“A NEW TRANSCENDENTALISM: 2) THE CENTRALITY OF NATURE”

by the Rev. Roger Bertschausen

A sermon delivered at the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

on January 31-February 1, 2004

P.O. Box 1791

Appleton, WI

(920) 731-0849

www.fvuuf.org

Reading: from Ralph Waldo Emerson

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.

There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more, in the leafless root there is no less.

Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike.

But we postpone or remember. We do not live in the present, but with reverted eye lament the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround us, stand on tiptoe to foresee the future.

We cannot be happy or strong until we too live with nature in the present, above time.¹

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The discussion at Thursday evening’s companion class to this series revealed some lingering confusion about the label “Transcendentalism.” Clearing that confusion up will be helpful in setting the stage for today’s sermon.

The source of the confusion is the presence of the root word “transcend” in Transcendentalism. When we hear “transcend,” many of us think about God being transcendent, or completely other than and separate from humanity and the world. The vision of a transcendent God is often one of an all-powerful force, calling the shots from far, far away.

The problem with this association with Transcendentalism is that this is not at all the vision of God Transcendentalists had. Quite the opposite, really: they saw God (or whatever we want to call “It”²) as permeating everyone and everything in the universe. They believed It is immanent: the opposite of transcendent.

So as we contemplate Transcendentalism, I suggest that you dispense with the idea of a transcendent God. That’s not at all what this is about. And remember that the word “transcendentalist” was slapped on the movement not because it describes God, but because it describes the central belief that the deepest, soul knowledge comes most often through intuition. Transcendentalists believe that intuitive knowledge transcends sensory input.

Now let’s go a little deeper into the Transcendentalist understanding of this sacred It that courses through every human being and all existence. This is where things get interesting—and a little bit complicated! Bear with me on this!

Emerson believed that we can only see It—the divine—within our souls by engaging on our own individual search for It. The doorway to the divine within, therefore, is different and unique for each one of us. This is why he lifted up the primacy of the individual search—and the importance of freedom in advancing our individual searches.

But according to Emerson, once you finally get to that divine within, you will find not something unique, but a Oneness. “It” is the same in all of us. It is a unity—regardless of which particular soul or other piece of creation we find It in. What’s more: It has neither personal nor individual characteristics. A unity underlies all of the incredible, beautiful diversity of humanity and everything in the universe. And now to make your head really spin, this underlying unity—immanent in all that is—now suddenly has a transcendent quality: It transcends each of Its particular embodiments.

Emerson drew deeply from the spiritual well of Hinduism in articulating this idea. In this case, I think his borrowings were true to the spirit of Hinduism. The theological idea in Hinduism that most intrigued Emerson was the idea of Brahman: a unitary deity encompassing all. Hindus believe that every expression of divinity—not just the gods and goddesses but each individual human soul and every element of nature—is part of Brahman. At the heart of Hinduism’s almost infinite polytheism—by some accounts there are 330 million distinct gods and goddesses in the Hindu pantheon—is the paradox that all is one, united in Brahman, which has neither personal nor individual characteristics. God is many; God is one. Both statements are true.

The paradox captured in this Hindu theology parallels a paradox at the center of Emerson’s theology: though he celebrates the individuality of each person, he also believes that at the core of each human lies the impersonal, overarching Oneness of It. Emerson writes:

It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.³

Hindus furthermore believe that every single unique embodiment of divinity contains within it the whole of Brahman. Not only are the many in the One, but the One is wholly and completely in each and every aspect of the many. Emerson echoes this view. He writes: “Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world…Every natural form to the smallest, a leaf, a sunbeam, a moment of time, a drop, is related to the whole, partakes of the beauty of the whole.”⁴

For the Transcendentalists, there is one other place besides our souls where we can most powerfully encounter this unity that is It: in nature. It, Emerson suggests, is “behind” and “throughout” nature.⁵

Not surprisingly, encountering nature therefore became a central spiritual discipline for the Transcendentalists. No one embodied this discipline more than Henry David Thoreau, the author of what remains the most influential and popular nature book of all time: Walden. Thoreau saw it as his job to search for It in nature:

