Sermons

READING Unitarian Universalist Pocket Guide, 6th Edition.  Susan Frederick-Gray, Editor. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2019. “Our Roots” by Dan McKanan, p 93.

Unitarian Universalist possess a rich heritage and many different ways of relating to it.  Some argue that because we lack a shared theology, it is our common history that holds us together.  Others relish the freedom to draw upon multiple spiritual sources without being bound to any single tradition.  Some take pride in knowing that unitarian and universalist ideas (notice the small “u”s) are as old as Christianity itself.  Our “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” is more ancient still.  Others stress the distinctly American flavor of our movement, noting that Unitarianism and Universalism (capital “U”s) were born in the epoch of the Revolution.  Still others tell the stories of our partner churches in Transylvania, the British Isles, the Khashi Hills of India, and the Philippines, insisting that their histories are our heritage as well.

 

READING Transcendentalism in Tapestry of Faith: Faith Like a River: A Program on Unitarian Universalist History for Adults

As a movement, Transcendentalism originated with Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1832 Emerson resigned his position as a Unitarian minister at Second Church of Boston because he declined to serve communion, a ritual he saw as empty of meaning. In 1836, his essay Nature introduced principles that would become recognized as Transcendental philosophy.

…  The followers of Transcendentalism felt a deep calling to live lives of personal integrity and to bring about social change. Henry David Thoreau both practiced and wrote about social responsibility. Theodore Parker was well known for his anti-slavery stance while Margaret Fuller championed the rights of women and Bronson Alcott worked for the reform of education. Two utopian communities, Brook Farm and Fruitlands, were founded by Transcendentalists as models for all society.

 

SERMON

Today, few people would identify themselves as Transcendentalists.

Also true …  Unitarian Universalism, more than any other religious tradition claims and continues to be influenced by the Transcendentalism of the early 19th century in America.

Beyond our own tradition, Transcendentalism has influenced Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Interfaith cooperation and companionship, the drive for women’s and minority rights, and an ever-evolving environmentalism.

Professor Ashton Nichols of Dickinson College taught extensively about the Transcendentalist Movement in 24 lectures in the Great Courses series. He says, “Transcendentalism in America was initially a movement of younger people whose ideas were passed on to young and old alike. Although many of its immediately practical ideas were short-lived, its value as an idealistic movement continues even into our own culture. Modern America still owes a great debt to such thinkers as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, [Henry David] Thoreau, [Bronson and Louisa May] Alcott, and [Margaret] Fuller, whose ideas lasted throughout their own lives and beyond.”[1]

So now, let’s back up and review what we may have forgotten since our high school English class when we perhaps first learned about Transcendentalism.

The Kahn Academy (a free on-line school for everyone) provides a very good basic description:
The philosophy of transcendentalism
The philosophy of transcendentalism originated in Unitarianism, the predominant religious movement in Boston in the early 19th century. Unitarianism was a liberal Christian sect that emphasized rationality, reason, and intellectualism; it was especially popular at Harvard.

The transcendentalists who established the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1836—mostly Unitarian clergy and Boston-area intellectuals—did not reject Unitarianism but yearned for a more spiritual experience to balance out the emphasis on pure reason. The very word transcendentalism refers to a spirituality that transcends the realm of rationality and the material world. Transcendentalists believed that humans were fundamentally good but corrupted by society and that they should therefore strive for independence and self-reliance.[2]

Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with beginning the Transcendentalist movement.  He was a Harvard-educated Unitarian minister in Boston.  After only a short time in the pulpit of Second Unitarian Church, in 1832, Emerson resigned that call and he did not serve as a parish minister again.

What happened?

Well, the identified problem for Emerson was his discomfort with ritual for its own sake. He felt that he could not and would not in good conscience serve the communion ritual to his congregation.  Since communion was at that time a very important aspect of Unitarian church life, he and the parish leaders were at an impasse.  Emerson resigned saying that he would take up the professions of public speaking and writing.  And so he did.

What was the problem for Emerson?  He had come to understand, and I suppose believe, that one’s personal experience with the divine was much more authentic than the reading of ancient scripture and the practice of the stale rituals of the church, even the liberal Unitarian Church.  While he never disavowed Unitarianism, he did become perhaps the first person to be spiritual but not religious in much the same way that people express that identity today.

