Reading: from Henry David Thoreau:A Man for All Seasons by Douglas T. Miller, pp. 7-9

[On July 4, 1845, Harvard educated, 27-year old Henry Thoreau moved into the cabin he had built with his own hands in Concord’s Walden Woods, in the part of it owned by Emerson.] “Thoreau’s aim was not to escape civilization, but to simplify it….He wrote, ‘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.’

….Though he enjoyed solitude and reveled in his new-found freedom at Walden, he had no desire to be a hermit. His house, which lay in sight of the road, was in easy walking distance of the village, and seldom did a day pass without Thoreau either visiting his family and friends in Concord or entertaining visitors at his pondside hut. Each Saturday his mother and sisters made a special trip to the pond, invariably bringing with them a welcome home-cooked meal and on occasion clean laundry. Emerson and his family were also frequent visitors, as were the Alcotts and Channings….

In warm weather the cabin became a favorite spot of picnics with sometimes as many as 25 of the townsfolk present. . .During his second year at the pond, he hosted a meeting of the Concord Women’s Anti-Slavery Society. Called to commemorate the freeing of the West Indian slaves, those assembled heard several speeches, including one by Emerson. The meeting ended with a pond side picnic lunch.

Thoreau’s own meals, when he was not entertaining or dining out with friends, tended to be simple. He was largely a vegetarian, though he did enjoy fresh fish that he occasionally caught from the pond and nearby rivers, and once, angered at a woodchuck that had been devouring his garden, he killed and ate the animal, finding the meat quite tasty…..(!!!)

Despite his active social life, Thoreau enjoyed long periods of solitude. He spent most of this time reading, writing and tending his garden, but above all else he loved to commune with nature.”

Sermon

A few evenings ago, Leo and I watched a PBS special on John Lennon. It was shocking to revisit the era of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI spying on both ordinary citizens and any artists who opposed the Vietnam War. It was the early 1970’s. Lennon was a major attraction to any peace event. In an interview, he said that the U.S. government wanted him out of the country because he was a peacenick. A peacenick! I had forgotten the term.

We watched horrified as police, dressed in black combat uniform and carrying truncheons, beat young protestors mercilessly, worthy of any south American dictatorship. I was a protestor myself though I was never beaten. I had forgotten! We thought we were prophets of a new age. It raised up for me once more the excesses of unprincipled and unbridled government.

I wonder how Henry Thoreau would have reacted. Young Henry was born on July 17, 1817. His family was very poor and while their businesses failed, they had extended-family living with them and they took in other borders. It was a crowded, lively home whose female members were intensely active in the Concord Women’s anti-Slavery Society. Because Henry was a brilliant scholar, they made great financial sacrifices for him to attend Harvard. Henry read in Greek, Latin, German, French, and Spanish. He either spent every minute he could in the library of Harvard College or out along the Charles River with his other love—Nature.

Thoreau thought he had found true religion in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s book called Nature. He had. The Concord intellectuals turned away from institutionalized Unitarianism, merged German idealism and Scottish philosophy and called it Transcendentalism. They found divinity and the religious impulse in Nature.

Thoreau was not held in high esteem by the people of Concord village for he held radical views about government, the institution of slavery, and the annexing of Texas, thus extending the territories of slavery. Unitarians formed many reform groups, some that still exist today, like the Tuckerman Coalition. But Henry was averse to joining anything. He urged the individual to act according to his conscience. He wrote and delivered at adult education gatherings, called lyceums, scathing essays against slavery. When he was to speak in a local church, conservative members refused to ring the bell to announce his presence. Thoreau pushed them aside and rang the bell himself. He spoke out against war, employment reform, and racial prejudice. He helped runaway slaves escape to Canada, hid them in his home, and was a “conductor” on the Underground Railway. He helped escaped slaves even when he was at Walden Pond. It was his support of the abolitionist John Brown that brought him the greatest notoriety.< br>
Henry stopped paying taxes in protest of all that the government was doing that he considered unjust. When he left his cabin in Walden one day and went into the village of Concord, the tax collector asked Henry to pay his taxes that were overdue. Henry declined and the tax collector reluctantly put him in jail. He was there only one night and one of his aunts paid his tax, which Henry wished she would not do.

