I would strap my sleeping bag on my bicycle and bike in a direction for a half hour to an open field next to a forest, to a lake with a view of the hills, or beside a gurgling stream.

I kept my glasses on so I could sort the stars into their constellations before I fell asleep.  And often I woke up with glasses on.

As winter came, I layered on a second army surplus sleeping bag, and worked on getting my face hole small and on the side, so falling snow wouldn’t wake me.  It was a fine line between success and the middle-of-the-night, claustrophobic panic attacks, a definite downside of mummy bags.

During the days, in Physics class and Algebra 2, I would gaze out the window toward South Mountain as it bounded gently into the blue horizon.  In the foreground were tall corn and broad wheat fields.  On the hillside in a clearing, an abandoned fieldstone barn with it’s upper story of weathered red wood. I felt that beyond was the great wilderness of America, the trackless West, the frozen Arctic…  And that’s where I was going to live.

When, after my first year of college in New Haven, Ct., I arrived back home,  I found a local realtor’s sign in the wheat sprouts beside the road between the school and the mountain, trumpeting immediately available commercial property.  I was heart broken.  Then I was angry.

I was going to go out that night and cut the sign down.  As the day gained momentum, I decided it was too easy.  Vandalism is a bad message.  I needed to get a smart and important message out.

So then I was going to paint my own slogan on the sign, and worked all day on the language.  I even positioned the can of paint and brushes outside my house so I could climb out of my bedroom window that night to do it.  Oops, my father discovered the paint.  Plus, it came to me that painting a counter slogan was still a version of vandalism…

I ended up deciding on a vigil, a five day fast beside the sign.  I called my effort, “Midnight Sunsearch,” produced a short story about never giving up hope in the face of the destruction of farmland and beauty, lettered my sign to put up beside the road, and took my place late Friday afternoon.

I remember the sun going down, turning orange, spilling over the primal green of spring leaves and newly planted field.  Everywhere you looked, colors brimmed, and the sun was beginning to flatten as it pressed on the horizon.

That’s when the police car stopped. It was Popeye Moyer.  We all knew Popeye.  I expected him to scold me about smashing down the wheat grass. That wasn’t it.  He said I was trespassing.  I needed written permission from the owner.  Who was out to dinner, I learned, ringing the bell at the mansion a mile away, talking to his son.

I finally met up with Victor Schmidt at 11:30 that night in his pajamas.  He said, fine, I could camp out.  But nothing written until he could talk to his lawyer Monday.  Which I told Popeye when he swung by, back at the field at midnight.

It had begun to rain.

Saturday morning he had more information:  I couldn’t have my sign without a permit.  I took down the sign.

Within the hour a furniture truck drove past and lost a big box.  Soon I had employed my magic marker: “Midnight Sunsearch, a five day fast, a wheatfield celebration,” and so on.

“It’s a box, it’s not a sign” I defended, the next time Popeye came by.  It was obviously a slow weekend for crime in Emmaus, Pa.

Alas, late in the day, someone had a little fender bender in front of my quiet vigil.  This time when Popeye came, he had a partner, and I was invited to join them in the squad car.  They had brought the Zoning Commissioner.

He sat next to me in the back seat.  My parents were going to be fined $100 a day if I didn’t pack it up.  But he had more to say.

“If you were my son, you know what I’d do?” continued Evan Burien, Mr. Zoning, staring straight ahead, My heart was clawing its way up my throat. “I’d beat the living poop out of you, and then I’d pay the fine for doing it.”

How could I possibly need to throw up, I hadn’t eaten a thing for a day?

“Do you have anything to say?”  I made myself breathe.  I channeled Pete Seeger.  I made sounds with my mouth, which I didn’t believe were happeninig, this being the first time I’d ever been on the wrong side of the law.

“(sung) This land is your land,
this land is my land.
From California to the New York Island.
From the Redwood forests to the Gulf Stream Waters,
This land was made for you and me.”

Everyone in the car kept their eyes straight ahead, like it was a funeral.  Mine.

In some ways, when it comes to what I most deeply care about, I feel like I’m still sitting there.  Who are these people staring straight ahead.  What is their hard silence saying to me about this land I love?  What will I say, or do, or sing when I’ve gotten their bottom line?