His published essay – a book really – Nature (1836) is where we find the core aspects of Emerson’s understanding of the divine and reliance on person experience.  Here is the beginning of Transcendentalism. Emerson put forth the idea that to apprehend the divine, one must transcend the doctrine and dogma from any organized religion or theology about the divine and rely on one’s own direct experience of spirit, God, divine presence – by any name – which can be found in every living thing.

“Emerson believed we cultivate our own character and through this cultivation become agents of good or evil in the world. Further, cultivation of character is grounded in an unmediated experience of the sacred, one that occurs by looking inward. Finding that spark of divinity within us, it is possible to have a direct, transcendent experience of the holy. Emerson’s belief became the cornerstone of the Transcendentalist movement, and Emerson’s greatest spiritual contribution to Unitarian Universalism.”[3]  (UUA Tapestry of Faith)

For anyone frustrated with church – in 1840 and in 2022, Emerson was and is a breath of fresh air.

He certainly was exactly that for young Henry David Thoreau who became a student and a friend of Emerson.  For those of us in Maine, we could wax poetic about Thoreau’s  The Maine Woods for the remainder of the day. But, he is better known for his writing at Walden Pond – a small pond just outside of Concord, Massachusetts – where Thoreau built a small cabin on a parcel of Emerson’s land. We know Thoreau as naturalist, a philosopher, a tax evader and a social activist.  All concepts embedded in Transcendentalism through his influence and writing.

Of course, Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience influenced later political and social reformers who understood their duty to disobey unjust laws through non-violent direct action as a matter of both conscience and faith.

Together with Emerson, their reliance on their own experience of nature and their own spiritual encounters with the divine through nature, has given rise to our contemporary ecological understanding and environmentalism.  I do not think we can underestimate their importance in preparing the way for modern conservation, environmentalism, nature writing, and the spirituality of nature and place.  Writers including Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams credit Thoreau with deeply influencing their own experience and writing of nature.

Let me move on from these two most well-known Transcendentalists.

There were others.  Many others.

Among Unitarians there were many who appreciated and were deeply influenced by Emerson.

William Ellery Channing

Theodore Parker

Julia Ward Howe and her husband Samuel Howe

Bronson and his daughter, Louisa May, Alcott

Horace Mann

And of course, Margaret Fuller.

Margaret Fuller was essential to the dissemination of Transcendentalist thought. She was the first editor of The Dial – the movement’s printed publication.  She was not just editor and publisher.  She was a contributor of her own thought and insight.  Perhaps she is best known for her positions on the place and role of both women and men in society. She was adamant that both men and women ought to be treated as equals – as surely they had been created as such. She wrote that neither women nor men had been given sufficient opportunity to develop themselves fully and completely and society needed to reform so that every person could excel and become their most authentic self.  Although to our ears this makes perfect and simple sense, in her day these thoughts were beyond revolutionary.

As a feminist, an advocate for women’s voting rights and the full human and civil rights of women, immigrants and African Americans, she was both well ahead of her time and deeply reviled.  Another Unitarian living out her faith and commitment to justice!

She influenced other important women in the movement toward equality, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Now, I want to pause.  I want to shift our thinking.

The early Transcendentalists were all from the greater Boston area and mostly men and mostly Unitarians.  They were also all white.

Now, I must confess that I never really thought about that until last month’s gathering UU Ministers when one of our Black UU ministers wondered aloud in his Berry Street Lecture if all his white colleagues and friends who revere Emerson and Thoreau give even a passing thought to the Black philosophical leaders of that day and time.

Oh.  Well, no actually.  I certainly had not.

Already I had planned a Sunday devoted to Transcendentalism as one of our spiritual sources and influences.

Now, I want to know who these Black Transcendentalists were and why I know nothing about them.

Well, I will tell you that in reviewing our UUA materials and spending countless hours consulting Google, I find no Black Americans identified as Transcendentalists.  None.  Perhaps some of you are better historians than I am and you will enlighten me and fill the gaps in my knowledge.

For now, however, I have my own working theory about why we find no record of Black Transcendentalists.

