Developing Spiritual Practices

Sunday, June 22, 2003
Rev. Cynthia Snavely

            I am almost surprised that I am here preaching this sermon this morning.  It was snowed out in February and replaced with a guest speaker this spring.  This is a sermon on spiritual practices drawn from the practices of our Unitarian Universalist forebears, the Transcendentalists.  The Unitarian side of our Unitarian Universalist tradition is often seen as rational religion without a strong spiritual component. We go off looking for spirituality among the Buddhists and the neo-pagans, which is fine.  But, we should also look to our own heritage.  Unitarian Universalist historian, David Robinson said in a lecture delivered in 1989, “Like a pauper who searches for the next meal , never knowing of the relatives whose will would make him rich, American Unitarians lament their vague religious identity, standing upon the richest theological legacy of any American denomination.  Possessed of a deep and sustaining history of spiritual achievement and philosophical speculation religious liberals have been, ironically, dispossessed of that heritage.”

            The heritage Robinson speaks of is the heritage of the American Transcendentalist movement.  Dr. Barry Andrews has written a paper entitled, “The Roots of Unitarian Universalist Spirituality in New England Trqanscendentalism.”  This sermon is a synopsis of that paper.  Andrews gives this overview of who the Transcendentalists were. “The Transcendentalists were a group of men and women, most of whom lived in New England during the first half of the 19th century and pursued careers as writers, ministers, educators, and reformers.  The nucleus of the group were members of an informal ‘club’ that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Peabody, James Freeman Clarke, Frederick Henry Hedge, George Ripley, William Henry Channing, and a number of others.  In spite of the diversity of interests in the group, almost all of them were Unitarians and most were ministers or former ministers.  According to one count, of 26 who were closely associated with the group, 17 were Unitarian ministers—all but four, that is of the men.  This was no coincidence, since the movement – in spite of all its literary, philosophical, and political dimensions – was essentially a religious one, an outgrowth of early 19th century Unitarianism.”

            The Transcendentalists wanted more spirituality in their religion.  Theodore Parker complained that, “I felt early that the liberal ministers did not do justice to simple religious feeling; …all their preaching seemed to relate too much to outward things, not enough to the inward pious life…Most powerfully preaching to the Understanding, the Conscience, and the Will, the cry was ever, ‘Duty, Duty!’  ‘Work, Work!’  They failed to address with equal power the Soul, and did not also shout, ‘Joy, Joy!  Delight, Delight!’”

Emerson believed that the soul would not be addressed adequately as long as the church kept trying to offer a second-hand religion.  Emerson did not want to be offered a way to the holy through the experience of the Israelites or through the experience of Jesus’ disciples.  He wanted to experience the holy for himself.  In his essay, Nature Emerson wrote, “the foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes.  Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?  Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”

            The Transcendentalist view of how to achieve this revelation was not through a conversion experience but through a process of spiritual growth and continual regeneration of the soul.  They spoke of self-culture.  Culture in that still agrarian time, had the sense of plowing and tilling.  One worked on one’s own growth as one did at the growth of one’s crops.  And it was never too early to start.  It was one of the group of Transcendentalists, Elizabeth Peabody, who began this country’s first Kindergarten, which is simply German for children garden.

            In order to do this one had to develop both the senses and the intuition.  “As Theodore Parker explained it, there were two schools of philosophy, the sensational philosophy of John Locke (and the ‘orthodox’ Unitarians) which held that there was nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses; the other, the intuitive philosophy attributed to Immanuel Kant which held that ‘(hu)man(s) (have) faculties which transcend the senses; faculties which give ((them) ideas and intuitions that transcend sensational experience  -- the existence and nature of god, the difference between right and wrong – could not be demonstrated empirically.  They could only be known intuitively, by faculties that transcend the senses. Hence the term Transcendentalism.”

            Andrews notes that the transcendentalists held a view that “at the heart of things there was an ineffable spirit that animated all creation, a divine energy immanent in nature and human beings providing a sense of meaning, purpose and direction.  This spirit was variously referred to as the OverSoul, Universal Mind or Spirit, Highest Law and God.  Alcott described it as, ‘that power, which pulsates in all life, animates and builds all organizations, shall manifest itself as one universal deific energy, present alike at the outskirts and centre of the universe, whose centre and circumference are one; omniscient, omnipotent, self-subsisting, uncontained, yet containing all things in the unbroken synthesis of its being.’ Parker put it more simply: ‘The fullness of the divine energy flows inexhaustibly into the crystal of the rock, the juices of the plant, the splendor of the stars, the life of the Bee and Behemoth.’”

