Tracing the Transcendentalists in Italy
Written by Jenny M. Rankin Sunday, 07 June 2009 00:00
Call to Worship
Last March, 21 of us travelled from Concord to Italy to trace the steps of the Transcendentalists who had journeyed there 150 years ago.
We trod in the footsteps of people like Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Sophia Peabody, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. We walked where they walked and saw the great art and ruins that they saw.
But our journey was more than a literal, physical one.
We tried to see with what Wordsworth called the inward or spiritual eye as we think the Transcendentalists might have done on their voyage so long ago.
This morning in worship we invite you to join us as we share with you something of this spiritual journey of discovery and awakening.
Let us begin with these words of Henry David Thoreau who never went overseas but liked to say he had travelled much in Concord!
“Nothing must be postponed.
Take time by the forelock.
Now or never!
You must live in the present,
launch yourself on every wave,
Find your eternity in each moment.”
(From henry David Thoreau, Journals, 1859)
Reflection
I remember a WPA luncheon years ago. We ate delicious chicken pie and listened to a speaker talk about transition. About how to navigate times of change in our lives. She said a lot of things but the one that stuck with me: the importance of pleasure during times of transition.
Pleasure. One of the first things to go when life gets stressed or difficult. She talked about how even small pleasures—a cup of good coffee, a walk in the fresh air—can be important in getting us through.
I thought of her words this week as I was reflecting on our trip to Italy. This spring, my mother’s sudden and serious illness cast a shadow on our family’s life, and in the midst of that, the trip to Italy was 10 days of pure pleasure. My travelling companions, art, architecture, history, religion, Transcendentalism, more and more to learn and see every day. I believe it has fed me in ways that are not always visible but are spiritually real nonetheless.
“Dwell near the perennial source of life,” Thoreau wrote “as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.”
The perennial source of life. What gives you life? Wakes you up? Lights you up? It is different for each one of us. Thoreau is telling us to find the spiritual water that nourishes us and then stay close to it.
For me, once source of life is learning. I don’t just mean “book learning” I mean a journey. I mean the discovery of people and ideas and spiritual questions or insights that I have never before encountered.
The idea for this journey began during a sabbatical that you gave me 3 years ago. I decided to visit my brother who lives in Rome. At the same time I had become drawn to Robert Richardson’s portrait of Emerson as a young man, actually a broken young man.
Some of you remember this part of the story: how in the space of just a few short years, Emerson lost his first wife to tuberculosis, resigned from the ministry, felt his lungs deteriorating. He was cut loose from all that mattered to him, adrift for a time.
Emerson, not the famous cultural icon, the Emerson who sits in granite splendor in our library, but a young man who was lost, who was trying to find his way back to health and wholeness.
And then, he heard of a ship sailing from Boston for Italy.
He bought a ticket, moved his mother, put his furniture up for sale at auction.
And on Christmas Day 1832, as a nor’easter tore into Boston Harbor, Emerson turned his face into the wind and his eyes toward the horizon, standing at the rail on deck as the ship sailed out to open sea. He was beginning a journey that would take him far from home, to a world of ancient cultures and art he had never before experience, a world that would help to shape his thinking and writing over the next 50 years.
I resonated with this young man because I’ve known rough passages in my life
And I knew you did too because I’ve listened to your stories. Whether it is illness or divorce or loss, there are all sorts of ways that life confronts us with the unknowable, the unthinkable, and sometimes the seemingly undoable.
What is it that gets us through? What is that mysterious power inside of us or that grace comes from outside of us when we least expect it, and have given up sometimes all hope?
I remember the first night that our little band of travellers gathered in a circle in Stephanie’s living room. I told them what I’ve just told you about Emerson as a young man and why his story spoke to me, not as a big famous person but as the lost young man.
I remember sitting there, looking around at the circle, seeing the faces and remembering what I knew of the stories that were in that room. Stories of losing a spouse too soon, living with illness, navigating divorce, losing a job. I realized that we were a collection of people that had weathered all sorts of things.
So we were going to trace the steps of this fragile young man, but there was within us also a bit of that same fragility. We took with us a hint of vulnerability, uncertainty, anxiety. This wasn’t just some historical quest we were on, this was in some ways for many of us a very personal and spiritual journey.
It was Byron who wrote (in a poem all these Transcendentalists learned by heart)
“Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee”
The “orphans of the heart.” There are times in all of our lives when we can feel like orphans of the heart.
Paradoxically, I believe it was those wounded places inside of us that made us somehow more open to the beauty and pleasure that we would receive in Italy.
Beauty eases sorrow. So we can only imagine that beauty eased Emerson’s soul as it did our’s. We can only imagine that Italy’s beauty and people spoke to Margaret Fuller’s troubled soul
This woman who had ambition and a formidable intellect but in Boston in the 1820s could find no place for herself. She had a calling but no context for her calling as an intellect, a mind to reckon with, a power.
There was no path for women like her in that day and age and so she had done the best she could, running her Conversation classes, teaching, making friends with Harvard Divinity students like James Freeman Clarke and Emerson.
But it was in Italy, that she finally felt at home. “how true was the lure that drew me to Europe,” she wrote, “if only I had come 10 years earlier.” It is the right soil for me to grow, she said. For the first time ever in her life, her soul felt truly at home. She had work as a journalist she loved, a man and baby to cherish.
We don’t’ know exactly what happened to Emerson on his voyage to Italy but we do know what happened when he got home. How he made a whole new life for himself, getting married, settling in Concord, starting a new profession. We do know that it was on the ship home from Liverpool that he put pen to paper and wrote the first words of his little book Nature that would catapult him to fame and Transcendentalist ideas to the public’s attention.
In Europe, Emerson had stood in the presence of great art and ancient cultures but rather than be intimidated by it, or try to copy it, it had somehow helped him remember the greatness that was inside his own soul. He came back to America, no longer a lost young man, but one that would help this new country create its own literature and culture, not by trying to become another Europe but by discovering what was uniquely and powerfully American.
Emerson would come home to teach a generation and more about finding the power that lies within each one of us, the spiritual power that only you possess. When we align ourselves with the energy of the universe, with the Oversoul, we can tap into that power and truly live life with energy and grace.
Whether we travel many miles or prefer like Thoreau to explore our own inner latitudes from right here at home, what matters is that we keep on with the journey. That we continue to seek, to learn, to question, to grow. To find what lights us up, what brings us joy, and then to dwell near those sources of life, that spiritual vitality which like an underground spring can feed us even when we forget it is there.
I look forward to more of these journeys with you, spiritual pilgrimages here in Concord and far away in other lands, which feed our minds and hearts and souls, which give us joy, and help us grow and change in ways we never could have foreseen, which make us spiritually stronger. We can never foresee what next chapter life will bring us, but we know we will need the spiritual fortitude for all that we encounter.