VACATION TO UNITARIAN AND UNIVERSALIST BIRTHPLACES Unitarian Universalist Church of St Petersburg August 21, 2016 Rev. Jack Donovan READINGS If We Agree in Love from Treatise on Atonement by Hosea Ballou (1805) Your Child Has Fallen from Hosea Ballou in The Universalist Trumpet (1849) The Pilgrims Covenant adapted by Alice Blair Wesley (1986) Taken Up Into God from Memoirs of Margaret Fuller (1831) Unitarian Christianity (excerpt) by William Ellery Channing (1819) I Went to the Woods (excerpt from Walden) by Henry David Thoreau (1854) Be Ours a Religion (hymnal reading 683) by Theodore Parker (c. 1859) SERMON Alisun and I have been away for three weeks. For me, the time was to be study leave and vacation. But our travel plan was returning me to the roots of my life and my religion and that made it not vacation, but pilgrimage. I was going back to Concord, Massachusetts, and Boston and all of northern New England where I grew from child to more or less adult, and going back to the towns and regions where much of Unitarianism and Universalism took seed and began maturing in me as well as America. So what I have to share is not a travelogue or a history, but a reflection. Great American poet T.S. Eliot, a Unitarian until he moved to England, wrote of an underlying Unitarian truth: We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Going back to our starting points, what is it about ourselves that we might come to know for the first time? Alisun s and my journey took us from Boston s Logan Airport to Cape Cod, to the island of Martha s Vineyard, to Concord Massachusetts, to the coastline near Portland, Maine, to the end of the Appalachian Trail at Mt. Katahdin in central Maine, then back to the coast of Maine, then Boston, then home. Memories from the earlier half of my life were everywhere, and so were markers of the founders of American Unitarianism and Universalism and their Transcendentalist partners the neighborhoods and churches where Hosea Ballou, William Ellery Channing, and Theodore Parker had their booming congregations, the homes of Bronson Alcott, the Peabody sisters, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond, so many First Parish Churches that had become Unitarian in the early 1800s and continue today at two of which sites we attended excellent Sunday services on Martha s Vineyard and Portland, Maine. In Concord, an old friend had arranged for 13 or so of my school mates (some of whom I had known from kindergarten) to meet for a tour of the new 92 million dollar high school (Concord still believes in public education) that had 1
replaced the one we attended, and then have lunch together. There wasn t nearly enough time to catch up with everyone, much less get to know their spouses. But it was very good. Though I was raised Roman Catholic, most of them, as I recall, had been raised in Concord s First Parish Church as Unitarians. A good share are still active members in UU congregations and it s important to them they even attend General Assemblies regularly. But a number haven t been part of any congregation. We re not religious, one of them told me. Later I wished I d replied, But everybody is religious. Don t we all have beliefs and ways of carrying them out? Some of us just don t belong to on-going communities that support and encourage us in our journeys. To have said such a thing might have been a truer act of friendship, if a little pushy. Their lives all have been good as far as I could tell. But it seemed that the ones who had not remained part of a congregation expressed a feeling of not having a way to contribute, which I take to be due to a lack of connection to an on-going community in which they could both give and receive. Maybe this is just me a UU minister whose work even before ministry was all community development focused observing through too narrow a frame. Yet these are people of accomplishment and experience and kindly character who have much to offer wise listening and conversation across the generations in a covenant group being not the least but they have no on-going community to offer it to. In her memoirs, Margaret Fuller said, Very early I knew that the only object in life is to grow. And after a day s walk (probably in Concord) with her friend and literary colleague Ralph Waldo Emerson, she wrote in her journal, We agreed that my God is Love, his Truth. Together, these two virtues provide two of the three core understandings of the UU tradition as to what life is about. Love and Truth. These two are both end goals, and both are means to those ends. They are seeds of potential in the human soul that must be grown in the human psyche or spirit. As contemporary developmental psychologists like Kohlberg and Gilligan agree, complete fulfillment comes when the searches for higher truth and higher love converge and unite and are completed as one. Emerson and Fuller had each other and their Transcendentalist circle for a short while to remind one another that these two virtues must grow together if wholeness is to be attained. But then their circle ended, dissipated. Novelty becomes repetitive in a closed group, and people move on. But joyful fulfillment of the developmental paths of Love and Truth, of heart and mind, are not possible without an on-going community of relationships. Millennia of evolution have replaced instinct with communities of support, encouragement, and education to allow our survival and promote our fulfillment. Some of the Transcendentalist Unitarians left the church behind in their pursuit, it seems to me, of lives that merged high individualism with high idealism. That seemed good and noble. This was the path of Henry David 2
Thoreau at Walden Pond and Emerson nearby, and it was the path of the folks who established the Transcendentalist utopian communities at Brook Farm and Fruitland. But their highly individualistic paths quickly came to an end. I think Thoreau understood that by the time he left the woods. What the utopian communities did not have to sustain them was the support and guidance of any long-lived community that could be called on if needed to help buffer and moderate excesses of individualistic enthusiasm, or idealistic willfulness, or simple foolishness. So, as catalogued by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott and the utopians themselves, they became manic, willful, and foolish, and their experiments died. Experience and research tell us that all along our life paths, to grow more deeply in Truth and Love in understanding and caring we need an on-going body of people to relate to people who renew the lights of our lives when they fade or even die, people who do not doctrinally constrain our guiding beliefs, but who are our sounding boards and our inspirations to explore a bigger box than we are in. That s one of my favorite definitions of a Unitarian Universalist church a home base for learning to build a bigger box of truth and love the home base being where you start and where you return transformed in who you