My profession is always to be on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking places, to attend all his oratorios, the operas of nature…to watch for, describe, all the divine features which I detect in Nature.⁶

Taking a cue from European Romantic writers as well as their own souls, the Transcendentalists turned to nature more than anything else to discover truths about It. Put down the biographies and the histories and the criticisms, Emerson writes in the opening words of his essay “Nature.” Indeed, put down even the essay itself, he seems to tell us. Don’t take his word for truth, or Jesus’ or Aristotle’s. Instead, go outside and connect with nature yourself. Emerson writes:

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…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.⁷

For the Transcendentalists, Nature reveals truths about It in three principal ways. First, Nature is a profound teacher. Emerson believed that Nature was full of lessons, if we but open our eyes and look.⁸ In her memoirs, Margaret Fuller writes about a profound, life-changing lesson she drew from Nature in a time of despondence and hopelessness. At the end of a long walk, she stopped by a stream and looked deeply into its churning waters:

I saw 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. In that true ray most of the relations of earth seemed mere films, phenomena.⁹

Thoreau discovered nature’s wisdom not just in pretty and serene events, but also in “events of a less peaceful character,” such as an epic battle in his woodpile between red and black ants.¹⁰ In this he presages the contemporary nature writer Annie Dillard. You might recall the powerful and disturbing passage I shared from her in December about the frog that had the life literally sucked out of it by a giant water bug.¹¹

Emerson and Thoreau also looked to nature for guidance in ethics and morality. “Every natural process,” writes Emerson, “is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference.”¹² Study nature, and we can find hints about the ethical choices that confront us.

I have certainly discovered some of the most profound teachings about It in my encounters with nature. I talked about some lessons learned from adventures in Yellowstone National Park, for example, in several sermons a few years ago. In one sermon, I shared about the experience of sitting on a rock, high above the Yellowstone River one cold November day. A stunning landscape surrounded me: mountains behind me and the river valley in front opening up panoramically. It was one of the most profound experiences of the transcendent power of It I’ve ever had.

When I returned to Yellowstone the following summer, I took a hike through a narrow canyon to see a waterfall. I looked up at one point and realized to my shock that I could see the exact spot where I had that powerful experience the previous November. Only now I was right smack in the middle of the panoramic landscape. I saw myself to be an intimate part of the landscape in a way I hadn’t seen the November before.

This second powerful moment at Yellowstone was an immanent experience of the divine. And it taught me to remember always that I am part of the landscape. I am in the picture. As the Christian theologian Sally McFague might observe, I am always inside and never outside of nature.¹³

A second way nature reveals truths about It is by serving as a mirror reflecting the interior of our souls. Nature, then, is a mirror of our soul as well as a window to the divine. And both reveal the same thing: the unity that is It. For Emerson, knowing nature becomes identical with knowing the self. He writes, “The ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.”¹⁴

And finally, nature can be a profound consoler when times are rough. I know I have turned to nature for consolation at such times, and found it in spades. I shared about one such experience indirectly last Christmas Eve when I told the story of the little girl Rachel’s gift of a rock to the baby Jesus. Rachel’s shepherd brother gave her the rock at a bleak time in her life, and she found in it courage and strength and solidity. She could think of no finer gift to present to the wonderful baby born in nearby Bethlehem.

The roots of that story were another trip to Yellowstone, when at a tough time in my life I stopped by a river just outside the park. There I found in the riverbed a beautiful, rounded rock (which I used as a prop in the Christmas Eve story). I reflected on how long that rock had been there, how long it had been on its journey from its volcanic origins eons ago. It felt so solid and strong, and sure enough, that’s how I felt when I picked it up. Because I was outside the park boundaries (and my parents taught me well: never remove a natural object from a national park), I took the rock home. It now sits on my dresser as a reminder of nature’s power of consolation, and when I fail to live up to Dottie Mathews’ dictum to “touch the earth everyday,” I touch that rock and feel a connection to the earth.

