Language from Walden informs our culture. I would not be surprised if people interviewed by Jay Leno and David Letterman identified quotes from Thoreau and Walden as quotes from the Bible. The familiar phrases from these texts season our understanding of ourselves. And so, like a good Sunday morning preacher, I've lifted texts from Walden to remind you of that with which you are already familiar.
How many of you knew that last quote was from Thoreau? In recent years, a book reviewer for the New York Times applied the phrase to politician Lowell Weiker and his political memoir "Maverick." And in "Sunset," a magazine of western living, Weather Shield used it in an ad for wood windows. You might set yourself the task to jot down the times you find Thoreau's words used to solidify corporate mission and sell product or service. His words in the context of our culture make sense, offer promise, inspire us to action…and so have found use in the corporate world and advertising genre.
I approached this book again after some years, wondering what it would hold for me and for us today. I came to Walden again expectant and today somewhat uneasy.
Spokesperson for America's individualism, Henry David Thoreau has been much revered and romanticized. In recent years, however, he has been sharply criticized, but, nonetheless, still with some redeeming features. In recent years, his entire personal celebration of self-sufficiency and wilderness experiment came under scrutiny. Charged with being an elitist white male and something of a dilettante, critics questioned the rugged individualism of his effort. They noted that he could and did easily walk to his sister-in-law's to sponge a good meal whenever he liked.
In recent years, Americans, including Unitarians, have been challenged in their allegiance to rugged individualism. This spirit now ran counter to renewed interest in togetherness. Individualism had fallen from grace…selfish and narcissistic. Tensions between other-directed types and inner-directed types emerged in the '50s and remain with us today, as if solitude and community are mutually exclusive. Solitude and community are not mutually exclusive. We know that.
At the same time, Thoreau and Walden enjoyed renewed appreciation from earth-centered religious practitioners, religious mystics, and environmentalists.
Historically, Thoreau's Walden strengthened an openness to Eastern religious traditions. The Egyptian Isis, the Hindu Maya, the Bhagat-Veeta, and the Persian poet Saadi are all referenced and celebrated in Walden. Indeed, one of the contributions of our 19th century Unitarian Transcendentalists was their curious and copious capacity to look to Eastern sage and seer. Today this affirms possibilities in religious pluralism. Thoreau mingled the sacred waters of Walden Pond with the sacred waters of the Ganges. The Indian government has translated Walden in to various Indian languages.
Thoreau's recognition of our relationship with Nature also suggests a land ethic for our times. He is celebrated by those who yearn to dig in the earth and hold the dirt in their hands and also by those who choose to sit under a tree and contemplate.
Like special places in our own lives, Thoreau knew Walden Pond from his childhood. He internalized an American dream to build a cabin in the woods and live there alone. Self-reliance and self-sufficiency, the dream of getting away from it all, is an American dream which many of us have internalized and which some of us have experienced. That is what he dreamed. And that is what he did.
Walden begins "When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months."
What is the legacy of Thoreau and Walden that we might celebrate today? What does Thoreau the writer, the naturalist, the escape artist, the reformer, the witness to spiritual being say to us today?
He introduces us to honest personal reflection. He makes "I" statements. In fact, the words "I" and "my" and "myself" occur nearly 3000 times in Walden. One annotator reports that the typesetter ran out of the letter "I" so frequently was it called for. Egotistical? I don't think so. Thoreau had a genuine curiosity about his own life, recognizing the experience of living to be "novel." His life was his raw material for reflection, and because he knew and esteemed and appreciated himself, he was able to appreciate others. Counselors and group process facilitators today implore us to make "I" statements, own our personal experience, acknowledge our personal context, and accept responsibility for our statements. It is a path to intimacy in honest sharing of ourselves. It is a path to intimacy and respect in community.
Heretofore, books were not written in the first person. Thoreau chose to make "I" statements, writing on the first page, "We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking….After all, the person I know best is myself." Here is acknowledgement of the uniqueness of singular experience, perspective, and context. He appreciated a vast number of "different" people, genuinely affirming those that others might demean or ignore.
Civil discourse calls us to make "I" statements. These are the statements in community dialogue that inform effective decision making. It is one way to acknowledge a world of greater diversity.
Thoreau also thought that too frequent society left us overly familiar and uninteresting to one another. Instead, he celebrated honest and thoughtful conversation that deepened friendship and promoted respect. Although his "best" room was the pine wood behind the house, he had three chairs in his house: "one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." More than three, people had to stand up. Big thoughts and big words caused the chairs to be pushed back against the wall in opposite corners, providing more room for thought to expand and concept to enlarge.
He also models for us recognition and response to the need to get away from it all. He escaped, leaving the foolish cares of this world behind. He eschewed "the so-called comforts of life." They hindered personal development and well-being.
Instead, he celebrated a "voluntary poverty" which today we might call "voluntary simplicity." The trappings of civilization trapped us in relationship of opinion and status, and created economic and social class divisions. Already in 1845 manufactures had learned to manipulate the fancy of taste and fashion.
