Sunday Services
Faith in a Seed
April 22, 2012 - 9:00am
Rev. Erika Hewitt
“Faith in a Seed” © Rev. Erika Hewitt
UU Community Church of Santa Monica 22 April 2012
“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
The Rev. Victoria Safford serves one of our congregations in St. Paul, MN. One day a child in the Religious Exploration program was at home and his parents overheard him say about church, “I don’t know the name of it, but where we go we’re really interested in trees. All of us believe in trees.”
A few days later, his mother called [the church]... to report this unusual confession of faith, and to see whether [they] thought it was time to supplement her boy’s understanding with a more comprehensive Unitarian Universalist theology.
The thing is, Rev. Victoria says, “I don’t know if there is a more comprehensive Unitarian Universalist theology. All of us believe in trees.”1
You know as well as I that “all UU’s believe...” is a precarious way to begin a sentence.
Rather than hold beliefs in common, UU’s prefer to align ourselves in the how of community: respect, acceptance, encouragement to seek the only piece of truth that you can know through your own living. I know I believe in trees, but it might be more accurate to say that Unitarian Universalists share both a sense of responsibility for the Earth and beings; and wonder and appreciation for its beauty. We can trace that shared
value back to Henry David Thoreau.
Henry was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts – where he lived for most of his life (and where you’ll be corrected if you pronounce his name Tho-REAU). In his short lifetime, Thoreau set to paper some of the most important and best-loved observations of nature. He wasn’t a “joiner,” you could say. He “resigned membership in the Unitarian church of his birth as soon as he became an adult,”2 and ended up identifying with Transcendentalism instead. Perhaps it’s cheating to drag him back under our Unitarian tent, but since Henry David Thoreau’s words and actions continue to inspire us today, he occupies a sentimental spot both in our hearts, and in the host of U.U. “saints.”
Last week I regaled you with – or inflicted upon you, depending on how much you enjoy history – a glimpse into Ralph Waldo Emerson. A full fifteen years younger than Waldo, Henry was “neither son nor brother but something of each.”3 The two men’s lives wove together finely. From Thoreau’s perch in Concord and on the banks of Walden Pond, he lived out his manifesto: “to live deep... to live deliberately.”
Now: on one hand, I feel obligated to remind you that throughout his residence on Walden Pond, Henry sent his laundry home to mama. I mean, if you want to live deliberately, there is nothing like pounding on your laundry with a rock in the woods. (My colleague Elizabeth says: “I bet his mama thought so, too!”)4
On the other hand: when we read Thoreau’s rhapsodies about “living deep” and his years of living intimately among birds, woodchucks, and chestnut stands, we forget that he and his Transcendentalist peers had a radically different view of the natural world than their fellow citizens.
Last week, I described how in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson – a former Unitarian minister – became the de facto figurehead of Transcendentalism. Instead of situating his Harvard Divinity School in a Biblical context, Emerson signaled that Nature was the new Scripture:
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and goldin the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath ofthe pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom tothe heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness thestars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child,and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river,and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of naturewas never displayed more happily.
From this moment forward, Transcendentalism was marked by its devotion to, and its reverence for, the natural world.
What made this a “radical” departure from their culture? In the 1800s, most people had a colonial view of Nature: wilderness was threatening and needed to be tamed. As the country expanded, Americans spoke of the frontier, “a blank slate available to anyone with the guts, willpower, and means to [make it ones property].”5
It would be a hurtful omission if I didn’t add this: during Thoreau and Emerson’s lifetime, white Americans and Europeans continued to pursue and occupy nature’s “blank slate” through encroachment on Native land and its peoples. In 1838 – the year that Emerson spoke at Harvard and Thoreau turned 21 – the Cherokee Nation was forced to undertake the horrific “Trail of Tears,” relocating them from Georgia to Oklahoma to make room
for more white settlers. Seven years later, the term “manifest destiny” was coined to describe the belief that the United States was destined to expand from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean.
For Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, the natural world was neither threatening nor a “tabula rasa commodity.”6 Nature was a gift, a revelation, a web of interconnection. They insisted – far ahead of their time – that “we are linked to all things living and dead.”7
Emerson’s enchantment with nature and its beauty8 verged on the trippy. In 1833, on European tour, Waldo toured he King’s Garden in Paris9 and was intoxicated to observe the interconnections between shells, minerals, fish, snakes, and mammals. “The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever,” he noted dreamily, and promptly declared himself a naturalist.
Thoreau, on the other hand, approached nature through a scientific lens. Barbara Kingsolver (who was herself trained as a biologist), notes proudly that Henry understood “that the scientist and the science are inseparable.”10 He “knew Concord’s forests like the back of his hand,”11 recording in his journals meticulous observations of their wonders, watching Nature unfold on her own terms. “I went forth on the afternoon of October
17th,” he cheerfully reports in one journal, “expressly to ascertain how chestnuts are propagated.” (Henry also went to find solitude. Where Emerson claimed12 that nature “must always combine with man,” Thoreau found nature more interesting than people.13)
It’s hard to overemphasize just how prescient and uncanny Henry was, and how deeply he trusted that – with patience and reasoning – Nature’s riddles could be solved. This was a time when, in the scientific community, it was “in dispute that new plants... grow always and only from seeds” rather than springing up spontaneously. (Says Kingsolver: “It’s hard to imagine grown men of science being uncertain of a thing that our firstgraders”
learn from a bean a Dixie cup.”)14 But uncertain they were. Meanwhile, Henry was firm on this point, thanks to his hours and hours spent in the woods.
