"Most of the Commonplaces spoken in churches every Sunday respecting the Bible & the life of Christ, are grossly superstitious. Would not, for example, would not any person unacquainted with the bible, always draw from the pulpit the impression that the New Testament unfolded a system? And in the second place that the history of the life & teachings of Jesus were greatly more copious than they are? Do let the new generation speak the truth, & let the grandfathers die. Let go if you please the old notions about responsibility for the souls of your parishioners but do feel that Sunday is their only time for thought & do not defraud them of that, as miserably as two men have me today. Our time is worth too much than that we can go to church twice, until you have got something to announce there."

From the Ralph Waldo Emerson's Journals, 1838

"What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Transcendentalist

"Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson is most well known for expressing the ideas that emphasize intuitive and spiritual values in a way that they can be lived practically, he was interested in knowing God and demonstrated starkly in his writings and in the way that he lived his life why we ought to be interested and inspired to know God too. Recently in one of my talks I shared a quotation with you from the artist Marc Chagall, in which he says that when he finished a work he would hold it up against something that God made and if it could not stand the comparison against what God has made, it was bad art. The implication here is that we can hold Emerson's works up anywhere in a world made by God and see that they belong, just as the sky, the trees and the mountains belong, just as you and I do.

In the reading I just shared with you from Emerson, there is a sense that he grounded what he knew in the present, he expresses this both by listing the date but also in the sense of presence you get from simply reading his words, and that grounding is what Ernest Holmes did in his time, and that is what we shall continue to do, we shall stand on the shoulders of these giants and see what we shall see now. Ralph Waldo Emerson vigorously challenged the religious assumptions and practices of his day. his visionary eloquence still awakens the infinite in each of us. His inspiring example lifts us beyond what we've been taught to believe about ourselves, and toward as much of the divine as we care to live. Ralph Waldo Emerson did his best to answer for himself the question "How then shall we live?" and in doing so left a legacy from which we can begin our own inquiry.

We see him awakening to a vision of One Mind as the whole of reality, yet instinctively avoiding the egotism that plagues New Age versions of "honoring the God within." Emerson's visionary eloquence still has the power to awaken in attentive readers, a power that increases with repeated reading. His inspiring personal example can easily lift us beyond what we've been taught to believe about ourselves, and renew our aspiration to embody the diviner possibilities of our own lives. Only you know sitting where you are how far you go in your attempts to embody the divine within yourself.

Emerson said flatly that "the best we can know of God is the mind as it is known to us." This is a two-fold practice of looking into both the depths of oneself, and looking as deeply into life as one can. This is not a pursuit for the lazy. That these simultaneously inward and outward glances take us well beyond the range of traditional religious thinking will be obvious enough once we follow the trail far enough.

Richard Geldard writes in God in Concord:

His great theme, the "infinitude of the private man," now properly rephrased as the infinite potential of the individual human consciousness, asserts that each person possesses in mind the equivalent powers that generate and sustain the universe. In effect, e = mc2 is a human metaphor as well: Manifest power arises in consciousness and not just in mushroom clouds.

and he tells us a few sentences later:

Emerson tells me on every page that this is not so. He affirms that consciousness, the life of the mind, is part of an eternal consciousness, access to which each individual possesses. This primary fact is the place he found to "stand," following the famous Archimedes dictum: "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth." Emerson's understanding created a philosophical lever with its fulcrum beyond the confines of sensory perception. His very existence, he said, took its being from a source beyond our perceptions of nature, stars, and systems. His essential freedom and power (or leverage) came from this infinite Absolute, and from that stand he elected to participate.

“Imitation is suicide.” Trust your spontaneous intuition, or you will hear your thoughts from someone else. Trust yourself. On June 6, 1838 Emerson writes in his diary:

"Another thing. We resent all criticism which denies us any thing that lies in our line of advance. Say that I cannot paint a Transfiguration or build a steamboat, or be a grand marshal, & I shall not seem to me depreciated. But deny me any quality of metaphysical or literary power, & I am piqued. What does this mean? Why, simply that the soul has assurance by instincts & presentiments of all power in the direction of its ray, as well as the special skills it has already got."

This brilliant observation, so crucial to later essays such as "Spiritual Laws," appears here as Emerson prepares his address. It is as though he feels the pique already in the objections his words will inevitably provoke, and he knows that very specific feeling marks the true path of his vision and the direction of his life. He will brook no opposition, but he will also not vent his anger in defense.

I wonder that we often do not recognize this powerful message ringing within ourselves. This sudden hint of anger when we are underestimated by another in the very thing that we do best, in which we continue to grow, in our calling, not to be known. This is hard, and yet, it seems a part of how we know what we are to express as our offering to the Divine. The very thing that bothers us is the denial by anyone, including oneself, of that greatness that lies within us which knows the range of its expression within the still small voice before it has whispered all its secret to us, and this divinity within us does not in any way desire to be stopped in reaching its full expression. This is our sacred duty as individuals and it marks our character how we take it up and fly its penant over our lives. To find what calls for expression in ourselves and to let nothing stop us in finding appropriate expression of this gift secreted within us, this is what is meant when we speak of "calling" or "right livelihood." “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the just man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” To be true to oneself is life's greatest blessing. Emerson tells us that "The voyage of the best ship is a zig zag line of a hundred tacks. Seen from a distance, it appears straight." They said the same thing about the trip to the moon. If we look at our lives we see the same thing in the way we have followed the path of those things that are the expression of our truest selves. Emerson tells us:

"The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

And because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury."

He tells us in his essay Self-Reliance: “Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.”

“The soul is no traveler: the wise man stays at home with the soul, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and is not gadding abroad from himself…” Wherever you go, there you are.

“For everything that is given, something is taken.” “He who knows that power is in the soul, that he is weak only because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and, so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly right himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.” “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” Emerson wrote that in his essay Self-Reliance.

Emerson was willing to trust that the individual with his or her own soul at stake will take the moral path once given the gift of reflective thought. Conscience is the key, and while it sleeps within, the individual is vulnerable to the pressures of the world. To awaken that conscience, sleeping within the recesses of the soul/mind, is what Emerson saw as the proper task of the preacher. All conversation, all formal sermonizing, should have as their goal the awakening of that self-reflective faculty.

At the close of the "Address," where Emerson reaches the formal charge for the young graduates, he finds language so original and feelings so personal that they create the vision he so earnestly seeks to convey. It is no wonder that the "grandfathers" present could make no sense of it. They had no personal experience with it.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,--cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connection,--when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles.

Emerson believed, and I do along with him, that Jesus Christ was a man with the extraordinary ability to demonstrate and use the divine power that is available to all humankind, and that all of us deserve an opportunity to stop and to connect with the source of good that is within each of us. This is what our mission is here each week, and we know that it was from this inspiration that Ernest Holmes took these words that are found beginning and ending his lessons: "There is a power for good in the universe, greater than we are, and we can use it." This is the power that is within each and every one of us, it is the power that Emerson saw, and this is the Power that is within each of us right here and right now.

When Emerson spoke to the Harvard Divinity class there were 6 graduating, and what he said had such power that even now it causes difficulty in orthodox Christianity. He was not looking to be popular, he was looking to be God's man, and he found heaven in the present in the way that he lived. If you will close your eyes, I wish to share and affirm with you now what he had to say that day to the graduation assembly about Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, "I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think." But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man." The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

Thank you for being here today.