Let us demand our own works and laws and worship
Without context, the rounded — or, we may say, the fullest possible meaning — of any text, other artefact, or an action is, at best, highly allusive and, at worst, simply not accessible to us.
So, what I want to offer you here is something of the historical context which forms the background to the kind of radical changes in the way we do church and religion that we are beginning to explore here in Cambridge, in our attempt to create a relevant, contemporary, liberal, inquiring, free religious community.
After I’ve done this, I hope you will be able to see that, at least as far as the broad Unitarian tradition is concerned, what I’m suggesting we do is actually very much “in the tradition” and not at all unusual or eccentric. In fact, I hope you will see clearly that making the kind of changes we’re exploring are what a community such as our own has always done from time to time and that, if we didn’t do this, we would have ceased to be a genuinely liberal, inquiring and free religious community and collapsed back into the kind of traditional church-religion most of us have spent our lives trying to escape!
One of the most important historical exemplars of this free religious way of proceeding is Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). In 1817, he went to Harvard University to train for the Unitarian ministry, and by 1830 he had become the senior minister at Second Church in Boston. However, during this time, he began to feel ever more strongly that the once radical religion of his forebears was now no longer speaking either to his own soul or to his own age, and by 1832 things were close to crisis. In June of that year, he confided to his private journal:
“I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.”
Things did not improve and, by September, he had resigned from the Unitarian ministry and, in so doing, began to take his first steps as the free thinker, lecturer, essayist and philosopher we now remember. He was one of those rare but important people who could see clearly that in unsettled times there always exists the possibility of setting out on a path that is safer than the known way.
However, despite the fact that Emerson left the formal Unitarian ministry, never to return, it’s important to realize that by the mid- to late-twentieth century the enquiring and free religious spirit Emerson displayed was one that, at least in ideal, had become absolutely central to the way the Unitarian tradition understood itself. Alas, it’s important to know, and without going into any detail here, that in America at the moment, this Emersonian spirit is under considerable threat from a new species of dogmatic identitarianism. But that’s a topic for another day . . .
So what is this Emersonian, free and inquiring spirit like that might help us boldly step forth upon new paths to ancient truth and so contextualize properly our own community’s willingness to make radical changes to the way it expresses itself?
Well, it’s hard to summarize in the time I have available, but a reasonably good place to get an initial sense of it is in the opening paragraph to his first published essay called “Nature” which was published in 1836, four years after leaving the ministry. This essay eventually became very influential and directly laid the groundwork for what became known as the Transcendentalist Movement and, indirectly, to the founding of the Free Religious Association in 1867. So here is that opening paragraph:
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”
Let’s now quickly walk through this with an eye to our present situation.
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.”
This is always true, I think. But in unstable times — such as our own — the tendency to seek stability by looking back to, and attempting to recreate, the past becomes overwhelming for more and more people. Even, alas, for a tradition such as our own.
But, despite this ever present, reactionary tendency, Emerson believed that looking to the past did offer us sight of something useful, namely, that all our current ideas, practices and institutions — whether religious, political, social or cultural — once upon a time did not exist, and that they were formed by people who “beheld God and nature face to face.” His most famous way of expressing this idea is found in his Address given in 1838 to the Senior Class of divinity students, their professors, and local ministers at Harvard Divinity College, Cambridge. He said:
“Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.”
Sight of these foundational, or radically reforming, figures caused Emerson to ask, as do I:
“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
Emerson felt again and again, and so do I, that a liberal, inquiring and free religion is all about helping people find ways to enjoy at least something of this original relation to the universe, and to reveal that it is always up to we who live in the present, to articulate our own poetic and philosophical responses to this encounter with the universe, rather than constantly to be referring back to what our forebears did, way back when.
Emerson thought that it was only by encouraging people consciously to immerse themselves in the floods and streams of unfolding nature (natura naturans, nature-naturing) beholding god-or-nature (deus sive natura) face-to-face, that we would have any real chance of accessing the necessary spiritual energies that could gift us with a living religion rather than leaving us with only a dead one constructed out of “the dry bones of the past” in which we are required to masquerade wearing the “faded wardrobe” of previous generations.
Emerson concludes his paragraph with a pastoral metaphor, writing that “The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields.” It’s a picturesque illustration of his belief that in this extraordinary life, there is always a new harvest of living experience that can be gathered into the heart of a free religious community. But, as Jesus reminded us so many, many years ago, alas the labourers are often very few . . .
Of course, this sort of radical spiritual and religious adventure is not something that can, or indeed should, be undertaken by any community every year of its existence because, although the journey of life never ends, it must have in it times of rest and repose. But, those periods of rest and repose exist in our tradition, not as ends in themselves, but as the necessary opportunities to regroup and reground ourselves and to allow for a new generation of free religious spirits to be born, nurtured and educated so that they, too, in their own time, are ready and able to set out on a new path that is safer than the way their forbears once knew, and so begin that eternal task of bringing in a new harvest of insight and meaning appropriate to their own experiences and age.
I hope that you can see that for various complex social, political, financial, philosophical and theological reasons we are no longer in a time of rest and repose and must, therefore, in the spirit of Emerson, set out, once again, to discover and enjoy our own original relation to the universe, begin to write our own poetry and philosophy of insight and gather our own harvest of wisdom.
Lastly, I need to be clear that, although Emerson’s free and inquiring religious spirit remains important and central to our religious tradition, any attempt slavishly to follow or enshrine every last detail of Emerson’s own personal playing out of that spirit, would be to commit the very sin he gave his whole life to avoid, namely, the building of sepulchres filled only with dry bones and a faded wardrobe. As one of my own great free religious influences, Imaoka Shin’ichirō wisely reminds us — and who, not incidentally, was sometimes called “the Emerson of Japan” — when considering Emerson’s work, the key thing to keep in mind is that we must always read it with “an attitude of direct observation” based only “on our own experiences.”
So, friends, let’s be confident in proceeding with our radical reforming project and continue to remember that, for us, it’s firmly in our tradition to claim the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today.
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