I suppose I’d sing a different song today, sitting in the back seat with Exxon or Haliburton or the Alaska Board of Game.  It probably should be “We are a Gentle Angry People, and we are Singing, Singing for our Lives.”  but I suspect it would be more plaintively anguished “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child.”

I want to get back to this idea of the more “plaintively anguished,” after some definitions…

“Practice of the Wild” is what I wanted this talk to be called, because it’s the title of a book I hugely admire by the zen poet Gary Snyder, and because both the word “practice” and the word “wild” have figured prominently in my life.

“Practice” was a word I discovered on a reading and praying sabbatical from Philadelphia, spent in a cabin near Palmer AK the summer of 1991.  I began reading the Buddhist creative writing teacher Natalie Goldberg, a book titled Wild Mind, in which she talks about spontaneous writing as a “practice,” a spiritual discipline of keeping your hand moving, and not letting your critical internal editor in on the process.  “Fill the page, keep writing, don’t think, go, go go.”

Also I was reading the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh (Peace is Every Step), whose approach to practice was simple and breathtaking.  By paying attention in meditation, by dialing in to our breathing, we can see our thoughts rising and passing, and by not identifying with them, we are free to live in a new way.  This was so simple, so effective, that it was like an earthquake, opening a broad, fresh, new world.

Why this was so striking was because, as a pastor, I’d always been drawn to spirituality, but it was always seen as a side dish, not the main course of a believer’s daily life.  But I realized you couldn’t call yourself a Buddhist if you didn’t have a daily practice, if you didn’t sit and breathe.  Suddenly, the idea of “practice” took over my thinking about our ultimate calling in life, sort of like “original sin” hijacked St. Augustine’s world in the 4th century, or “grace” did Martin Luther’s in the 16th.

About the same time the word, “wild” began banging on my door.  Whenever I’d turn my focus from first century Israel (i.e., Jesus) to America, I was confronted by the American Romantics, or Transcendentalists.  It was a cultural revolution in the American 19th century when Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the naturalist John Muir father of the Sierra Club and Walt Whitman the poet, broke loose.

They envisioned that the world is held together by a spirit that is not of the Church, and certainly not of Reason (alone), but of a direct experience of the (natural) world. (Harpers April 06, Curtis White, p 35) These Americans broke with convention and pursued life with eyes wide open, confident that they could make sense of it as they went along. They embraced the unknown, the unpredictable, the “wild.”

The American tradition has this effect on you (or used to, before the resurgence of various unchallenged ideologies like religious and political conservatism/ fundamentalism): you become pragmatic; you don’t trust dogma, rather, you trust your own common sense; you want to test ideas, to see for yourself.  And your sacrament, your touchstone, becomes unmediated experience, that is, experience of and in the wild.

I submit that the inheritors of this transcendental revelation are select nature writers of our day.  Books that have figured prominently in my life include  Practice of the Wild, by Snyder and The Island Within by Richard Nelson of Sitka, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Dream of the Earth by the catholic priest Thomas Berry, States of Grace by the Buddhist feminist Charlene Spretnak, and countless others

Reading naturalists awakened the voice of Thoreau in my consciousness, “I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”  It was a calling away from a focus on scriptures, religious doctrines, western history and even from books altogether, a calling into experiences, unmediated by culture and thought, as well as the earth-centered traditions, held by native peoples everywhere, who which have lived in this fashion for millennia.  In short, to see if there wasn’t a way more to connect with the “wild.”

What was exciting about the impetus to embrace the “wild” was the realization that I was going to change.  In some deep, unconscious way, those who honor the wild are perceived as “crazy,” or as irrelevant, or even as selfish.  People who love the earth first and foremost seem a threat to our culture because an intimacy with the earth can inspire a wild kind of love, a fierce motherly devotion to simple beauty and intensity which can entail a powerful resistance of those things that threaten it.

One of the prophets of this vision is the poet Wendell Berry.  His glorious, satirical poem “Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” has never let go of me since someone read it for a wedding I did twenty years ago.  It goes, in part:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection

When Fr. Thomas Berry talks about “Wild” in his book The Great Work, he quotes Thoreau’s essay “On Walking,” where Thoreau writes:  “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.”  Berry calls this essay the most “comprehensive critique of civilization” ever made.

