In This Refulgent Summer
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Call to Worship:
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The
grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the
tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the
pine, the balm-of Gilead and the new hay.
May we be gathered for worship.
Prayer:
Oh life that makes all things new
Hear our prayers.
Be in this room.
Bear with us in grief and impatience.
Celebrate with us in love.
Bring us outside,
Into the clear light of summer.
Ease our hearts.
Let the earth take care of us.
Let the wind and the sun and the rain
Know what they know
And let us, in this refulgent summer
Breathe, and be still,
And need nothing more than this.
Amen
Reading:
"Morning Poem" by Mary Oliver
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
From Dream Work (1986) by Mary Oliver
Sermon:
It was in 1838 that Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his Harvard Divinity School
address from which the title of this sermon and the words of the call to worship
were taken.
He was talking about the sense of life and gratitude that we receive from being in the presence of nature - the transcendence that we experience in the beauty of the natural world. It was an early entry in what became the transcendental movement. It was also, interestingly, his attempt to breathe a little life into the lifeless and stultifying preaching that he feared would be the product of the graduating class of ministers from Harvard, then a Unitarian seminary, 170 years ago.
Have we gotten livelier since then? Probably yes and no.
When he gave this sermon he suggested that the young ministers should speak in church as if they were living people, with some experience of the earth and life outside the four walls of the church. Also, he denied the miracles of Jesus, and in doing so he so offended the Harvard regents that they didn't let him come back for 50 years. He also left the Unitarian ministry not too long after this. We claim him now. We weren't so proud of him then.
It is often so.
I thought I would talk about transcendentalism a bit today, about that movement within Unitarianism which looked to direct experience of nature as a way of understanding the intentions of the divine.
Transcendentalism was a movement from the mid-1800's, mostly in New England and dominated by Unitarian thinkers, of whom Emerson was the first. It is based in the idea that we each possess the capacity for a transcendent knowledge of the spiritual realm that we can receive unmediated, often from nature, and not through education by others.
It was a sound rejection of the institutional church, and of the capacity of stogdy old institutions hell-bent on preserving themselves, to be places where the winds of the spirit could readily blow. At its most individualistic (Emerson was probably the spear-carrier for that) it really rejected the idea of spiritual exploration in community, relying instead on the intuition and reason of the individual to figure things out for him or herself from the experience of existence - and particularly of natural existence.
I should like transcendentalism a lot, but in fact I have some trouble with it. It was useful in its time, but while it encouraged a view of inspiration from nature, it also encouraged a view of the independence of man that I find unsupportable, and in some ways dangerous.
Emerson's Harvard Divinity School Address is a knotty little document that I thought we could profitably spend some time with it this morning, reflecting on what of its ideas still linger here to our benefit, and what it might be better to discard. And then I'm going to give you a little assignment for the summer (though I'll see you again in July) and then we're going to sing the closing hymn outside.
Yes we are.
Speaking to future ministers, Emerson urged them to talk about what they know from the pulpit. "Speak the truth," he said, "and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness."
Please don't hold me responsible for Emerson's syntax. I know he's one of the major Unitarian Saints but I find him, if the truth may be told, a little ponderous.
He goes on in the sermon to say "See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, see the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus by their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell."
I find that that to be a a more unfortunate sentiment. Most of us, in my experience, fall somewhere in the middle between goodness and vileness, and we don't always have the luxury of affinity - life is more of an endeavor in walking the middle way with a wide-ranging group of fellow travelers, and doing our best with that.
Emerson would be horrified, I suppose.
Post-modernism hadn't happened yet. Heck, modernism hadn't happened yet.
The thing I have to like about Emerson is his high anthropology ideal - meaning that he thought quite a lot of the capacity of the human to invent and improve itself. I tend to think highly of that capacity in all of us as well, but I don't discount the reality of evil at work in the world quite so cavalierly as Emerson did. Perhaps he wouldn't either anymore, if he'd lived through the 20th Century.
"Evil," he said, "is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death…."
This idea that goodness has substance but that evil is simply the absence of substance is an old one -it goes back at least to Augustine, as far as I know, and others may know that it goes back farther. It is highly problematic, however, in that it tends to overestimate (I'm really sorry to say this) the power of goodness, particularly individual goodness, and to underestimate the power of evil, individual or collective.
Nothing in the last century could make one terribly optimistic for the truth of Emerson's idea that goodness is power. It claims too much, and denies too much.
Emerson goes on to raise another idea which is healthy in the way that it challenges the institutional church, but unhealthy in the way that it claims an independent power for the individual that I doubt any individual possesses. Jesus maybe. The rest of us, not so much. He says:
"This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from another, -- by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason….
"Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand."
There, I think, you have a pretty defining statement of the transcendentalist philosophy. By "this sentiment" he refers to the intuition of goodness that each of us can gain from proper application of reason to the temple in which we stand - being, nature, Earth. And each of us shall seek to be great not by following the great but by drawing on the depths of our own individual resources and our own unmediated access to the divine at the heart of nature.
