“A NEW TRANSCENDENTALISM: 3) THE CENTRALITY OF SOUL”

by the Rev. Roger Bertschausen

A sermon delivered at the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

on February 7-8, 2004

P.O. Box 1791

Appleton, WI

(920) 731-0849

www.fvuuf.org

Call to Gather:

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, your religion must help you answer three questions: “Who are you? What is dear to you? What do you stand for?”¹

Reading: from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds.

As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.

I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

There is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us.

Every moment when the individual feels invaded by it is memorable.

It comes to the lowly and the simple; it comes to whosoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur.

The soul’s health consists in the fullness of its reception.

For ever and ever the influx of this better and more universal self is new and unsearchable.

Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.

When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.²

**********

There was a lot wrong with the world in pre-Civil War heyday of the Transcendentalism. The colossal evil of slavery undoubtedly topped the list. There was also the Mexican War, which Emerson and other Transcendentalists opposed as an unjust, imperialist war fought under the false and troubling pretense of pre-empting Mexican aggression. Women lacked the right to vote and just about every other basic human right. The European American onslaught against Native Americans intensified.³ The natural environment came under increasing attack, too. And vast majority of people on the earth lived under the repression of authoritarian rulers. Working to make the world a better and more just place was a central aspect of Transcendentalism.

Some of what so distressed the Transcendentalists has been corrected in the hundred and sixty years since. Slavery is no longer legal—which is not to say it’s completely disappeared from the face of the earth; tragically, it hasn’t. In many countries including our own, women now have the right to vote. Human rights in some places have advanced significantly.

But many of the problems the Transcendentalists so lamented continue unabated or have taken on new but related forms. Thoreau didn’t know about backhoes and urban sprawl and ozone depletion, but the destruction of the environment he bemoaned clearly continues, and at an increased and more toxic pace. And of course new problems—weapons of mass destruction, for example—have surfaced with explosive power. There is still a lot wrong with the world. The world still desperately needs fixing.

Transcendentalists believed there is one—and only one—excellent place to begin building a better world: by tending to your own soul. Emerson famously said that the remedy for what so ails the world is “first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul.”⁴ A lot of sick souls inevitably mean a sick world. Healthier souls mean a healthier world.

The Transcendentalists also understood that it is inherently difficult to make someone else’s soul healthy. So instead, start with the one soul you do have at least some control over: your own. Each of us has work we can and should do in tending to our own soul. Mahatma Gandhi, who read and embraced much of Transcendentalism, summed this up in the context of British-ruled India when he noted that “home rule begins with self-rule.”⁵ To be successful, the work of freeing India from the British had to begin with each Indian tending to his or her own soul. This is precisely where Gandhi began his liberation work.

The first step in tending to your soul is to know your soul. For the Transcendentalists, this is where spirituality must always begin. Of course, the Transcendentalists didn’t invent this idea: among other places, it surfaced six hundred years earlier in medieval Sufi poetry. Emerson in particular among Transcendentalists read Sufi poetry voraciously. This poem by the thirteenth century Sufi mystic Rumi about his search for the divine gives rich expression to the idea of where best to begin your spiritual path In this poem, Rumi uses “He” as I have used “It” throughout this series:

Cross and Christian, end to end, I examined.

He was not the Cross.

I went to the Hindu temple, to the ancient pagoda.

In neither was there any sign.

To the heights of Heart I went, and Kandahar.

I looked.

He was not on any height or lowland.

Resolutely I went to the top of the mountain of Kaf.

There only was the place of the Anqa bird.

I went to the Kaaba.

He was not there.

I asked of his state from Ibn Sina;

He was beyond the limits of the philosopher of Avicenna…

I looked into my own heart.

In that place I saw him.

He was in no other place.⁶

Rumi, like the Transcendentalists, also believed that when you truly see your soul as it is, you will see nothing less than the sacred It I’ve been talking about so much in this series. Indeed, each soul is It.

The Transcendentalists believed that spiritual disciplines such as walking in nature, journaling, and conversations are wonderful ways to get to know your soul. These disciplines help still the buzz of life that so awfully and effectively shields us from our own soul. Thoreau lamented all of the distractions from soul in his time; imagine what he’d say looking at all the gadgets of the twenty-first century that so occupy our minds! Your spirituality must quiet these distractions if you are to have any chance of getting to know your own soul.

Once you have learned something about your own soul, then comes the next crucial step of tending the soul: be yourself. So many of us waste so much of life in trying to be what we aren’t: more beautiful, more intelligent, more accomplished, more grounded or more-whatever-else we imagine to be a deficiency. This perhaps more than anything else is the recipe for a sick soul. Once you know who you are at your core, be that person! And don’t waste time trying to make other souls something which they aren’t. Emerson writes, “Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another You. One’s enough.”⁷

Knowing and being yourself is not the end of the journey. There is one final, crucial step, according to the Transcendentalists: reaching out to other souls. Because tending your own soul is relentlessly its starting place, Transcendentalism sometimes is interpreted as self-centered to the point of selfishness. Emerson’s concept of Self-Reliance especially gets misinterpreted this way.

