I hardly need to say any more about Margaret Fuller than what I said in the newsletter and in the morning's reading. "Transcendentalist, proto-feminist and radical Margaret Fuller met the American mind head on in the early part of her century. As editor of the transcendentalist magazine The Dial, Fuller brought the transcendentalist movement to the American public. As an early feminist who sought to develop the minds and lives of young women through her conversations, Fuller awakened a new generation of women's thinking. And, as radical, Fuller came into her own."
A remarkable person who is a credit to our heritage. But that a remarkable person is a credit to our heritage, someone we can point to with pride, does not necessarily make a sermon. It is biography. How does biography become sermon?
The question lying behind this question is a deeper one: Why is it that we Unitarian Universalists make such a fuss over our forebears?
Case in point: If it were any larger, our First Unitarian portrait of Susan B. Anthony in the foyer would be a mural not a picture. We take rightful, great pride in Susan B. Anthony's membership in this congregation. I read discussions of forebears among UU ministers; we have t-shirts that list as many Unitarians and Universalists as you can get on a T-shirt without the need of a magnifying glass for reading the list; we teach about them to our children in our religious education classes.
Before I talk about Margaret Fuller, why am I doing it - on Sunday morning in a sermon? Long time minister of Northwest Church in Southfield, MI, the late Frank Gentile, commented once that we
UUs make a big deal about our historical people because we don't have a central figure like Jesus or the Buddha. That makes sense to me. My Lutheran church focused on the Bible and on Jesus. I didn't know much about Martin Luther and didn't know German Lutheran theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer existed until I wasn't a Lutheran anymore.
But we UUs focus on people in our history, for example, Origin, Francis David, Faustus Socinus, Jan Hus, Michael Servetus, King John Sigismund and his mom Queen Isabella of Transylvania and then that great cloud of witnesses from the late 18th and through the 19th century. It is a source of pride that people like Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dorothea Dix, Jane Addams, Adlai Stevenson, Jim Blanchard (former MI governor), Gene Roddenberry (originator of Star Trek), Pete Seeger and many others were, and are, part of our heritage.
Sources of pride but how to talk about them in sermon?
I also wonder sometimes, have some concern that we exercise a kind of hero/sheroe worship that has as much power to move us out of the spiritual and justice work of the here and now as the power to move us into such work.
Hero/sheroe worship makes what was done before us more significant than what is possible among us now. They were so big, so remarkable, so.... nearly perfect. But none of these people were perfect.
Every last one of them had broken parts in their lives, troubles and sorrows they couldn't fix, things they didn't understand -- like every one of us. But we tend to treat them as if they were perfect. So how does biography become sermon??
These people who came before, whom we honor so much, -- were people like us. Nobody is perfect; all of our lives have difficult moments, years -- decades! Whole stories, including the broken parts, of the most famous and courageous among us is a healthy tonic to my thinking I can't do what people like Susan B. Anthony or Margaret Fuller did a hundred years ago and more.
Superman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman - the one-dimensional heroes that I grew up with ended up making me feel less able, not more able. I don't want to have one-dimensional Unitarian Universalist heroes and heroines that make me, make any of us, feel less able. Our tradition is dedicated to empower our lives.
Talking about our forebears in a whole manner is helpful to us. And to speak of our institutional history in this manner as well. For example, there used to be an adult ed curriculum called "The Disagreements Which Unite Us". It looked at the issues which have caused Unitarians and Universalists consternation over the last two centuries.
It explored how we've come to be the religious people we are through our fights and our problems, through the people who wrestled through them. The curriculum helped the people who took the course see that people wrestling through hard issues ever goes on, institutionally. AND PERSONALLY - PEOPLE IN OUR TRADITION - PEOPLE LIKE US - LIKE Margaret Fuller. Margaret Fuller was not one-dimensional! She struggled and wrestled, met the issues of the day head on and made mistakes, alienated people close to her, alienated the nation for awhile, left the country to escape the mess. She wasn't an easy woman.
But she wouldn't have been Margaret Fuller if she'd been a simple person. She wouldn't be a model if she'd been simply a woman of her time. And so a sermon on a complex woman, a person like us. Never simple. As fifteen year old Margaret Fuller made clear in the letter to a younger girl about her own studies in today's reading:
"I rise a little before five, walk an hour, and then practise on the piano, till seven, when we breakfast. Next I read French, -- Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe." etc. She ends the letter with this statement: "I feel the power of industry growing every day, and, besides the all-powerful motive of ambition, and a new stimulus...I have learned to believe that nothing...is unattainable!" She would learn of things unattainable. But she was fifteen!
She led a remarkably intellectual life; more academic than most Americans then or now; far more academic than any other girl of her time. Her father's challenge was the force behind the education she received. He wrote from his Senate office in Washington: "Tell Margaret I love her if she learns to read." She did -- at age three. Her father challenged her and taught her but he couldn't teach her what to do WITH her genius or her education. Margaret didn't know what to do with it either.
One biographer said of Fuller that she was "living a problem the more oppressive and insidious because she couldn't name it." It was a suffering that contributed to intense and pervasive migraine headaches as well as to chronic insomnia throughout her life. Margaret Fuller was not perfect but she kept on. She suffered but didn't surrender. Her prayer was this: "Give me truth, cheat me not by illusion."
