June 2003 The one thing in the world of value
is the active soul.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
We expect that you will receive this issue of Quest near May 25th,
the bicentennial of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson is one
of our guys. He was a Unitarian minister who changed the course of American
thought in general and Unitarianism in particular. He is not a rock
star, athlete, scandalous politician, or pop psych guru. He is not funny,
not simple, not accessible, not even touching most of the time. But
he is popular, and for good reason. We hope you enjoy this issue. -
Jane Rzepka
Quest Archives
The Pioneer of Concord
 by
Judith Walker-Riggs, interim senior minister, Fountain Street
Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan
You should seek for your God within yourself, not in persons of
bygone ages.
So taught Ralph Waldo Emerson.
What an irony! Here we are, seeking to enrich our religion by remembering
the noted American sage and Unitarian of bygone ages, Ralph Waldo Emerson;
doing exactly what he told us not to!
It's funny. Emerson's thoughts have become so commonplace we're likely
to forget he thought them. There's the story of the student who read
"Hamlet" for the first time and asked, "What's so great about this?
It's just a bunch of famous quotations strung together!" It's kind of
like that with Emerson.
He might forgive us. After all, we might not even be here without him.
Aren't many of us here precisely because in Unitarian Universalism we
are free to find our own personal religion? Because we are free to accept
or discard what we hear? Because, indeed, we are free to do exactly
what Emerson recommended, to seek the highest within ourselves and not
in persons of bygone ages?
That we should seek within ourselves for the highest may not seem to
us such a radical message. But believe me, when Ralph Waldo Emerson
first proposed such a thing-to Unitarians-most of them would have none
of it.
Perhaps they just didn't expect it of him. After all, Emerson,
born in May of 1803, was of such reputable stock! His seventh ancestor,
the Rev. Peter Bulkeley, purchased from the Indians an area known as
Musketaquid-and renamed it Concord. Emerson's line went back a long
way.
How much more reputable can you get than to have eight direct ancestors
who were ministers of New England churches?
Perhaps the unconventional religious notions had started with Ralph
Waldo's father, William, who as minister of First Church in Boston emphasized
virtue and good sense, rather than theology.
Still, Ralph Waldo was expected to turn out all right.
Not that it was easy. It wasn't. Ralph Waldo was the fourth of eight
children. His father died when Ralph Waldo was eight years old. To survive,
the family had to sell the books from father's library, and take in
boarders. It was a serious, hard-working childhood.
Oh, it had its interesting moments. There was Aunt Mary Moody, for
example, a passionately religious woman who, among other things, wore
a shroud all day and slept in a coffin at night in order to be ready
for the Lord.
Emerson entered Harvard at 14, the common age to begin college in Emerson's
time. After graduation at 18, he opened a finishing school for young
girls. What a picture! The late-teen-aged Ralph Waldo Emerson trying
to run a school surrounded by giggling young girls. That puts a different
kind of flesh on Emerson's mythic bones.
The school succeeded, but after four years Emerson closed it, took
the money he had saved from his enterprise, and went to Harvard Divinity
School.
As a matter of fact and record, Ralph Waldo Emerson never graduated
from divinity school. Was he ill? No one knows, but graduation or not,
Ralph Waldo Emerson was accepted into fellowship as a minister among
the Unitarians, or in the language of their day "approbated to preach."
He began as a sort of student intern in Concord, Massachusetts. While
there he met Ellen Tucker, and in December of 1828 they were engaged.
In March of 1829, Emerson was installed as assistant to the minister
of the Second Church in Boston.
In September, he and Ellen were married. The senior minister of Second
Church became ill, and Emerson assumed full charge. Everything seemed
to be going just as you would have predicted from his ancestry.
Ah, but how often life has other plans for us. Emerson suffered the
blow of his wife Ellen's death a mere 18 months after their marriage.
His journals reveal the depth of his devastation at this loss.
To make matters worse, the theological issues that had been bedeviling
him in his ministry at Second Church were coming to a head. Even Unitarianism,
as it then was in Boston, was too tight and constricting for him. Emerson
resigned his ministry.
So here was this imposing, six-foot man, with dark brown hair, blue
eyes, clear complexion, and even clearer mind, at the age of 20 already
widowed, and starting on his third career, from teacher, to minister,
to lecturer. Mid-life crisis was not invented in our generation.