This is a misinterpretation. The Transcendentalists’ premise is that good, effective action to build a better world can only begin with tending your own soul. But tending your soul is not the whole point. It is not enough—not nearly enough—to tend your soul and then stand around watching your family or friends or neighbors or strangers near and far suffer. Reaching out to other souls in need and building a better world is the true point of the spiritual journey. A healthy and grounded soul simply helps you be able to do this work. So even for Thoreau—that champion of solitude and Self-Reliance—the greatest miracle of all is “for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant.”⁸ Soul connecting with soul; soul helping soul: this is what the spiritual life should be about.

There is a balance between the individual and the community in Transcendentalism that often gets over-looked when Self-Reliance is misinterpreted to be only about the individual. Emerson’s idea was that people who know who they are and act out of that knowledge make for better individuals and better communities and a better world.

This brings us to social action. Part of the wrap against Emerson and the other Transcendentalists is that they tended to stand on the sidelines discussing and ruminating rather than rolling up their sleeves and setting about the task of building a better world. There is, for example, the story about a Mrs. Brackett, a Bostonian Abolitionist who told Emerson to his face in 1841 that she would rather hear that a friend died than became a Transcendentalist. She said this because Transcendentalists “are paralyzed & never do anything for humanity.”⁹

Mrs. Brackett was particularly angered that the Transcendentalists hadn’t yet done much to fight slavery. In truth some of them were slow to take up the cause. Emerson was habitually slow to move on any social action. He insisted always on taking sufficient time to contemplate the issue at hand and the various options for action. “I will not move until I have the highest command,” he declared.¹⁰ He especially wanted to make sure that he didn’t mindlessly follow others into action that he hadn’t adequately thought through. The highest command could only come from his intuition, and only after careful deliberation.

But there was a place for action. “It is by no means necessary that I should live,” Emerson writes, “but it is by all means necessary that I should act rightly.”¹¹ He did not advocate staying on the sidelines forever.

In the face of the terrible injustice of slavery, he did finally act. Well before Abolitionism has moved from the fringes of northern culture to the center, Emerson became an outspoken Abolitionist. His conversion to the cause certainly helped the movement gain steam and legitimacy, and he quickly became one of the most noteworthy Abolitionists.¹²

In this case, Emerson wasn’t overly temperate, either, once he decided to act. In one famous Abolitionist speech (in 1844), he said, “If any cannot speak, or cannot hear the words of freedom, let him go hence…Creep into your grave, the Universe has no need of you.”¹³ He didn’t exactly hold back in his rhetoric! He also chose the Fourth of July—then as now a highly patriotic holiday—as an occasion to make a major speech lashing out against slavery and the U.S. government’s tolerance of slavery. Following Thoreau’s lead, he actively supported civil disobedience in support of Abolitionism, and he spoke out strongly and often in support of John Brown during Brown’s treason trial.¹⁴

Emerson certainly wasn’t alone among the Transcendentalists in his Abolitionism. Theodore Parker came to the cause earlier, and gained much notoriety in rescuing escaped slaves who were being tracked down in the North under the Fugitive Slave Act. Virtually every Transcendentalist was a devoted Abolitionist.¹⁵

The principal reason Transcendentalists worked to end slavery and for other just causes was their passionate belief in the inherent dignity and worth of all people. This was also a matter of soul: if the sacred “It” resides in the soul of each and every person, then it follows that every person should be treated as a sacred manifestation of God. You shouldn’t make a slave of God. You shouldn’t force God to pack up and find a new home. You shouldn’t launch a war against God. You shouldn’t deprive God of basic rights. The divine within, in the words of the Transcendentalist William B. Greene, “is the origin and the foundation of human rights.”¹⁶

Transcendentalism was nothing less than a liberation theology. Its goal: the liberation of each soul from every constraint of convention, persecution, and oppression so that every soul might live up to its full potential. Emerson’s biographer Robert Richardson summarizes well the social imperative of Transcendentalism. You will hear in this a variation of Jesus’ message to love your neighbor as yourself and hints of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

What I find necessary for myself, I cannot withhold from others; more, I cannot rest in my possession of, say, freedom until all others are free. Every person knows, said Frederick Douglass, that slavery is wrong, for him. Slavery is therefore, wrong. So are hunger, homelessness, and involuntary poverty wrong.¹⁷

Just as Transcendentalism’s focus on nature opens Unitarian Universalism’s door to nature mystics and earth-centered spirituality, so does its focus on the soul open significant doors. Transcendentalism opens the door to those who have similar views of the soul—all the way from Rumi and the other medieval Sufi mystics to Hasidic Jews to contemporary soul writers like Thomas Moore.

And Transcendentalism opens Unitarian Universalism’s door to liberation theologies as well. Central to all liberation theologies—whether feminist or Latin American liberation theologies or African American liberation theologies—is the belief that human souls are in need of liberation and justice. This belief was central to Transcendentalism as well. And Transcendentalists join these liberationists in saying that the work of doing justice falls squarely on us human beings. We must not sit idly by expecting an all-powerful God to do the work of justice for us.

To close, I want to return to Emerson’s three questions from the Call to Gather: “Who are you? What is dear to you? What do you stand for?”¹⁸ As tempting as it might be, don’t rush past the first to the second and third. The Transcendentalists tell us that you can’t give adequate and sustained answer to the second and third question if you avoid the first, more difficult question. And it is also important to remember that we don’t answer these questions once and for all, but must return to them over and over again as our soul continues to grow and change.

I invite you to spend the next few moments of silence contemplating these questions. Who are you? What is dear to you? What do you stand for?

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