A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church
May 23, 2010
Today Unitarian Universalist congregations are celebrating the 200th birthday of Margaret Fuller. She was a 19th century woman for the 21st century – a Unitarian, public intellectual, leading Transcendentalist, early feminist theoretician, first American foreign correspondent.
Why do we Unitarian Universalists make such a fuss over our forebears? There’s long been a t-shirt and a poster listing “Famous UU’s”and now there is, of course, a website with short biographies, too. Why do we feel the need to name the famous among those who preceded us?
It’s been said that we do it because our faith tradition doesn’t have one central figure like Jesus, Mohammad or the Buddha and so instead we name our “host of witnesses.” Others have said that we do it because we’ve always been small in number and so we have to make up for it by declaring the largeness of our impact. Those things may be so, but I also think doing it reminds us of what we value and, even, of who we can be.
It’s as we sing, “Forward through the Ages in unbroken line, move the faithful spirits at the call divine; gifts in differing measure, hearts of one accord, manifold the service, one the sure reward…”
That would be a perfect hymn for after the sermon, except that we are going to sing the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Hymn Contest winner instead, a new tune composed for a compilation of her words.
Any of us who took American Literature in high school likely recognize the name of a male Unitarian, public intellectual, leading Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden Pond.
Being a Unitarian Universalist minister in the Boston area where they and the other Transcendentalists hung out, I learned from my ministerial colleagues certain secrets about them. Like Henry David’s last name was actually pronounced “thorough” and that he had wanted to conduct his experiment in simple living on the shores of a pond in the town of Lincoln, but the property owners refused because he’d been known to be careless with his campfires!
Other Transcendentalists (male or female) are not as well-known today, except perhaps in the Boston area where you plaques mark their homes — Bronson Alcott (Louisa May’s father) who was an innovative educator; George Ripley who founded the experimental, egalitarian community called Brook Farm; Elizabeth Peabody who ran a bookstore in Boston that became an intellectual gathering spot and was the founder of the nation’s first kindergarten; and the Rev. Theodore Parker, a great Unitarian preacher and a fiery abolitionist known for illegally obstructing the return of slaves to their owners as required of all states by the federal Fugitive Slave Act.
The Transcendentalists were, or started out as, Unitarians, and many of the men among them were ministers, though Emerson left his first and last Unitarian pulpit position when his refusal to administer the Lord’s Supper was not received favorably by his congregation, and Theodore Parker was censored by his Unitarian ministerial colleagues for his radical theological views.
Most of the Transcendentalists felt Unitarianism, which was still relatively new and in which most had been raised, to be dry and cold. They thought its reliance on reason to understand the Scriptures had removed the mystery and mysticism from Christianity. And Emerson, at least, thought much of its preaching offered nothing very practical or inspiring. It wasn’t easy to please them!
It’s not easy to characterize them, either. They were a varied, vibrant collection of public intellectuals starting in Boston about 1830 into the 1860’s, when they in some cases led, and in others got swept up into, the anti-slavery movement and the lead-up to the Civil War. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism’s leading philosopher, was not easy to listen to and is not easy to read—his prose does not have much structure– I don’t think he wrote from an outline! But, it still appeals to seekers of spiritual depth today.
Often his meaning is more something to be intimated, hinted at, than to be accurately defined. When he says “there is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us,” do we know exactly what he meant? No, perhaps not, but we have a sense for it. “When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.” Still, though, what is the “it” and can we really subscribe to this idealistic, individualistic view of human nature?
Emerson’s rather imperial sense of the individual self is one hallmark of the American Transcendentalists. Another is his controversial insight that divinity may be found in our experience of the natural world, and is thus directly accessible to everyone with intuition. A third hallmark is their activist devotion to the common good, as a hisotorian described them, “movers and shakers in the forefront of educational reform; proselytizers for the rights of women, laborers, prisoners, and the indigent and infirm; and agitators for the abolition of slavery.” [American Transcendentalism, Philip Gura, p. xi].
Surely we can see these three hallmarks in ourselves, Unitarian Universalists of the turn of the 21st century, and in the seven principles which our congregations covenant to affirm and promote.
First. We can see Emerson’s sense of self in our first, third and fourth Principles, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person, encouragement to spiritual growth, and a free and responsible search for truth and meaning” and most especially in the first Source from which we draw, “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder…which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”
Second. Like Emerson, many of us today experience this transcending mystery and wonder first and most powerfully in the natural world, which we covenant to respect as the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part,” our seventh principle.
Third. We can see their activist devotion to the common good in our current Principles as well, in that we affirm and promote “justice, equity and compassion in human relations, the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process, and the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.”
We see all of the above in Margaret Fuller, plus a radical feminism which made her life an adventure out of the ordinary prescribed for women of her time. She managed to have a successful career as an author, intellectual leader, and journalist as well as being for the last few years of her life a revolutionary, lover, wife and mother – all before her untimely death at age 40.
Margaret Fuller had a connection with First Parish in Canton, Massachusetts where I served as minister for ten years. Her parents first met in our meetinghouse pews! Her mother Margarett Crane was born and raised in Canton, in a house where today there is a Dunkin’ Donuts.
Margaret Fuller wrote about fond memories of visiting her grandmother in Canton and about First Parish, saying “It was at church that my father first saw [my mother], he happening, through some chance, to be in Canton on the Sabbath. He loved, and his love was returned. He soon led her to the altar, a blooming girl of twenty, and ten years younger than himself…a rising young lawyer, whose talents had already become favorably known.” [History of the Town of Canton, Daniel V.T. Huntoon, pp. 418-419].