Thoreau was an early critic of the northern factory system, alert to its exploitation of labor. He questioned the unquestioned celebration of progress, writing, "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys…Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles per hour…We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
Today, we live with information overload, and I deplore the incessant demands cyberspace makes on me at the same time I celebrate the opportunities for communication it provides. I find the United Nations programs that promote communication among the world's peoples, including the world's children, across boundaries of national tension to be hopeful for world peace. I'm hopeful that chatty initial conversation may lead to greater acceptance and appreciation and so contribute to world peace.
Always Thoreau paused for reflection. He recognized that the progress of the railroad had been paid in the poverty of Irish labor. "Few are riding," he observed, "The rest are run over." Today Walden is catalyst for us to reflect in our disproportionate use of the world's resources. As early as 1845, Thoreau was concerned that growing rail traffic would result in "grading" the whole surface of the planet." That was before our romance with automobiles, highways and byways…and that was before we realized that people in China also want automobiles, highways and byways. The latest study/action issues from our Unitarian Universalist General Assembly focus attention in economic globalization, moral consumption, and sustainable planet. If there is interest in these issues, we can explore these resources.
For this moment now, let's take time to identify with this imagery he presents from the more simple and sparse life of his experience: He writes, "When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass,…dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white…It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass…."
Pause now to undertake the image of placing all of your household effects out on the grass.…If you are not exhausted from the image, consider whether or not the effect is pleasant…. Consider your attachment to your stuff…And consider today and tomorrow how much stuff is enough stuff.
Thoreau reflected honestly on the plight of the poor and the role of charity. With wit and concern, he concluded "If I knew for a certainty that a man [could be a woman] was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life…." We continue to struggle today with a tension between social service and social advocacy. Clearly we need to feed, clothe, and shelter, and we need to change structures of oppression. We need to examine the hubris of paternalism, even as we acknowledge our failures and frustration in not gaining experience in what to do with our genuine impulse to care and wish to alleviate suffering and injustice. Service and advocacy are not mutually exclusive goals, but they do challenge and create tension for the allocation of financial and human resources.
I don't know the history of this congregation well-enough to know its story in social justice work. It is one of the failures and frustrations of interim ministry. I know that programs, such as Room At The Inn, survive because of committed individuals during this interim year. I see some of you engaged in issues of Reproductive Choice. I know that Kirkwood has a rather unique and fine recycling center. I'm sure there are other areas of commitment and concern. My hope for you is that you find your vision and commitment in conversation with your new minister…that you identify one or more areas for commitment, that you articulate vision and mission, engage in study, action, and reflection, and truly make a difference.
Thoreau recognized that "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve." These are harsh words for us to hear and significant challenge to us.
Thoreau also acquaints us with the relationship between solitude and meditation. He models for us experience in spiritual nurture and well-being. He knew both the lapse of time and also stayed in the present moment "in undisturbed solitude and stillness."
I have always felt his spiritual experiences were most pronounced from the center of the pond. In one account, he speaks of midnight fishing by moonlight. In another he speaks of his encounter with a loon. One concern I had approaching this sermon today is my inadequate effort to summarize and paraphrase such a masterful writer. Talking "about" clearly loses the rich imagery of his descriptive writing, writing that is a symphony in prose by a master craftsperson.
Remember that his daily life was characterized by aloneness time. His daily life embraced a reflective approach to experience of nature. He paid attention to detail. [You have opportunity at the Bergfried property to enjoy this solitude and cultivate this kind of experience for yourself.] He was a keen and imaginative observer.
In the first account, he slips from making "I" statements and uses the projected "you." I often wonder if this experience was so intense for him that even Thoreau found it necessary at some level of his being to distance himself from the experience to articulate it.
For a moment imagine his solitary figure out in the middle of a pond at midnight; reflective by nature, he is there in the middle of the pond with fish, line, and loon…a solitary figure on a clear lake beneath a starry sky...a loon with an uncanny crazy wild laugh. Is it any wonder that he might expect to cast his line both "upward into the air, as well as downward into the water…."
In the second account, the loon unexpectedly sails out from the shore toward the middle of the pond. He laughs and Thoreau pursues. He dives, and the two…man and loon…engage in a game of hide and seek, Is it any wonder that Thoreau speculated, after some time at hide and seek between man and loon, that perhaps "a wind from the east that rippled the surface and filled the whole air with misty rain" was answer to the loon's call to its god for aid and succor…is it any wonder that he "was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered," recognizing that perhaps "his god was angry with me;" and soThoreau decided to leave him….
Is it any wonder that after a complete survey of Walden Pond, Thoreau still celebrated its mystery. Thoreau was a surveyor and he carefully surveyed Walden Pond, determining its length and breadth, its depth and underwater contours, dispelling the local myth of its being bottomless. Still he asks, "What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless."
And finally he concludes his experiment, reflecting on his personal growth and learning: "I learned this at least…if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours…In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex….If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they would be. Now put the foundations under them."
What a wonderful message of hope!…a message for us…for this congregation and for ourselves as a people in world community. What a wonderful message of hope for these times and this time of year.