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<\/a>\nDREAMING EMILY<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
A Sermon by
\nJames Ishmael Ford<\/p>\n
26 February 2012
\nFirst Unitarian Church
\nProvidence, Rhode Island<\/p>\n
Text<\/em><\/p>\n 1263 Jan and I don\u2019t get out a whole lot. Just the way things are. But, we do some, and it has had a lovely a cumulative quality, marking our hearts in many ways. I vividly recall our walk through the Cambridge cemetery visiting the James family, with a side trip to stand before the great UU theologian James Luther Adams. A similar visit to the poet\u2019s corner at the Concord cemetery, standing with Thoreau and Emerson and many others just thrilled me to the core. Following my first visit to Walden Pond, I\u2019ve returned, pretty much several times a year to circumambulate the pond and meditate on our tradition and what it can mean. Over time it has come together and blends and makes something lovely about our living here in dear old New England.<\/p>\n Among those places we return to and have become part of our lives, Jan and I try to get out to the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires at least once a year. There\u2019s a lot to experience. Although possibly the most moving moment for us was the time we walked through Emily Dickinson\u2019s home in Amherst. I think of her as one of the wise ones. And, today, as you may have noticed, thanks to Fred and the choir we\u2019re celebrating Emily, her whole life, all of it, wise, sad and even occasionally silly.<\/p>\n Think of this as a meditation, a revery.<\/p>\n 1755 (choir)<\/p>\n As our own Mel Shelly observed, she is as \u201cAmerican as any American poet, and just as complex\u2028and just as haunted as Whitman or Emerson, or as her misunderstood soul mates Frost and Sandberg.\u201d In fact I think Dickinson sings into our hearts our uniquely American spiritual quest, and among all the other things about her, is someone we can profitably attend to as a community of liberal faith. Except for a brief interval during her childhood, a time of financial hardship where the family lived in another house in Amherst, Emily lived her entire life in the house where she was born. Much has been made of her propensity to wear white, but no one knows for sure what it actually meant to her. Increasingly reclusive, for her last two decades she rarely left her home even to cross the yard to visit her beloved sister-in-law. Still she had a small circle of friends centering on her sisters and brother and just a couple of others. They would prove invaluable in preserving and presenting her poetry to the world following her death in May 1886.<\/p>\n She wrote her first poem at nineteen. When she died a few months short of fifty-six, Emily had published seven poems, or maybe ten, my sources for this differ. Interestingly of that tiny number whatever it actually was, several were in fact printed without her consent. She did not write for the general public. Nonetheless she was prolific; she was the author of 1,775 known poems as well as about 1,100 letters. Like many, pretty nearly all poets she wrote in any number of voices. So, it is a dangerous task to pick a few of her poems and to assert they reflect her thinking. But preachers are often willing to go where angels and indeed the prudent fear to tread. <\/p>\n 1106 These are the rites of Nature\u2019s House \u2013 For Sureties of her staunch Estate She was baptized into the Congregational church as an infant, but never had that \u201cquickening of the spirit,\u201d the experience of Jesus\u2019 unique saving grace that allowed her full membership in that orthodox Calvinist congregation. Rather, like so many of us in this Meeting House, she found her salvation in nature and the vast expanses of the human mind. Over the years she\u2019s been claimed by many including with some justice our own Unitarian Universalist tradition, our claim to Emily resting on her close association with the Transcendentalist movement. However, she was not strictly speaking a Transcendentalist, as she joined no club or church. Not unlike many of us here, I suspect.<\/p>\n She read Emerson and Thoreau and admired them. Indeed Emerson read her in manuscript, and expressed his own considerable admiration for her thinking as well as her abilities as a poet. Without a doubt she walked in that august crowd of nature mystics at the heart of our way. And, push come to shove, it is hard to describe her theology as anything but Transcendentalist. <\/p>\n 598 The Brain is deeper than the sea \u2013 The Brain is just the weight of God \u2013 Here I feel we find common ground not only with her as a Transcendentalist and therefore a more or less direct spiritual ancestor of ours, but also as a living exemplar of our peculiar, mysterious and beautiful contemporary spirituality. <\/p>\n Here is, I think, the secret of our way. Our human body, our human mind, if we allow it full, thinking and feeling, its simple mysterious presence; is all we need to know that which saves, that which heals, that which can be called holy. You and I are the gates of the divine. Our eyes the eyes with which God sees. Our hands God\u2019s opportunity to act in this world. You and me, poor, incomplete, stumbling, foolish and grasping, we are the hope of the world. Emily sings that hope, and we, at our best are living it.