In 1835 Emerson remarried. He and his new wife Lydia would have four
children.
Then in 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson was invited to speak to the graduating
students at Harvard Divinity School. It proved to be a real watershed.
For in that most famous speech of his life, Emerson spoke movingly of
a need for a new theology-a theology based on our own experiences of
God in nature itself, "the doors of whose temple stand open night and
day" for every person.
Most Unitarians at the time still believed that proof of the importance
of Jesus lay in the fact that he had performed miracles. Here was Emerson
saying that Jesus wasn't important because of miracles, but because
of the faith he had taught, a faith available to every person in the
always-open temple of nature that surrounds them.
What scandal ensued! This man dared to use the hallowed halls of a
Unitarian seminary to criticize current Unitarianism! Subversive, and
in Harvard's terms, poor taste.
The Unitarian ministers of Boston set themselves to preach against
him. Emerson himself stayed out of the direct debate, and seemed to
have a rather amused tolerance for the storm he had created. In a letter
to his brother he wrote, "They say the world is somewhat vexed with
[me] on account of [my] wicked writings. I trust it will recover its
composure."
 Not
everyone in the world could manage such composure. Emerson spoke at
a literary society in Middlebury, Vermont. When he finished, a local
clergyman concluded the meeting as usual with a prayer. Stepping into
the pulpit Emerson had just left, the minister prayed: "We beseech thee,
O Lord, to deliver us from hearing any more such transcendental nonsense
as we have just listened to from this sacred desk."
But Emerson's approach appealed to some of the tiny audience who had
heard him on that fateful day at Harvard. Emerson is often called "The
Oracle of Concord." Oracles point to something beyond themselves. Emerson
pointed to a burgeoning movement in religion which valued intuition,
the study of all religions including Eastern ones, and the grounding
of personal faith in the reality of nature and one's own experiences.
It was those few students who took Emerson's vision and made it their
own, who built into our tradition much that we still value today.
And Emerson? Emerson went on lecturing. And working on the honest development
of his new faith. Indeed, it is less well-known that Emerson spent several
months a year for 19 years lecturing in the raw, new mid-west, which
he came to love. As he did, his faith continued to develop. He was no
airy-fairy intellectual. He found religion in real life, and he tested
it there too. Some of his experiments failed. Out of concern for animals,
Emerson became vegetarian for a while, but grew weak, and gave it up.
Out of stern democracy, he invited the family servants to
| Here was Emerson saying
that Jesus wasn't important because of miracles, but
because of the faith he had taught, a faith available
to every person in the always-open temple of nature
that surrounds them. |
|
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eat at the dinner table with the family. The servants objected, and that
too was an idea that failed. Out of the theory that the scholar must be
a whole man, he entered on manual labor in his yard. He discovered that
it made him too tired to do anything else. "The writer shall not dig,"
was his practical conclusion. But not all of Emerson's attempts
to apply religion to life were ill fated. Slowly, he became a prophet,
particularly on the abolition of slavery. When the Fugitive Slave Act
was passed in 1850, which made it a crime to assist a fugitive slave,
and required the slave's return to his owner, Emerson wrote, "This is
a law. . .which no one can obey or abet without loss of his self-respect.
. . . I will not obey it, by God. . . . If you put a chain around the
neck of a slave the other end fastens itself around your own."
Earlier than many, Emerson became a champion of women's rights. And
earlier than many, Emerson addressed the dangers of materialism and
militarism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson has been called the most original and subtle thinker
America has produced. He was not some chalky colored grouch sitting
in some isolated study in Concord, Massachusetts, looking out the window
gooey-eyed at a tree while snarling at his neighbors, as we might have
imagined him. Yes, Ralph Waldo Emerson was "The Sage of Concord." He
was also a compassionate, suffering, loving, experimenting, failing,
succeeding, thinking, writing, traveling and changing human being.
Quest June 2003 Contents
Drawing
the Breath of Life
by Rev. Jane Rzepka, minister, Church of the Larger Fellowship
For a number of CLFers, the seasons are changing. New life and leaves
in the Northern Hemisphere, autumn color in the Southern. It's on our
minds and a part of our spirits. And so I think of this piece by the
Rev. Clarke Wells:
I suppose I should write something institutional or churchly or
ethical, but my heart isn't in it. Where my heart is these days is
between me and God, or whoever it is that turns the seasons and lays
the sun across the trees with that sudden and terrible beauty.
