UNITARIANS WHO MADE A DIFFERENCE:

Ralph Waldo Emerson![1]

INTRODUCTION: In his address to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School in 1838, Emerson opened with an eloquent description of the beauty of the world. However, seeing its beauty and admiring its greatness has an existential impact upon us. It causes us to ask: “What am I?” and “What is?”

And how did Emerson answer those questions?

…Our being is without boundary…to the good, to the perfect, we are born….Let us, then, learn the revelation of all nature and all thought: namely, that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own mind...and that the simplest person who in her or his integrity worships God becomes God."

It was 30 years before he was invited back to speak, despite Harvard’s Divinity School being Unitarian and Emerson’s being a Unitarian minister and one of the nation’s most sought after speakers.

H.L. Mencken dismissed Emerson as a “moonstruck” person, living in some alternative universe, blindly optimistic, indifferent or oblivious to evil…a man who with great sincerity announced that if he found himself in hell, he’d work to turn it into heaven. It was also Emerson who urged his listeners and readers to “hitch your wagon to a star,” and “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

But there was more to him than sayings. Here are three rather profound religious questions that he posed in one of his publishing efforts, entitled, Nature:

SCRIPTURE.

First, “Why should we not enjoy our own original relationship to the Universe?”

Emerson is particularly critical of Christian theology and its exaggeration of the person of Jesus. It turned him from a simple prophet of Galilee who was in the line of the ancient prophets of Israel, into the quagmire of theological speculation about his having two natures, human and divine, or worse, the doctrine of the Trinity, which makes no sense to anyone.

The point is simple: Jesus is one of thousands upon thousands – maybe even millions – who have struggled with the same issues. They’ve ventured and won, tried and failed…they know the ups and downs of both failure and success. Many have much to offer.

            But the key is, their relationship to us can and should be our own unique relationship…a revelation of how to live that we discover all on our own.

            I remember when I first went to help out at a little Unitarian Universalist church near the Children’s Hospital where I was consulting. In an effort to get to know as many of the few people at the church as were there, I struck up a conversation with Linda, the wife of the president. She asked me about my religious journey and I shared my Pentecostal upbringing, and my choice of United Methodism for some 25 years after that. I then asked her about her journey. She answered, “I wasn’t really raised in any religion. But after college I began to practice ‘Lindaism.’” I guess my face betrayed my lack of understanding so she explained. She said, “I don’t need a minister or book to tell me what to believe. I – Linda – can do that all by myself.”

            I’m quite sure Emerson would initially be caught off guard, but then be pleased with Linda’s Lindaism. (Her husband is now minister at First Unitarian of Oklahoma City.) For sure it answers in a unique way his first question: “Why should we not enjoy our own original relationship to the Universe?”

Secondly, “Why should we not have a poetry of insight and not of tradition?”

Emerson refers to the language of religion as poetry. That means none of it is right or wrong, but different…it’s poetic. Emerson asks, however, for a poetry, a religious language, that stems from intellectual insight, rather than from an ancient time in history…a tradition…based on what happened 2,000 years ago.

            That means we may find insight from Sigmund Freud, Karl Jung, Albert Einstein, Norman Vincent Peale, Billy Graham, Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou, or Martin Luther King, Jr. But we discover them and they become the insight to which we cling as decisive for our lives at this moment in time.

            I’ve heard Maggie Mullins say how our summer services program of a few years back on the new physics was so helpful for her on her spiritual journey. But I’ve also heard others say how helpful Maggie was for them in claiming mindful meditation as their spiritual practice.

That is Emerson’s point: The concern should be when beliefs pass from others to us, without having gone through the brains of either of us.

Thirdly, “Why should we not have a religion by revelation to us, rather than the history of someone else’s revelation?”

Let me translate or explicate. When Emerson says, why not “a religion by revelation to us,” he means what we might call our own, “aha moment.” When we got it. When we understood.

We all remember the story of Helen Keller, who was blind from infancy, and despite her physician father’s hiring a private tutor for her, it never took. Since she was both deaf and blind, she couldn’t understand what was going on in the world outside her. She was in a world without any recourse to meaningful symbolic communication, such as a tapping vocabulary. She couldn’t grasp that there was a meaning to certain pressures on her fingers and hand by her teacher.

Until one day in the Spring of 1887, her tutor, Anne Sullivan, who was partially blind herself, ran water over 7-year-old Helen’s hand at the well pump, and then patiently spelled out in Helen’s hands the letters, W-A-T-E-R. She did it again, and then for the first time ever, Helen paused, pondering. Then Helen tapped into Anne’s hand in the same way; Anne tapped back and soon, Helen was insatiable in wanting to know words and meanings. Here is how Helen later explained it:

"We walked down the path to the well-house….Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word W-A-T-E-R, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me."

Helen immediately pleaded for the name of the pump to be spelled on her hand; then she wanted the name of the trellis. All the way back to the house Helen learned the name of everything she touched….Within the next few hours Helen learned the spelling of thirty new words.