<\/p>\n Emily\u2019s way, and ours into that hope is through fierce honesty. And in doing so she transforms the small into the great, you and me from our foolishness into our sacred potential. Another commentator on Emily\u2019s way, Krystyna Grocolski, suggests that fierce honesty is part of her spiritual tool-kit, which also included \u201cSelf-analysis, self-discipline, and self-critique (as) the tools of her search.\u201d All of which we should attend to, so I repeat them: honesty, self-analysis, self-discipline and self-criticism. Here Emily shows us how we can engage in our own search for our true heritage, our natural home. I say this because I believe she found it for herself and points to it for us. Listen to how she deals with death and life, loss and longing, and the whole great mess, the dark and the light intertwining.<\/p>\n 355 It was not Frost, for on my Flesh And yet it tasted like them all, As if my life were shaven When everything that ticked \u2014 has stopped But most like Chaos \u2013 stopless \u2013 cool \u2014 (choir)<\/p>\n As Emily sings to us,<\/p>\n Not \u201cRevelation\u201d \u2013 \u2018tis \u2013 that waits, I have no doubt Emily found those unfurnished eyes. And because of that she can be our teacher on our own quest. This is a quest for the authentic, for the real, for the sacred ordinary. This is the path of Unitarian Universalism. Or, it certainly can be.<\/p>\n Her last written words appear to be in a note composed just before she slipped into a terminal coma: \u201cCalled back.\u201d I suggest her whole life was a calling back to our true home, calling back to our true joy. And, dear sister Emily, our teacher calls us back, calls us over the ages and generations to that same home, that same joy.<\/p>\n May each of us seek it.<\/p>\n And may each of us find it.<\/p>\n Amen.<\/p>\n
\nTell all the truth but tell it slant \u2013
\nSuccess in Circuit lies
\nToo bright for our infirm Delight
\nThe Truth\u2019s superb surprise
\nAs Lightning to the Children eased
\nWith explanation kind
\nThe Truth must dazzle gradually
\nOr every man be blind \u2013<\/p>\n
\nTo make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee \u2014
\nOne clover, and a bee.
\nAnd revery.
\nThe revery alone will do,
\nIf bees are few.<\/p>\n
\nI hope you\u2019ll indulge me the briefest of biographical details. Emily Dickinson was born in December 1830, to a prominent Amherst family. She spent a year at Mount Holyoke under the tutelage of its founder the remarkable Mary Lyons, but could not adjust for many reasons, including the fervent Evangelical Christianity that was constantly preached there, and so returned home after two semesters. Emily traveled very little, a brief stint in Washington with her father during his single term as a US congressman, some time in Cambridge for medical treatment, and not a lot more than that.<\/p>\n
\nThese are the Signs to Nature\u2019s Inns \u2013
\nHer invitation broad
\nTo whosoever famishing
\nTo taste her mystic Bread \u2013<\/p>\n
\nThe Hospitality
\nThat opens with an equal width
\nTo Beggar and to Bee<\/p>\n
\nHer undecaying Cheer
\nThe Purple in the East is set
\nAnd in the North, the Star \u2013<\/p>\n
\nThe Brain \u2013 is wider than the Sky
\nFor \u2013 put them side by side \u2013
\nThe one the other will contain
\nWith ease \u2013 and You \u2013 beside \u2013<\/p>\n
\nFor \u2013 hold them \u2013 Blue to Blue \u2013
\nThe one the other will absorb \u2013
\nAs Sponges \u2013 Buckets \u2013 do \u2013<\/p>\n
\nFor \u2013 Heft them \u2013 Pound for Pound \u2013
\nAnd they will differ \u2013 if they do \u2013
\nAs Syllable from Sound \u2013<\/p>\n
\nIt was not Death, for I stood up,
\nAnd all the dead lie down \u2014
\nIt was not Night, for all the bells
\nPut out their Tongues for Noon.<\/p>\n
\nI felt Siroccos \u2013 crawl \u2014
\nNor Fire \u2014 for just my marble feet
\nCould keep a Chancel, cool.<\/p>\n
\nThe Figures I have seen
\nSet orderly for Burial,
\nReminded me of mine \u2014<\/p>\n
\nAnd fitted to a frame,
\nAnd could not breathe without a key;
\nAnd \u2018twas like Midnight, some \u2014<\/p>\n
\nAnd space stares \u2014 all around \u2014
\nOr grisly frosts \u2014 first Autumn morns,
\nRepeal the Beating Ground \u2014<\/p>\n
\nWithout a chance, or spar \u2014
\nOr even a Report of Land \u2014
\nTo justify \u2014 Despair.<\/p>\n
\nBut our unfurnished eyes \u2013<\/p>\n