I tend to like him for saying that intuition of the holy cannot be received at second hand. Take that, church. On that level I think he's probably correct - you either intuit for yourself through some direct trans-rational experience that it's out there or you don't believe in it. So up to that point, I think I agree with him. But after that he loses me.
Because while each of us may have to make that leap of assent to the existence of the holy on our own, I do believe that we'll best figure out what the holy is, and where it would like us to go with our lives collectively. I really fail to see how we could even know what goodness is, except in dialogue with others.
The transcendentalists have this great ideal of man - alone in the wilderness, surviving by reason, and standing against the corrupt institutions of the day, improving on dead ideas by the direct experience of nature and the application of their own reason.
They do this, of course, in the languages they learned from their families and in school, over three square meals a day prepared for them by women from ingredients grown by others, while continuing to breathe oxygen produced by plants and drink water produced by we don't quite know what.
They do this as adults, which they would not have become if their mothers had walked away from them at birth, expecting them to become, in an instant, "inlets of reason."
In spite of the American ideal that we are all self-created people, we know as a matter of fact that we are not. Our existence at all is pretty random, and it was certainly not a matter of our own control. We were born helpless, and only through the intervention of others were we spared long enough to survive to a point of relative self-maintenance.
Even at our most vigorous we are not self-maintaining beings. At our most basic we rely on oxygen we don't produce, and on water that we don't produce, and on gravity that we also don't produce. It's a pretty complex picture, our being maintained here at all, and we ought not only to be grateful, we ought to be able to abandon these crazy ideas of independence - and we certainly ought to be able to discern that independence is not only not possible, from a religious, social or environmental point of view it's not even desirable. Being untrue, it is also therefore unhelpful.
It's as if there is something shameful about being dependent on others. And that way of thinking creates a block in our consciousness about our real state of dependence on the proper functioning of natural systems.
It really strikes me as quite odd that this wasn't obvious to such smart people in the 1830's and thereafter. If you read Thoreau, and you should, you will enjoy his rugged independence and his willingness to go hang out in his little cabin on Walden Pond, but you may be less aware that his little cabin was on Emerson's property and that he bopped over there for a decent meal of a Sunday.
I don't mean to ruin anything for you, but I wish the Transcendentalists had been just a teensy bit more self-aware, instead of merely self-focused.
Please don't report me to the Unitarian police for saying that.
In our self-care many of us go to nature to experience quiet, peace, calm - to escape from the pressures and stresses of our overloaded lives - to gain a little perspective on troubles that seem big but in the grand scheme of things are small. Nature as a tonic is a fine thing. But if we could be a little analytical of the reason that so many of us are drawn to nature to get our heads back in order is precisely that it makes us feel appropriately small - appropriately dependent and contingent before powers that are beautiful and wild and far, far beyond our control.
It is a relief not to have to be in control of things, isn't it?
I appreciate Transcendentalism, but I think we need a reformed Transcendentalism for the present day in which we understand that the value of nature and beauty will have to be received by each of us as an unmediated gift from the holy ground of being, but that the course of our lives will be decided more collectively, and with more reference to the ideas of the people around us.
Still, to get the first half of that you have to go outside, just as Emerson said you did.
So now I think we get to the assignment part of the sermon. It's June. It's a little hot for June, but it's June nevertheless. Summer. Summer officially since Thursday, with the longest days and the shortest nights happening right now. I bet the fireflies are great out here in the evening, when the sun isn't quite so hot and the breezes come.
The prairie is in full flower, and the colors change daily and weekly. Soon there will be tomatoes and cucumbers - the best flavors and textures of summer. The CSA boxes are arriving, stuffed with lettuce and spinach and maybe beets, that are too good to waste no matter how you really feel about them. Good in the sense of virtue, maybe, not in the sense of tasty.
I know I don't need to tell you this, but go outside.
The 2008 presidential election will keep. We are not, thanks be to God, stuck at a checkpoint in the Gaza, trying to get our children back to the West Bank. No one should be, but thanks be to God that we are not. We have water to make lemonade with. Ice, even.
Winter will come. Since Thursday, I'm sorry to remind you, the days have been getting shorter. This perfection of life will not last more than a minute. It never does. Who knows where life will take us before the next summer comes.
So for a few minutes every evening, go outside. See how the mosquito crop is doing, watch for fireflies, see what color the sky turns just before it gets dark. Watch for rain. Watch for deer and coyote. Go outside to breathe in the oxygen rich air, and to feel the moisture that is rain traveling between rainclouds, between rivers and lakes, from sea to sea.
For part of this summer let the Earth take care of you. Go outside in complete dependence, and in complete security that your needs will be met when you get out there. Not by you - oh you stalwart independent one. But by the grace that upholds all things.
Amen.
Benediction:
For you shall go out in joy
And be led back in peace;
The mountains and the hills before you
Shall burst into song,
And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Go in peace.