Margaret Fuller was born, and mostly raised, in Cambridge MA. Her father – later to be a Congressman – saw to it that she had a rigorous education equal to what a boy would get by teaching her himself. As a teen, she was particularly drawn to German philosophers and theologians and in her twenties published translations of some of their works. She supported her mother and siblings after her father’s death and sent her three brothers to Harvard on her teacher’s salary.
She formed a close friendship with Emerson and others in the Transcendentalist circle. For five years starting in 1839 Fuller supported herself by holding popular, weekly forums for women in Boston on culture, politics and feminism that she conducted at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore. If she had been a man, she would have attended and maybe lectured at Harvard, but women were not admitted to colleges and weren’t allowed on the lecture circuit in those days – though she became the first woman allowed to use Harvard’s Gore library.
She founded the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial, with Emerson in 1840 and was its first editor, publishing in it her first major feminist statement. In it she advocated social and economic equality for women.
By 1844, she was parting ways with Emerson’s individualism, The Dial’s readership was declining, and Fuller accepted a job in New York City as a writer for the New York Tribune, Horace Mann’s widely read newspaper. There she became much more interested is social reform than in philosophy. She visited prisons and mental hospitals and wrote about the deplorable conditions she saw, becoming the first female investigative journalist.
She expanded her Dial article on feminism into the book Woman in the Twentieth Century, published in 1845, becoming a best-seller. In it she wrote, “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another…There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” ( pp. 115-116). More than one hundred years later, the 1960’s and 70’s women’s movement espoused that notion as if it was original!
Was she so advanced for her day that she advocated gay rights, too? I was amazed to come upon this statement, “It is true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man. It is regulated by that same law as love between persons of different sexes.” But, she continued, “Only it is purely intellectual and spiritual, un-profaned by any mixture of lower instincts.” (Journal Extracts, p. 343). Not quite there.
Then, in 1846, she had a chance to go to Europe as the tutor for the son of some friends, and Greeley agreed to pay her for periodic travel reports. She became the first American female foreign correspondent. For Europe, it was a time of great foment in numerous countries (think Marx and Engels) leading to the revolutions of 1848-49 and she was drawn into it.
In four years, she filed 37 dispatches. 24 were from Italy at the height of its revolution, which captivated her attention and enthusiasm, and led her to meeting and becoming the lover of a young Roman revolutionary; they wed and had a child, Angelino. She worked for the cause herself, even managing a hospital for the wounded.
After the uprising ultimately failed, they helped settle refugees for a while and then – poor and not welcome in Italy – they sailed with their not yet two year old son for the U.S. in 1850. But their ship sank off Fire Island, Long Island, New York and they all drowned; her book-length manuscript on the Italian revolution went down with them. Her friend Emerson sent Thoreau and a few others to Long Island to search the beach for the manuscript but they were unsuccessful. She was only forty.
That ship wreck was a tragedy for liberal religion, women’s rights, and American journalism, too. Even more broadly, had she published her history of the Italian revolution, introducing the ideals of the Revolutions of 1848 to the American public, how might American history have been different?
What would she have written about the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850, the year she died, which required all citizens, even in the north, to assist authorities in returning escaped slaves to their owners? How might she have influenced the build-up to the Civil War when members of Congress were literally bashing each other’s heads in the aisles and dueling it out (famously, not that far from here, in Colmar Manor)?
Had the “faithful spirit” that was Margaret Fuller lived to a ripe old age like Emerson…how much wider and deeper would our vision today perhaps be?
Margaret Fuller did not live the life that was expected of a woman of her time. She made her own way. She lived on an edge, but she didn’t fall off. On the edge is where things change, and that’s right where we should be if we want to help things change. In fact, that was the message to graduating students at the University of Maryland’s commencement this past Thursday night from outgoing University President C.D. ‘Dan’ Mote Jr. He told them that as good students, they’d learned well to do what was expected of them, which by definition, he said “puts you on middle ground.” Now it’s time to leave the safety of the middle ground and move to the edge where you can make something important happen in the world. Change happens at the edges.
Here at Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church, we are moving to an edge, creating change. Having decided to move our long-term tenant out and reclaim the space in our Religious Education Building, we are taking a financial and organizational risk for higher goals. We are moving out of a safe middle ground, needing to depend on ourselves more and less on rental income, freeing our energies from being a landlord to being of service to the community, freeing our space for our use and to benefit others, opening up possibilities we’ve only begun to brainstorm about. We’re on the edge, but with your financial support and active organizational involvement as willing leaders and workers, we’re not falling off.
“One Foot Planted in the Center, the Other Dangling Off the Edge.” [by Gordon R. Dragt] That’s where we are. That’s the title of a book I’ve just read. And the subtitle is “How Intentional Leadership Can Change Your Church.” One foot planted firmly in our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, with people like Margaret Fuller reminding us of our values and who we can be, and the other foot dangling off the edge, willing to take smart risks. As another church leadership book says, “We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.” [Take the Next Steps: Leading Lasting Change in the Church, Lovett H. Weems].
Smart risks… toward a vision of a spiritually-alive, inclusive church for all people, of all ages, races, ethnicities, political affiliations, sexual identities, and physical abilities, no matter who they love – committed to doing the work of justice in this world. We could make Margaret proud.
Amen.