All of this made him think of the relationship of the people to the government; in response, he wrote an essay called, “Resistance to Civil Government,” which was published after his death as “Civil Disobedience.” Henry’s point was that the individual should ponder things and that conscience, the higher faculty, should guide action. It concerned him that at the government level, conscience did not govern, greed did. If conscience did govern, then there would be no slavery, war, inhumane conditions for workers, and so on. Not paying taxes deprived an unjust government of the means to do injustice. He knew it was an ideal. His point was that people needed to think for themselves; the dilemma was how to have conscience guide the nation.

Thoreau would rather have pondered Nature and things philosophical and just write about it and he did this but he could not stand by and see injustice reign. He was like the prophets of ancient Israel who dedicated their lives to proclaim justice and call the people back to it. It cost him the woman he loved for no father would allow such a radical into their family. Though some of his many literary works were published in his lifetime, they were considered too pantheistic—the divine in Nature and not Christian; he was ignored. His friends, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson, supported him by hiring him to do handyman work. He was a constant companion to the Emerson children and to Mrs. Emerson when Waldo traveled. Children loved him.

Unlike the ancient prophets, Thoreau was convinced that human beings needed to renew and purify themselves in nature and he advocated preserving land so that people could do this. The higher law would be obvious to people he thought if they could spend time in nature. He was way ahead of his time.

Throughout his life, he wrote books and essays, but fame was to come a hundred years after his death. Mohandas Gandhi found the words and ideas in “Civil Disobedience” and “Walden” useful in his work in South Africa. Later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was inspired by Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. King wrote, “Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I re-read the work several times. I became convinced then that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good….as a result of his writings and personal witness we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest….Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany…it is the outgrowth of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.” (Miller, p.88)

However, Thoreau did not express complete commitment to nonviolence, thinking that violence might be a cost of justice. After all, he did support John Brown in his violent action at Harper’s Ferry. The Reverend King embraced the non-violence of Gandhi’s “satyagraha,” or truth force. King saw that this truth force brought down the “British Lion” and so now we turn our attention to the prophet, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Like Thoreau, King was also ahead of his time. Unlike Thoreau, he was grounded in the concept and language of the Bible. Although King was not fighting the forces of slavery, he was fighting the aftermath of slavery—Jim Crow laws. The moral high-ground of justice and non-violence garnered the sympathy of the world. King’s high ground of nonviolence was not popular with all black followers. His focus on peace may have brought the greatest danger to King. He knew the cost to the prophet. Thoreau also knew the cost to the prophet. Gandhi knew the cost as well. They all three chose the high ground of moral action knowing the consequences. But they all left a compelling legacy. And it is fitting that we pause one day a year to consider their necessary sacrifice so that we all should hold the state accountable for what it does in our name. It is hard, isn’t it?

People have more rights today than at any time in human history. But the state still perpetrates evil.

Personally, I like to think in terms of the imperative we have to create the Promised Land; it’s not a “land” but a condition, a condition of truth and justice. Thoreau and King sought the same things. But Rev. King harnessed the language of values using the familiar words of the Bible.

In the next few years, will conditions in our country call us to become the peacenicks of the 1970’s? If so, we will find ourselves invoking the actions and words of Thoreau and Rev. King.

Though Henry Thoreau caused quite a stir from time to time he nevertheless managed to spend much of his life in nature and writing and revising. He returned to the family home and helped in the pencil factory that sustained his family. But he suffered possibly from asthma, bronchitis and finally, tuberculosis. He became very weak. Many came to see him. In these final days, he loved the attention and was animated. When it was obvious that he was dying, his aunt asked if he had made his peace with God. He replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt!” (Miller, p. 100) He slipped away peacefully on May 6, 1862. He was 45 years old.

He was baptized Unitarian, left the church as a young man, but his memorial service was in the Unitarian church. He was later buried with the other Transcendentalists in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, his grave marked with a stone that says simply, ‘HENRY.’ We can claim him as a Unitarian ancestor, but he was surely his own man.

Peace was in the minds and hearts of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace and justice was their mantra, each in their own unique style and language. Today is the actual birth day of MLK so let us sing the hymn that African Americans think of as their national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing.

References

The following has inspired and informed this sermon:

Miller, Douglas T. Henry David Thoreau: A Man for All Seasons, New York: Facts on File Limited, 1991.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings, New York: Barnes and Nobel, 1992.