Ralph
Waldo Emerson was such an inveterate optimist that his good friends (and professional
curmudgeons) Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne doubted his judgment. Melville put pen to paper to describe him as
having a “defect in the region of the heart.”
His
sunny disposition has long interested me, given his heart wrenching
series of personal tragedies, a childhood of financial anxiety, career changes
as he shed early ones that didn’t suit him, and a trust and confidence busting
period in American history. I would have
expected a pessimist. Instead, he
emerged from this crucible of experiences with optimism, and with something
worthy to say to the many of us today, similarly burdened by sorrows, and weighed
down with worry about finances, jobs, and the future of our country. He is fine patron saint or namesake for this
church.
Let
me tell you something about his life, and I’ll suggest a possible reason why he
was so optimistic. You may disagree, and
knowing you, you’ll let me know over coffee hour! I look forward to different interpretations.
Emerson
was born in 1803, in Boston. His father
was a Unitarian minister, as, in fact, had been about seven prior generations
of Emersons – either Unitarian or Congregationalist ministers. The first tragedy Emerson was old enough to
remember, when he was seven or eight, was that his dad died, probably of
stomach cancer, leaving a young widow, pregnant for the eighth time. The congregation let the family stay in the
rectory until they installed a new minister, and paid her a condolence stipend
of $25/mo for a year, but soon Mrs. Emerson was on her own, with six surviving
children under the age of ten, two of whom, in the language of Emerson’s
journals, were retarded and insane.
To
make ends meet, her sister, Mary, and she opened a boarding house in Beacon
Hill, Boston. She never remarried. Imagine how financially vulnerable the family
must have felt. Will the new lodger stay
the full term? Will he pay on time? Will he be a big eater? Will the price of meat go up? The children did odd jobs to help out. How isolated did they feel? They were more intellectually oriented than
their economic peers, and far poorer than their social and educational peers,
and to top it off – at least from an adolescent’s perspective, by age fourteen, Emerson towered over nearly
everybody he knew, at almost six feet tall – this in an age when people like
Stephen F. Austin were 5’ 4”! I imagine this upbringing influenced his
subsequent writings advocating self-reliance, don’t you?
The
three college able sons worked to put each other through school. For example, William
opened a school for young ladies, so that Emerson could attend Harvard College
(college is what high school aged education was called). While there, he worked as a waiter in the
school’s commons (probably for the free food) and also served as something of a
gopher for the President’s office. He
graduated only in the middle of class, but perhaps that was partly because he
read so widely outside the prescribed curriculum. For instance, his Aunt Mary and he were very
interested in the new English translations of Eastern religions, including Buddhism,
Hinduism, and Islam. Do you find Buddhist influences in such writings as The
Over Soul? I do, too.
When
he graduated, he taught at the school so that William could attend Divinity School,
but he didn’t take to teaching, or at least to teaching young ladies, so once
his brother’s education was complete, he closed the school and cast about for a
new career. I imagine that many of you
can empathize with his situation – your first job lands in your lap but after a
few years you realize it isn’t a good fit.
Then you have to figure out what might be.
Well,
what was an impecunious, educated young man to do? Since he had no capital, he couldn’t start a
business or invest in one. He had
already rejected teaching. He’d never shown any inclination toward
medicine. So perhaps more from a sense
of limited alternatives than a calling, he entered his father’s and brother’s
profession, and enrolled in Harvard Divinity School.
The
year 1829 was an eventful one for Emerson.
The happy events were that, at 26 years old, he was ordained and became
an associate minister for a Unitarian church in Boston and he married, an 18
year old named Ellen. A great sorrow was
that he had to institutionalize his little brother, in an Asylum for the
Insane, for increasing bouts of violence.
This
grief was soon supplanted by another.
His young bride had tuberculosis, and her condition worsened so rapidly
that her mother had to move in with the young couple to care for her while
Emerson juggled with his new ministerial duties. Sadly, she died, when she was 20. Despite what must have been a predictable
outcome, Emerson was distraught at her death.
He wrote in his journals that when she had been dead for six weeks he
felt compelled to open her coffin to convince himself that she was really
gone. Some of you have shared your grief
experiences with me, and have said that you have the strongest sensation that
your loved one is right behind you or beside you. I bet that is how Emerson felt.
