Rev. Joan R. Gelbein
Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington
Sermon,
January 25, 1998
This morning sees the conclusion of the three-part series on the Transcendentalists that was put together for this, our annual January tradition of “UU Identity Month.”
The desire we have is to devote time to further an understanding of our Unitarian Universalist heritage. In fact, it is remarkable to many of us - who have been attracted to a UU church in this latter part of the twentieth century - to realize the length and rich variety of our past.
But, truly, we lose these facts and stories at our own peril. Without a strong sense of identity, personally and institutionally, we give up our ability to shape the future with confidence, clarity, and vision.
Unitarianism in America grew out of the need of many to escape from religious persecution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the early 1800’s the first association of Unitarian Churches was created. Under the leadership of the great minister, Dr. William Ellery Channing, the American Unitarian Association was formed in 1825. Dr. Channing did not, by then, fully approve of the name “Unitarian,” because he felt it did not adequately describe our basic philosophy. His concern over the name that identified us as a religious movement, was that we were not any longer as concerned with the nature of God (Trinitarian vs. Unitarian) but were, instead, much more interested in the nature of the Human Person. But, Unitarian was the name we were known by, and Unitarian was what stuck to us.
It was soon to come, in the mid-nineteenth century, that a particularly significant change would occur within Unitarianism. It was the loosely organized movement that became known as Transcendentalism, and is strongly identified with the three Unitarian Transcendentalists we are celebrating this month: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.
Emerson argued for a new American culture, freed from European bondage, and a rebirth of an intellectual and artistic life of the spirit. Before long, Emerson and his circle of writers, reformers, and artists would christen those ideals—“Transcendentalism.”
The Transcendentalists stood at the heart of The American Renaissance—the flowering of our nation’s thought in literature, poetry, painting ,sculpture, architecture, and music in the period roughly from 1835 - 1880.
Concentrated in Boston and Concord, MA, the home of many of the members such as Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts, George Ripley, Theodore Parker, and the Channings, Transcendentalism grew to be a broad geographical phenomenon, but at the heart of the movement was the clutch of Unitarian free thinkers centered there in Boston and its environs.
In 1841, Emerson attempted to define the philosophy simply as Idealism. In reality it was a far more complex collection of beliefs: that the spark of divinity lies within each person; that everything in the world is a microcosm of existence; that the individual soul is identical to the world soul, or Over-Soul, as Emerson called it. This belief in the Inner Light led to an emphasis on the authority of the Self. It led to Walt Whitman’s bold “I,” to the Emersonian doctrine of Self-Reliance that Paul spoke about two Sundays ago, to Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, and to the Utopian Communities of Brook Farm and Fruitlands. It was the first outcry of the heart against the materialistic pressures of a business civilization. A few bold American spirits made a gallant effort to introduce to this mercantile and pragmatic nation some of the deeper currents in the intellectual and spiritual life of the West—and of the East. They are what we have to display as an American counterpart to the ebullient Romanticism of Europe.
Transcendentalism dominated the thinking of the American Renaissance, and its resonance’s reverberated through American life well into the 20th century. It’s attraction was, surely, its message of confident self-identity, spiritual depth, and social justice, but also an aesthetic which celebrated in landscape and mindscape, the immense grandeur of the American spirit.
Part and parcel of this landscape and mindscape of the Transcendentalist American spirit was Margaret Fuller.
Sometimes called the “most important woman of the nineteenth century,” and certainly America’s first true feminist, Margaret Fuller holds a distinctive place in the cultural life of the American Renaissance.
Diane’s dramatic reading just a few minutes ago, conveyed a sense of the high energy and high intellect of this woman, surely outstanding in any time, but against the backdrop of women’s expectedly more passive role in family and society, and the innovative milieu of the Transcendentalists, she shone in a unique way.
Personally, I struggled in my encounter with Margaret Fuller. She was not as easy for me to grasp as Thoreau and Emerson. There is so much in both those men’s writings that lead on merrily to sermon upon sermon.
