Transcendentalism For Today

May 2, 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Don Smith

I remember well the first time I announced to a group of people that I considered myself to be a Transcendentalist. The words had barely crossed my lips when that small – and usually reticent – part of my brain that demands a higher degree of specificity asked “Whatever do you mean by that?”

Well, I wasn’t sure. Maybe I had just been reading too much Emerson, but I doubt it. I don’t believe the things I believe because Emerson also believed them. In fact, there’s a pretty wide gap between my beliefs and Emerson’s on a great many things. Emerson would, no-doubt, say to me “You are no Transcendentalist.” But I also think that if Emerson were alive today a good many of his beliefs would be different.

I read Emerson because I agree with most of what he says about the way we should live – the proper approach to life and nature – and I enjoy the way he expresses the ideas that we share. A lot of the Transcendentalists’ thinking came from the philosopher Immanuel Kant. One of the principle ideas that Kant put forth was that certain knowledge is intuitive – it’s built into the structure of our minds–and is not the result of experience. Knowledge that is of an intuitive nature he called transcendental, thus the term Transcendentalist.

Kant said that we cannot know the real world because we see and understand it through our own perceptions and concepts. Our view of the world is distorted by the way our minds work. From there he, or at least his followers, went on to say that we form our world, and not the other way around.

Ayn Rand once wrote that “Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.” This may be the case, but I find room in my rational worldview for a little mystery, and I celebrate that mystery as something that adds a wonderful dimension to my life.

If I’m designing a building that has an overhanging beam, I know that I must design for the inflection point – the point at which bending forces in the beam change direction and shear forces are greatest – and I know that I can employ the quadratic equation to find that point. But I never forget that the quadratic equation is no actual thing; it is merely a mental construct. To use Kantian language, there is no ‘thing in itself’ that exists outside our minds.

While I do not believe that the physical world is the product of my thought, I do believe that there is more to matter than it’s molecular and chemical composition. I believe that there are categories of knowledge that are outside the bounds of science, and that things have meanings beyond their physical reality, even if those meanings are created by us and are, therefore, somewhat arbitrary.

I’m comfortable knowing that there are bounds to human knowledge. Many of things that we would want to know are not knowable. I accept this and even embrace it. I choose to view life and the world we inhabit with a sense of mystery and wonder. I celebrate the transcendent things. That’s what I mean when I say that I am a Transcendentalist.

Beyond this way of viewing life – of celebrating the wondrous and the beautiful–I embrace the idea of self-culture as expounded by the New England Transcendentalists. Today we might say self-correction, rather than self-culture. This is a simple idea, really. I have ready work with the correction of my own faults and weaknesses, so I need not worry about yours. Surely there is nothing easier to do than to find fault with others, but easy tasks don’t provide much sense of accomplishment, no matter how well we carry them out.

Another point upon which I agree with the New England Transcendentalists is that we owe it to ourselves to go through life with our eyes wide open, alert to the world and to the ideas that are shaping it. A few weeks ago Dr. Loehr spoke from this pulpit of the concept of G’d as a man fully awake. Emerson lived a life of such mental intensity that Robert Richardson titled his excellent biography of him Emerson: The Mind on Fire. But Thoreau, who knew Emerson as well as any, and better than most, was still able to write in Walden that he had never known a man who was fully awake. “How”, he asked, “could I look him in the face?”

One could easily assume that these people we know as the New England Transcendentalists set the bar too high; that none could possibly reach it. But they were addressing the ideal, the fullest potential of humanity. Why should we not strive toward that goal? If we’re striving toward so high a goal – the goal of being fully awake to life – then it’s of less consequence if we fall short of our goal.

I enjoy living a simple life – a grounded life – even while dreaming of the infinite possibilities that we possess. If this sounds attractive to you, then there might be a little of the Transcendentalist in you too.

PRAYER:

Hannah Wells

As Spring hesitates before it turns into Summer,

let us consider our own hesitations.

Let us take time to confront our fears, and then discount them.

