“…it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul”
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 14, 2024 – Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by Waldo, was an ordinary man, among ordinary neighbors, in an ordinary town, who also was an extraordinarily spirited man, large enough to conceive a new way of apprehending the world, which had recently given birth to a new nation. His father had witnessed the first stirrings of that birth, on the Concord commons.
A good son, he followed his father into the pulpit, but the vast new world now surrounding him made him feel pinched, and small there. The pulpit is an old world convention, the creation as much of armed princes and kings as of ordained clerics and preachers.
With the courage of his own convictions, by following the compass he saw in his mind, instead of one fabricated in Boston, London, or Rome, he stepped down from the pulpit, when he recognized the folly of preaching.
“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject…” The quotation is excerpted from Emerson’s Harvard Divinity School address of 1838, which, overnight, transformed the celebrated alumnus into persona non grata.
blind and hidebound by nature
Institutions are blind and hidebound by nature, and it took until a new generation had risen to power at Harvard, for America’s most revered thinker to again be welcome on campus. People may be moved and driven from within by divine inspiration, by the word of God spoken to the soul, but schools and churches are things made of wood and stone, not blood and spirit, and so they exist only in the wilderness of stuff, forever deaf, dumb, and blind.
It may be presumptuous of me, a non-scholar, to think that Emerson recognized the dual nature of religion, or at least its etymology, as something that both ties together, as a lasso does, but that also ties off, as a noose does.
America is a nation that professes no religion, so that her citizens remain free to follow, or blaze, whatever path they think leads to heaven, or salvation, or wherever else they want religion to take them.
That is the guarantee made clear in the Bill of Rights. It is first because foremost in the minds of our founding generation was the example of the English king, who had overruled the Bishop of Rome and declared himself head of a bespoke English church.
Becoming joint pope-king saved on administrative costs related to his self-absolution for having two wives executed. As America teeters toward her semiquincentennial, let us pray for a quick, painless death to the treasonous, bespoke MAGA church. My faith assures me that its abandoned congregation, and all their errant preachers, will find salvation elsewhere.