The Oversoul

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 11, 2013

So much of UU conversation has been about what we don’t believe. Let’s talk about one thing handed down to us by Emerson and the Transcendentalists – that there is one soul for all things.

I remember a class in Seminary where I sat stunned as the professor laid out my whole hard-won system of beliefs on the blackboard, listing the tenets of Mystical Pietism. I thought I had put that thing together over years of high school and college, late-night conversations, wrestling with what I’d been taught as a child, setting some of it aside, honing other pieces of it until they fit what I could live with, what made sense to me. Later, after most of that had fallen apart and I had walked out of its wreckage into what felt like a freer, more truthful philosophy, I was shocked again to read the tenets of Transcendentalism and find that there, laid out, was a list of my whole hard-won system of beliefs. Again.

I’ll read you the list in a few minutes, and you can see whether you are Unitarian Universalist in the Emersonian tradition. First let me tell you a little bit about him. His father was a Unitarian minister who died when Emerson was 8. Several of his brothers and sisters died in childhood, and two more brothers died of tuberculosis as young men. He fell in love with a very young woman, Ellen Tucker, whom he met in Concord MA on Christmas Day in 1827. They married two years later. He was 27 and she was 18. His mother moved to Boston with them so she could take care of Ellen, who was already sick with TB. Emerson was working as a minister, and his faith took one more blow when Ellen died, at 20. He wrote in his journal a year later that he had gone to visit Ellen at her grave and opened the coffin. She was due to inherit a large sum of money when she turned 21, but never made it that far. Waldo (as he preferred to be called) sued the family and was awarded her portion of the inheritance, which gave him an income equivalent to the one he was paid yearly as a minister.

He traveled, wrote, read, and supported his friends who gathered around Concord in what became almost a “genius cluster,” with the Alcotts, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller visiting, walking with him, talking intensely about the Eastern philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism, just coming into the American consciousness, about the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Their association enriched all of them. He married another woman named Lydia, whom he renamed Lydian, and she took care of everyone.

Too much had happened for Waldo to be comfortable believing in the traditional picture of a God who was a personality, in charge of everything. He and the skeptics around him struggled with the ageold conundrum: if God is God, he is not good. If he is good, he is not God.

If the belief that God was a personality, and that this personality was all-powerful was the root of the problem set before him by the skeptics, then perhaps it would be good to let go of that view of God. What do you go on? Not just scripture. There were lots of scriptures from lots of religions – how do you claim one is the truth? The Christian scriptures were being used to justify slavery and to keep women from taking their place beside men as their equals.

Do you go on other people’s instructions to you? No. You had to attend to your own experiences. Personal experience was something he felt you had to trust – your experiences and those of others.

Why are there some moments in life glow with meaning and with power? Some conversations have a depth and quality others do not, some people who seemed to be centered in something that others know nothing about. How do most people know what’s right and wrong, and why do we feel bad when we do something wrong? What can explain the feeling about the Divine that humans have in every time and culture? What feels true? What felt true to Waldo about God was that God was immanent, meaning nearby in life. “As close to me as my jugular vein,” as the Koran says. It made sense to him that God was in the world, in Nature, and that you could learn about the Divine by learning about Nature. He discounted the miracles in the scriptures, saying they had nothing to do with the blowing clover or the falling rain, that they were “Monster,” unnatural, and unworthy of the Divinity.

Emerson said a human being is a stream whose source is hidden, whose being is pouring in from somewhere else. As the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere, every particular person is contained in the Over-soul, the Unity within which we are all made one with all other. There is a common heart. All sincere conversation is its worship, all right action is submission to it. It is that force that makes us feel enlarged by doing good and diminished by doing wrong.

Within each person is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us. When it breathes through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affection, it is love

Emerson was not alone in describing a new way to see God. Samuel Reed, another minister of that time in Boston, a huge influence on Emerson, called for a religion that sees God in everything.

Emerson wrote in the mid-1800’s that each person makes her own religion, his own God. What is God? “The most elevated conception of character that can be formed in the mind. It is the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection.” He called this the “oversoul.”

Emerson opened up the thinking of his time to the possibility that there is only one Soul, the soul of all things. That is God. Soul is in all things, in us, and the One soul makes itself manifest through our lives, our actions, our voices when they are creative, when they are useful, when they advance the cause of life and of love, truth and beauty. Could this be a way to think about a Higher Power for those of us who feel a need to think that way? Some among us are satisfied with the God or power or force they don’t believe in, or the one they do believe in. Others want to talk about it, not to make creeds or pronouncements, but to honor experiences we have had where we were loved or guided or lifted by something outside of ourselves. What do we call it? How do we talk about it without having to submit to doctrines and oppressive authority? The Oversoul, the One, the Source, maybe those are some ways for us to name this unnamable thing that we feel. See if this list captures some of your beliefs.

Basic Tenets of American Transcendentalism:

This list must not be considered to be a creed common to all transcendentalists. It is merely a grouping of certain important concepts shared by many of them.

The human soul is part of the Oversoul or universal spirit

Therefore, every individual is to be respected because everyone has a portion of that Oversoul or life force. (God).

This Oversoul or Life Force or God can be found everywhere, a deep power in which we exist.

The divine can be found in both nature and human nature

Jesus also had part of the Oversoul – so he was divine as everyone is divine –

The miracles of the Bible are not to be regarded as important as the whole world is a miracle and the smallest creature is one.

More important than a concern about the afterlife, should be a concern for this life – Emerson: “the one thing in the world of value is the active soul.”

Death is never to be feared, for at death the soul merely passes to the Oversoul.

Emphasis should be placed on the here and now. “Give me one world at a time.” – Thoreau

Evil is merely an absence of good and not a force in its own right. Light is more powerful than darkness because one ray of light penetrates the dark.

One must have faith in intuition and experience, for no church or creed can communicate truth.

The unity of life and universe must be realized. There is a relationship, an interconnectedness between all things.

Are you a Transcendentalist? Do you desire to respect the Divine element in yourself, others and the rest of Nature? Might you believe that transformation comes through expanding our awareness of the Divine in all aspects of your life? Does it make sense to you that to be truly human, we need to live in community with others? I think I’m a Transcendentalist, which places me squarely in the middle of Unitarian Universalist tradition. If you are a Christian, you are squarely in the middle of UU tradition as well. If you are more of a Humanist, you are also squarely in the middle of UU tradition. The stream of thought, yearning, conversation and action in which we stand is a very large one. It feels good to have so much gone before and imagine all of those who will come after us in this faith.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776