May we let our fears be washed away by a heavy Spring rain,

so we can wake up to a morning like this one, with our hearts calm,

our purpose clear, and the brilliant fire of our souls ready to work.

May we be washed of fears, anxieties, and self-concerns

because we wake up to a morning such as this and are certain that the world needs us.

For while we can notice the beauty that surrounds us,

the world is not only a beautiful place.

As wildflowers wilt in the sun, and bushes drop heavy blossoms,

so too are things falling apart in the fragile world we live in.

Rather than work to meet our needs, may we see that our own needs are met when we work for the needs of others.

May we enlarge ourselves to transcend the self.

May we become so big that our service in the world becomes

our center; our service becomes who we are.

On a morning such as this, after a much needed storm has replenished life, may we also be replenished so we can engage the beauty of the world, its poetry, its natural art.

May we be enchanted.

And may we see that the most poignant beauty of all lies in where the world is broken and hands are busy at its repair, many, many hands, quietly repairing what is broken.

May we find our hands among them, touching this beauty.

May our desire to improve the world and our desire to enjoy the world, become one.

May compassion become our rapture.

Amen.

SERMON:

Let’s begin this morning with a trip down memory lane. Do you remember that certain book you read, perhaps when you were 13, a senior in high school, in college, or early adulthood, that book that completely changed how you understood life and your place in the world? That book that you loved so much because you felt like it enlightened you, made you privy to important knowledge. What book from years ago do you still think about, refer back to, look at life through the lens of?

When I was 13, that book was J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye. It was so funny to me! Holden Caulfield, a young man, criticizes everything about society with sharp wit, particularly all the expectations of the upper middle class – doing well in college, social climbing, marriage. To him, everything and everyone was so phony. Yeah, I thought when I was 13, I agree. I didn’t want to have to work hard to be “popular” in school, I didn’t want to work hard to earn A’s in my classes either. Holden Caulfield was an awkward middle schooler’s HERO.

Holden Caulfield affirmed my teenage tendencies toward what sociologist Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism.” That was one of the other chunks of reading that left an indelible impression on me, which I read Spring semester of my Freshman year in college. I was a Sociology major, ready to learn how I could save the world, or at least look darn good trying to. Robert Bellah and his team of sociologists published Habits of the Heart in the mid 80’s, a reader-friendly book about how our American values of individualism are impeding on our sense of commitment to public life, to being responsible, civic-minded citizens, and how the kind of church we go to plays a role in this.

Bellah tore the Unitarians apart in this book, charging that there was nothing in this denomination that obligated one to serve the greater good with total commitment; there was nothing rooted in strong religious principles that instructed one to serve his or her community as equivalent to serving the ideals of one’s faith. I remember reading this, and thinking, “my God, he’s right! We Unitarians don’t hold each other to anything!” Bellah goes on to associate the Unitarians with the historical/cultural tradition of “expressive individualism,” and mentions figures like Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, who he said “put aside the search for wealth in favor of a deeper cultivation of the self.” But it was Walt Whitman, Bellah said, who most epitomized the American cultural tradition of “expressive individualism.”

Bellah wrote, “For [Walt] Whitman, success had little to do with material acquisition. A life rich in experience, open to all kinds of people, luxuriating in the sensual as well as the intellectual, above all a life of strong feeling, was what he perceived as a successful life.”

I have this quote hi-lited in the copy I still kept from college. In the margin, is an arrow pointing to it with the word, “Yeah!” I was all for Whitman when I first read this. I remember all the students in this class greatly resisted the ideas in this book, such as wanting a life rich in experience being questionable, as something to be reconsidered or discouraged altogether. We took it out on the professor, who we called a “stodgy nerd with bad breath.” I know that in those years, I wanted to do everything that reeked of Whitman’s definition of “rich experience.” I wanted to travel the world, learn about exotic cultures, back pack in the far reaches of the wild, fall madly in love, run in a field of wildflowers, swim naked in Lake Michigan – whatever was popularly qualified as romantic experience I went after, and did.