Like
many grieving people, he suffered a lost off faith around this time, and also,
I think, a mystical experience. He had
become increasingly disenchanted with Unitarian theology, describing it as “corpse
cold” for focusing on dusty old books and long dead people when it should focus
on the living and the loving and the giving and the grieving people right here
and now. In my very favorite description
of Unitarians, he called us “God’s Frozen People”. And truth be told, he had decided that he
didn’t like pastoral care and didn’t really like being a minister. He wrote that to minister to others, he
decided that he needed to leave the ministry.
The man for whom we have named our church for 50 years, resigned from his
congregation after only 3 years.
Year
later, in 1837, Harvard Divinity School invited him to deliver the Commencement
Address. Apparently they didn’t know
these views! Imagine being one of the
enthusiastic graduates and their doting parents hearing the following,
no-holds-barred denunciation of their chosen faith! Christianity "dwells with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus."… and …has
turned Jesus into a "demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would
describe Osiris or Apollo. He added that since God is in all men,
“special miracles” don’t need to occur; revelation happens every day to anyone
who pays attention. Instead of dwelling on such issues, he encouraged preachers
to preach from their hearts and from life, not from dusty books, as he
contemptuously referred to the Bible.
One critic said his views were an insult to religion. Others decried him as an atheist (of course!)
Once
he quit his job, I wonder if he felt like a failure. He’d rejected two professions. What next?
Wisely, he took a year to decide.
His wife had inherited some money and he used it to travel to Europe,
where he met many of the great thinkers and writers he admired, including Samuel
Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, who were also interested in Asian influences in
thought and theology.
When
he returned, he married a second time (in 1835) a woman named Lydia (whom he
called Lydian) by whom he had four children.
The oldest, his namesake, died at 5 of scarlet fever. For any of you who are grieving now, I’d like
to recommend a touching poem he wrote, called Threnody, about how everything in his home reminds him of the sweet
little son, now gone.
During
this time, he started his third career, a prototypical Emersonian one: he made it up and relied solely on himself. Although he had discovered that he didn’t
like teaching in a school or ministering in a church, he decided to become an itinerant
lecturer, not affiliated with a school or church, although he spoke at both, in
lectures that combined spiritual and academic subjects in his famously stream
of consciousness style. I think the
closest person to him today might be Depok Chopra. Emerson rented a hall, put up flyers, sold
tickets and delivered speeches on topics as varied as Nature, American Scholar,
The Conservative, Idealism, Manners, and others on famous men of letters or
history. As you can imagine, his new
career was not very lucrative, but his wife supported him, emotionally, and
perhaps financially, too. He later
started a magazine, too, The Dial, in 1840 with Margaret
Fuller, “to promote the constant evolution of the truth not the petrification
of opinion.” He turned some of his lectures into articles for the magazine and
essays for self-published books of essays.
Emerson
became extremely popular and respected. I
think the reasons are threefold: his personal demeanor, his content and delivery,
and timing. Haven’t you sometimes
wondered if a charismatic person on the national scene would have been as
effective ten years earlier or ten years later?
Let me tell you of the context of his growing lectureship so you can
appreciate his appeal.
In
1837, the country was plunged in a great depression that lasted five-six years
in various places. Just like our more recent
financial debacles, there was rampant finger pointing.
Some blamed foreign speculators (the British). Others blamed two presidents in a row,
Jackson and Van Buren, for failing to prevent it, and failing to assuage it
once it was underway. Of the 850 banks
in the nation, half folded or closed doors, and this in a time with no deposit
insurance. Cities as large as Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and New York closed every bank within their borders. Imagine what this meant. Shop keepers couldn’t get credit for
inventory. Farmers couldn’t get credit
for next year’s crops. Parents yanked
kids out of schools (there were very few free public schools) not only because
they couldn’t afford the tuition but also because they needed to replace the
employees they couldn’t afford with their kids in the fields and businesses. Sound eerily familiar? It was a very disconcerting time.
Not
surprisingly, the 1840s saw an influx of religious revivals. The Presbyterians
were preaching predestination and the Calvinists were talking about sinners
deserving punishment. Meanwhile, down
the street is a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He
didn’t have the bombastic oratorical style so popular then. Rather, he walked to the podium, a tall, thin
man dressed in sober black like the New England preacher he once was, and in
what has been described and a deep and resonant voice, he began to talk. He spoke as though he were thinking out loud,
and he trusted and respected the audience enough that he was letting them
“listen in.” One of his quotes is that
“a friend is one before whom I can think out loud.” That is the impression he gave. Though his topics were many and varied, a
frequent theme was this: Trust yourself. You can trust yourself. That little voice inside of you that you
might call intuition? That is God
talking to you. God is in everything –
and that includes you. So would he
condemn you to Hell? Inconceivable. Are you an incorrigible sinner? How could that be?