I've been taught all my life to believe that growing up meant
to become less vulnerable, that getting overwhelmed by life is what
happens when you are young, that the charge of visions, feelings and
nameless longing gradually spends itself in the process of maturing,
that as we get older life is less tearing, not as confusing, ecstatic,
strange.
I am here to testify to the opposite and to warn myself and others
about what life has in store. I was driving back from Lowell yesterday
afternoon on some country roads, and I simply had to stop the car
near a stone fence and go through the woods for an hour.
It had nothing to do with practical matters or politics or theology
or vocation or marriage or my maturity or immaturity. It had to do
with autumn trees against the blue and shattering light and where
I am with living. I report it to you on the chance that you're as
odd as I-that it all gets more intense, not less-so that if you have
to go through the same thing, like stopping your car for an hour,
you will not feel crazy, at your age, being torn apart that way.
This sermon is supposed to be about Ralph Waldo Emerson, and there's
a lot I could say about his perspectives on self-reliance or American
scholarship or nature. But really, I want to highlight only one of Emerson's
messages, and it's the same one that Clarke Wells describes. It has
nothing to do with practical matters or politics or theology or vocation
or marriage or maturity or immaturity. It has to do with autumn trees
against the blue and shattering light.
Emerson, and the Transcendentalists who joined him-their whole deal
was "direct experience," first-hand experience. Emerson wants you, on
your way home from today's errands, to experience the season's air and
| He would not want
you to take his word for the glories all about, or my
word, or the word of a religious tradition, or the word
of a philosopher or poet. You are the locus of your
own experience. |
|
|
the particular smell of the leaves and the stillness of time and whatever
it is you might, at the end of the day, feel moved by. He would not want
you to take his word for the glories all about, or my word, or the word
of a religious tradition, or the word of a philosopher or poet. You are
the locus of your own experience. We have here an Emerson who sounds
for all the world like a raving New Ager. He says that the highest,
most trustworthy knowledge consists of intuitive graspings, of moments
of direct perception. And do you know what he calls that? He calls this
process of intuiting and perceiving, "reason." That's what he means
by the word "reason."
Somehow I have always assumed that most people the world over who go
to high school have to read Emerson-that we all kind of grew up with
him. But that's not true at all. Thinking back on it, I didn't ever
learn about Emerson in school; I learned about him in my Unitarian Sunday
school in Ohio. And my children didn't learn about him in school either;
they learned about him in Sunday school.
But if you did learn about Emerson in school, you probably have him
pictured in your mind as a cool and dispassionate commentator. A cold,
white, plaster cast. A deep, aloof thinker, free of human emotion. A
convoluted, eloquent-and, well, boring-writer, obsessed with individualism
and reason. A very smart guy, but not a lot of fun.
However, as Robert Richardson says in his Emerson: The Mind on Fire,
"Freed of his vast, unfortunate, and self-perpetuating reputation, Emerson
steps forth as a complicated, energetic, and emotionally intense man
who habitually spoke against the status quo and in favor of whatever
was wild and free. [He] turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist
citizen, a fond father, a loyal brother, and a man whose many friendships
framed his life." Indeed, it has been said that Emerson had more friends
than any person in America. (His sister-in-law called them "Waldo's
menagerie.") One author describes him as a somewhat silly youth, a lovesick
suitor and an awkward Unitarian minister, a loyal brother and grief-stricken
father, a generous friend and selfless enabler of younger writers, an
outraged abolitionist and vehement fomenter of civil disobedience. He
also had deep feelings in favor of women's rights.
Though we have been taught to think of Emerson as an individualist,
in fact he was as committed as any of us to his community in Concord,
Massachusetts: He served on the school committee, the cemetery committee,
the library committee, and the Lyceum committee. On specific issues
he wrote letters, collared friends, addressed meetings, and signed petitions.
As a high school kid, you may have heard about Emerson's "self-reliance."