In this, Thomas Berry sees what Wendell Berry sees, that against the wild, natural realm stands a almost mindless theoretical and technological human-centered world, the most obvious failing of which is how unrelentingly it can trivialize away life.

How often we give up the exhilaration of the wild and difficult for the safety of the trivial.  Instead of an engaged life, we get to choose between a Ford or a Chevy, between “Law and Order” or “American Idol.”  We trade who we could become – loving, wise, caring, calm, and just – for what we can consume, and having chosen that route, we tender our most precious qualities – kindness, hope, friendship – to be first in the line for convenience and comfort.

Gary Snyder writes:

Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.  that is, to the “wild.”

Now, for a moment, back to the “plaintively anguished.” Back to me singing “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.”  Another way to say it, why are activists of every stripe, including those trying to practice the wild, so good and so right but so sad?

This has been on my mind for a long time.  For decades I’ve been trying to encourage friends who are activists, who love the world and its creatures, as they cook for homeless people, create shelters for runaway teens and abused spouses, fight for the Arctic Refuge or struggle for votes to zone their towns.

So often the good, committed people end up losing heart.  Part of it is that truly to see something, is to love it, and to fear for it.  And this includes a place,  To love a place is a scary thing, because your love is given away to something which can change, which can be violated, ruined, destroyed.  You come back to it in a year or ten years, and what you loved is gone.  Sometimes it’s too painful to return.

A field of wheat becomes a strip mall.  Or a child you taught to read starts drinking and skipping class.  Or a close friend falls utterly out of contact.  Or a trail you ski gets a house built on it.

Another part of the helplessness is that you can’t communicate your love effectively to others, to help them see and appreciate the hope, beauty and vulnerability you cherish.

An apocalyptic litany from Gary Snyder that has worried itself into my soul for the past decade goes like this:

It is said that about a million and a half species of animals and plants have been scientifically described, and that there are anywhere from ten to thirty million species of organisms on earth.  Over half of all the species on earth are thought to live in the moist tropical forests.  About half of those forests, in Asia, Africa, and South America, are already gone.

A clear-cut or even a mile-wide strip mine pit will heal in geological time.  The extinction of a species, each one a pilgrim of four billion years of evolution, is an irreversible loss.  The ending of the lines of so many creatures with whom we have traveled this far is an occasion of profound sorrow and grief.

Death can be accepted and to some degree transformed.  Bit the loss of lineages and all their future young is not something to accept.  It must be rigorously and intelligently resisted.

When beauty or hope is violated, that terrifying knowledge hovers over you like a vulture.  This is what grief is.  Some people short circuit the grief – I know, I’m one of them – and turn immediately to anger, or passive cynicism.  However, the sorrow must not be avoided or written off.  Feeling sorrow trumps shutting down and disengaging. Feeling our sorrow helps us remember what we love, what we have lost, what we can still hold on to.  Sorrow, when it is explored, becomes a friend, and helps us find ways out of debilitating grief into healthy actions.

I’m skipping a reference here to Joanna Macy and her grief work.  If you’re interested in this, talk to me (see below, end of document).

The bottom line is this:  when you can embrace your anguish and sing, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” you know where love comes from, you know what you’re in danger of losing, and you’re ready to take responsibility for nurturing, nurturing the motherless child, or abused spouse, or homeless neighbor, or Arctic Refuge that’s depending on you for life.

So, to tie it up: I think the “practice of the wild” is a three-step, recurring cycle, in which we move through:

1. First, an original childlike attentiveness to all the wonderful strangeness of beauty and harmony all around us, which may include a naive courageousness to boot – my “Midnight Sunsearch.”
2. Second, we, every one of us, fall into despair at some point when we realize  beauty’s vulnerability, some people’s crazy selfishness, and the difficult losses which those who love sustain, but…
3. Third, with luck and a deepening ability to work our love in the midst of outlandish circumstances, we emerge back where we began, with a love for wild beauty, but now with a resolute commitment to protect what might be lost and an articulate engagement in practices growing from a “wild” heart: the practices of breathing and walking, of talking together and simplifying, of laughing and of dancing, practices which ineluctably lead to justice, truth, and deep compassion for all things.