Thankfully, my sociology teacher was a gifted educator, and through his lecturing I finally got what the main meat of this book was trying to say: to be an “expressive individualist” is selfish! It’s self-serving, self-absorbed, but most importantly, it limits the actualization of the self since the self can only be actualized within community, within a broader mode of being and acting in larger society. What does this mean? It means that the smaller our scope of attention is in the world, the smaller our sense of connection to humanity becomes, and essentially the smaller we are. If I only focus on myself and what feels good, the less I actually participate in the world, in contributing to the common good, in serving what is larger than myself.

While all those things aren’t bad in and of themselves – the traveling, the hiking, smelling the flowers – I realized that this was only a small part of what life is supposed to be about, of what is truly challenging and enriching, of what is character-building. Those things are good for MY soul – but they have no connection to the WHOLE soul of humanity.

I didn’t figure this all out right away, but eventually in young adulthood I’ve come to realize that it’s only through serving the common good that my life becomes “rich in experience,” or “a life of strong feeling.” It’s only when I forget myself that I can finally become myself. We can only become our best selves in a community of people who know us and trust us and like us. We become known when we work with others toward the spirit of what is good for a shared community – I know now that this is the only way I can find authentic peace and wellness in my life.

If anything, we are the most miserable when we can’t see beyond our own wants and must-haves. People divorce as soon as they perceive that their “needs” aren’t being met. If you think about it, self-absorption is an evil force because it tends to break relationship. It pushes us into isolation. The only way to counter this isolation and separateness is to engage in my interpretation of Emerson’s “Oversoul,” which you read in the Responsive Reading this morning:

“Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”

Unfortunately Emerson stops short of being explicit of HOW one can engage this luminous reverence of life. He seems to imply that it is an individual experience. While undoubtedly we’ve all experienced individual moments of grace that seemed rooted in the divine, I would argue with Emerson that such experiences only scratch the surface of engaging what is at the center of the sacred.

Perhaps what is at the center isn’t blissful at all; no rapture, no ecstasy, no enchantment. Perhaps experiencing the divine is only found through a culmination of hard, quiet effort to make the world a better place, to keep life safe and sacred.

This is why the sacred is so elusive! It cannot exist in immediate gratification, it’s impossible. The Transcendentalists of the 19th century seemed to make the mistake that it is easily accessible, if only we paid better attention to our senses, our thoughts, and feelings. But nowadays, that’s the way things are, that’s the entrenched status quo – we are paying too much attention to ourselves. For us living in the post-modern world, the real challenge is to get our minds off ourselves, off our personal stresses and concerns. All this self-improvement seems to have led to a neglected society.

So I propose that Transcendentalism for today is to transcend our selves. How can we act in and experience the world beyond the self? Imagine that who you are can be represented in con centric circles. The small circle in the middle is you. The first circle around you is your family, the next circle your friends, the next circle your church community, the next your local community, the next circle your state, then your country, then finally the biggest circle is the world. It’s like rings in a tree trunk. When our lives act in those bigger circles, we become bigger, stronger, more wise. If we only act in the first tiny circle of our selves, we stay small; we don’t grow.

The American Transcendentalists of the 19th century got one very important thing right. They had faith in the highest ideals of our human capacities; they truly believed that we could successfully serve those ideals. They believed that life could be rich in experience, in beauty. But the problem is that what they defined as beautiful and sublime tended to not go past their noses. It was too self-contained. They trusted in their intuition, but whether their hunches were good or bad, right or wrong, made no difference in the world around them.

The health of our individual mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual states are all very important – I’ve preached many times on how it is essential to heal our wounds in those areas with courage and perseverance. But our healing isn’t complete or as relevant until we are able to give back to the world, or learn how to give for the first time. We work to heal for the same reason we take time to grieve – so we can participate in the world again. That’s when life is beautiful, when we can overcome or transcend our personal struggles to a place where we can give of ourselves fully once more.

The people who are so good at giving have healthy relationships with their egos – that is, they don’t think about their ego that much. They know that caring for their own hearts and minds and souls is an indirect process that happens primarily when they focus on how they can serve others.