know yourself to be, now with vastly wider horizons. As we realize more and more, to be able to grow does not depend on being as brilliant as Margaret Fuller (though the story of her short life is so instructive and inspiring) or as brilliant as Ralph Waldo Emerson (though he had such a powerful positive influence on the spirit of America and the world). It depends only on being human, alive, and involved in on-going covenantal relationships with people humble enough and thoughtful enough to know they can grow and want to. And that is a good place to be, to start from and return to. I think of the Plymouth Pilgrims joining with the Boston Puritans to form churches that agreed on covenants like the one we read this morning as an Invocation, hoping, or really pledging, to walk together in ways of Truth and Caring. That, it seems to me, has allowed a people and their posterity to be fulfilled and to live in a way, when at our best, to be good for the world. Let me tell two quick stories from toward the end of my pilgrimage. One of the things that Alisun and I wanted to do on this pilgrimage was to hike the end of the Appalachian Trail up Mt. Katahdin. We did get to hike in the Maine Woods, as Thoreau recommended. But we did not go to the mountain just not enough time. Perhaps it was just as well. Here are Henry David Thoreau s words on being one of the few to have reached the summit of Katahdin in the day when Native peoples considered the mountain to be sacred and still lived around its base: The mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if some time it had rained rocks the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature seems to say sternly, Why came ye 3
here before your time I cannot pit nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Phew! Cheated death again. And we did get to see Katahdin all day long for two days across the lake from the lodge where we stayed. A few days later, at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, we saw the work of Marsden Hartley, one of the best known American artists in the 1900s before the war. He was part of the Alfred Steiglitz-Georgia O Keefe s circle of Modernist and was a devotee of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Hartley was born and raised in Maine and he did 18 different paintings of sacred Mt. Katahdin. He wrote, I try to paint the God-spirit in the mountains. The idea of modernity is but a new attachment to things universal, a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth, a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere, a voicing of one s own soul to oneself and then to whomever else hears. I loathe being apart either from my crowd or my mountains. I don t know if he might formally have been a Unitarian or Universalist. But you can hear the Unitarian Transcendentalists in his words and attitude toward life and you can hear their wisdom in his giving equal measure of devotion to the wild and to the community, his crowd. By a lovely coincidence, we made another discovery near Mt. Katahdin, in the Appalachian Trail base town of Millinocket. My brother and sister-in-law had recently bought a neat little landscape painting, only to discover that the artist had a studio and gallery in Millinocket the North Light Gallery. So we went to visit her. There we discovered she is a stalwart Unitarian, as is her daughter, and because the nearest UU church is over two hours away, she and others gather on Sunday afternoons for what she calls Gallery Church. Pretty cool North Light Gallery Church -- gorgeous paintings and photographs all around on the walls and stands, streams here, forests there, mountains and lakes, moose, deer, fox, bear, ducks, geese north light streaming in the big storefront windows and a fine artist providing a circle of conversation, just as Margaret Fuller did for the women of her time, back when a women s study circle and their education was unthought of and scandalous. But Margaret transcended that critique. She knew, along with her crowd, that the mind and heart need education, none better than from a trusted circle of conversant friends. Edgar Allen Poe said, Humanity is composed of men, women, and Margaret Fuller. These days, thanks to the facilitation of church communities like ours, there are more and more Margaret Fullers, to the benefit of all. That s what I learned on my pilgrimage not something so much new as renewed and renewing. And I am very glad to be back with my crowd and the sacred mountain that is our church and Mirror Lake and St Pete and our wonderful ocean coast. Thank you for being here and being you. 4
READINGS THOUGHTS FOR GATHERING Hosea Ballou, Universalist minister in Treatise on Atonement (1805) If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury; but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Hosea Ballou, Universalist Trumpet (1849) Your child has fallen into the mire, and its body and its garments are defiled. You cleanse it, and array it in clean robes. The query is, Do you love your child because you have washed it or, Did you wash it because you loved it? How much more so the divine Parent of us all! INVOCATION The Pilgrim Covenant (adapted by Alice Blair Wesley, 1986) May we walk together (or, We pledge to walk together) in the ways of truth and caring as best we understand them now or may learn them in days to come -- that we and our children might be fulfilled and that we might speak to the world in words and actions of peace and good will. WORDS FOR MEDITATION From Margaret Fuller s Journal (circa 1831) (Sitting by the stream in the meditative woods, I wondered,) How is it that I seem to be this me? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? And then, I saw that there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance, that it was only because I thought the self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the All, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God. READINGS BEFORE THE SERMON from Unitarian Christianity by William Ellery Channing (1819) Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for humankind, in the language of humankind, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books. We feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writers, their true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining what is difficult, and for discovering new truths. With these impressions, we are accustomed to value the Gospel chiefly as it 5
abounds in effectual aids, motives, excitements to a generous and divine virtue. We regard the spirit of love, charity, meekness, forgiveness, liberality, and beneficence, as the badge and distinction of Christians, as the brightest image we can bear of God, as the best proof of piety. from Walden, Chapter 2, by Henry David Thoreau (1845/1854) 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. and, if (Life) proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it. CLOSING WORDS Hymnal Reading #683 Be Ours a Religion by Theodore Parker 6