First Parish Unitarian UniversalistIntegrity as a Way of Life: Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist-Canton, MA
September 21, 2003
After this biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson) was published in 1995, I gave a copy to my father-in-law for Christmas. I thought he would be interested because he quoted Emerson at my and Don’s wedding. We had invited each set of parents to speak during the ceremony, with no instructions as to the content.
Mine read several thoughtfully chosen passages from the Bible, suspecting that it might otherwise go un-mentioned in our ceremony. (Correctly suspecting, I might add). Don’s mother made her own statement disputing that the popular idea that, in marriage, two people become one; she said that “oneness is something to be achieved in time and then only in part.” And Don’s father quoted Emerson.
Lots of people quote Emerson. In fact, one of the things he is known for is his quotable aphorisms. Probably the most familiar of them is—do you know?—“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”
Just this year a fellow UU minister [Barry M. Andrews] published this collection of Emerson’s sayings, A Dream Too Wild, one for each day of the year, to be used for daily meditation. Unlike the short pithy Emerson quotes in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations—and there are 112 by Emerson!—Andrews’ collection features longer passages that reveal the subtlety and context, thereby being a truer representation of Emerson’s breadth and depth.
This is an important contribution because, as almost every commentator says and as I found true myself as a theological school student, Emerson is hard to read. So, it helps that someone else looked hard for the best paragraphs! His writing is dense and it rambles.
There are gems if you look for them, to be sure. One of my favorites appears when, in describing what it is like to lose yourself in nature—after he says, “in the woods, we return to [intuition] and faith”—he declares, “all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball.” Transparent eyeball! What a gem of an expression!
Such a collection is important for another reason. Its longer passages provide an opportunity to see another Emerson trait, his many contradictions—as is not possible with mere quick quotes. As another colleague [Ken Sawyer] described it, “He’ll say one thing and then the opposite, but often he’ll make both points so brilliantly you’re glad to be offered the choice.”
Now, my father-in-law used only a two phrases from Emerson in his reflections at our wedding and they weren’t contradictory, but he put them to good, and I might add, Emersonian, use. From Emerson’s essay on “Love,” the phrases were touch-stones at the start and end of his reflections on two of the ways that a life-long commitment between lovers benefits them.
One, he said at our wedding, that each person widens the other’s horizons if both try consciously to be open to the clearer insights which are possible when two different people look at a situation from their somewhat different points of view and articulate for each other what they see.
And, two, that the lovers build in their minds an idealized image of the partner—an image stronger in the attributes which he or she admires, nobler in virtue and wisdom than real humans exhibit, and much weaker in undesirable traits than is the actual case. The outcome of this, he said at our wedding, is an attempt by each to become more like the exalted picture carried in the mind of one’s spouse. Thus, both characters develop year-by-year in the direction of their best and highest thoughts.
“How idealistic!” Is that what you are thinking? Such idealism is characteristic of much of Emerson’s writings. To be fair, though, in his essay “Love,” he acknowledged the prevalence of a different, more materialistic view of marriage and, sounding like a twentieth century feminist, condemned “the education of young women” [that discourages them from these high aspirations and] “withers the hope and affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim.” [http://www.literaturepage.com/read/emersonessays1-92.html].
Emerson himself married twice. His first wife, Ellen Tucker, who by all accounts he loved dearly and deeply, and idealized much as my father-in-law advised, died of advanced tuberculosis at age 19, only two years after their marriage in 1829. Emerson was 25. It was a great grief that followed, profoundly upsetting.
As Richardson, the biographer, tells it,
Emerson’s life was unraveling fast…His professional life was also going badly. Though he was a much-loved [though still new] minister in an important Boston church, he was having trouble believing in personal immortality, trouble believing in the sacrament of communion, and trouble accepting the authority and historical accuracy of the Bible. The truth was that Emerson was in a fast-deepening crisis of vocation. He could not accept his ministerial role, he was unsure of his faith, and he felt bereft and empty…Before the year was out, Emerson had resigned his pulpit, moved his mother [out of his house], sold his household furniture, and taken ship for Europe. [p.4-5]
Ellen’s death was not the first Emerson had known, nor would it be the last, due to illnesses that today we easily combat with antibiotics. When Emerson was 8, his father, a Unitarian minister (as was his grandfather), died. Bereft of his income, his mother with her four sons and a daughter (who died within a few years) struggled on her own, running a rooming house in Boston, and eventually resorted to moving in with relatives in Concord, MA. The brothers were very very close. Ralph Waldo was devastated again less than three years after Ellen’s death by the death of his brother Edward, and once again by the death of Charles only two years after Edward.
Waldo (as he called himself) first met Lydia Jackson, who was to be his second wife, when she, well-read and a poet, was 31 and he 30, a guest preacher in her church in Plymouth. After the service, a friend asked her how she had liked hearing her own ideas preached [168], that’s how alike in mind and spirit they were. Nearly a year later, he wrote about meeting her, “It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time…The youth gazed with great delight upon the beautiful face until he caught the maiden’s eye…The mysterious communication that is established across a house between two entire strangers, by this means moves all the springs of wonder.”[191].