I want to end with the story about Picasso and Henri Matisse, illustrating the cycle from childlike receptivity, to adult engagement to through anguish:  When, late in life, Matisse was designing stained glass windows for a chapel, Picasso confronted him, saying: we spent our whole lives championing the new, the modern, the progressive, the liberated.  How can you further such a backward cause as the Church?

Matisse replied calmly that they had both been trying their whole lives to regain, through art, the inner atmosphere of their first holy communion, a state of grace. 27 in Spretnak

“Wild” grace, I’d humbly submit.

—–

(Joanna Macy excursion: Of those who have worked on this approach – the ecopsychology of human experience – Joanna Macy is an important guide.  Macy emerged during the 80s as an activist resisting nuclear brinkmanship during the Reagan administration.  She wrote World as Lover, World as Self, and began hosting what would become thousands of workshops emerging from her own journey through personal despair, telling her nightmares of the wasting of the planet, dreaming of the terrible deaths (not actual) of her own daughters, guiding others through their own despair into a new land, a steady place which lay beyond trauma, a place of empowerment. She believed that when people walk into their darkness, together, they can and will emerge on the other side, stronger and fiercer.  This “despair work” is different from “grief work” in that its aim is not acceptance of loss – indeed many paralyzing environmental “losses” have not yet occurred and are hardly to be “accepted.”  Note: On Ecopsychology, see also Theodore Roszak “The Voice of the Earth”)

Let’s imagine a woman in Fairbanks with two daughters, Claire, a successful child, and Janet, the younger one, who got into trouble in high school but graduated from UAF with good grades and landed a well-paying job in Anchorage. Janet married, they bought a house, and had three children. But she and her husband were constantly looking for thrills and excitement. They got hooked on cocaine, gradually gambled away their life savings, and lost custody of their children. Janet’s husband went to prison. Janet lost her job and is now at the end of her rope.

We can imagine that Janet has not written or phoned her mother for weeks. But now, like the son in the original parable, she compares her present situation with her previous prosperity, and thinks that any living situation her mother could provide would be better than living on the street. So she takes a bus for Fairbanks.

Here she is now, knocking on her mother’s door, tired, distraught, and feeling very guilty and contrite. She even wonders whether her mother, who knows she was on cocaine, will let her come in.

And here’s her mother, who sees Janet’s haggard face through the living room window and is shocked and repulsed by this face, this face which shows the effects of Janet’s foolhardy lifestyle.

Mother opens the door and Janet says “I’m home, Mom. I’ve made a mess of my life and am no more worthy to be called your daughter.” Mother hesitates, hugs her, and then, more by mother instinct than by conscious thought, says “Janet, I love you. I was so worried about you. Come in and get warm. Let’s have a cup of tea.”

Janet says “Forgive me, Mother. I’ve done everything wrong. I hate my life.” And mother replies, “Janet, I’m your mother. I hate what you’ve done. But I forgive you.” Mother is surprised to hear herself say that, but having said it, she feels better. In a way it seems to the mother very natural to go ahead and forgive Janet. After all she forgave her two girls a dozen times a week in the difficult years of raising them, especially when they were screaming at age two and rebels at age fourteen. A forgiving character is a necessary qualification for parenthood. But she had thought the hard years were over, since she had tried to raise her daughters to be responsible and provide for themselves. Her older daughter, Claire, had fulfilled her mother’s hopes. But with Janet, bad, bad Janet, what should Mother do?

If the mother had been a Unitarian-Universalist, I suppose we could imagine her being very rational and saying “I will thoughtfully and thoroughly weigh the pros and cons, including theological and ethical arguments, before making the decision to invite you inside and forgive you.” But this is subzero Fairbanks, and you are warm, compassionate UU’s. You would at least bring the daughter in out of the cold, and CONSIDER forgiving her.

Let’s return to the story.

