OUT OF THE WOODS

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

September 10, 2006

READING

From “Conclusion” in Walden by Henry David Thoreau
I learned this, at least, from my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

SERMON

It was on a September morning such as this more than a century and a half ago that Henry David Thoreau gathered up his few belongings and left a small cabin he had built and occupied for two years in the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts, never to return. Having just turned 30 years of age, Thoreau was anxious to see about getting a couple of writing projects that he’d been working on into print, and his friend and benefactor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had invited Thoreau to stay in his home in Concord to provide company for his wife, Lydian, as Emerson prepared to leave for his second tour of Europe.

It was a good time to leave in any event. With fall approaching and the blustery nights of a New England winter ahead of him, Thoreau couldn’t help but think of the comforts of hearth and home and the society of friends, even as crusty and idiosyncratic a fellow as he may have been. But there was more than just convenience, comfort, or ambition that drove Thoreau’s decision. “My purpose in going to Walden Pond,” he wrote early in his book Walden, “was not to live cheaply nor to live life dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles.”

Today as we gather for the start of a new church year I’d like to reflect a little on Thoreau’s “business” and how that might inform some of the “business” we are about in this church. Each of us here has experienced our own woods – places that are to varying degrees cool and contemplative or tangled with briars and low-hanging branches. Sooner or later, though, if we are to fulfill who it is we were meant to be, to reach the peace we seek, we must find our way out of the woods. We must find a way to bring all that we have, our insight and reverie as well as our confusion and pain, into a common space where it might be put to service, to find the embrace of a community where we might be affirmed and upheld, a place that opens the way to wisdom, compassion and understanding.

Thoreau’s Walden became an icon almost from the day it was published. The project appealed to a popular romantic vision at the time of the self-reliant individual, of utopian escapes from a rapidly industrializing economy. In the two years prior to Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond 33 new utopian communities were founded in the United States, several of them, such as Brook Farm, Fruitlands and Hopedale, led by Unitarians or Universalists.

These days Thoreau has become in many people’s minds this curious figure frozen in time, sitting at his idyll alongside Walden Pond, observing the ants and woodchucks and dismissing his neighbors and their lives of, in his words, “quiet desperation.” It’s worth remembering, though, how he framed his project: “I went in the woods,” he wrote, “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.” He intended not to retreat or withdraw, but to advance, to find a new beginning in his life, to awaken to what was truly important in life.

Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond, for all his talk of self-reliance, was hardly an experiment in self-sufficiency. The land where he built his cabin was available only because Emerson had bought it less than a year before and made it available to him. He borrowed tools, had help raising the frame of his cabin and obtained the materials for it by purchasing a rundown shack. And while Thoreau did plow a field and plant beans and corn, he was also a frequent dinner guest at the home of his parents and friends. His travels during that time included a two-week trip to Maine. Nor was he unfamiliar with the affairs of the day in the town. It was while he was living in his cabin at Walden Pond that he was arrested for evading taxes and spent his famous night in jail.

What his cabin in the woods gave him was the opportunity to center his attention and to simplify. “Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!” he wrote. Ambling down leafy paths, watching the lake ice crack and heave, tracking the arrival of songbirds and the emergence of ferns gave him first-hand acquaintance with the most fundamental of facts.

“Let us settle ourselves,” he wrote, “and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice, and tradition and delusion and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place which we can reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.”

After casting about for much of his adult life, Thoreau for the first time found a focus, and it gave him time not only to acquaint himself with the natural world around him, but also to do some of the most productive writing of his life. Each day, each walk presented him with some new discovery. As a result, he wrote, “My life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.” Little wonder that his writing resonated, and still resonates with so many people, so that Walden Pond itself has become something of a pilgrimage site for those feeling the need of some deliberate living.

I made my own pilgrimage to Walden Pond almost exactly three years ago. Debbie and I had come to Boston for my interview with the ministerial fellowship committee, the threshold test for anyone seeking to enter the Unitarian Universalist ministry. I had done well in the interview and so my brother Terry, who lived nearby, offered to take us out to Concord.

Walden Pond is now surrounded by parkland and is a favored swimming spot for many locals. Thoreau’s cabin is long gone, but a replica of the tiny structure has been erected near the road with a statue of Thoreau nearby. Debbie was disappointed that I wouldn’t pose for a photo giving Henry a kiss. The actual spot of the cabin is a good hike around to the far side of the pond from the swimming area, marked by a small sign and a pile of stones that visitors have left over the years. I hunted around and tossed a stone on as well. The area is grown over with mature deciduous trees, so it’s a little hard to imagine Thoreau’s vista of the pond bordered by young pines.

It was a memorable day, though I have to say I expect Thoreau would have snorted at the spectacle. Mary Oliver had it right: “Going to Walden is not so easy a thing as a green visit. It is the slow and difficult trick of living, and finding it where you are.”