Personal healing is important, but we probably don’t need to worry about ourselves as much as we do. I know I’m still trying to learn this. There is a concept in Buddhism called “not-doing.” It means that we let things take care of themselves, we don’t try to over do it, or try too hard. It’s having faith that while we continue to focus on living the best lives we can and be the best people we can be, that our personal issues and problems have a way of solving themselves. Finally we get to a point where we realize we don’t need to be solved – we don’t need to be “fixed.” Things tend to work out when we simply continue to participate well in the world. Our flaws and our so called “personal growth issues” don’t seem to matter as much when we become good at helping others.

When the Trancendentalists talk about trusting their intuition in terms of possessing knowledge that precedes experience, I want to say, ‘yes, that unconditioned knowledge is there, but I can only trust it if it doesn’t have to do with myself. I can trust it and follow it if it points to the highest ideals that serve humanity as a whole.’ I like to think of this trustworthy knowledge that we’re all born with as the knowledge of the Kingdom of God. I believe we all possess it, deep within our psyches, and life is about doing all we can to uncover it, to actualize it. We can discover that the Kingdom has very little to do with the self – the self becomes only a vehicle, a conduit for doing good in the world.

The Kingdom of God not only transcends the self, it actually saves us from the prison of self-absorption,the constant clamor of the ego.

One of my friends is studying the Kabbalah, the teachings of Jewish mysticism. He told me that his teacher explained to him that the constant yammer in our minds that keeps all our attention on ourselves is actually the devil speaking. The voice of our ego is the voice of the devil. I know that sounds heavy-handed, so let’s just use it as a tool of metaphor. I think it’s comforting – because what it means is that that voice of anxiety in my self isn’t my true voice; it isn’t the voice I need to listen to or act on. According to my friend, the Kabbalah teaches that it’s the voices within ourselves that are faint, that are hard to hear that we should be trying to listen to. The quiet voice that says something like, “maybe I need to go over here and see how I can help someone.” That is our true nature, not this ego-driven one.

If we’re going to pay any attention to our intuitions at all, they need to be the intuitions that come from this center, from this sacred center. Not the center of the self, but within those larger circles. Transcendentalism for today ought to focus on attending to what our center is to be; what is the circle of the largest diameter within which we can define ourselves? To what degree shall we transcend ourselves?

When we realize the extent of our power as individuals to act in the world, we come to understand what the Kabbalah teaches, and what some wise philosopher also concluded: that every act we do is either an act of creation or an act of destruction. For the sacred is not only elusive, the sacred is fragile – the Kingdom of God is difficult to access, we know that true moments of grace between human beings are rare. If we are the spiders and the sacred is the web, which connections with the world are we going to extend to? Which parts of the web are we going to repair, slowly, meticulously, but with great intention and purpose?

Sure life is beautiful! The Transcendentalists of the 19th century perhaps served an important historical function of their time – to counter an increasingly industrial mindset, to try to preserve nature against production and development, to uphold a mind set that dismissed an agenda of ruthless progress. That’s still applicable in today’s world. But we need to take more steps outward.

Today we know life has beauty to offer us; that is a given. And it’s well advised that we do recharge our batteries every now and then in nature, that we do spend time just being with ourselves, star-gazing, watching the ants work. YES, there is so much beauty in the world and we are well advised to notice it – God does get mad if we walk by the color purple and don’t notice it.

But what is really going to drive you to act in the best ways possible in the world? To what ideals are you so accountable that they transcend the need to serve the self, that serving these higher ideals becomes a priority, perhaps even your life’s work?

In the Spring of my senior year of college I had to present a final project to the Sociology department. They had given me permission to spend an entire quarter writing poetry, rather than do some kind of social service internship, because I didn’t want to just serve the world, I wanted to be a poet in the world, too. I remember I began the presentation to all my professors and fellow students with a favorite quote from E.B. White. He said,

“It’s hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world – and when to respond to the challenge. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world . . . this makes it hard to plan the day.”

May we transcend this quandary. May we discover that, after all – to improve the world and to enjoy the world are in fact the same thing.

May our joy be our service. May our service be our joy.