Remember, Emerson left the pulpit for the lecture circuit in 1832 and published Nature in 1836.

Fuller published Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1843

Thoreau published Walden in 1854.

Where were most Black Americans?  Most of them were enslaved.  They were not thinking about the transcendent nature of God or the beauty of the natural world or the balance of social responsibility and rights of both women and men.

They were not leading lives of relative privilege in Boston and they were not following the lead of a Penobscot named Joseph Attean through the Maine Woods.

So, were there any great published and widely recognized Black thinkers and reformers of the pre emancipation period?

Well, there were. And I will talk briefly about two of them. For their passions and life’s work did in fact overlap with the core tenants of Transcendentalism.  You will recognize their names and perhaps recall their contributions to abolition and social reform.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper —  September 24, 1825-February 22, 1911

Frederick Douglass —  February 1817 or 1818 – February 20, 1895

Both of these Black Americans lived in the North. Neither was enslaved when they were influenced by Transcendentalist thought.

One born free. One an escaped former slave.

Both were very well educated and compelling public speakers.

Both drew on the wisdom and truth of their own experience in coming to their firmly held beliefs and public positions.  As such, they are both the embodiment of the Transcendentalist philosophy.

Understandably, their focus was on abolition and the rights of Americans of African descent.

After emancipation, Frederick Douglass fought to get the vote for Black and female Americans.

Professor Ashton Nichols says, “Douglas, finally, wanted to make the grand promises of America available to all of America’s citizens. The work of his legacy continues.”[4]

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born a bit later than Douglass and Emerson, yet she was fully engaged in promoting abolition, civil rights, women’s rights, and temperance. As an adult, she became familiar the abolitionists of the Unitarian Church and joined the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia.

Both Unitarians and the AME church have claimed Harper as a member. She was reluctant to choose between the two. AME was the church she had been raised in. It was family and home to her, and she always remembered where she came from and what her people had been through. Her reasons for joining the Unitarian church, on the other hand, may have been partly political. Although she had had personal and professional contacts in both black and white communities ever since her first book of poems was published, many doors remained closed to her. In a society where color lines were clearly drawn, a Unitarian church provided a rare opportunity for the races to meet. The Unitarians she knew could help to advance the causes she supported in places she could never go.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper died in 1911, before she had the opportunity to vote. The cause and concern of African Americans and the perils of life stayed with her to the end. In a final poem, she wrote these words:

I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.

The importance of Frederick Douglass and Frances Harper in a reflection about Transcendentalism is clearly seen at the intersection of abolition and transcendentalism. While not all Unitarians were abolitionists, it is fair to say that most if not all of the Transcendentalists were abolitionists.  This intersection supports their insistence on person freedom, the enlivening of the spirit through personal experience, the need for each human being to find their own way to meaning and purpose and their insistence that unjust laws ought to overturned or at the very least disobeyed non-violently.

This philosophy of apprehending the divine nature in all things, reason, humanism, freedom, justice, and the right of conscience is our inheritance from our Transcendentalist ancestors.

That there were no Black Transcendentalists is also part of our inheritance.

During the height of Transcendentalism, slavery gripped our nation and divided our congregations.

It is a blessing that there were those who bridged the gap between Black and white to secure abolition and human rights for Americans of African descent.

We have inherited so much from our Unitarian Transcendentalist ancestors that continues to feed and nourish our own spiritual development and practices. May we be worthy of that gift.  May we be as steadfast in holding and living our truth as Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Alcott, Harper and many others were in their own time.

Let us continue to bridge the gaps that separate us one from another as a matter of faith and conviction.

May it be so.

Blessed Be.   I Love You.   Amen.

[1] Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement. Professor Ashton Nichols, Ph.D. The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2006. Course Guidebook, page 134.

[2] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-early-republic/culture-and-reform/a/transcendentalism

[3] UUA Tapestry of Faith: Faith Like a River: A Program on Unitarian Universalist History for Adults.  Leader Resource 3: Transcendentalism.  Authors: Alison Cornish and Jackie Clement

[4] Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement. Professor Ashton Nichols, Ph.D. The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2006. Course Guidebook, page 115.