UUPS Newsletter 1999 Spring

President's Column

EMERSON' S GRAVE ENCOUNTER

For my Psi Symposium President' s Column I would like to share with you some major excerpts from a sermon I preached about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the remarkable dreams that he and his wife Lydian had in conjunction with the death of Emerson' s first wife, Ellen, and the death of their first born son Waldo. The deaths and the dreams were part and parcel of Emerson' s philosophy of life and being.

In reading Robert D. Richardson' s award winning biography, EMERSON THE MIND ON FIRE (University of California Press, 1995), I confess I was astonished to learn that Emerson was so driven by grief over the death of his first wife, Ellen, that he was moved to open the coffin and view her corpse a year and two months after her death. He had been in the habit of walking to her grave every day and carrying on conversations with her spirit in his mind and in his journal writings. Her loss had carved a deep wound in his still young soul and he found it ever so difficult to let her go. She became for him in his later years a kind of Dantean Beatrice of his imagination, an earthly angel who once walked with him for a short time during the days of his youth.

Emerson's second wife, Lidian, never quite felt that she could compete with this ghost from Emerson's past. She once had a dream "in which she and Emerson were together in heaven when Ellen came up. Lidian...bowed out leaving Emerson with his first wife." Since Lidian couldn't literally give Emerson his first wife back she did the next best thing. When their first of two daughters was born she magnanimously suggested they name her Ellen.

I was also surprised to learn that 25 years after the death of his first wife Emerson would open the coffin of another loved one, his firstborn son Waldo, who had died from Scarlet Feaver at age five. This time it was 15 years after the death, not one year, so the corpse would be even more disintegrated than that of his wife Ellen had been. It's interesting to note that a few months prior to Waldo's death, Lidian, who was in the last month of her third pregnancy with Edith, had a strange dream about a statue that looked "so beautiful that the blooming child who was in the room looked pale and sallow beside it." The statue spoke to the child--a girl--about life and being, "and then, by a few slight movements of the head and body, it gave the most forcible picture of decay and death and corruption, and then became all radiant again with the signs of the resurrection."

Perhaps this was a premonition of Waldo's impending demise and the resurrection and renewal of life that would come with the birth of a new child. But it was a resurrection that would come not without great suffering and pain for both mother and father of little Waldo. A year after Waldo's death Lidian would observe that "flowers grow over the grave, yet it is a grave no less." In coming face to face with death, not once but twice, Emerson was not only doing difficult grief work, but also working out the terms of his life philosophy. He would write in his essay on tragedy, "He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain. No theory of life can have any solidity which leaves (this) out of account." In his Journal he would reflect: "Work and learn in evil days, in days of depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows." But then he would record this ringing affirmation: "I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." He would come to affirm that the powers of the soul are equal to the challenges of life and death all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

In terms of his philosophy of being Emerson would move from a detached Platonic idealism to a kind of dynamic pantheism which sees God in everything, and all things in perpetual transformation. Permanence", said Emerson, "is but a word of degrees, everything is medial." Metamorphosis or transformation was nature's method of advance. Or as he wrote in one of his poems:
The rushing metamorphosis,
Dissolving all that fixture is,
Melts things that be to things that seem,
And solid nature to a dream.

I recalled a dream that I had some eight years ago of walking in the First Parish Norwell cemetery and observing that a bulldozer had exposed a series of graves on a small hillside. A marble slab lies on top of one of the graves. It is the grave of a former minister. The slab is removed revealing two bodies within--the minister and his young wife, who is dressed in her bridal gown, and holding a baby in her arms. The bodies are not decomposed, but still intact. The bride has dark hair and is very beautiful. The sunlight shines on her closed eyelids and she begins to squint. I notice that she is breathing very slowly. Perhaps she thinks it is time for the resurrection. I draw near to her, take her hand in mine, and speak softly in her ear, "Are you awake?" I ask. I lean down and kiss her hand.

Was this sleeping beauty the bride of my soul, my inner Beatrice, my better half, my feminine side, awakening to consciousness? Or perchance my encounter with the angel of death and transformation telling me that though life be short it is nonetheless sweet and the remembrance of beauty eternal? I cannot say, but I've never forgotten that dream, and Emerson's grave encounter brought it to the fore once again. Emerson came to the conclusion after his two grave encounters that every day is judgment day, and every day is time for the resurrection.

In closing I would like to relate a telling dream that Emerson recorded in his journal of October 1840. "I dreamed", writes Emerson, "that I floated at will in the great ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, 'this must thou eat.' And I ate the world." (p.342) Richardson comments that "this is Emerson's global Eucharist; he had come to take Communion at last." Emerson had discovered in the inner reaches of his own soul that we all carry the world and universe within us, but each of us must come to know it for ourselves.

If eating the apple was Emerson' s version of the temptation in the Garden of Eden, this time it was done, not out of ignorance and innocence, but out of knowledge and intuition of our connection to the whole of creation. To know that we are connnected to all that is, that the laws of nature and the laws of love and justice are in our own mind and conscience, is to know the basis of all religion and morality, and our relation to the ultimate source of existence. What could be more expressive of this realizaiton than to say, "I ate the world."

I have been attempting with you to ingest and digest Emerson's life and philosophy by passing it through "the fire of our own thought." In so far as we can do this not only with Emerson, but with whomsoever we make encounter in head and in heart, we are making Emerson relevant once again whether we quote him directly or not. When our own mind is on fire we are caught up in a living philosophy that can spark and enflame the hearts and minds of others. Like Emerson we may find that both our intellect and our dreams are transformed by the process.

(Richard M. Fewkes – President, UU Psi Symposium)