"Watching the Water Freeze"

 Henry David Thoreau did not travel widely.

Several trips to Maine, 

one visit to Minnesota,

a sojourn in New York,

were all this Massachusetts native saw of the world.

Yet he saw far more 

than many who have covered more distance ever would.

"I have my horizon bounded 

by woods all to myself,"

he wrote while staying at Walden Pond.

 "It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. 

I have, as it were, 

my own sun and moon and stars, 

and a little world all to myself."

 

What he saw he recorded in "Walden,"

his journal of the two years and two months 

he spent living

in the Concord woods.

Long narrative descriptions of the natural environment

let the reader in on 

Thoreau’s view of his world.

His observations are vivid and visual,

his prose densely packed with details of bird and animal life,

fishing and gardening,

swimming and hiking.

One of the more memorable passages plumbs the depths of Walden Pond,

reputed by jumpy New Englanders 

to be bottomless.

The pond is remarkably deep for its size,

Thoreau noted.

Knowing this – 

and the legend surrounding its depth –

amused him. 

 

"What if all ponds were shallow?"

he asked.

"Would it not react 

on the minds of [people]?

I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure 

for a symbol.

While [people] believe in the infinite

some ponds will be thought to be bottomless."

 

Thoreau intuitively understood the relationship

between nature and spirituality,

relating the depths of the pond

to the capacity of the human imagination

to create symbols and stories.

Thoreau and his Transcendentalist friends 

were sophisticated spiritual seekers.

They were already exploring 

the practices of eastern traditions 

at a time when American religion 

was just beginning to break free from Calvinist Christianity.

And the Transcendentalists sought not only to broaden their knowledge 

of the world’s religions.

They also looked within themselves,

to their primary experience of life

for the origins of a personal faith.

Comfortable as free-thinking Unitarians

but several steps ahead of the rest of the congregation,

they searched for new adventures and insights everywhere.

 

For Thoreau, these new adventures and insights

came from his primary encounter with nature.

A self-taught naturalist, 

Thoreau’s interests were wide-ranging.

During the time he lived at Walden Pond,

he read an early version of Charles Darwin’s account 

of his trip to the Galapagos Islands.

He quickly grasped Darwin’s theory of evolution

and later in life, 

set out his own experiments to prove it.

He also learned observation techniques from Joe Polis,

a Penobscot Indian,

who guided him on his wilderness expeditions.

 

And yet, Thoreau was not simply a naturalist,

or a contemplative,

for Thoreau  was primarily a reader and writer.

He read Aristotle and Sophocles 

on rainy days in the cabin.

He wrote in his journal the book 

that was to become "Walden,"

but not until he had rewritten it several times

in the years after he had returned to town.

 

In his recent book "The Future of Life,"

scientist E.O. Wilson addresses Thoreau personally,

in a letter that serves as the book’s introduction.

"You were far from the hard-eyed frontiersman 

bearing pemmican and a long rifle,"

Wilson writes.

"Frontiersmen did not saunter,

botanize,

and read Greek.

So how did it happen that an amateur naturalist

perched in a toy house on the edge of a ravaged woodland

became the founding saint of the conservation movement?"

 

"Here is what I believe happened,"

Wilson speculates.

"Your spirit craved an epiphany.

You sought enlightenment and fulfillment the Old Testament way,

by reduction of material existence to the fundamentals.

The cabin was your cave on the mountainside.

You used poverty to purchase a margin of free existence.

It was the only method you could devise 

to seek the meaning in a life

otherwise smothered by quotidian necessity and haste."

 

The image of Thoreau as an Old Testament prophet

fits him better

than that of a nature lover lost in serenity.

There is not much in Thoreau’s work that is serene.

He rails famously against lives of "quiet desperation"

and extols "marching to a different drummer."

 

A critic wrote recently in "The New York Times Book Review"

that Thoreau may have had 

"contemplative moments in nature."

"But he was also cantankerous and extremely competive."

The reviewer added,

"I haven’t made an exact page count,

but I’d say Thoreau spends more than half of Walden

ranting about how stupid 

other people’s ways of life are,

particularly as compared to his."

 

Some of that competitive character shows itself

in the story I read to the children this morning.

Thoreau challenges a friend to a race to Fitchburg.