The next day the mother decides that Janet’s return should be celebrated, and so she calls up some family friends and her older daughter, Claire, who lives in town, and she invites them all to dinner at Pike’s Landing. And that brings Claire into the story. She is resentful. She says “Hey, Mom, why all the hullabaloo and celebration for Janet, when she has made a mess of her life? Sure we’re glad to see her back, but how can you forgive her for neglecting her children and using cocaine? And why haven’t you ever thrown such a party for ME, good old reliable ME, who sticks at my boring job and always pays my credit card balance? I even wash the coffeepot at the UU fellowship!”

And Mom replies: “Don’t take it badly, Claire. I thought we had lost Janet completely, but now she is back home safe and sound. Isn’t that a reason to celebrate? Janet has made big mistakes in her life but I love her and forgive her as I love you and forgive you. I’m hosting this celebration to show her that we’re glad to have her back. Join us at the restaurant so that we have the whole family together.”

In the gospel parable the story ends there, and we don’t know whether the older child attends the celebration. Perhaps the parable should be renamed “The Parable of the Opposite Siblings”, one who was adventuresome and reckless, the other who was hardworking and responsible, even a bit dull, like a Unitarian minister. We know humanity well enough to know the strengths and weaknesses of both types.

So far as I can unravel it the parable seems to be saying, loud and clear, that forgiveness is the glue that holds families and society together. The parable goes even further in suggesting that the act of forgiveness can be a joyful event, to be celebrated with a feast. So perhaps the best title for the parable is not “The Prodigal Son”, but “The Joyful Forgiving Parent”.

In the original parable the father tries to teach the elder child to forgive. We can imagine that the parent might also need to teach the younger child to forgive herself as well as to reform her lifestyle.

Bible commentators have suggested that this parable is really an allegory about the relationship between God and humanity, with the forgiving father in the story being God. If it is an allegory about God then it carries a distinctively Universalist message. You may remember that the founders of Universalism, which is one half of our Unitarian Universalist heritage, were reacting against the hellfire and damnation preachers of their time, who said that most people were sinners and were going to hell for eternity. The Universalists preached that God is forgiving and merciful, not harshly judgmental. They thought God might mete out some punishment to evildoers in the afterlife, but would not send anyone to hellfire for ever and ever. Other Christians thought that too much talk about God’s mercy would encourage people to sin more than ever. Actually Universalists behaved as well as anyone else, but many people believed they were a threat to decency and morality. You should probably be prudent and NOT tell your God-fearing friends about the very merciful, very forgiving Universalist God, or you will never be invited to their potlucks.

In the parable there is no mention of ANY remedial action to be taken by the prodigal child,, who, in my version of the parable, neglected her children and snorted cocaine. Should forgiveness come so easily? Shouldn’t the daughter have to do something to merit forgiveness?

In the Catholic and Jewish traditions God a person seeking forgiveness from God must take it seriously. For Catholics God’s forgiveness is obtained by doing three things: first, penance, which means feeling contrite, then confessing your wrongdoing before a priest, and finally, taking some action prescribed by the priest. At least that’s the way it was two generations ago, before most Catholics in the U.S. and Europe stopped going to confession regularly. In the Jewish tradition you are expected to feel remorse, make restitution and then renew your relationship with God. After those steps have been taken you can ask for forgiveness from the person wronged, and finally, ask forgiveness from God.

The priest and the rabbi will tell us that we can become better people by following this process. The Jews even schedule a special day each year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in September, for everyone to think back over their last twelve months and go right away to ask forgiveness of people wronged.

But what if you are being asked by your daughter for forgiveness and the daughter is contrite, as in the parable? Is contrition enough? Are you going to ask for more than that? Confession, reform plan, restitution, whatever? Or could you joyfully forgive and even prepare a feast? At least a pizza party?

Let’s not forget that forgiveness has a positive effect on the person who does the forgiving. Being able to let go of resentment and grudges is usually a very liberating experience, particularly if you have suffered greatly. Perhaps you have heard about those families of murder victims who have spoken out against the death penalty and have shown compassion for the families of the condemned murderers. For both types of families this has been a welcome healing process. In people who are unable to forgive, by contrast, resentment often feeds on itself and sometimes leads to depression. At the very least resentment and anger “take up space…in our psyches….”, as one UU minister expressed it.