Perhaps it was because of this prayer that she gathered young women for "conversations." For five winters Margaret and 20-25 young women met over tea in the parlor of a friend to discuss important philosophical questions of the day. She used her intellect and education; she handed on its importance to other young women so that they would gain access to a life of the intellect, so that they would not be cheated by illusion. Perhaps she hoped to find in that group of women someone she could genuinely talk to.
In her journal she wrote: "I must take my own path, and learn... without being paralyzed for today. We need great energy, and self-reliance to endure...."
Margaret Fuller was not a perfect woman - like us. There were rules for the Conversations: certain topics were forbidden. There was to be no discussion of abolition. She struggled (like us!), and wrote in a letter:
For all the tides of life that flow within me, I am dumb and ineffectual.... I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is at present too straitly-bound to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle...With the intellect I always have, always shall, overcome; but that is not the half of the work. The life, the life! O, my God! Shall the life never be sweet?
Our Unitarian and Universalist forebears were difficult people, like we all are, and they got on with it -- mostly!
Margaret Fuller biographer Belle Chevigny says something else that fits for me about the importance of learning about who this woman was: "I found in Fuller much more than I had bargained for-a woman who can speak to us still on the problems of reconciling productive independence with emotional needs, desire for singular achievement with sisterhood, feminism with other social issues, the strain of struggle with the desire for peace and acceptance, and intellectual idealism with an imperative need to act on material reality."
Fuller was a woman very much alone. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, described three classes of humans: men, women, and Margaret Fuller.
Aspasia, courtesan of Pericles in Greek mythology was the only model she could find for herself; and women in Europe, like George Sand, whom Fuller met near the end of her life; complex, difficult, struggling, human.
When Margaret Fuller was 26 years old she met Ralph Waldo Emerson, then 34 years old. He introduced her to Transcendentalism, for her a religious affirmation of the life of the mind. For several years Fuller was editor and literary critic for the transcendentalist magazine The Dial. She absorbed Transcendentalism -- and grew beyond it.
Now, she wouldn't have been able to imagine not including discussion on abolition and other justice issues of her day, and weighing in on them. Transcendentalism, its too often emphasis on the life of the mind, was not enough for her.
She traveled one summer -- to the frontier on boats and canoes along the Great Lakes -- outside the confines of Boston life, a trip that also moved her outside the confines of the interior life, farther into public life and public concerns. She entered the fullness of her public life in America when she wrote Woman in the 19th Century, the first American exploration of women's lives.
In the same year Horace Greeley hired her to the NY Tribune as the first woman to write for a major newspaper. She visited Sing Sing and the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane, and wrote about the terrible conditions and what work was being done by other women to make life better for the imprisoned and the mentally ill. The book Woman in the 19th Century was reviled. More controversy than she could tolerate she finally escaped to Europe.
In Milan Margaret met radicals during a time of growing ferment in Italy that would turn that country into revolution at the end of the 1840s. And she met nobleman Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Somewhere along the way they married. Somewhere during that time they had a baby together. Through that time they lived in the Revolution. Ossoli fought as a soldier and Margaret became hospital director on a small island in the Tiber River. Their baby nearly starved -- left with so-called friends -- separate from either of them.
Her friend William Henry Channing wrote letters praising her courage. She wrote back, disagreeing:
"You say you are glad I have had this great opportunity for carrying out my principles....I rejoiced that it lay not with me to cut down the trees, to destroy the Elysian gardens for the defence of Rome; I do not know that I could have done it. And the sight of these far nobler growths, the beautiful young men, mown down in their stately prime, becomes too much for me. I forget the great ideas, to sympathize with the poor mothers, who had nursed their precious forms....You say, I sustained them; often have they sustained my courage; one, kissing the pieces of bone that were so painfully extracted from his arm.... One fair young man, who is made a cripple for his life, clasped my hand as he saw me crying...and faintly cried, 'Viva L'Italia.'...'God is good; God knows,' they often said to me, when I had not a word to cheer them."
It strikes me even now; this letter includes no mention of not being with her infant son.
The revolution ended and Margaret and her husband decided to journey to America and so they boarded a ship. Their ship encountered a storm just off Fire Island, nearly home, and the ship broke up and went down. There were survivors and they reported they had seen the three: Margaret, her husband, and their baby, all were drowned (7/19/1850).
She had much yet to live for; she had much yet to bring to public conversation. A book manuscript drowned with her. In a December 1849 letter, in the midst of revolution, she wrote her friend Ellen Channing what could be called her epitaph: "I neither rejoice nor grieve, for bad or good, I acted out my character."
Her last letter to Quaker friends, written June 3, ended: "with most affectionate wishes that joy and peace may continue to dwell in your house, adieu and love as you can."
We all struggle with our own issues, wrestle with God and demons, meet the day head on and make mistakes. We alienate people close to us and run away from some of the roughest, harshest tangles that come our way. We aren't easy people. We aren't simple, acting out our characters, trying to live the life that is most possible for us. We wouldn't be heroes and heroines, models in our own ways, for the lives of the next generation, if we were simple.
We are called to join together in courage and wisdom, in truth and trust; to affirm and live by what we know and what we learn; to affirm and engage in the disagreements which do not destroy us, and, in our ongoing commitment and love of life and one another, make us who we are.
Like Margaret Fuller. "Adieu, and love as you can."
return to main page