RW Emerson is
justifiably famous for his pithy one liners, although they appear strewn like
nuggets of gold in a field of dense pyrite, at least to modern readers. Here are a few you may recognize but not have
realized he was the author:
Hitch your wagon to a
star. To be great is to be
misunderstood. Nothing can bring you
peace but yourself. All mankind love a lover.
And this last one,
which I love from an author: Next to the originator of a good sentence is the
first quoter of it.
He was a lecturer and
writer of history, biography, and science, as well as a poet, but I want to
focus on his religious and philosophical views today because the conflict he
felt in religion is one that you may feel, too, pulled between heart and mind,
intellect and emotion. By looking at some of his decisions, and
considering the context of those actions, we can reflect on our individual and
congregational values about the heart and mind of our faith.
Unitarians sometimes
forget that, although he was a Unitarian minister, in what amounted to a nine
generation family business, Emerson quit the job after only 3 years. Ostensibly it was over his discomfort in
celebrating the Eucharist, but really, according to his journals and other
writings, it reflected broader reasons that many of us have experienced, too,
as we have church shopped through our lives, trying out different
denominations, and various congregations within them. After he left, he neither referred to himself
as Reverend nor expected others to do so.
I think he’d be rather embarrassed to have a Unitarian church named
after him, because he purposefully left the denomination, explaining that one’s
relationship with the divine was better found outside any church than within.