To be honest we have to admit that asking for forgiveness OR granting forgiveness is often painful. The same UU minister, Scott Alexander, wrote this about repairing his relationship with one of his friends:

…I cared enough about the relationship and found enough courage within to arrange for a confrontation between the two of us. Not a nasty, one-way confrontation where I spewed out my anger toward him, but a creative, healing dialog where first I said how hurt and angry I was, and then together we engaged in genuine conversation about his feelings and perspectives and how together we might close the painful breach between us. Let me tell you [that] this process leading to forgiveness was uncomfortable for both of us. He acknowledged his betrayal and disloyalty, but, as I listened to his own hurt feelings, I also faced ways in which I had contributed to the weakening of our friendship, and stood myself in need of forgiveness.

¹

From Scott Alexander’s story we are reminded that forgiveness within relationships often requires that both parties do some forgiving. We can imagine that all three parties in the parable had some responsibility for the failure of the prodigal child, and would need to ask forgiveness of each other. Indeed I can imagine the parent, especially the modern one, asking herself, “How did my actions as a parent contribute to the irresponsible behavior of my daughter?”

Much more could be said here about the subject of forgiveness. I imagine that each of you has a story to tell or a dilemma to ponder. We’ll have a moment of silence and then time for comments.

I want to close with some advice from a UU minister in Massachusetts, Stephanie Nichols: “The invitation of [this parable, she says] is to never give up on home, to stay in relationship with those people and those parts of yourself that have been lost, and to remain ready to rejoice when someone or something that has been lost is found again. It is an invitation to live with open arms rather than with clenched teeth.” ²

In this country we find Unitarianism a significant trend in the 1700’s. Joseph Priestley emigrated to the United States from England in 1794 and founded a Unitarian church in Philadelphia. It was attended by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. King’s Chapel in Boston converted from Anglican to Unitarian in 1786. The American Unitarian Association was organized on May 25, 1825. By coincidence the British Unitarian Association was organized that same day. By 1825 Unitarian was flourishing. The theology became more developed and streamlined.

I.

When the Association was organized in 1825 there was no doubt who was its chief spokesman. William Ellery Channing was the most respected preacher of his day. The Unitarians loved him and the Calvinists dreaded him.

Now I want to describe the life and works of William Ellery Channing. Let’s see if we can put flesh and blood on that most remarkable man.

Channing was born in Newport, R.I. in April 1780 of a strict Calvinist family. He was reared under the severe preaching of Dr. Samuel Hopkins, an old school Calvinist. Once young Ellery attended church with his father and listened to Dr. Hopkins expound the wrath of God, the depravity of human nature, the evil of life, and how we all are in imminent danger of going into everlasting hellfire. Young Channing trembled for his life. On the way out of church the elder Channing said to Dr. Hopkins, “Sound doctrine, Sir, sound doctrine.”

Ellery noted the comment but he also noticed that his father whistled a pleasant tune on the way home. He saw the gentleness of his father, the manner in which he loved and trusted other people. That struck him as inconsistent because obviously the father didn’t act as if people were totally depraved nor did he seem to fear being sent to hell just any time. The episode had a lasting effect on his thinking.

From the beginning, young Channing was interested in theology and logic, though he was only an average student in most regards. He loved to climb the rigging of the Newport ships. He enjoyed good health and loved sports. He liked to fly his kite and once spent a night in a haunted house.

Channing was affected all his life by his early training. In his home he saw a belief in the goodness of people coupled with suspicion of the lower classes; humanitarianism with a tolerance of slavery; high personal morality with an acceptance of the rum and slave trade.

Channing entered Harvard University, then a small school with 173 students. At Harvard he became embroiled in politics and found himself the leader of several student groups. He was intensely patriotic. He led the student group in a petition to President John Quincy Adams about the wickedness of the French. He said in the petition,

When we contemplate the French, our youthful blood boils within us. In defense of America we now solemnly offer the unwasted ardor and unimpaired energies of our youth to the service of our country.

His youthful blood apparently still was boiling within him at commencement time when he was asked to be class orator and deliver the commencement address. He was forbidden to make any reference to politics but that didn’t deter young Channing. He railed against the French and in closing turned on the faculty. Facing them squarely he stormed, “But that I am forbid, I could a tale unfold which would harrow up your souls.” And with that declaration, to the applause of his listeners, he concluded his college career.

