a domestic conqueror...

I have been a stay at home father for our children since the oldest was six months old (12 years now) and while this has been a blessing in many ways, it has been, in others, a struggle. I most certainly am not, in Emerson's words from today's reading, "a domestic conqueror"...but I have tried to create a certain culture. My wife and I are presently working on intentionality in our home and life, something Emerson speaks of in his "Domestic Life" from the volume "Society and Solitude."

"Let us come then out of the public square and enter the domestic precinct. Let us go to the sitting-room, the table-talk and the expenditure of our contemporaries. An increased consciousness of the soul, you say, characterizes the period. Let us see if it has not only arranged the atoms at the circumference, but the atoms at the core. Does the household obey an idea ? Do you see the man, - his form, genius and aspiration, - in his economy ? Is that translucent, thorough-lighted ? There should be nothing confounding and conventional in economy, but the genius and love of the man so conspicuously marked in all his estate that the eye that knew him should read his character in his property, in his grounds, in his ornaments, in every expense. A man's money should not follow the direction of his neighbor's money, but should represent to him the things he would willingliest do with it. I am not one thing and my expenditure another. My expenditure is me. That our expenditure and our character are twain, is the vice of society...

It is a sufficient accusation of our ways of living, and certainly ought to open our ear to every good-minded reformer, that our idea of domestic well-being now needs wealth to execute it...

...the reform that applies itself to the household must not be partial. It must correct the whole system of our social living. It must come with plain living and high thinking ; it must break up caste, and put domestic service on another foundation. It must come in connection with a true acceptance by each man of his vocation, - not chosen by his parents or friends, but by his genius, with earnestness and love...

With a change of aim has followed a change of the whole scale by which men and things were wont to be measured. Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, -in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged. The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury ; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere ; only the low habits need palaces and banquets...

Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every company, at every fire-side, with the riches of Nature, when he hears so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that Nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon...

I think that the heroism which at this day would make on us the impression of Epaminondas and Phocion must be that of a domestic conqueror. He who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention and Fashion, and show men how to lead a clean, handsome and heroic life amid the beggarly elements of our cities and villages; whoso shall teach me how to eat my meat and take my repose and deal with men, without any shame following, will restore the life of man to splendor, and make his own name dear to all history."

Blessings

eloquent teachings...

After Church on Sunday, a beautiful, crisp October day, my family and I drove to Cambridge and visited the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House. We have lived here for over six years and it is the first time we have gone; shameful! I have written before of my love for Longfellow and his house demonstrates many of the reasons why. It is old, respects its history, exudes joy but has an underlying sadness, reflects broad loves and deep friendships...

Our long suffering children did very well but enjoyed the Harvard Bookstore, Chinese food, and ice cream more than the Longfellow!

Here is Longfellow on Autumn:

With what a glory comes and goes the year!
The buds of spring, those beautiful harbingers
Of sunny skies and cloudless times, enjoy Life's newness,
and earth's garniture spread out;
And when the silver habit of the clouds
Comes down upon the autumn sun, and with
A sober gladness the old year takes up
His bright inheritance of golden fruits,
A pomp and pageant fill the splendid scene.

There is a beautiful spirit breathing now
Its mellow richness on the clustered trees,
And, from a beaker full of richest dyes,
Pouring new glory on the autumn woods,
And dipping in warm light the pillared clouds.
Morn on the mountain, like a summer bird,
Lifts up her purple wing, and in the vales
The gentle wind, a sweet and passionate wooer,
Kisses the blushing leaf, and stirs up life
Within the solemn woods of ash deep-crimsoned,
And silver beech, and maple yellow-leaved,
Where Autumn, like a faint old man, sits down
By the wayside a-weary. Through the trees
The golden robin moves. The purple finch,
That on wild cherry and red cedar feeds,
A winter bird, comes with its plaintive whistle,
And pecks by the witch-hazel, whilst aloud
From cottage roofs the warbling blue-bird sings,
And merrily, with oft-repeated stroke,
Sounds from the threshing-floor the busy flail.