            They had experiences in which they felt connected or caught up into this spirit, and they had spiritual practices which they felt might open them to those experiences.  One of those practices was spending time in nature.  Thoreau wrote in his journal, “My profession is always to be on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking places, to attend to all oratorios, the operas in nature…To watch for, describe, all the divine features which I detect in nature.”  And Emerson wrote, “Go and hear in a woodland valley the harmless roarings of the South wind and see the shining boughs of the trees in the sun, the swift sailing clouds, and you shall think a man a fool to be mean and unhappy  when every day is made illustrious by these splendid shows. Then falls the enchanting night; all the trees are windharps; out shine the stars; and we say, ‘Blessed be light and darkness, ebb and flow, cold and heat, these restless pulsations of nature which throb for us.  In the presence of nature a man of feeling is not suffered to lose sight of the instant creation.  The world was not made a great while ago.  Nature is an Eternal Now.”

            Thoreau is said to have spent half of each day in the out of doors.  Sometimes this time was on excursions, but at other times it was simply sitting and contemplating.  Contemplation was a spiritual practice for the Transcendentalists.  Andrews says, “The two years he spent at Walden Pond were an especially contemplative time for (Thoreau),… (Thoreau describes one of his mornings there…. “Sometimes, in a summer morning, haven taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in revery…I grew in those seasons like the corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been.  They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.”  Emerson in his lectures on “Human Culture” said, “In your arrangements for your residence see that you have a chamber to yourself, though you sell your coat and wear a blanket.”  “The simple habit of sitting alone occasionally to explore what facts of moment lie in the memory may have the effect in some more favored hour to open to the student the kingdom of spiritual nature.”

            That quiet chamber might also be used for another spiritual practice, reading. “Books must be read,” said Thoreau,  “as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”  Emerson and Parker were known for their extensive libraries.  Margaret Fuller was known as a discerning reader and book reviewer.  The Transcendentalists read “poetry, philosophy, mythology, history, science and biography.”  Thoreau mentioned the East as he spoke of contemplation.  The Transcendentalists read sacred texts from India and China and their Bibles.  Thoreau wrote, “The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. There are at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.  These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words, and his life.” 

            Please remember that while these 19th century Transcendentalists wrote of wise men and referred to people always, it seems, as he and him, there were women in their group.

            Writing was another spiritual discipline of the Transcendentalists.  This was a group of people who kept journals.  Alcott kept a journal for over fifty years.  Emerson began his journal at the age of seventeen, and he was the one who encouraged Thoreau to begin to keep one.  “Pay so much honor to the visits of Truth in your mind as to record those thoughts that have shone therein,” advised Emerson. 

             Finally, conversation was considered a spiritual discipline.  Alcott wrote, in his journal, “My theory of Conversation as the natural organ of communicating, mind with mind, appears more and more beautiful to me. It is the method of human culture.  By it I come nearer the hearts of those I address than by any other means.”  Several of the Transcendentalists actually added to their income by leading conversations.  Andrews notes that, “For a period of five years Fuller conducted conversations on such topics as mythology, education, women’s issues and universal religious ideas.  Typically, between 25 and 30 women subscribed to these sessions.  She would begin each with a brief introduction, invite questions, and ask a few questions herself as a means of drawing the others out in a discussion on the subject.”

            “These spiritual disciples – excursions in nature, contemplation, reading, journal writing and conversations--, “ notes Andrews, “represented the means of cultivating the self or the soul. But, in keeping with the doctrine of self-culture, these means were never ends in themselves.”  The Transcendentalists believed that spiritual self-culture would bear fruit in ethical and moral lives. They experimented in communal living and were involved in the social reform issues of their day.  George Ripley quit the Unitarian ministry in 1840 to found the Brook Farm Institute for Education and Agriculture, a cooperative community meant to, according to Ripley, “do away with the necessity of menial services, by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressures of our competitive institutions.”  Emerson, on a more modest scale, moved his family to the village of Concord so that he could afford to live on his income as a writer and lecturer and had the servants sit down to dinner with the family. 

            The spiritual development which led to moral and ethical growth in the individual was expected from those individuals to effect society at large.  Andrews notes that, “The Transcendentalists were singly and as a group more active in social and political reforms than their (old school) Unitarian opponents and critics.  The ethical consequences of their Transcendentalist ideals impelled them into a wide variety of causes and reforms: the educational reforms of (Bronson) Alcott and Elizabeth Peabody; the Christian socialism of William Henry Channing; Margaret Fuller’s feminism and involvement in the Roman Revolution of 1848; Thoreau’s civil disobedience; George Ripley’s Brook Farm; abolitionism and women’s rights.  These ere not accidents or deviations, but logical consequences of the Transcendentalist social ethic.  They were the inevitable outcome of a belief in a common human nature and the desire to integrate spiritual aspirations and moral behavior.  Transcendentalism, for all its emphasis on spirituality, led its adherents into the world more often than away from it.”

            That is my synopsis of Barry Andrew’s paper.  If you want to read it whole, it is on the UUA web site.  I thought it was worth sharing, because what the Transcendentalists had is the very heart of what each congregation needs.  We need to be a people committed to spiritual practices that will grow us morally and ethically, and we need to call the institutions of our day, of which we are a part, to act morally and ethnically within our society.  Change yourself, then change the world.