Emerson bought a house in Concord, they married, and bore three children. Young Waldo died at age five, to their great grief, about which Lydian wrote, “How intensely his heart yearns over every memento of his boy I cannot express to you. Never was a greater hope disappointed—a more devoted love bereaved.” [359].
Daughters Edith and Ellen grew up in Concord, enjoying the many houseguests and visitors, the hundreds of apple trees planted by their father nearby, and long walks with him to Walden Pond. I invite you to join me on an outing to visit the Emerson home next Sunday afternoon for picnic and a tour—there is a sign-up in the Parish Hall, but deciding at the last minute next Sunday is ok, too.
In many ways, Lydia was her husband’s intellectual and spiritual peer, but she was somewhat sickly much of their married life, during which his career as a traveling lecturer in high demand must have drawn him away from home for long periods. It was only after Emerson’s faculties began to decline, when they were in their mid-sixties, that his wife seemed to come alive to her own abilities and freedom, “a clear case of compensation,” wrote the biographer Richardson. [557]. On the other hand, Emerson’s views on slavery and women’s rights were influenced by his wife who was outspoken on each before he was, and she had great fun satirizing the lofty, self-important Transcendentalists with whom her husband gathered, as in these two of the series of “transcendental commandments” she made up,
Loathe and shun the sick. They are in bad taste and may untune us for writing the poem floating through our mind… Despise the unintellectual and make them feel that you do by not noticing their remark [313]
I’ve taken some time here to give you a feeling for Emerson as a human being who loved and suffered, and as a spouse and family man. I’ve chosen to do so to dispel the commonly-held view that I suspect you may have, as I did, that Emerson was cold and unemotional. Apparently his audiences at the time held the same view, about which he comments in that essay on “Love,”
I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul…to the power of love. [http://www.literaturepage.com/read/emersonessays1-87.html]
Another commonly-held view of Emerson is as the father of American individualism. In his essay “Self-Reliance” we can see ground for that, for its last two sentences are “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.” [Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stephen E. Whicher, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957, p. 168]
And, in it he says,
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” [151]
His idea, his belief, is that we are each enough. That if we rely on our Intuition, we will see the right way ahead clear.
In contrast with this individualism, though, Emerson was social. Not to the point of wanting to live communally in an agricultural setting with other transcendentalists, as his friends George Ripley and Bronson Alcott tried to get him to do.
But, reading Emerson: the Mind on Fire, I was struck by how important it was to Emerson to have good friends with whom to exchange and examine ideas. As a voracious reader and ceaseless writer, he necessarily spent a lot of time alone. Yet, his home was a hub of interaction. There was a steady stream of visitors in the Emerson household, including names you would recognize like Henry David Thoreau (who even lived there for a while) and Margaret Fuller, Emerson’s predecessor as the editor of the transcendentalist journal called The Dial, and first foreign correspondent for a major US paper. They were his closest friends, and like him, were participants in the gatherings that became known as the Transcendental Club.
(Each of these also had a Canton connection, as you may know. Thoreau lived here for a short time teaching school while his friend Orestes Brownson was minister here, and Margaret Fuller’s mother (whose name was the same as her daughter’s) grew up in Canton and she wrote about the town and her visits to her grandmothers.)
But Emerson’s self-reliance did not end in self-betterment, nor did it end with his talkative friends. As one commentator [Richard Higgins, “Remembering the Emerson who Sought God” in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Summer 2003, p. 10] observed, “it merely started a journey to common moral laws and community.” For example, he threw himself into the fight against slavery, giving speeches against the Fugitive Slave Law, putting his house on the underground railway, and even “entertained John Brown at his home, raised money for him and spoke on his behalf” [Richardson, 498].
We’re running out of time and there is so much more to say about Emerson. Richardson’s biography is 572 pages long, and look at all the little tabs I inserted, marking interesting ideas and events! Then I categorized them, noting page numbers under forty different headings. Over the summer my husband queried me, “You read that whole book and all you are going to get out of it is one sermon?”
I hope you don’t get tired of Emerson this year. He’s likely to be mentioned in quite a few sermons! Otherwise, I won’t get my preaching’s worth out of my summer reading!
Seriously, there is so much more to say. About how incredibly well-read he was, one of the first Americans to explore Buddhism and read the ancient Hindu texts, the Rig Veda and the Bhagavad-Gita. About his incessant journal writing, and cataloging thereof.
I want to talk about other ways in which Emerson has been misinterpreted. I don’t think he is as anti-God as he’s thought to be. Or, as anti-church.
And, I want to talk about how we Unitarian Universalists are indebted to him today. Not just for his pithy aphorisms that go so well on our calendars. Not just for his emphasis on self-reliance, which we can see expressed today in our promotion of every person’s “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Not just for his reasoned rejection of the authority and historical accuracy of the Bible, which seems old-hat to us today, but was radical in his time, even among Unitarian preachers. Not just for his commitment to the “right of conscience” and the goal of “peace, liberty and justice for all” especially any whose freedoms are denied. Not just for his eloquence on the gifts of solitude when experienced in nature.
But also, most profoundly, we are indebted to Ralph Waldo Emerson for his life-long affirmation that each and every one of us can have direct personal experience of what we Unitarian Universalists describe as the first of all the sources from which we draw, “that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that uphold and create life.”