O what a glory doth this world put on
For him who, with a fervent heart, goes forth
Under the bright and glorious sky, and looks
On duties well performed, and days well spent!
For him the wind, ay, and the yellow leaves,
Shall have a voice, and give him eloquent teachings.
He shall so hear the solemn hymn that
Death Has lifted up for all, that he shall go
To his long resting-place without a tear.

Blessings

written in the soul's deep pages...

This from Samuel Longfellow's "Hymns and Verses." May all have a blessed Sabbath.

"IN ALL AGES ENTERING HOLY SOULS."

Light of ages and of nations!

Every race and every time

Has received thine inspirations,

Glimpses of thy truth sublime.

Always spirits in rapt vision

Passed the mystic veil within ;

Always hearts bowed in contrition

Found salvation from their sin.

Reason's noblest aspiration
Truth in growing clearness saw;
Conscience spoke its condemnation,
Or proclaimed the Eternal law.
While thine inward revelations
Told thy saints their prayers were heard,
Prophets to the guilty nations
Spake thine everlasting word.

Lord, that word abideth ever;

Revelation is not sealed ;

Answering now to our endeavor,

Truth and Right are still revealed.

That which came to ancient sages,

Greek, Barbarian, Roman, Jew,

Written in the soul's deep pages

Shines to-day, forever new!

Blessings

lifting the curtain from the common...

Last Winter and Spring, I had the honor and opportunity to preach several sermons. It is a cliche' to say that all who preach have just one idea and say it in many ways but it is difficult to deny it's truth. My dominant theme was to redeem each day...not, of course, very original.

Today, Brother Emerson on the importance of humility in doing the work of redeeming the day. This from his essay "Works and Days" found in the volume "Society and Solitude."

"One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday. 'T is the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. 'T is the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior. In the Norse legend of our ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher's hut and patches a boat. In the Hindoo legends, Hari dwells a peasant among peasants. In the Greek legend, Apollo lodges with the shepherds of Admetus, and Jove liked to rusticate among the poor Ethiopians. So, in our history, Jesus is born in a barn, and his twelve peers are fishermen. 'T is the very principle of science that Nature shows herself best in leasts; it was the maxim of Aristotle and Lucretius; and, in modern times, of Swedenborg and of Hahnemann. The order of changes in the egg determines the age of fossil strata. So it was the rule of our poets, in the legends of fairy lore, that the fairies largest in power were the least in size. In the Christian graces, humility stands highest of all, in the form of the Madonna; and in life, this is the secret of the wise. We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and pedlers. In daily life, what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well. " A general," said Bonaparte, " always has troops enough, if he only knows how to employ those he has, and bivouacs with them." Do not refuse the employment which the hour brings you, for one more ambitious. The highest heaven of wisdom is alike near from every point, and thou must find it, if at all, by methods native to thyself alone."

Blessings

spirits clad in veils...

Christopher Cranch was one of the more fascinating of the transcendentalists. A Unitarian minister (for a time serving as Frederic Henry Hedge's assistant) and friend of Emerson and James Freeman Clarke, Cranch was a poet, musician, artist, writer of children's books and much else. Even Poe, no lover of the Transcendentalists, had some vague praise for Cranch naming him "One of the least intolerable of the school of Boston transcendentalists."



ENOSIS
by: Christopher Cranch (1813-1892)

THOUGHT is deeper than all speech,
Feeling deeper than all thought;
Souls to souls can never teach
What unto themselves was taught.

We are spirits clad in veils;
Man by man was never seen;
All our deep communing fails
To remove the shadowy screen.

Heart to heart was never known;
Mind with mind did never meet;
We are columns left alone,
Of a temple once complete.

Like the stars that gem the sky,
Far apart, though seeming near,
In our light we scattered lie;
All is thus but starlight here.

What is social company
But a babbling summer stream?
What our wise philosophy
But the glancing of a dream?

