Thoreau on the Merrimack River A sermon preached by the Rev. Lee Bluemel At the North Parish of North Andover, MA, Unitarian Universalist October 12, 2014 All good things are wild and free. There is no remedy for love, but to love more. As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kinds of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. Henry David Thoreau, Transcendentalist One could say that the Merrimack River is where it all started. One could say it was the Merrimack that inspired a young man not only to write, but to then publish his ideas, ideas that would eventually shape our nation and make him one of the most recognized figures in North American literature. If we could go back 175 years, we might run into him, walking or paddling or camping out. We might see Henry David Thoreau on the Merrimack River. Thoreau is most often associated with another body of water a modest pond in Concord, Mass. This Walden Pond has become a place of fame and pilgrimage for all who are familiar with his most known work, called, quite simply, Walden. Yet it is possible that our river, our valley, is also worthy of fame. It is possible that we, too, should feel intimately connected to this man whose words have had a lasting influence in our wider society. And if we are connected to him, perhaps our faith has had more influence, impact and power than we ve recognized before.
It is easy, of course, to miss how deeply we are connected to persons, events, history and the future. The dominant culture in our country is not one of telling oral histories, of daily offerings to ancestors, of memorized histories or lists of the generations that came before us. We tend to have a bit of amnesia when it comes to how we got to where we are todaywhether as individuals, a nation or a faith. The trouble is this: when we ve lost a sense of connection to the past, when our family s or society s history is vague to us, it is easy to both overestimate and underestimate its influence and impact on us, as well as any influence and impact we might claim. For example, we have all inherited advantages or burdens due to the legacy of our family and societythe impact of race and class, addiction and education, etc. But when we forget this, we may tend to believe and create policies that reflect the idea that whatever we have achieved was due to the sweat of our own brow. We may also feel far more isolated- and our options more limited- than need be. We are the result of such a long, long historywho can feel alone with all those ancestors and connections through time? Studies have even shown that children gain resilience from knowing the various roads taken by their ancestors. When we ve lost a sense of connection to others and history, we may also weaken our sense of the interdependence of all life, through time, and the inner peace that comes from knowing how thoroughly we are held by and belong to others. And as Unitarian Universalists, as members of a minority religion not only in the Merrimack Valley but nation-wide, without a sense of connection to those who came before us we may feel weakened in our own influence, impact and power. But what if our little congregation here in the Merrimack Valley is connected to, related to, descended from genius and is a part of that genius still?
Now, some might not call Henry David Thoreau a genius, but he is at least one of the most quoted U.S. writers, as well as being a Unitarian and a Transcendentalist. Transcendentalism was a movement within Unitarianism, a movement that criticized doctrine and staid institutions and emphasized the divinity within nature and all humanity. It began in the late 1820 s and 30 s, and became a major cultural movement in 1836, with the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson s book, Nature. That same year, this Meeting House was built under the pastorate of Rev. Bailey Loring. The North Parish congregation had just fully claimed being a Unitarian congregation. 1836 was also the year that a group of Unitarian ministers started a small group they called Hedge s Club after the name of one of its members. They called their philosophy the new views or absolute religion or simply The Way, but were re-named by their opponents the Transcendentalists. The Transcendentalists- both men and women would be at the center of the American Renaissance a flowering of thought in literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music from 1835-1880 in our country. Two of them-- Emerson and his mentee, Henry David Thoreauwould become some of the most well-known Transcendentalist writers to posterity. Perhaps you have heard a few of these before- all from hand of Thoreau: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us. Beware of enterprises that require new clothes. If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. And then there are these, which could be mottos for our recent building project: If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you ve imagined. Sayings like these are so familiar they feel modern, not 160 or more years old. But Thoreau did live in another time. He was born in Concord in 1817, but shortly thereafter his dad moved the family to Chelmsford to try running a grocery store. They lived in Chelmsford until Henry was four years old. One story from that time is written thus: When he was three or four years old, at Chelmsford, on being told that he must die and having the joys of heaven explained to him, he said, as he came in from coasting (on his sled), that the did not want to die and go to heaven, because he could not carry his sled to so fine a place; for he added, the boys say it is not shod with iron, and not worth a cent. That attitude pretty much stayed with him for the rest of his life. Why worry about heaven when the sledding is perfectly fine on earth? But this did not mean he was not what we might call a spiritual person. He wrote that one of his first memories was of lying awake at night, looking through the stars to see if I could see God behind them.
This curiosity, this sense of seeking God or the divine also never seemed to leave him. Henry grew up with his three siblings, John, Helen and Sophia. He went to Harvard, worked in his family s pencil factory, and started a school with his older brother, John, to whom he was quite close. In 1839, when Henry was 22, the two brothers took a vacation together. For two weeks, from August 31 st to September 13 th, they traveled up the Merrimack River by boat, foot and stage, all the way to Concord, NH. They camped along the way, and Henry recorded the trip in his journal. Three years after the trip, John died unexpectedly. He cut himself while shaving, and died of lockjaw in Henry s arms. The year was 1842. Henry was only 25 years old at the time. It was a terrible loss. For several years Henry went back to work in his father s pencil making factory, and also as a surveyor. But he also started to think seriously about writing a book based on his journals of the trip, as a tribute to his brother. Determined to give it a try, at the age of 28 he moved two miles from Concord to Walden Pond. He built a small cabin there on land owned by his mentor, the Transcendentalist and one-time Unitarian preacher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He stayed for two years and two months, and while there wrote a first draft of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. After another draft and revisions, he published the book in 1849. 1,000 copies were made, at Henry s own expense. Sadly, it was not a best seller. He had to take on more surveyor work to pay his debt to the publisher, and after four years, the publisher was no longer willing to store the unsold copies and returned 706 of them to Henry. He wrote in his journal, that these stacks of books were " something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs...
