement in the daughters will best aid in the reformation of the sons of this age….

Then and only then, will mankind be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for woman as much as for man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession…..

What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her….”

Once when asked what positions women could aspire to should they be allowed, Fuller quipped,

“Let them be sea-captains, if you will.”

She was definitely ahead of her time!

While she could have stopped with this work alone and have been a key figure in social criticism and reform, she kept going.

In her understanding of life, individual transformation was inextricably linked to social transformation.

She was a true Unitarian indeed!

So, Fuller’s work expanded to include concern for the conditions of Native Americans, immigrants, female convicts, and the working poor.

At the age of 36, Fuller was given the opportunity to travel to Europe, and she took it, eager to explore other lands.

Not one to rest on her laurels, she soon found herself in Italy, caught up in a revolutionary time, and writing dispatches about it for The New York Daily Tribune.

She met and married an Italian count, and had a child.

Sadly, on their journey across the Atlantic to America, she and her family perished in a shipwreck.

Fuller was only 40 years old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller – three figures unwilling to sit by and accept the norms of their time.

Each was moved to write, speak, and act for changes in their religion and in society that they felt reflected their deepest held beliefs about God and humankind.

In Emerson’s words that we read together earlier (from The Over-Soul),

“Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought, that the Highest dwells within us….Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related.”

From Parker in one of his many sermons against slavery (“The Effect of Slavery on the American People”):

“(Slavery) belongs to… a time of barbarism….

By nature each man is a unit of human substance, having all the …natural rights of humanity. By slavery, he is reduced to a fraction with none of the…natural rights of humanity.”

And then there is Margaret Fuller with her passionate words and ideas:

“Let us be wise and not impede the soul. Let (woman work and engage in the world) as she will. Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation.” (From “The Great Lawsuit” as published in The Dial)

She was determined to push through the limitations of her time to give women a greater voice and a greater role in the larger world.

Those in the later woman’s suffrage movement had her to thank for laying the groundwork.

What stays with me is the Transcendentalist belief these individuals shared that all individuals were a part of the divine and thus deserving of those “natural rights of humanity.”

Believing fervently in this sense of divinity and the rights one must be afforded accordingly, they were determined to uphold the worth and dignity of so many groups of people who had long been pushed down.

While coming from almost 200 years ago, their words and actions do speak to our time today.

There are still so many who are viewed as unworthy of rights and who are silenced, pushed aside, ignored, and worse yet abused.

So, the mantle is passed to us Unitarian Universalists of the 21 st century.

Right here at First Parish, we have our own calling to reach out to those around us whose worth and dignity, whose well-being, whose hope has been denied.

In a few minutes, we will gather for our last Open Forum of the church year to discuss “Social Action as a Community.”

My friends, we need to have an intentional conversation about what areas of injustice and need pull at our spirit as we take in the many wrongs of our society.

We need to come together as a community of faith to commit to service and action in the larger community.

This is about our faith, our calling, our hope for the world.

May we live up to the words of Margaret Fuller who proclaimed,

“Cherish your best hopes as a faith, and abide by them in action.”

May it be so for us all.

Amen.