Channing lived for a time in Virginia, where he went for his health. He came into contact with slavery, a system which so revolted him that his health suffered severely and he had to return to the north to recover. He went to Cambridge and then accepted a call to the Federal Street Church, the original name of the Arlington Street Church in Boston. He long had questioned the Trinity but now a genuine religious conversion took place. He wrote, “What liberty is so valuable as liberty of the heart?” His first sermon was preached on the text, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, give I thee.” Everyone agreed that here was a bright shining star on the Boston firmament and that he would go far. The old Calvinists began to hesitate about him. Channing became the center for the moderates. He appealed for more rational and less emotional, more moderate and less dogmatic, religion. A new phrase, “Boston religion,” began to bring shivers to the souls of the good Calvinists.

II.

Unknown to Channing, a storm was brewing under his very nose. The Calvinists turned from scorn to hatred, from fear to violence. In 1815 the skies began to darken, the storm clouds gathered. The first shot was fired by the Rev. Jedidah Morse—father of Samuel F. B. Morse, who became Unitarian. Jedidah Morse complained that “Boston religion” was in fact nothing other than Unitarianism, a movement of some note in England and suspected in this country. Morse issued a pamphlet which he felt contained the more odious doctrines of Unitarianism. Samuel Thatcher next fired away, insisting that the Bostonians were afraid to admit their real—i.e, their Unitarian—belief, for fear their infidelity would lose them their positions. Thatcher concluded with a call to all true Christians to separate from the infidels and deny communion to them.

Channing denied the charges and for three years the new religion remained on the defensive. Then in May 1819 the full fury of the storm broke. One Jared Sparks was to be ordained in Baltimore and he asked Channing to preach the ordination sermon. Channing used the text, “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” That sermon is one of the two most famous sermons ever preached in this country, the other being Emerson’s Divinity School Address.

It was a powerful attack on the Trinitarian doctrine. Every word of it was a denunciation of the Calvinist position. Respectable Protestant ministers turned pale at the very thought of Unitarianism. One prominent minister threatened to excommunicate any person who attended Dr. James Freeman’s sermons at King’s Chapel. He declared that the boys ought to break his windows and stone him through the streets.

But Boston then was a center of liberalism and Channing’s sermon was received with enthusiasm. Biblical scholars took their pens and scratched away during the small hours of the morning in their studies to rush to the aid of Channing. The new liberalism spread like wildfire through Harvard and horrified the orthodox ministers of New England.

Channing then rose to heights of moral stature seldom found. His philosophy led him into all sorts of political and social crusades. He preached a thanksgiving sermon urging the overthrow of Napoleon; he organized the Massachusetts Peace Society. He gave important lectures at Harvard and received his Doctorate in Sacred Theology.

His reputation increased, church attendance and membership grew so large that a new church had to be built, and his salary was raised to the astonishing level of $1,200 a year. He was a generous man and gave money away as fast as he gained it and almost never had any for himself.

His fame grew but his energies remained in the liberal fight for righteousness. One incident of note occurred in 1823. A young man who was just then beginning to study for the ministry wrote to his Aunt Mary—a staunch Calvinist who could hardly have been gratified by the letter—that “Dr. Channing is preaching sublime sermons every Sunday morning in Federal Street, one of which I heard last Sunday, and which infinitely surpassed Everett’s eloquence.” The young man proceeded to take up theological studies under Dr. Channing. The young man’s name was Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Channing wrote more when an associate for him was appointed. In one sermon he said,

I am shocked at the imprisonment of the honest debtor; and the legislation, which allows a creditor to play the tyrant over an innocent man would disgrace, I think, a barbarous age. I cannot but remember how much of the guilt of the convict results from the general corruption of society.

People didn’t like that. One layman wrote,

When Dr. Channing used to preach about God and the soul, about holiness and sin, we liked him; that was Christianity. But now, he is always insisting on some reform, talking about temperance or war. We wish he would preach the Gospel.