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed,” he noted in his journal. “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
In his early 40s, Thoreau got his hands on a copy of a new book called On the Origin of Species. Clearly “influenced by Darwin’s theor[ies],”15 his last writings “anticipate issues in... biology... that did not become fully articulated... until the early 1970s.”16 Imagine what he might have written had he not died at the young age of forty-four.
This, like many aspects of Transcendentalism, is our religious ancestry. It’s the spiritual legacy that each of us has chosen, whether we were drawn to Unitarian Universalism because of an already deep awe for the world, or whether we’ve invited our religious faith to shape that awe within us. We Unitarian Universalists behold the world around us with a combination of reverence and reason.
I’ll say it plainly: UU’s have a different relationship with nature than most people of other faiths. It’s unusual, I can attest, to find other religions that embody this love for nature, this curiosity that embraces and protects.
To prove it, I share with you “A Tale of Two Trees.”
The first tree in my Tale is abstract: in my last semester of seminary coursework, I registered for a theology class. It met a 8:30 a.m. – not a good time for me – but I thought there’d be some good interfaith dialogue, because the class was being taught at a non-UU seminary.
At one of the first class meetings, the professor spoke about images of God: those Biblical metaphors – some poetic, others disturbing – for the Holy. Suddenly my ears perked up.
“God can be a shepherd,” he said, “or take the human form of Jesus. We can speak of God as a potter, or as a King. But we could never say that God is a tree,” he chuckled. “The Bible doesn’t offer that metaphor, so it’s just not possible to compare God to a tree.”
I dropped the class. Like I said, 8:30 a.m. isn’t a good time for me. My intellectual mind could understand and respect his desire to emphasize Biblical authority. My soul, however, couldn’t bridge the gap. There are days, for me, when trees are the only place I do find God, or wonder, or transcendence. Of course God can be a tree.
The second tree in my Tale is more concrete; it’s a eucalyptus tree near my house in Santa Barbara. The
tree towers over a Protestant church – it’s one of the tallest trees in the area – and I’ve been visiting it
weekly for several years. Sometimes I walk past the tree a few times a week, and each time I do I stop to
pat its trunk with both of my palms, craning my neck way, way up to look at its canopy. If there’s no one
watching, I say hello. Out loud. It’s only polite – the tree is a friend.
Last spring, when I was at an interfaith clergy luncheon, I was seated next to the minister of the
church where “my” tree lives. As we ate, I told her, “I admire how well you do outreach with your church
buses, and your campus is beautiful. But what I really love,” I dropped my voice conspiratorially, “is that
tree outside of your sanctuary.”
She wrinkled her brow. “What tree?”
“You know,” I prodded, “that enormous eucalyptus tree right outside of your sanctuary?”
She was shaking her head, confused.
“It’s really, really tall? And has a beautiful, smooth trunk...” I trailed off. Clearly, my colleague had no idea what I was talking about, and the more I waxed poetic about the tree, the more the conversation would falter. I wasn’t concerned about seeming strange, though. People shook their heads at Henry, too; they clucked their tongues about Emerson finding his “Muses” in the woods. I’m in good company.
There’s a final parallel between us and our Transcendentalist forebears that we need to mention. Before he contemplated chestnut propogation, before he caught a bad cold counting tree rings and tuberculosis took his life, Thoreau went to the woods to live. He built his cabin on Walden Pond so that he could “learn what life has to teach, and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he had] not lived.”
But Henry didn’t stay there, in his cabin, forever. A little over two years after he’d moved to Walden, Thoreau says, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
I suspect that there’s another reason Thoreau left the woods. In the words of Robert Fulghum, “He didn’t go very far 17 [to Walden] and wasn’t gone very long...Thoreau walked the two miles into Concord almost every day, and he welcomed visitors at the pond. Henry was lonely. That’s why he finally moved back to town.”
Remember that, the next time you hear someone claim that they don’t go to church because Sunday is their day to hike, or the next time someone asks you why you go to church: Henry David Thoreau, the architect of solitude, was lonely.
This is the poignant postscript to Henry’s rambles in the woods and the wonder that Emerson found in seashells: as lovely as Nature is, as much peace as we find there, it is to each other that we return; it’s in the company of our human companions that we find our ultimate home.
May your heart hold great wonder for Nature, may you find there beauty and comfort, and may your rambles always bring you back to us, your religious community.
Benediction
These are the words of Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass:
“When I heard the learn’d astronomer;When the proofs, the figures,were ranged in columns before me;When I was shown the charts and the diagrams,to add, divide, and measure them;When I, sitting, heard the astronomer,where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
Go out in peace, remembering to look up and remember the stars.
Endnotes
1. “Trees for Starters,” in Walking Toward Morning, pp. 27-8.
2. Dan Harper. See www.danielharper.org/blog/?tag=henry-thoreau
3. Richardson, p. 281.
4. Rev. Elizabeth Harding, personal communication.
5. Brulatour. See www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/nature.html
6. Brulatour.
7. Robert D. Richardson, Jr.’s introduction to Faith in a Seed, p. 17.
8. See Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson, Jr., p. 122.
9. Richardson, pp. 139+
10. In “The Forest in the Seeds,” in High Tide in Tucson, p. 239.
11. In Faith in a Seed, page xvi.
12. On September 1, 1850.
13. In In the Eye of the Hurricane by Philip Hallie, p. 122. This thought was offered first
by Bacon, with whom Emerson agreed.
14. Kingsolver, p. 237-8.
15. Gary Paul Nabham’s Foreword to Faith in a Seed, p. xiv.
16. P. xiv.
17.“Solitude” by Robert Fulghum, in What on Earth Have I Done?, p. 6.