SPOKEN MEDITATION

Questionings by Rev. F. H. Hedge

Hath this world, without me wrought,
Other substance than my thought?
Lives it by my sense alone,
Or by essence of its own?
Will its life, with mine begun,
Cease to be when that is done,
Or another consciousness
With the self-same forms impress?

Doth yon fireball, poised in air,
Hang by my permission there?
Are the Clouds that wander by,
But the offspring of mine eye,
Born with every glance I cast,
Perishing when that is past?
And those thousand, thousand eyes,
Scattered through the twinkling skies,
Do they draw their life from mine,
Or, of their own beauty shine?

Now I close my eyes, my ears,
And creation disappears;
Yet if I but speak the word,
All creation is restored.
Or--more wonderful--within,
New creations do begin;
Hues more bright and forms more rare,
Than reality doth wear,
Flash across my inward sense,
Born of the mind's omnipotence.

Soul! That all informest, say!
Shall these glories pass away?
Will those planets cease to blaze,
When these eyes no longer gaze?
And the life of things be o'er,
When these pulses beat no more?

Thought! That in me works and lives,--
Life to all things living gives,--
Art thou not thyself, perchance,
But the universe in trance?
A reflection inly flung
By that world thou fanciedst sprung
From thyself;--thyself a dream;--
Of the world's thinking thou the theme.

Be it thus, or be thy birth
From a source above the earth--
Be thou matter, be thou mind,
In thee alone myself I find,
And through thee alone, for me,
Hath this world reality.
Therefore, in thee will I live,
To thee all myself will give,
Losing still, that I may find,
This bounded self in boundless Mind.

SERMON

At our annual meeting in March, Rev. George Brooks broached the idea of changing the name of this congregation to something other than "Fellowship" because it may have negative connotations for some and thus be keeping people away from entering our doors. Several of our newer members who have lived in the area a number of years did not come because of their associations with the name "Fellowship" of a small lay-led group without a building that does not reflect our congregation today. The title "Fellowship" is not an official Unitarian Universalist Association designation or category. We could call ourselves "The Most High Temple of Abundant Light and Coffee Communion" if it was the desire of the members.

Before changing the name of our congregation, I suggest we review our identity and consider what name best describes who-we-are and wish-to-be in the future. This is an important task for a congregation to consider as so much is expressed in a name. It may be all that someone knows about our religious tradition when they first come into contact with us. This is an important opportunity to think deeply about the nature of this gathering of individuals.

I've chosen the Rev. Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge as a source for reflection on this topic because I believe he speaks to our times which have similarities to the first half of the Nineteenth Century in America. Dr. Hedge was part of the birth of a movement within Unitarianism called Transcendentalism, of which we have a resurgence today in the humanism / spirituality struggle going on in many of our congregations. Transcendentalism took the Unitarian idea of the individual being the arbiter of theological matters and advanced it a giant step by saying that not only could individuals be guided in understanding the scriptures by the use of their rational minds, the individual could experience a direct relationship with the spirit which motivated the writer of the text and actually receive revelation directly.

Transcendentalism was heavily influenced by the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the idealism received at the time through Carlyle[1]. It was Dr. Hedge who brought to the Transcendentalist movement the expertise in German Idealism as a scholar of German literature. Hedge was perhaps the only Unitarian minister who was reading Kant, Schelling, and Hegel in the original German and was able to grasp the depths of their thought and bring it to his colleagues. A man of towering intellect, Dr. Hedge interpreted them within the uniqueness of the American experience, laying the groundwork for this thought to take root on American soil.

Hedge was born in 1805, the son of Levi Hedge, a professor of logic at Harvard[2]. The boy showed immediate scholarly promise by memorizing Virgil at the age of seven (I'll have to see if Andy can do this). At the age of thirteen he was sent in the care of George Bancroft to study in Germany where he learned the language and became immersed in the culture and ideas which would later seed the Transcendentalist movement (I discussed this possibility with Philomena last night and she vetoed it). He returned to study at Harvard in 1822, ending his studies with a Master's of Divinity in 1829. It was in his ministry until 1835 in West Cambridge, writing for the Unitarian journal The Christian Examiner along with Ripley and Brownson that the Transcendentalist movement came into being.