Thanks largely to our Transcendentalist ancestors, nature is a very significant part of Unitarian Universalism today. I know encounters with nature are very important in many of our individual spiritual journeys, and for some of us these encounters even approach the kind of spiritual discipline Thoreau made of nature. And our affirmation that we are part of the interdependent web of all existence—so central to UU-ism today—comes from Transcendentalism more than anything else. Emerson occasionally described It as a web.¹⁵ And he certainly recognized that all is interrelated: “The near,” he writes, “explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature.”¹⁶

The really wonderful thing about finding truths about It in nature is how close and accessible these profoundly spiritual experiences are. Mystical union with the divine is not some rare experience accessible only to the few enlightened ones among us. It’s not something that must wait until we die (if we’re good and/or lucky). Nor is it locked away in sacred texts thousands of years old. It can be found in the here and now, as close by as your backyard or a nearby park. All we have to do is open our eyes and heart and be present to nature.¹⁷ “See the miraculous in the common,” Emerson advises us.¹⁸ Thoreau chimes in: “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”¹⁹ Concludes Emerson biographer Robert Richardson (who incidentally is a Unitarian Universalist—and the husband of Annie Dillard!):

If this is mysticism, it is a mysticism of a commonly occurring and easily accepted sort. The aim of the mystic is to attain a feeling of oneness with the divine. Experiences of the kind Emerson…describes have happened to nearly everyone who has ever sat beneath a tree on a fine clear day and looked at the world with a sense of momentary peace and a feeling, however transient, of being at one with it.²⁰

Along with its inherent pluralism, Transcendentalism’s recognition of the insightful role of nature in spirituality has another very significant impact on contemporary Unitarian Universalism: it opens our spiritual door to nature mystics like Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver and Marge Piercy (to name four of my top ten writers!). These mystics look to nature in the same way as the Transcendentalists: for teaching, for a mirror of their souls, and for consolation. I consider them all to be New Transcendentalists.

Transcendentalism also opens the door to earth-centered spiritual traditions. A basic connection between Transcendentalism and earth-centered spiritualities past and present around the globe is pantheism. Opening the door to earth-centered spirituality has had a very profound impact on contemporary Unitarian Universalism, and no doubt many of you are part of this Fellowship because this door has been opened.

And finally, Transcendentalism opens the door to environmentalism, a pressing, central concern for many Unitarian Universalists today—like the Post-Crescent outdoor writer (and Fellowship member) Ed Culhane. Ed wrote a wonderful column this week calling attention to the lamentable fact that both President Bush in his State of the Union address and his Democratic respondents failed to mention the environment even once.²¹

You can make a strong case that Transcendentalism was the beginning of the environmental movement in the United States. Thoreau, for example, observed that Walden Pond was in need of repair from humanity’s negative impact. Rather than devaluing and degrading it, he said, the pond needed to be treated as if it was sacred (which of course in his view it was).²² And Thoreau valued wild lands even as American civilization picked up the pace of its assaults on the wilderness.²³ Thoreau and Emerson were tremendous sources of inspiration for John Muir²⁴ and Aldo Leopold, to name just a few noteworthy environmentalists. One contemporary writer asserts that environmentalism is Transcendentalism’s “main institutional legacy.”²⁵

Transcendentalism and its love for nature bequeathed a wonderful legacy to the United States and to Unitarian Universalism. I believe that it is our sacred responsibility to embrace and use this legacy. The fate of environment—and with it nothing less than the fate of our souls—rests on our appreciation and protection of nature.

The first step, Thoreau and Annie Dillard tell us, is to wake up and see and appreciate Nature. “Only that day dawns to which we are awake,” Thoreau writes at the end of Walden.²⁶ I will close with these words from Emerson biographer Bob Richardson about his wife, Annie Dillard:

My wife…says that you have perhaps an hour in a new place when you can really see it freshly. After that hour you see more and more what you expect to see. The way to live, she says—and my wife is always right in these things—is to look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first—and for the last—time.²⁷

Copyright 2004 by Roger B. Bertschausen. All rights reserved.