But...Margaret! Now, Margaret doesn’t yield a synthesis of her philosophy easily in her writings. Her feminism at a time that preceded the first wave of American Feminism drew my attention of course. I looked forward to reading her work and finding a wealth of quotable thoughts to spur my sermonic fantasies. Well, I haven’t read everything she wrote or everything written about her. I got stopped by pages upon pages of chatty or intense letters in a nineteenth century prose and grammatical style that I’m not used to. I felt very distanced from the author’s world and wondering what to do with the material.
In an opening paragraph of a letter to Mary Vose on the seventh of August, 1820, Margaret tells us all that,
“As I am in a fair way to be very idle very dull and very cross this afternoon if I do not write to somebody I will give the preference to employment and to you. I do not imagine you will thank me but it is not because I have any thing pretty or new or even remarkable to tell you but to rid myself of the burden of an insupportable idleness.”
I couldn’t help but wonder why such written thoughts needed to be preserved. But, then, the chattiness took on an edge, and the woman - bursting out of her times - began to emerge.
In this letter to Almira Barlow in November of 1830, I hear humor, sarcasm, and poetic observation in describing a woman’s day:
“Many things have happened since I echoed your farewell laugh. ... Elizabeth and I have been fully occupied. She has cried a great deal, fainted a good deal and played the harp most of all. I have neither fertilized the earth with my tears, edified its inhabitants by my delicacy of constitution, nor wakened its echoes to my harmony,--yet some things I have achieved in my own soft feminine style. I have made several garments fitted for the wear of American youth; I have written six letters, and received a correspondent number; I have read one book; I have given advice twenty times, -- I have taken it once; I have gained two friends and recovered two; I have felt admiration four times,--horror once, and disgust twice; I have been a journey, and showed my penetration in discovering the beauties of Nature through a thick and never-lifted shroud of rain; I have turned two new leaves in the book of human nature, I have got a new pink bag (beautiful!).”
In this letter, written to the Unitarian Minister, James Clarke, in 1833, she draws a symbolic picture of herself:
“But we must all be machines: you shall be a steam-engine; ....., -- and I will be a spinning jenny. No! upon second thoughts, I will not be a machine. I will be an instrument, not to be confided to vulgar hands, -- for instance, a chisel to polish marble, or a whetstone to sharpen steel!”
The instrument analogy makes us think of Margaret Fuller the literary critic, who polishes and sharpens words to analyze and interpret ideas and images. I began to realize, though, that Margaret was not only about the parceling out of finely crafted words, but one whose whole life was fashioned as an instrument to carve pioneering experiences.
Her life was an expression of choice for unconventional opportunities and risks, and it reflected, in its innovative engagement with destiny and strong sense of Self, the Transcendentalist vision of the amalgam of intellect, action, and passion. Through experiencing life fully, she would discover, as well as express, the deeper spiritual amalgam of the divine spirit with each human being..
James Clarke wrote of Margaret after her untimely death: “Margaret’s life had an aim, and she was, therefore, essentially a moral person, and not merely an overflowing genius, in whom impulse gives birth to impulse, deed to deed. This aim was distinctly apprehended and steadily pursued by her from first to last. It was a high, noble one, wholly religious..... It gave dignity to her whole career and made it heroic. This aim from first to last was SELF-CULTURE. .... [She had a] profound desire for a full development of her whole nature, by means of a full experience of life.”
This is what she sought to share with other women: the adventure of life that is possible through the development of intellect and self-esteem. Each fall and spring from 1839 to 1844, Margaret organized a series of weekly “Conversations” or seminars with women who wanted to participate in discussions of art, literature, mythology, and education. Her method was Socratic; each conversation was devoted to a philosophical question, and Margaret would engage the participants in discussion and dialogue before expounding her own views with a clarity of thought and luminosity of expression that dazzled her listeners. She was teaching, but she was doing it in her own way; she was discovering an outlet for her interest in developing women’s intellectual opportunities; and she was thoroughly enjoying her position as a center of intellectual activity. Nothing like these Conversations meant for women had been done before.