Hedge's talents came most into play in mastering the German metaphysics of the time and interpreting them to the Unitarian literati of Boston. After he was settled in a church in Maine, these folks would meet whenever Hedge was in town. The group was called the Transcendentalist Club by all but Emerson, who was fond of calling it "Hedge's Club". It is a little bit of a mystery why Hedge didn't become better known and remembered by historians for all his contributions. Carlyle's description of him with "A face like a rock, a voice like a howitzer; only his honest kind grey eyes reassure you a little," suggests he wasn't a very affable fellow. One of the reasons I'd like to assert this morning he may not have been remembered was because his vision of Transcendentalism didn't divorce him from the mainstream Unitarian church and thus did not cast him so much into the public eye as Emerson or Theodore Parker.

The Transcendentalists can be easily compared with the hippies of the 60's. Both were caught up in a romanticism that rejected societal convention, rejected the mundane materialism of economic life, and questioned norms and traditions. They both rejected the advancement of technology as the solution to societal ills. They both looked to the here and now for emotional and spiritual satisfaction, shunning the sense of duty and deferred gratification of their elders. Some of the rebirth of interest in Transcendentalism has come from these aging hippies turned academics. The first generation of Unitarian leaders looked on these folks as ungrateful inheritors of their splendid inspiration.

At the center of Transcendentalism was the individual who could have direct connection with the divine rather than mediated through the sacred texts or revelations of previous prophets. They believed that the same Holy Spirit which inspired ancient authors was available to the receptive person today. In fact, initiation in the experience of this Spirit was necessary to even understand their writings and ideas which infuriated their critics. Rather than conforming thought to traditional views, they advocated the inner work of self-culture to explore their inner realms. This kind of personal mysticism opened a new world to them of discovery which sent them off in divergent directions.

Dr. Hedge felt that the development of the self was the most important contribution one could make to society. The critics called this selfishness, but Hedge responded:

Whatever selfishness there may seem to be in such a discipline as this, exists only in appearance…In self-culture lies the ground and condition of all culture. Not those, who seem most earnest in promoting the culture of Society, do most effectually promote it. We have reformers in abundance, but few who, in the end, will be found to have aided essentially the cause of human improvement; either because they have failed to illustrate in themselves the benefits they wished to confer, and the lesson they wished to inculcate, or because there is a tendency in mankind to resist overt efforts to guide and control them…The only efficient power, in the moral world, is attraction. Society is more benefitted by one sincere life, by seeing how one man has helped himself, than by all the projects that human policy has devised for their salvation.[3]

This emphasis on individual self-culture and idealism didn't fit well with revealed religious traditions. It placed a high importance on personal feeling and interpretation, which helped drive Emerson from the ministry. It was his intellectual rejection of the tradition of serving communion which forced him to leave. Dr. Hedge, on the other hand, had a quite different understanding of religious tradition which allowed him to remain loyal to his tradition and eventually serve as president of the Unitarians.

Dr. Hedge was able to do this because in all the different sects of Christianity he saw the Holy Spirit working. He was one of the first to advocate an ecumenical movement envisioning all churches being united, not with a visible Pope, confession, dogma or liturgy, but rather an invisible center of Spirit which would join them all. Jesus wasn't a descended God but a pure man fully infused with the Spirit the Transcendentalists could still contact. Not only had that Spirit of God become incarnate as Jesus, it continued on through the life of the Church - in all its many diverse sects.

Hedge understood this Spirit as something formless, a impulse, a possibility which was always working. He recognized that different minds and different cultures would embrace different understandings of this Spirit. This was acceptable because of the fundamentally creative nature of this Spirit - even in what we perceive as error! Thus any historical expression of Spirit was both true and limited to that time and place. This dynamic Spirit is growing through the organ of the Church, its visible expression and body.