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor?" It may have felt like a failure to Henry, but he did learn some lessons from it. He learned, for example, to revise-- and later did eight revisions of his next book, Walden, before publishing it 160 years ago, in 1854, to modest success. But perhaps more importantly, A Week on Concord and Merrimack Rivers began to explore topics that he would continue to pursue in Walden. The book was not really a travel journal, but a series of reflections divided into seven days. There are descriptions of the journey, but also dense reflections on themes such as friendship, the passage of time, death, and immortality, as he worked through the grief of his brother s death. He also wrote about the superiority of a religion inspired by nature, intuition and silence, in contrast to institutional Christianity. I am by no means a Thoreau scholar and indeed I m sad to say that I haven t read A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in its entirety, having just become aware of it myself. But I have read excerpts from it in this little book called True Harvest, which has readings by Thoreau for every day of the year, and is published by the UU press Skinner House Books. In just the excerpts included in this little book, one sees so many themes familiar to Unitarian Universalists today. Thoreau argues for personal inspiration instead of conformity. He writes The wisest man preaches no doctrines 175 years later, we, too, avoid doctrines and trust personal experience when it comes to faith and inspiration. Thoreau favors a focus on this life to a focus on the afterlife. Even as he also admits his hope that we may, even here and now, obtain some accurate information concerning that other world, he writes Here or nowhere is our heaven.
175 years later, we, too, focus on the here and now. Thoreau articulates his longing for mystical experience: I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision. At the same time, he focuses on what he can know through his senses. He wrote, I see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting Something to which we are allied, at once our maker, or abode, our destiny, our very Selves 175 years later, our congregation includes mystics and those who long for epiphanies, as well as those who would trust their senses- what they can see, hear or feel. Thoreau writes of turning to the gods and the sacred literature of the Hindus, Chinese, Persians, Hebrews and Greeks for inspiration. He sees intuition of the divine in every tradition, every people. 175 years later, we name world religions among our sources and have a pluralistic faith. Thoreau writes of his inspiration from nature, both in the keen observations of a botanist and in his sense that divinity pervades all nature. He writes, Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God. And The stillness was intense and almost conscious, as if it were a natural Sabbath the landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light 175 years later, earth-centered religions are one of our sources, and observation of the natural world is part of our guide to the sacred. Some of us are pantheists- seeing the divine in the natural world, and still others panentheists- seeing the divine both in and beyond the natural world. All of these ideas, so commonplace today, are not modern or recent or new. They go back 175 years, to the thinking of one of the most known writers of our nation. In 1862 Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis. He was young- just 44, but had already left his stamp upon the world. His writings included his two books, essays, writings on Native Americans, writing on local flora and fauna, and a huge journal
which was eventually published in 20 volumes. (I haven t read those, either!) He had lectured to audiences in Newburyport, Danvers, Salem, MA and Lowell but sadly I can find no record of a lecture in Andover or Lawrence. Still, the people of North Parish must have been quite aware of the Transcendentalists, as they shaped Boston, New England, the wider culture, and eventually Unitarian congregations like ours. If you are ever asked what Unitarian Universalists believe, you could even answer that ours is the religion of Henry David Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists. It is a religion that focuses on the here and now more than promises of an afterlife, a religion that values personal experience and conclusions over conformity and doctrine, a religion that is open to truths from the natural world and the scriptures of other, non-western faiths. It is a religion with room for mystics and scientists, poets and explorers like Thoreau. This sensibility is nothing new. Ever since this Meeting House was built, 178 years ago. they have been part of our faith s history, our nation s history-- and even part of our local history. For they first came to light not in Concord, but along the banks of the Merrimack River. So perhaps we need not go even so far as to Walden Pond on pilgrimage, but drive or walk past our own Merrimack River, to sense our deep connection to Henry David Thoreau. In doing so, may we be glad that our modern faith is so deeply rooted, glad that we might carry forth our thoroughly American Transcendentalist legacy. Amen.
Historical Readings: Excerpts from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, by Henry David Thoreau, a Unitarian and Transcendentalist: Most people with whom I talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dried very dry, I assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and powder-post Some, to me, seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations are for them everlastingly settled, -- as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and the like. These are like the everlasting hills to them. But in all my wanderings I never came across the least vestige of authority for these things. They have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate. And this, addressed to a certain Miles Howard: Do you know the number of God s family? Can you put mysteries into words? Do you presume to fable of the ineffable? Pray, what geographer are you, that speak of heaven s topography? Whose friend are you that speak of God s personality? Do you, Miles Howard, think that he has made you his confidant? Tell me of the height of the mountains on the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad. The reading which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindus, the Chinese, and the Persians, than of the Hebrews, which I have come to last. Give me one of these Bibles and you have silenced me for a while. When I recover the use of my tongue, I am wont to worry my neighbors with the new sentences; but commonly they cannot see that there is any wit in them.
I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too