Emerson paid her a lovely tribute after her death with this reminiscence of the effect of her vibrant presence:
“She wore this circle of friends, when I first knew her, as a necklace of diamonds about her neck. They were so much to each other that Margaret seemed to represent them all, and to know her was to acquire a place with them. The confidences given her were their best...... She was an active, inspiring companion and correspondent, and all the art, the thought, the nobleness in New England seemed at that moment related to her and she to it.”
One of the lasting results of these Conversations was the publication in 1845 of her ground-breaking book, Women in the Nineteenth Century.
She was given the rigorous education by her father that only boys and young men were entitled to in those days. She was enormously precocious, excelling in letters and languages, being the first woman to ever have entrance to the Harvard library. She survived in a man’s world as woman-and-man. She once asked, “Will there never be a being to combine a man’s mind and a woman’s heart.” Edgar Allen Poe observed her and the decided to divide humanity into three classes: men, women, and Margaret Fuller.
From Chapter 1 of her book about women in the nineteenth century, she wrote this:
“By Man I mean both man and woman; these are the two halves of one thought. I lay no especial stress on the welfare of either. I believe that the development of the one cannot be effected without that of the other. My highest wish is that this truth should be distinctly and rationally apprehended, and the condition of life and freedom recognized as the same for the daughter and the sons of time; twin exponents of a divine thought.”
Her book laid the foundation for the historic Seneca Falls convention on women’s rights of 1848.
She resolved to live deeply while she could. Which led to a restless moving about. In fact, she died in passage from one home to another. Each of her well-known contemporaries had a specific place with which he was associated, literally and symbolically: Emerson had Concord, Thoreau, his pond. Giving wide latitude to the imagination, those places could be transformed in a concrete embodiment of ideas. But Fuller was placeless. The psychic and imaginative rewards granted to Thoreau and Emerson were never hers. Without a center, she had no controlling focus to help define herself and her place. But, Margaret feared stasis more than anything. Better to seek and fail than merely to be safe. The very intellectual premises of creativity that she most admired called for action, for a “coming into being.” She was caught in the worship of experience, of finding the new sensation and perspective, of making her life, wherever it be lived, her art.
Over and over she emphasized the idea that the total effect of a life was what really mattered. She learned to live in a larger world. Her seeking took the form of a risky commitment to the new, to the Self, to the possibilities of growth. Margaret Fuller’s life dramatizes the perils and accomplishments of an American life well-lived.
Her Transcendentalist milieu transformed her, as she, in turn, influenced it. While her writings, in some sense, are lost to us, the incidents, strength, and character of her living are not. Her life gives us much to consider--but perhaps most of all, with Thoreau-- the thought that we must choose to live fully and suck out the marrow of life.
May we, in the light of her memory, aspire to a life of commitment and courage.
May we aspire to clear thinking and luminous expression.
May we seek knowledge and authenticity -- speaking out, risking action.
May we have confidence in ourselves
enough to embrace the fullness of each day; each moment.
May we always seek knowledge, and beauty, and compassion.
This poem, written by Margaret Fuller in 1844, reveals the essence of her
life, and, too, the transciency and victory of all our lives:
Let me gather from the Earth, one full-grown fragrant flower,
Let it bloom within my bosom through its one blooming hour.
Let it die within my bosom and to its parting breadth
Mine shall answer, having lived, I shrink not now from death.
It is this niggard halfness that turns my heart to stone,
‘Tis the cup seen, not tasted, that makes the infant moan.
Let me for once press firm my lips upon the movement’s brow,
Let me for once distinctly feel I am happy now.
And bliss shall seal a blessing upon the moments brow.
--Amen.