You may have picked up the more subtle distinctions, but I always took
this to mean "responsible"-"self-reliant" as in knowing how to fry an
egg or change a tire or get a
| Religion is revealed
to each person; it cannot be had at second hand. |
|
|
load of laundry from washer to dryer and back into the drawers. And this
proponent of self-reliance, this Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a fellow who
had somebody else do his cooking, somebody else chop his wood, somebody
else wash his clothes, while he, the self-reliant individualist, sat in
his chair, surrounded by an extensive support network of family and friends,
and read Goethe. It never occurred to me that Emerson wasn't talking about
any of that: he was never advocating isolation or self-sufficiency. In
fact he said just the opposite: "Every being in nature has its existence
so connected with other beings that if set apart from them it would instantly
perish." Emerson was telling me not that I should isolate myself in an
"I Am a Rock, I Am an Island" stance, but rather that I should rely on
myself, my self-reliant self, for religious experiences, for spirituality.
I cut out a little story by Thomas Lee from the New York Times
that goes like this:
An older gentleman watched me judiciously selecting pears at Dean
& DeLuca recently. "How do you tell when they'll be ripe?" he asked.
"Well," I replied, "it's hard to say: a day, maybe two."
"But how do you know? I never get pears; I never know when they'll
be ripe."
I passed on someone else's wise words about there being only 10
perfect moments in the life of a pear and then, rather sternly, I
added my own philosophy: "When the pear is ready, you have to be ready."
The gentleman looked longingly at the fruit in my basket, then
timidly chose two pears from the pile in front of him. When they were
bagged and weighed, he handed me his business card.
"Look," he said, "when yours are ready, will you call me?"
"Know your own pears." Emerson's not going to take some stranger's
word for pear ripeness. In fact, he's not even going to take the word
of the owner of the grocery store! He's going to rely on his own senses
and experience and intuition first-hand. "Even in a world of objective
knowledge," he says, "the subjective consciousness and the conscious
subject can never be left out of the reckoning." That's Transcendentalism:
immediate personal experience.
And that's what Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Unitarian, contributed to
our movement. He had been a minister at Second Church in Boston, where
he didn't just get into hot water theologically. He was a goofus as
a pastor, setting off to make pastoral calls without detailed directions,
and therefore spending time visiting complete strangers who had the
same name or lived on the same street as a parishioner. And if he did
find the right parishioner, he was so awkward in his role as minister
that at least one person just sent him away: "If you don't know your
business, you had better go home."
He had trouble with the Unitarian church of the day-with communion,
for example-and with the Bible, as you might imagine. He wanted direct
experiences of religion for his parishioners, not set rituals like communion,
symbolic of the experiences of other people long ago. And the Bible,
reports of the religious experiences of antiquity, wasn't much better.
Every day, right now, was blessed; every person needed to have his or
her own epiphanies. "Why," he says, "should not we have a poetry and
philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation
to us, and not the history of theirs?" "Why should we grope among the
dry bones of the past? The sun shines today also." Emerson resigned
as minister of the Second Church in Boston.
A few years later, a committee of students at Harvard Divinity School
asked him to come and speak. It was a Unitarian seminary back then,
and the students were all a-dither because Abner Kneeland, a Universalist
minister, had begun serving a jail term for blasphemy. Emerson was also
happy to break with the theological establishment, and he did not disappoint
the students. The Divinity School Address, one of our most important
Unitarian historical events, delivered in 1838, suggests that the holy
is all around us. The address begins: "In this refulgent summer, it
has been a luxury to draw the breath of life." We are each religious
beings, we each have religious inclinations and intuitions of our own.
Religion is revealed to each person; it cannot be had at second hand.
You hear that kind of talk, all these many years later, in Unitarian
Universalism. Our children in Sunday school do not simply admire the
crocuses that grown-ups planted; they plant them themselves, in the
dirt, and they watch them grow in the spring with their own eyes. In
most of our churches we do not have stained glass windows depicting
religious figures through whom we derive our religious experiences;
we have clear glass in the windows so a person can see out, directly
to nature, in living color. These are our miracles; this is our mysticism.
Emerson reassures us that spirituality is accessible to anyone who has
ever sat beneath a tree on a fine clear day and looked at the world
with a sense of momentary peace and a feeling, however transient, of
being at one with it.
Some months ago I saw a review of the Cantata Singers in the paper.
The headline read, "Cantata Singers inspired by lucid mystical powers."
"Who," I wondered, "would ever put the words 'lucid' and 'mystical'
next to each other in a headline or anywhere else?" Well, I think that's
the kind of thing Emerson might do.