The friend earns his railway fare by working.

Henry Thoreau walks.

We all know who really got there first.

 

Thoreau was – as we all are – a mix of many qualities;

contemplative and competitive;

anti-materialistic yet feverishly counting every penny;

loving towards creation but curmudgeonly towards society.

His spiritual life is something for us to study,

as much for these reasons

as for the enduring impact 

his writing has had on our own faith tradition. 

And his spiritual life has global implications today.

He was an environmental prophet

who posed questions 

we would do well to ask ourselves

if we hope to have some part in saving our planet.

Environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben wrote

that Thoreau "posed two intensely practical questions

that must come to dominate this age

if we’re to make … changes:

How much is enough?

and How do I know what I want?"

The answers were easier, perhaps, in Thoreau’s time.

"He could not guess," McKibben wrote,

"about the greenhouse effect.

Instead, he was the American avatar in a long line

that stretches back at least to Buddha,

the line that runs straight through Jesus and St. Francis

and a hundred other cranks and gurus.

Simplicity, calmness, quiet –

these were the preconditions for a moral life,

a true life,

a philosophic life. …

Happily," McKibben added,

"he went about it in very American ways –

he was Buddha with a receipt from the hardware store."

 

Though few of us would spend two years and two months living in the woods

and another five years or so rewriting versions of it,

we still find something in Thoreau’s experience

that resonates with our own.

More than anything, 

it is those sustained contemplative moments

that leave the reader under his spell.

Thoreau devotes several stunning passages

to his observation of the freezing and thawing of the pond.

"Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation," he writes.

He studies the formation of bubbles for hours 

by lying down on the ice 

on the shallow end of the pond.

There he notes with painstaking detail 

each pattern and variation in color.

Just reading these descriptions slows down the reader’s heart rate!

 

It is impossible to read Thoreau 

and not understand that contemplation

and observation are so closely connected

as to be almost the same thing.

And this is good practical spirituality –

Buddha with a hardware store receipt –

for those of us who want a contemplative life

and don’t know how to have one.

Begin by observing your world.

 

As Thoreau amply demonstrated,

your world can be anywhere.

The woods beside Walden Pond are scruffy, second-growth forest,

not deep wilderness or soaring mountains.

And yet, whether he watched the water freeze

or listened to the songs of the birds and the loons,

Thoreau was able to immerse himself in nature.

His hermitage was just a few miles from town

and he was easily interrupted.

But with extraordinary self-discipline 

and focus,

Thoreau turned his world 

into an object of contemplation.

 

Thoreau succeeded in answering for himself –

at least for those two years and two months –

the question "How do I know what I want?"

Whether hoeing beans or sitting in the sun in his doorway,

Thoreau was conscious each and every minute of the day

that he was doing what he knew he wanted to do.

That confidence certainly enabled him

to undertake the disciplined and focused studies of nature

that he reproduced so successfully in writing.

 

And as for the question, "How much is enough?"

surely he would have answered – this is enough,

right here.

"I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, 

and a little world all to myself,"

he wrote.

Thoreau was seeking the wisdom

that comes after simplifying life to its fundamentals.

 

In his letter to Thoreau, E.O. Wilson wrote,

"When you stripped your outside obligations to the survivable minimum,

you placed your trained and very active mind

in an unendurable vacuum. …

and in order to fill the vacuum,

you discovered the human proclivity

to embrace the natural world."

 

Few of us can afford to strip our lives down to the fundamentals.

But we can receive the wisdom that Thoreau attained

during his sojourn in the woods.

The earth is really all we need.

Perhaps the human spiritual quest must begin and end in nature

if we are to be true to our human nature

and our place in the world.

 

Then again, perhaps anywhere on earth will do.

That may be Thoreau’s last message to us,

that wherever we may be

there is life that is worthy of our attention.

And whatever that life,

it can show us what is fundamental and irreducible 

if we take the time to see.

References used to prepare this sermon include Walden, by Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Beacon Press, reprinted from a first edition published in 1854); and the "Introduction" to it, by Bill McKibben; The Future of Life, by Edward O. Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); "Into the Woods," by Maud Lavin in The New York Times Review of Books, May 19, 2002; and Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, by D.B. Johnson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).