How
could one be a pessimist with that view?
To Emerson, God is in him and in everyone he meets. He encouraged them to be self-reliant, and by
trusting the authority of themselves, to respect themselves, too. Imagine the impact on women. He said you don’t have to experience a second
hand relationship to God through a priest or a book, and by extension,
other authority figures. He encouraged
everyone – men and women to trust that wee voice within to tell them what is
right, what is good, what to do, and to seek or question when they don’t hear
that voice.
Imagine
the impact on an audience at this time.
They probably felt like they couldn’t trust banks, employers, the
government, maybe even neighbors in what must have been a dog-eat-dog time.
Women
loved him: He didn’t talk down to
them. He avoided patriarchal language in
discussing God. Instead, he tended to
use terms like “Over-Soul” or Nature.
One
of my favorite stories about his audience may be apocryphal, but it seems to
capture a truth. A journalist noticed a
scrub woman who attended several of his lectures. Intrigued, he asked her, “Do you understand
what he is saying?” “Nope,” she said, “Not a word.” “Well, then, why do you come?” “Because,” she explained,“ I like to see Mr.
Emerson standing up there, talking to me like I am just as good as he is.” Isn’t that a lovely thing to say about a man who, in the latter half of his career, was the most famous American thinker on both sides of the Atlantic (along with Mark Twain)?
Emerson was a man
of integrity who inspired confidence and trust. I believe that this was because he lived his values; he did trust himself. As he became more famous, politicians and journalists sought his endorsements. He refused to be the poster boy for
politicians or others’ issues but he didn’t
shy away from controversial subjects important to him. He just picked and chose. For example, he spoke out against slavery in 1844, was
against the forced relocation of Cherokee Indians, publicly supported women’s
suffrage and higher education as early as 1855, and refused to support the Fugitive
Slave Law, when passed in 1861. Some of these positions were not popular with his American audiences, as he he saw, traveling by train all the way to California giving lectures, and some of his positions astonished the Europeans when he traveled there for a year.
When
people disagreed or condemned his thinking, he never argued back or put down his opponent. He let his lecture or essay stand where it
was. His ego was not ruffled by others' disagreement.
To me, Emerson is a wonderful embodiment of 6 of our denomination's 7 principles: inherent worth and dignity of all people, the practices of justice and
compassion, encouragement of free and responsible spiritual growth, right of
conscience and the democratic process, and respect for the interdependent web of life. The only one I don't see directly represented in his life and writings is the principle of a world community.
Sadly,
his memory and some of his verbal skills faded about 12 years before his death, to the point where he could not lecture any more. It is hard to tell from health references in his journals and others whether the cause was some sort of dementia. Touching, to me, is the title of his last book, “Society and Solitude.”
In these latter years, he was so beloved, that when his house burned to the ground, admirers paid to rebuild it. What a wonderful validation.
Emerson
did not regard himself as a philosopher, but as a thinker and he thought a lot:
50 volumes of writing. “Essential
writings: 850 pages. He said, “you are
what you think all day long.”
Was
he naturally optimistic, or was his attitude nurtured in the crucible of
repeated grief? Was his theology sunny
because he was an innate optimist, or did he become an optimist because of his
theology? Perhaps he just chose to think
in this way, all day long.
Every
generation seeks a leader, a role model, a soul model. Who is yours? Who encourages the best aspect
of your nature? Who encourages you to
stand up for what you believe is right, even if others criticize you for it?
Emerson was it for a generation torn asunder by the Civil War, as people strove
to pick up the pieces of their lives, their families, their states.
Also,
each one of you is a role model for others.
Many of you are role models for me. What do you want your legacy to
be? What do you encourage in
others? And is that what you want to
convey? Is your theology consistent with
your demeanor and lifestyle? Look at yourself from the outside, from time
to time.
Each of us as
individuals, and together as a group can be Emersonian. Each of us can pick and choose which issues
to focus on: when to be quiet and when to stand up for something in an outlet
that is effective. Each of us needs to
be self-reliant, and pick ourselves up out of disappointment or grief or
self-blame. Like Emerson and his mother,
many of us will have to adjust our hopes and dreams; we’ll need
inspiration. And according to Emerson, that
source is very close: it is here and
now, inside you.
