Between Walden Pond and Lake Michigan 

 

Sermon Delivered at All Souls Community Church

Grand Rapids, Michigan Sunday, June 1, 2003 

© The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith 

 Reading: Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

The masses of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. 

 

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof… 

 

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever." 

 

 The universe is wider than our views of it. 

 

Sermon 

 

The new summer has begun this day. Summer has always been a kind of respite from the rest of the year. It is a new time, a different time, a time to recognize we have free choices to make. Healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. The days are longer and the nights are brighter. It is the time to do different things. It is the time for spiritual endeavors. 

 

Sometimes we call the spiritual endeavors vacations, other times going to the lake. But summer is the time for spiritual endeavors that yield great insight into the human condition as each of us experiences it. That’s what I would invite you to consider these next three months. So as it is with spiritual endeavors, it is a time to begin with provisions suited to the spiritual journey. 

 

At the beginning of this new journey I would invite one to consider two disciplines to aid in discovering spiritual realities that surround us, but go largely unnoticed. The first is to purchase a book of blank paper within which to record your discoveries, like any good explorer would. And the second is to pack two provisions for the journey, to nurture you regularly during this journey. The first is William James’, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Read it throughout the summer as a roadmap to the landscape of the spirit as it infuses the material world. And the second is Henry David Thoreau’s, Walden. Read it throughout the summer as a companion piece of exercises to sharpen the eye in seeing the manifestations of the spirit in the world we share. 

 

For his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James defined his task in a letter to a friend as follows: “To defend experience over philosophy as the real backbone of the world’s religious life.” It is our perspective as liberal religionists in the Free Church tradition of Unitarian Universalism, descended from the original 16th century Reformers, to defend and practice engaging “experience over philosophy as the real backbone of the world’s religious life.” 

 

There are two ways to live the spiritual life. Both are real, but they are unlike one another. The first is deemed by many to be the authentic, “certified” origin of religion: living the spiritual life by tradition, by taking the doctrines and revelations of past ages, the wisdom men and women have accumulated over the years, a philosophy of life that has the refinements that other ages and cultures have given it, and apply this philosophy to the experiences that makeup one’s life. The faith here is that the pattern given to one to live by is a reflection of a divine pattern the world is composed of. This is what commonly passes for Christianity and Judaism today. In pulpits today many will hear no more than a declaration of a past philosophy’s truth, that it is the divine pattern the world is composed of, and an urging to conform one’s understanding of one’s experience to it. It’s as if my experiences are clumps of unformed clay, placed side-by-side like pool balls, over which I place a patterned mold that I am given to shape them together into a meaningful whole that never quite encompasses them all. Believing in the right and truthful philosophy is the aim of this form of the spiritual life, and obedience to that philosophy, the pattern one is given, God’s will, is the chief means. 

 

The other path of the spiritual life is by experience, by taking the discreet experiences one has, laid end to end, and searching within the various and discreet experiences themselves for some deeper, spiritual meaning that the experience itself is just a symbol of. To this form of the spiritual life, tradition and past proclamations of truth are to be tested, discarded if obsolete and kept if useful; revelations are understood to be rarely, if ever, transmitted through institutions, creeds, doctrines, the philosophies of organized religion because those are the secondary yields of experience. In this view, the yields of religion – doctrines, creeds, beliefs, morals, and ethics – are no substitute for the religious experience itself, and cannot yield it. Although we are capable of enormous distortions of intent and interpretation of our experiences, trusting the discerning capabilities of the self is the aim of the spiritual life, and discovery is the chief means. 

 

“Look what God has done,” proclaims the preacher out of the first form of the spiritual life, in the old story of the minister and the farmer. The farmer responds out of the second form of the spiritual life, “You should’ve seen it when God had it alone!” 

 

To the practitioner of the first, the second form of the spiritual life looks like blasphemous unbelieving, a lack of faith. To the practitioner of the second, the first looks like unreflective and unthinking conformity to something imposed from the outside. The first holds obedience as the highest quality of the religious life, while the second holds risk and the hope of discovery. Both have assets and liabilities. The first is not our religious tradition as Unitarian Universalists. The second is. 

 

What Thoreau did at Walden Pond was to live the life of experience over philosophy; that is, to practice a form of the spiritual life that is ours. He went there to discover spiritual realities as they are amplified and embodied in the world. He was on a search for the spirit. 

 

Thoreau lived in Concord, Massachusetts, and the First Parish Concord; the Unitarian Church still standing there today, was part of his universe. In the book that bears his experiences he tells how he spent a few years of his life, beginning, appropriately enough, on Independence Day, July 4, 1845: 

 

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. 

 

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., hinted at the larger meanings of Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden, and why it is crucial for us to understand it today: "Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external ... So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: 'Improved means to an unimproved end'." (Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1964) 

 

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. 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. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages… As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. 

 

What are the ends that improved means, of any kind in any society, should be directed? 

 

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. 

 

But how can one do that? How can one learn to reawaken and keep one’s self awake? It is the result of conscious endeavor and the continual practice of “revelation seeking!” It is most in evidence when we take a common part of everyday experience, and plumb its depths for possible meaning. 

 

For example, clothes are as mundane an everyday reality as any, and yet, clothing, like food and shelter, is called one of life’s necessities. Clothes symbolize the world of spiritual realities woven into our experiences. In one of the oldest creation stories, the story of Adam and Eve, clothes play a crucial role, as the first man and woman clothe themselves, cover their nakedness, after they have eaten of the fruit of the tree at the center of the Garden. That is, when they become human they take on outer garments, unlike other animals that unconsciously parade around the world in their birthday suits! Clothes are the symbol of human self-awareness, and often they are the symbol of our willingness to give away that self-awareness to the purported wisdom of some all wise Other: 

 

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates,(13) and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the "they"—"It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now." 

 

To be a practitioner of the spiritual life is to draw from the experiences of everyday a wisdom that compels one to live towards the free fulfillment of creation our relationships to this world aim us towards: 

 

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. 

 

And to live in this kind of spiritual life will require us, require us not to be overcome by our fear of the new day, and not to be overwhelmed by our fear that we ourselves need change, need shed our old opinions and preferences, the pride of self that leads us to hold onto our conclusions long after they have proved useful or true: 

 

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes… Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind. 

 

Author E.B. White, in The Yale Review in 1954, summed up what was the likely intent of Thoreau’s visit to Walden Pond: 

 

Thoreau, very likely without quite knowing what he was up to, took man's relation to nature and man's dilemma in society [Note: taking on the relationships that make us human and free without taking on society’s yoke which makes us slaves to the opinions of others] and man's capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these matters together, in a wild free interval of self-justification and delight, and produced an original omelet from which people can draw nourishment in a hungry day.

• E.B. White, The Yale Review, 1954

Between Walden Pond, the past, the place where Thoreau took a deeper look into his own experience, a century and a half before us, and Lake Michigan, the horizon, the future, where we will go sometime this summer, lies our present. And to see into the deepest parts of our present, our today, the experiences we will have that will fill this day, we need engage our experiences with every ounce of our being, every part of our intellect and our emotion, to live into the spiritual realities the particles of our lives symbolize, is to greet the newness of the day with an intention of drawing from it all, all that it contains. 

 

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. 

 

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

AMEN