Thus to cut oneself off from the Church is to abandon this visible expression and body of the Spirit. Although Hedge believed that Jesus most perfectly embodied this Spirit of God, he didn't rule out its expression in non-Christian religions. Certainly that Spirit was to be found in Judaism. But Hedge saw an evolution of expression of Spirit happening which matched the social evolution of humanity. The revelation became clearer as we were better able to understand it. In that evolutionary process, something unique was being expressed through Unitarianism. Hedge put it this way to the Harvard Divinity School graduating class:

What we want to maintain and diffuse is not a more rational theology but a broader charity. It is not the Hebrew Christian doctrine of simplicity in the Divine Nature in opposition to the Greek Christian of triunity; it is not the Pelagian doctrine of free agency, in opposition to the Augustianian doctrine of free grace; it is not the Socinian doctrine of personal merit, in opposition to the Calvinistic doctrine of imputation; nor is it, to come nearer our true theological position, the reconciliation of these antitheses in more adequate statements….what we want to diffuse is not these, but a charity which respects all confessions as different hues of the same Word; a piety which indifferences them all by soaring above them into a region of the spirit, where truth is not yet refracted into propositions by passing through the denser atmosphere of the understanding. Above all we want to diffuse a practical Christianity, which seeks the application of Christian morals to human life; a Christianity which puts life before doctrine[4].

Dr. Hedge presented this theory in his President's address to the Unitarians in 1860 titled "The Broad Church." Using the text from Luke 8:29, "And they shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the north and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God," he explained that the church as four dimensions "typifying different tendencies and qualities of the spirit,-- the east, stability, conservatism; the west, mobility, progress; the north, internal activity, the inner life, idealism, mysticism; the south, exterior productiveness, ritualism, symbolism, ecclesiastical organization." All of these dimensions are present in the Gospels and must be honored. All these dimensions are present in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Medieval Church, the Protestant Church. The trouble with the Protestant church was not that these elements were not present but that they were not present in one church:

Protestant Christendom is bounded on the east by the Rocky Mountains of immovable Orthodoxy, on the west by the River of Free Inquiry, on the north by the White Sea of Mysticism, on the south by the Gulf of Prelacy, which divides it from the Church of Rome. In other words, Calvinism at one extremity, and Universalism at the other, Quakerism and Spiritualism on this hand, and Episcopacy on that, define this spiritual kingdom and attest its completeness…it is one of the evils of Protestantism that, internally and practically, it is not a whole but a chaos of disunited, independent states, having no ecclesiastical fellowship with one another[5].

Dr. Hedge rebelled against this parochialism insisting that we needed all these dimensions in our Unitarian (and now Universalist) faith. Just selecting one or two would not give the Spirit enough elbow room to come fully to life, to incarnation in the congregation.

As we consider the name of our Fellowship, I think it would be wise to reflect on Dr. Hedge's ideas of Church. This Fellowship was founded, one might say, in the west, the River of Free Inquiry. The other three directions were hardly present at all. Resistance to them was mighty. But the desire for a minister betrayed an interest in these other directions. Now, with a minister in place, we have flirted with these other directions. I bring a much stronger connection for the congregation to our association of Churches and the ritual, traditions, history and heritage of Unitarianism and Universalism. Being young, I bring a stronger connection to the mystical movements of our time. Being trained in seminary and indoctrinated by the UUA, I bring a sense of the orthodoxy, the political correct, the Boston party line with me as well. This is a lot of change and I hope you appreciate I've been cautious when and where to introduce these changes and ideas. My hope is the development of these four directions rather than just one has created a more satisfying experience of involvement in this congregation.

Changing the name of the Fellowship is a way of recognizing these changes and affirming the shift in identity which is now happening slowly. By changing our name we can announce to the community our intention to be a more complete religious community. All this can be part of the motivation to present a new image of ourselves to the community and to each other.

Dr. Hedge was a radical in his thinking for his day having great foresight to call for the ecumenical movement which gains strength today. But his Transcendentalism didn't separate him from his congregation he served or his religious tradition. Yes, we have differences in how the Spirit speaks to us through our feelings, preferences and ideas; Yes, we have differences in even believing that there is a Spirit at all at work in us. If we can begin to appreciate the manifestation of Spirit in each other as valid, however we understand what gives inspiration and meaning to our lives, we have the basis for Hedge's broad religious movement in which we participate as Unitarian Universalists. That broadness is not just in the variation between congregations but also the affirmation of the variation within our congregations.

To be whole we need to affirm the four directions of religious life, for they are within us as well. I encourage us to keep and ponder all this in our hearts as we consider what we should call ourselves in the future, as the Spirit continues to manifest within our congregation.

Copyright (c) 1996 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.