Central Thought: It is the relationships with others that allow us to live more fully.

I decided to speak of Ralph Waldo Emerson today not only because today is our Membership Sunday and Emerson is considered one of the forefathers of transcendental thought that has influenced our Unitarian Universalist movement but also because today is the anniversary of Emerson’s death. Because of this convergence I thought there would be no better day to clear up some misconceptions of his thought.

The way I see it Emerson has been pigeonholed by his thoughts on self-reliance (an essay many of us were expected to read in High School) and I wanted to take this opportunity on our Membership Sunday and the anniversary of his death to point out that Emerson did have friends.

I would argue that when we think of historical figures we don’t often think of them living in community. When think of Emerson do we think of the fact that he lived right next door to the Alcott’s and near to Thoreau.

In her book American Bloomsbury Susan Cheever does an interesting job of fleshing out these relationships between Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathanial Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. I don’t know about you but until her book I generally thought of these characters of history in isolation.

Louisa May Alcott writing Little Women, and Henry David Thoreau living in the woods. How these individualists supported each other in their lives and work never entered my mind. But as our readings point out there was a moment in Emerson’s life when despite his desire for independence from the culture and his thoughts about self-reliance, he did in fact rely on his friends to support him by listening to his ideas and helping to flesh out his thoughts.

I believe it helps to understand American Transcendentalists by paying attention to the context of their history and what they were rebelling against.

American Transcendentalists were in fact a generation of well educated people who were alive in the decades before the American Civil War, living mostly in and around Boston and were attempting to create a uniquely American body of literature. America had won its independence from England decades before and these people strove for literary independence. And so they deliberately went about creating literature, essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other writing that reflected a new American Ideal.

While Emerson was touting ideals of self-sufficiency and Thoreau was living in the woods, they were in fact benefiting from each other’s experiences and thought to push them beyond the cultural expectations that surrounded them.

I am wondering how often we do that? I think we sometimes underestimate the value of a community in helping us to grow and stretch to our fullest potential.

How much do we rely upon our friends and neighbors to live beyond what is expected of us into new ways of being in the world?

Take a moment now in fact to think of a time you were energized by a friend. Where their ideas were a catalyst for your own.

How have your friends been able to liberate you from the conformity of your daily life?

I know that some of the ways that my friends do this for me are unplanned and unexpected like when a friend comes over to help me clean my house or cooks me dinner so I can focus on my sermon. But there are other ways this happens that are similar to Thoreau’s Transcendentalist Group.

In my life I have been involved in countless self started study and book groups that have enabled me to reach beyond my own limited thinking and stretched me to examine new truths.

There was the Women and Self Esteem group in the late 1980’s that helped to push me beyond my shyness. There was the Book Group focused on healthy living that started me down a path that included acupuncture and meditation to mellow my ADHD. And there is currently the group of ministers I meet with each week to read my sermon and the one that helps me to problem solve around pastoral issues that have been invaluable mirrors for me in this first year as your minister.

Finding helpmates, who support our life’s work and help us, to see beyond our limited viewpoints is essential to living life more fully.

And I would argue that this is also what church is for.

As our new members join today they join a place where they can reflect upon their individual values and create new meanings in their lives.

I believe this the fundamental difference of Unitarian Universalism from what other church traditions desire from members.

If you were joining today the church across the street they would be suggesting a course of belief, bound by theological doctrines and beliefs that would be offered to inspire you and which it would be hoped that you would to conform to.

Instead in this church our belief is that the divine is in each of us and it is only through being in dialog with each other that can we will stretch ever closer to the truth.

On this membership Sunday I want to remind us all that we need partners on our journey to hear our struggle and to help us to visualize new possibilities.

It is my hope that our church can offer this for all of us.

While we might not be exactly as Emerson sitting around his living room smoking cigars with friends, I do hope in the coming years we may establish more time together to create our new dreams and ideas.

There have been quite a few opportunities to walk together in community this year.

Less formal opportunities like the Harvest Dinner last fall or the Seder last Friday or even the Clean Up Day on Saturday are times when gather together in community and labor together and talk about our beliefs, or plans and our lives.

More formally the Social Action Conversations, New Member Discussion Groups and The Dealing With Difficult Behavior Class have helped to offer time for individuals time and space to share their ideas and come to new understandings for themselves.

Coming up on May 23, Scotty “squatoguazza" and I will begin an Integral Thinking study group which I hope will help us to provide spaces to build new ideas and new ways of thinking much in the way Emerson’s transcendental club did

In the near future it is my wish that we may create even more opportunities to brainstorm ways to take back our time in this corrosive culture that is demanding more and more of us and give is new ideas and ways to reduce our carbon footprints.

I believe that opening dialog is the first step. And so it is that those of you who have signed the membership book and those of you who become members today are signing on not to be fed a doctrine to make sense of the world, but a community of others, striving beside you to live the best life imaginable.

When we think of community involvement and social justice I believe it is easy to think of the few stars that stand out and think they did it all on their own.

Take Rosa Parks for example. You know, Rosa Parks who started the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat on a bus and being arrested. It is easy to imagine that she was just tired and wanted to sit down. But the truth is she was in training for years before she refused her seat in a heroic act of civil disobedience. She was married to a long time member of the NAACP and she even attended several activist trainings before refusing to give up her seat on that fateful day. So in truth Rosa, who is considered the mother of the modern day civil rights movement, had a whole team of people supporting her decision not to give up her seat that day .

What I am trying to say here is basically this-- that the whole image of a self-made person is bunk. Even those who led great movements need their friends to accomplish anything and in order for us to make a difference we need to do the same.

Those of you who have been here for a very long time, have seen ministers and members come and go from this place, I hope you will join with me in welcoming these new members and embracing all that they will bring to our community through their thoughts, and ideas and perceptions which I hope in time will inspire our own.

May we go forward from this place- knowing that we always have this group to challenge us, to sustain us and to open our minds.