In the words of the sermon's opening reading, and in the continuing
spirit of the oracle of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I suppose I should write something institutional or churchly or
ethical, but my heart isn't in it. Where my heart is these days is
between me and God, or whoever it is that turns the seasons and lays
the sun across the trees with that sudden and terrible beauty.
It has nothing to do with theology. It has to do with autumn trees
against the blue and shattering light and where I am with living.
Quest June 2003 Contents
Growing
Up With Waldo and Henry David
by Gail Geisenhainer, minister, UU Fellowship of Vero Beach,
Vero Beach, Florida
There were times when things got very confusing when I was growing
up in Concord, Massachusetts. The house we lived in was on Independence
Road, just off Alcott Road, both of which were tucked into a hillside
behind the Orchard House: the Louisa May and Bronson Alcott Museum.
Half a mile down the Lexington Road from the Orchard House was the home
of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A short mile beyond Emerson's, just past the
convergence of Walden Street and Thoreau Street, was Henry David Thoreau's
beloved Walden Pond. And dotted throughout town were the former residences
of a host of other nineteenth century literary luminaries such as Margaret
Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
That part made sense. Concord had been a gathering place for intellectuals
in the middle of the nineteenth century. The pencils that Henry David
had made with his brother, the quill pens that the many authors had
used, their libraries and their manuscripts were all preserved in the
local museums. The preservation of these artifacts had been done with
order and care. Ralph Waldo Emerson's entire personal library had been
removed from his home and reconstructed in a fireproof, glass-enclosed
room at the Concord Antiquarian Society Museum (which we all called
the Ant House).
In the 1950s and the 1960s we didn't yet have the phrase, "dead white
men." It would have been handy though. Leaving aside Louisa May and
Margaret for the moment, these "dead white men" were just names in books.
They were faces on postcards in the tourist shops, and geographical
points in town: Emerson's house, Thoreau's hut, Bronson's School of
Philosophy. They were past tense, wrapped up and orderly. And that's
where it got confusing.
As I came to the age when I began hanging around the conversations
of adults, I heard references to Bronson, Henry David, and Waldo. I
assumed them to be our neighbors. "Oh no," I heard, "Bronson only wants
children to eat 'aspiring' vegetables, ones that grow upwards.
They can eat broccoli but not carrots." Which might be answered with,
| "These guys are long
gone," I thought to myself. "How come everyone talks
about them as though they're still around? Should I
read their stuff?" |
|
|
"Well, he is right about putting art work on the walls of his school;
children need to see that." And Thoreau-everyone in town talked about
Thoreau as though he were still the local bad boy. These may have
been so-called "dead white men," but their ideas were vibrant and alive.
Their theories and decisions informed idle conversation and scholarly
debate. Their names made it across back yard fences and were tossed back
and forth in church coffee hours. "These guys are long gone," I
thought to myself. "How come everyone talks about them as though they're
still around? Should I read their stuff?" And I was off and running.
I became hooked on Henry David in the public library. A copy of his
journal was always open right in front of the circulation desk. The
librarians would cycle through the years and leave the book open to
the day of the year that corresponded to the present. So on October
15th, say 1962, I could wander in and read about an October 15th from
a hundred years earlier. Henry David, through his journals, first taught
me about the importance of observing the seasons and the changes in
the natural world. I aspired to see the way that he had seen.
But the giant among these souls, the one whose presence still hummed
and crackled, was clearly Ralph Waldo Emerson. The same folks who discounted
Bronson Alcott and scoffed at Thoreau spoke of Emerson with reverence.
Here was a genius, a masterful mind.
When I came to Emerson I was entering my rebellious teenage years and
the Beatles were about to change the landscape of American music. We
were all itching for some relief from the restrictive 1950s. In his
essay "Self-Reliance" Emerson said, "Trust yourself," and "Who so would
be a man, must be a nonconformist." This was great stuff for a teenager
in the 1960s! He said, "I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate
to large societies and dead institutions." Wow! This was great!
But it was when I came upon Emerson's essay "Circles," that I went
through the looking glass and into a whole new way of looking at and
being in the world. He said, "There are no fixtures in nature. The universe
is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees." Two paragraphs
later he declared: "Everything looks permanent until its secret is known.