Now our spiritual journey is probably never going to have that dramatic an insight, but I do remember clearly when I made certain discoveries about the faith in which I had been reared that were life-changing. In fact, they are why I’m here rather than in a Pentecostal or a United Methodist Church. More importantly, at an early age, I began a journey searching for my own insight into what I believed and wanted to practice. As Emerson would put it, it was a search for my own revelation, rather than someone else’s. It was not second hand faith translated through the life of some one else. It was my insight and my revelation.

One other significant facet of Emerson’s perspective on religion had to do with Christianity and Jesus. He felt that undue emphasis upon the death of Jesus and his resurrection was at the expense of his actual life’s emphasis upon caring and supporting the oppressed. He preached and practiced love for others as we love ourselves. He went the extra mile in reaching out to the sick, the halt, the blind, the hungry, the thirsty, and the poorly clad.

To Emerson, it was the height of disrespect after the death of Jesus for his followers to focus on his death and resurrection and to ignore one very simple fact: The reason for Jesus’ death on the cross was because of what he said and did, not because he was a helpless pawn in some grand cosmic scheme of redemption, or that 2,000 years later we could be saved because his blood was shed. No! A 1,000 times No! Two thousand years later, what demands our attention about the life of Jesus is his absolute commitment to the poor and the oppressed.

Sure, believe what you want to about his death and resurrection. But Emerson would say, don’t do so at the expense of his amazing life of love and compassion for the sick, the oppressed, and the have-nots of our society.

Friday, I was visiting with someone who wanted to know more about All Faiths. During the conversation, she asked, what do you do in the community for others? I stuttered a moment, and then said, “Well, we have a member on the board at the McGregor Clinic, which serves some 500 women and men diagnosed with AIDS and H-IV; he and a nurse practitioner in our congregation oversee our stocking their pantry so that they can give food to needy patients when they come for medical assistance. We also collect clothes once a month to take to them. In addition, Dale and Nancy make sure that we give $1,200 a year towards their operating expenses.

In addition, we’ve been assisting Hope House, a facility for children in transition from their dysfunctional home to foster care; one of our members led an effort to completely remodel the facility, inside and out; put a lawn in; installed a playground; and for several years we provided back-to-school clothes every summer.

We’ve been supporting the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for many years. In fact, today, Peggy JSingh is selling produce that she drove down to Immokalee yesterday to buy, with the profits going to the Coalition. We provided lunch for two busloads their volunteers headed to Chicago when they were going to demonstrate at McDonald’s headquarters. As minister, I emceed a fund-raiser, attended a demonstration at Burger King in Miami, and showed up in support of their efforts, as have scores of our members at other times and places.

During the Bush administration, our congregants stood every Wednesday on the corner of McGregor and Colonial, to protest the war in Iraq. We’ve had a board member at the Quality Life Center and attempted to be in support of their mission to their community. And this Thanksgiving, we’re going to feed 400 at the Nations Association.

Our members, Joan and Paul Segundo, have started a program in Bolivia that has built more than 100 schools, along with apartments for teachers; plus, some 50 medical clinics, along with water wells, dams and highways, plus emergency air service to a hospital.

We have another member whose wife and he were involved in taking groups of students to the Dominican Republic every year; she was involved in a devastating and debilitating automobile accident. But he’s kept going and is working at building an even broader organization that will carry on the vision that he and his wife initially had.

She said, “You must have a large congregation.” I said, “No, but we do have a committed and caring one.” 

That’s what faith is about, which is not what happened to Jesus after his death. He had spent his brief young life helping others to understand what is truly important, and when he died people turned his death into a religious ritual rather than focusing on the life lessons he taught about helping others. Emerson said that’s a travesty of the life of Jesus.

            Emerson did not consider himself an atheist, though others did; nor did he not like supernaturalism. He opposed the notion of a personal, historical God. Instead, he sometimes substituted “Over-Soul” for God, that “unifying force or energy in all things.” 

CONCLUSION.

To me, spiritual awareness is always about realizing our dreams. The universe is a platform enabling us to actualize our deepest and most heartfelt aspirations. The process of discovering who we are and what we are to do with our lives and how we are to follow the coincidences of our lives depend in large part upon our staying positive and seeing the silver lining in every event.

            Without a dream, we do not envision the role we can play in making a difference in our society. Without a dream we will not risk ourselves upon the shores of uncertainty and rejection. But with a dream, we see molehills where others see mountains, castles where others see outhouses, diamonds where others see stones.

            A dream can cause every failure to be only a lesson learned. A dream enables us to be grateful for the infinite possibilities which life on Planet Earth gratuitously offers us, every hour of every day. 

A dream helps us to see our infirmities in the context of infinity. We learn to look at today and tomorrow as blessed opportunities. We look for the opening, rather than fear the closing. Life’s lessons are always there for us to learn.

            And faith helps us to realize that we should dream for more than ourselves. We should also dream to make a difference in the lives of others. 

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum. Amen. And blessed be. [i]

Ralph Waldo Emerson

(engraved and published by S.A. Schoff... from an original drawing by Sam W. Rowse - 1878. Wikipedia makes this image available in various forms on its website)