Channing next took up his energies against slavery. He railed at the slave holders and he became politically dangerous. The wealthy people of Boston stood to lose much by freeing the slaves. Channing lent his enormous prestige to Abolitionism, a movement heretofore thought to be led by crackpots. The other leaders could be dismissed as fanatics, flighty women, or backwoods parsons. But the Rev. Dr. William Ellery Channing, minister of the distinguished Federal Street Church and acknowledged leader of the American Unitarian movement, was unassailable.

III.

Channing continued his appeal to conscience and reason but slavery was neither a reasonable nor a conscionable business. Yet Channing condemned the use of force in dealing with the slave holders. “The North has but one weapon,” he wrote, “moral force.” Channing exerted all the moral force his now frail body would permit. He spoke, lectured, preached, and went everywhere his time permitted. Finally, in October 1842 he succumbed to typhoid fever.

His opponents said of him that just before he died he saw the error of his Unitarian ways and recanted. That was patently false, however, and was given no credence. In death his reputation increased. Lowell and Whittier wrote odes to him. Ministers in America and England preached sermons. His written works were collected and went at once through 22 large editions. Channing’s writings began to affect the country more and more. Such men as George Bancroft and Beethoven were influenced by his writings.

Now, what judgment do we draw about this man? What were his works? He succeeded in refuting the Trinity. He was the founder of the American Unitarian Association. He wrote pamphlets, books, and preached sermons against all sorts of social evils: against the use of alcohol, child labor, exploitation of women. He was fearless and courageous to an extreme. So great was his preaching that at one time there was not a church in Boston that was not Unitarian.

Why is he so revered as the guiding light of American Unitarianism? His theology in many ways would not commend itself to us. He was not a great pastor and often lacked social tact. He was short and thin physically. He had few close friends. Then why do we honor him as one of our great prophets?

IV.

Channing pleaded for reason in religion. He regarded Christianity as the one religion above all others. It could be brought to its full bloom by the use of reason. Just as the Wesleys brought Christianity to the people on an emotional basis, so did Channing present it so that it was intellectually acceptable. Religion, he said, must first of all appeal to the rational faculty. Channing stayed in front of the crowd, always ahead, always leading.

His preaching was bold and courageous. His enormous contemporary reputation was well deserved. Well might Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, and other great people of the day come to him for stimulation. Channing was far more than a comfortable purveyor of truisms, the sedative of the bourgeois conscience. He had a lasting effect on the great minds of the day. Harriet Martineau said after meeting him, “You felt you were in a presence in which nothing that was impure, base, or selfish could breathe at ease.”

Dr. Channing’s peculiar gift seems to have been his ability to perceive more deeply than the mass of people, more deeply than the majority of intellectual leaders, but without losing their confidence. The freedom you and I have from religious dogma is mostly the result of his works. His fight for his principles was unyielding. Conscience, reason, tolerance, and respect: those guided Channing in all his thinking.

His fight for social justice never ended. His was one of the strongest voices against slavery. He fought against the rum trade and championed the cause of temperance. He worked for education of the working classes. He spoke the rights of all the underprivileged. He was inspiration to Julia Ward Howe, Bronson Alcott, Emerson, and all the great people Boston produced in that age.

Dr. Channing worked with feverish intensity for everything that was for the common good. He was able to perceive that good because his great learning came from knowing people, not just from books. He had an unyielding faith in human goodness as potential for improving society.

Channing killed forever the old Calvinism that filled people with the spirit of the devil and degraded them. He slew a religion that was destined to die if mankind was to live.

Channing was a man whose whole life demonstrated his faith in the natural goodness of people and in the power of reason and good will to solve human problems. Not once in his life did he ever take a public stand at variance with his truest thought in an attempt to avoid public displeasure or to curry favor.

When you visit Boston you must go to the Boston Public Gardens, just down from the State House. There you will see a statue of William Ellery Channing. He faces the front door of the Arlington Street Church, the old Federal Street Church which for so many years prospered under his guidance. It was there that Dr. Channing in May 1825 organized the American Unitarian Association.

The monument was erected by the citizens of Boston. On it is the tribute to his memory. The inscription reads,

He breathed into theology a new spirit, and proclaimed anew the divinity of man.