The point of Walden was not to encourage visits to Walden Pond or the New England woods. It was to invite its readers to a new way of understanding their own lives wherever they may be. In Walden Thoreau tells the story of a traveler who asked a boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. When the visitor’s horse sank up to the girths he called out to the boy, “I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.” “So it has,” the boy answered, “but you have not got halfway to it yet.” So it is with many of the bogs of society, Thoreau observed, and yet there is always a solid bottom to be found. Though no preacher, Thoreau was among the Transcendentalist writers of the mid 19th century who transformed the Unitarian church with their insistence that individual experience be recognized as the basis of religious understanding.

We may learn much from the scriptures, prophets and teachers of old, he wrote, but “God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.”

We mistake Thoreau’s message, though, if we leave him as the rugged individualist tramping through the woods. His reverie at Walden Pond was a means to something larger, not an end in itself. What he learned, he tells us, is that if one lives the life one has imagined, fronted the essential facts of life, one might pass some invisible boundary, the boundary of our own self-concern, and find a larger life with deeper compassion, with wider vision, with greater integrity.

There is no limit to what the world might teach us, he argued, but ultimately the hardest part of the journey is the struggle we endure within, the moral universe we explore with faded maps and uncertain compasses. And exploring that territory, Thoreau learned, means leaving the woods, choosing to enter and engage with the larger world. Thoreau followed such a path in his own life. After his years at Walden Pond, though he never ended his habits of daily walks of many miles across the countryside, Thoreau devoted new energy to issues of moral courage.

One of the first pieces he wrote on leaving Walden Pond was his famous essay “On Civil Disobedience,” which Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. cited as a strong influence. He also became active in the abolitionist movement: organizing, writing, lecturing and working with the Underground Railroad.

In this church, we invite you to explore the forests of your own spirit, wherever you may find them, to follow those paths that feed your heart’s and mind’s hunger. But then we also ask you to come out of the woods, to put your passion, your wisdom, your vision to work in this place that we may be a community of fellow seekers and agents of freedom, tolerance and compassion in the world.

Now, the truth is we have not always been good at all that. Last year at the Service of the Living Tradition at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Rev. Patrick O’Neill noted sadly that in recent decades many liberal churches have withdrawn in a kind of Thoreauvian fashion to safe enclaves where they keep to themselves and tend their own private hurts and woes. They have checked out of the moral debates raging in this country, leaving the field to a determined few with very different perspectives.

It is time, O’Neill argued, and I agree, that we leave our idylls and join the game, that we put ourselves in a position to shape the agenda and help frame the terms of the debate. Thoreau was very clear: There is nothing wrong with dreaming of a better way. But, having built our castles in the air, it is time to put foundations under them.

We do that in our lives and in our community together through the commitments we make and keep, commitments that we as a community have centered in the covenant that joins us as people of many faith perspectives to work together in the spirit of hope and love. It takes place in acts of outreach and of inner growth, in raising our voices and risking discomfort and in seeking out and learning to follow the paths that help us deepen our faith.

The woods have long been a powerful image in the religious life. It was to the wilderness that Jesus went to reflect and discover the ministry that he was to bring to the world. It was in the forest that Gautama had the awakening that made him the Buddha.

Simplify! Simplify! Encounter the world and shed the preachments that keep you from your spirit’s path. Attend to that which opens and deepens you. Distill it, test it, engage it. Then, come out of the woods into the circle of light and love where you belong.

Many of the oldest sacred stories, older than those of organized religions, those handed down by the pagani, or country people, are reflected in the nursery rhymes of our childhood. Though tamed and sweetened, they still carry hints of their early power, and many of them also center on encounters in the woods that have some transforming effect: Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Snow White and so on.

Some years ago Stephen Sondheim wrote a musical, “Into the Woods,” that wove together about a half dozen of these stories that, as we know, all end with the peaceful assurance that the protagonists lived happily ever after. Sondheim pushes the stories to ask what might happen after those happy endings and makes the case that, whatever stories we weave about our lives, our destinies are linked. We need one another. And that is not simply an inescapable fact that we have to put up with, but in truth is our salvation. The saving truth of our lives is that we are not alone.

Yes, life leaves us to chart our paths, at times navigating a straight way, at times stumbling. We seek guidance and are disappointed, learn lessons from unexpected places. In the end, we decide what’s right, we decide what’s good. But it’s hard: So many choices and conflicting demands and no clear way before us, and no unimpeachable authority to show it to us. We are left to depend on our own hope and integrity and that of a community of people who honor and respect one another, a community grounded in respect and love.

Each of us has a forest to explore full of risk and adventure, learning and awakening, but our journey does not end there. We are ultimately called back to the world from which we emerged. It is there we learn who we were meant to be and what we were meant to do. We each bring unique gifts and imaginings, singular awareness and understanding, but it is in sharing those gifts and that understanding and opening ourselves to receive, extending our awareness beyond the boundaries of self that we are realized.

And as it is with our gifts, so it is with our despair. We need not carry the full weight of our failures, disappointments and loss. Together we learn compassion for each other and the difficulties we endure, and we find the strength to start over. Wherever our journeys take us, we are present to support one another in our struggles. No one is alone.

As we start a new church, let this be a place where we live the life of our imagining, where we are present to each other and the moral challenges before us.

Welcome back!