Permanence is a word of degrees." I sensed that I was on holy ground.
And lest there be a shred of remaining doubt, Emerson wrote of "the
Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can
never meet."
From that point forward it was no mystery to me why Waldo was spoken
of with such lively engagement and deep reverence. He had fired up my
adolescent mind. And he had opened my eyes to entirely new ways of looking
within, and without to the natural world.
Quest June 2003 Contents
REsources
for Living
A wide variety of events is planned for the 200th anniversary of Ralph
Waldo Emerson's birth. A calendar of events associated with the Emerson
bicentennial year is posted at www.rwe.org.
This year's General
Assembly, the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists, will
also feature events relating to Emerson. Call the UUA's General Assembly
Office for an up-to-date listing, or visit this Web site: www.uua.org/uuhs/
News/EmersonProject.html. |
|
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by Dan Harper, interim director of religious education
The Deep End of the Pool
Emerson's absorption in Asian religion and literature cannot be
understood unless one sees that for him the East was the proof-persuasive
precisely because it was non-Western-that at the deep end of the pool,
where it matters, Westerner and Easterner are profoundly alike, indeed
identical. Nor does this perception in any way lessen the importance
and the delight of the shallow differences that separate us from one
another. Emerson's politics of identity validated both East and West,
declined subordination or dismissal, and committed him to a constant
and ever widening . . . inquiry.
Emerson: The Mind on Fire,
Robert D. Richardson Jr.
Emerson's influence on Unitarian Universalism has been far-reaching
and profound. One of the many areas in which Emerson has deeply affected
our religious outlook is his approach to other world religions.
Emerson lived at a time when some of the great religious literature
from Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, and Zoroastrianism was being translated
into European languages for the first time. As he read this newly translated
religious literature, what struck him most was how much he found he
had in common with it. Emerson came to the conclusion that at some deep
level all world religions spring from the same source. Not only that,
Emerson concluded that he and other Westerners could get as much spiritual
gain from this great religious literature as from the Bible. This basic
insight was radical stuff in his day, when most Westerners assumed the
Bible was the only religious literature worth reading.
 Today,
we Unitarian Universalists are still open to religious literature from
around the world. Indeed, the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association
clearly state that: "The living tradition we share draws from many sources
[including] . . . wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us
in our ethical and spiritual life."
Introducing wisdom from the world's religions is one of the foundation
stones of UU religious education. Let me touch briefly on how CLFers
of different ages can study world religions. For children, one of the
best introductions to world religions is through stories from different
religious traditions. Just as we sometimes present Bible stories to
children, we can present stories from other faiths. A good source for
such stories is the new CLF curriculum plan, available online athttp://www.clfuu.org/recurriculum/intro.html.
If you don't have Internet access, write to me and I'll send you a printed
copy.
Adults and youth might want to follow the example of Emerson himself,
and read some of the world's great religious literature in translation.
Emerson was deeply affected by the Bhagavad-Gita, and this is a perfect
starting place for UUs today. I believe every Unitarian Universalist
above the age of 14 should have some familiarity with this text, which
Emerson called a "trans-national book." The Bhagavad-Gita opens with
Arjuna, a nobleman and warrior, standing in his chariot about to ride
into battle. But when he looks at the opposing army, he finds that he
recognizes many of the people he's about to fight, some of whom are
even his relatives. So he turns to his charioteer, and says that he's
decided not to fight. It turns out that his charioteer is none other
than the god Krishna in disguise, and so begins a dialogue between Arjuna
and Krishna about how to act, and what is important in life.
To get a taste of the book, you can start by reading chapters 1-4,
and then chapters 10-11. I recommend the translation by Franklin Edgerton
published by Harvard University Press (available through online booksellers).
It's not a poetic translation, but I find it clear and straightforward.
Plus, the interpretive essay by Edgerton alone is worth the price of
the book. You can also find a pretty good translation, by Sir Edwin
Arnold, of the complete Bhagavad-Gita online at http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext00/bgita10.txt.
After you've read the first chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita, turn to "Brahma,"
one of Emerson's greatest and best-known poems. Compare the opening
lines of Emerson's poem:
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
with these lines from the first chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita:
He who shall say, "Lo! I have slain a man!"
He who shall think, "Lo! I am slain!" those both
Know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain!
Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
If you decide you want to read further in literature from the world's
religions, some of Emerson's favorites, such as the Sufi poets Omar
Khayyam and Hafez and the Analects of Confucius, serve as a wonderful
starting point. Like Emerson, we still can find a sense of connection
with the deepest insights from religions around the world.
Quest June 2003 Contents
A Cure for Despair
by Jack Mendelsohn, minister emeritus, Bedford, Massachusetts
 I
preach about Emerson because I want to be cured, and because I know
that I must be cured primarily by myself. That is Emerson's message.
We can be cured, but only by our own choice.
There are mornings when it is almost more than the spirit can bear to face not only one's own personal trials and tribulations, but also the day's news of human folly, crime, violence, strife and savagery.
One rises, peers in the mirror, dresses, looks at the newspaper, listens to the radio or television, then cowers before the feeling that evil is all around us. So I preach today of Emerson because I, for one, still want to be cured of the despair that bedevils me and my generation. Or to put it more exactly, I want to do something about curing myself.
Emerson lived through his days and nights of private hell. Let me document. His genteel mother had to take in boarders to keep the wolf of poverty from her large family's door. Early symptoms of tuberculosis came close to shattering his career before it began. Death kept a constant vigil at his side. His father died when he was nine. Two of his younger siblings died in childhood, and two more died as young men. His adored young wife, Ellen Tucker, died of tuberculosis. A few years
later, death struck again, this time at his 5-year-old son.
The point about Emerson was that the upbeat still broke forth. No one really knows how he did it. He was not delivered by logic, nor by sudden conversion. He came to himself over the long haul, in a steady, relentless process, in the curriculum of a lifetime. He believed that life could be an endless renewal, a constant becoming, and he made it just that.
I think this is the basic lesson we can learn from Emerson, a lesson that turns the task back to ourselves, to our own endless self-renewal, to our own constant becoming.
Quest June 2003 Contents
Announcements
 CLF
Gathering at the Mountain
CLFers everywhere are invited to the first CLF Gathering at the
Mountain this Labor Day weekend, August 29-September 1, 2003. The weekend
will be facilitated by the Mountain staff, by our own Denny Davidoff
and Laurel Amabile, CLF board members, and Lorraine Dennis, CLF Administrator.
This weekend promises to be a chance for CLFers to have some "face time"
with each other in this beautiful North Carolina setting. You can do
as much or as little of the planned activities as you would like. We
will worship, sing,  do
crafts, tell stories, hike, and more. Most importantly, we will get
to know each other. This could become an annual event for CLF and an
annual pilgrimage for your family. Many UU congregations come together
at a conference center for a retreat once a year. For isolated UUs,
coming together in this way can be a very special way to find community
and make life-long friends. Take a look on the CLF website at www.clfuu.org
and on The Mountain's website at www.mountaincenters.org
and make your plans now to be at The Mountain this Labor Day weekend.
September's Water Ceremony
Over the summer, many UUs collect a sample of water from a cherished
spot for use during a water service that takes place when UUs in the
northern hemisphere come together again in the fall. Learn more about
this special service and how you might celebrate it in the September
Quest.
Did You Know that you can visit General Assembly,
June 26-July 1, 2003, by reading the daily posts on the GA website?
Go to http://www.uua.org/ga/ga03.
Quest June 2003 Contents
 Emerson
gave us last Monday evening the most brilliant lecture I ever listened
to from any mortal. It was on the identity of the laws of the mind with
the laws of nature. He proved conclusively that man is only a higher
kind of corn, that he is a squirrel gone up into the first class, that
he is a liberated oyster fully educated, that he is a spiritualized
pumpkin, a thinking squash, a graduated sun-flower, and inspired turnip.
Such imagery, such wit, such quaint things said in a tone solemn and
sublime! I have the most profound respect henceforth for every melon-vine
as my ancestor (melancholic thought). I look upon every turtle as of
kin. Tonight he lectures again. I fear I may lose it.
The Rev. Thomas Starr King, from a letter to Randolph Ryer written in 1845.
Starr King (1824-1864) served as minister of the Unitarian Church in San Francisco while tirelessly campaigning for California to remain with the Union during the Civil War and raising much of the money for the organization that became the Red Cross.
Quest June 2003 Contents
Last updated June 12, 2005
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