Only when the sun of love
Melts the scattered stars of thought;
Only when we live above
What the dim-eyed world hath taught;

Only when our souls are fed
By the Fount which gave them birth,
And by inspiration led,
Which they never drew from earth,

We like parted drops of rain
Swelling till they meet and run,
Shall be all absorbed again,
Melting, flowing into one.

Blessings

Here we are...

The gap between real and ideal, a source of our "soul's imprisonment" is reconciled, according to Frederic Henry Hedge, by the life of Jesus. Part two of "The Soul's Deliverance:"

"And this to me is the great significance of the life of Jesus. I see it in the reconciliation of the ideal and the actual. This is the true historical atonement in Christ...Jesus expressed, as no other has done, his conception in his life; he realized his idea and turned it into fact, and made it a part of the history of man.

The greatest of Christian painters, the immortal Raphael, has figured this marriage of the real and the ideal in the life of Jesus, in his painting of the Transfiguration...

He knew how to come down from the mountain with undiminished power and glory...He has solved in his life the old contradiction, and done away with the discrepance between here and there, between the spiritual world and the actual...Jesus accepted the conditions of his lot, externally one of the humblest, and exalted himself and it, and made his life divine by perfect obedience to those conditions. He did not aspire to the place of command to which his people gladly would have exalted him, but abode in his native humility and walked with his peasant companions, and found the topics of his duty among the halt and blind and publicans and sinners, and preached his gospel to the poor. He did not seek to transcend his sphere externally by self-aggrandizement, but was satisfied to fill it completely, casting into it all the fullness of his royal nature. Thus he brought his soul out of prison,-the prison of low and bounded reality,-by ignoring its bounds, living wholly in the eternal...

Accept the actual in which you are placed. Put away selfish and sickly ambition, and find yourself in your appointed conditions. Adjust yourself with the terms of your lot. Instead of seeking to lift yourself above it by uneasy efforts, seek rather to fill it out by throwing into it the fullness of your faculty and your life...

Here we are; that is our first concern. Let us see that we be truly and wholly and beneficently here, with all our faculty and heart. It may seem brighter elsewhere, but that is an optical illusion; here, too, it is good to be. God is here, and man is here, and the calls and the topics of daily duty. And duty is everywhere the same thing, everywhere sufficient and divine...

The Kingdom of Heaven is here or nowhere. Duty is the key that unlocks it to all. Only so far as we succeed in making the will of god our meat and our drink, can we ever lay hold on everlasting life."

Blessings

"The Soul's Deliverance" pt. 1

We live in a society geared toward expectation. Everything will get better if only...if only I had the right job, the right things, the right (fill in the blank.) Frederic Henry Hedge speaks of this imprisonment of our souls in this wonderful sermon. Today, the first part discussing the problem and tomorrow, the solution.

"The Soul's Deliverance"

"Bring my soul out of prison, that i may praise thy name." Psalm cxlil. 7.

...there is one universal experience which claims to be noticed in this connection (the feeling of imprisonment)-one species of confinement common to all who rise above the level of a merely animal life. I mean the conflict we all experience between the ideal and the actual, between desire and fruition, our conceptions and attainments, our designs and our acts. We all have our ideal...could we only realize these aspirations in the life! But who does this? What hero or saint ever makes his actual life correspond with his ideal, his practice equal to his vision?...

This, then, is the prison to which I especially invite your attention. This is a prison in which we all have been confined,-the feeling of incapacity, the insufficiency of life, the conflict between the ideal and the actual, our desire and our destiny, and on the other hand a discrepance between our theory and our practice...

But this I say, that divine Providence working in human history has not left us without guidance and without hope in this radical and universal need. The answer has been suggested at least, if not realized. The way of escape from this prison of our infirmity has been indicated in one recorded life in which the conflict between the ideal and the actual has been done away; the life of 'that man whom he hath ordained,' the divine man, whom with some dim sense of this service his adoring disciples have named their Redeemer and their God. And this to me is the greatest significance of the life of Jesus."

Blessings