The First Universalist Church (Unitarian Universalist Association) of New Madison, Ohio

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first wife was named Ellen. He met her when he was 25 and she was 17, and they married a year later. She had tuberculosis, and he knew that when they married. Still, it was a passionate love affair. She wanted to write poetry, he to preach. They supported each other’s aspirations in every way possible. They traveled together, and when they were apart, wrote to each other constantly. They tried every known remedy and treatment for Ellen’s tuberculosis, but to no avail. Ellen died when she was barely 20 years old, less than two years after their wedding.

Each day for nearly two years after her death, Emerson visited her grave. On one such day, March 29, 1832 to be exact, about 14 months after Ellen died, he opened the coffin and viewed her corpse. His most famous biographer, Richard Richardson, suggests this shows one of Emerson’s most deeply held convictions, the power of “direct, personal and unmediated experience.”[i] He still could not believe she was gone. He continued to write to her in his journal as if she were alive. It was a time of great distress for Emerson. He was only 28 years old, had only been an ordained minister for a year, and his world was falling apart. He continued to visit his wife’s grave for several months. Yet, the March day when he viewed her corpse marked a turning point in his healing process. In less than a year, he gave up his pulpit and traveled to Europe, seeking what we would call today a geographic cure. It worked. He returned from Europe with a new vision and vigor for his life, and he became the leading thinker, speaker and writer that we remember him as today. And, though several years later he remarried, and by all accounts happily so, he never forgot Ellen.

I am introducing my sermon with this story for two reasons. First, as one of the great prophets of the Unitarian-Universalist tradition, learning about Emerson is one way of connecting to our faith tradition. The second reason is that my topic this morning is divine love—the spirituality of sexuality. The text from which I am drawing much of today’s sermon is Emerson’s essay entitled “Love.” Although Emerson would not make many top ten lists of romantic authors, he knew whereof he spoke. Richardson says, “Emerson lived for ideas, but he did so with the reckless, headlong ardor of a lover.”[ii] It sounds like an oxymoron, but he was a passionate intellectual. He believed that we can understand the divine by studying creation itself, that we can know the creator by studying the creation.

First, though, a brief detour. My focus this morning is on how Divinity is revealed through human nature. As my primary example, I will be considering romantic love. Those among us who are not in romantic relationships may feel left behind by this sermon. I think there is in the theology that underlies Emerson’s essay, however, something more universal than just romantic love. So, single people, stay with me. Don’t be too quick to tune me out. I promise you there is something in this for you, too.

Emerson loves the idea of love. “All mankind love a lover,” he writes. He’s not just talking about altruism here, or the love of God, but human, passionate desire. He asserts in his essay, “(Love) expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only to have the countenance of the beloved object.”

Yet, love is so much more than desire, more than what it does for the one in love. We see our lovers differently than any other human sees them. Emerson explains, “[T]he lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.”

Emerson compares this insight to art. “The statue,” he writes, is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it and say what it is in the act of doing.” Think for a moment of your favorite painting or sculpture and the moment you fell in love with it. At some point, you no longer noticed that it is so many inches wide or tall, that it is composed of this color or that, or that the brushstrokes have a particular style. The moment you fell in love with that object was the moment it struck you, “that’s what beauty looks like.”

Emerson acknowledges that what draws us to one another romantically, initially, anyway, are the human equivalents of those qualities we first notice in a painting. It may be our lover’s hair or eyes or figure or smile. If, when we look at that person, we see not beauty in its physical form, but the very ideal of beauty, then, we know we are in love.

There’s more. Love not only enables to see what others do not, it enables us to see what the very objects of our love cannot see in themselves. Emerson puts it this way, “[W]hat we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself and can never know.”

Emerson is not through, yet. He keeps raising the level of the power of love, and he’s got two more to go. He suggests that it in learning to recognize these traits in the objects of our love that we learn to recognize these traits in others. Seeing past our flesh and bones to the divinity within can be learned and improved with experience. Here’s how Emerson puts it. Referring to the best qualities we see in our lovers, he writes, “Then he passes from loving (these qualities) in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls.” Here’s how I translate that. When we love someone, we see the very best in him or her, and from that experience, we learn how to see the best in others as well.

Emerson takes this up another level. Here are his words: “And beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each that which is divine from the taint which it has contacted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to love and knowledge of Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.”

Emerson is saying that the passion with which we are drawn to a particular human being also gives us the power of insight into the soul or spirit of the object of our passion and enables us to see past all of our lover’s petty annoyances and shortcomings. When we learn how to love in this fashion, we also learn to see past other people’s annoyances and shortcomings, too, and to see the divinity in them. Of course, this is a very idealistic view of humans. Our own pettiness often keeps us from obtaining the highest ideal of love Emerson describes. Yet, what I think Emerson is saying is that to ascend to the highest level of love is to know the divine. To use his analogy of art, I would put it this way. Passion draws us to one or another human. When the passion turns into intimacy, and the lovemaking is truly lovemaking, and not just sex, we see beauty in a way we never could have seen before, and we see in our partner the divinity within ourselves. Filled with this spirit and insight, we pass from seeing this divinity only in the one to seeing it in others, and then to all. Then, like our perception of our favorite painting, we see the whole world and all of humanity differently. Not in human terms at all –not in size or shape or color or weight – but we see Divinity in all of humanity and in each human. If you want to say God, I wouldn’t disagree with you, but whatever it is called, it is the ultimate source of love itself.

Now, let me get theological on you for a moment. Here’s how the great Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing says God instructs us: “A wise teacher discovers his wisdom in adapting himself to the capacities of his pupils . . . not in filling them with skeptical distrust of their own powers.”[iii]

In other words, we can only know the ultimate reality with the senses and abilities with which we were created, and I would add, that includes our innate desire to be intimate with another person. Almost everyone would agree that prayer and meditation are two paths to spiritual growth or to whatever we hold to be divine or whatever we understand is our source of creation. Of course, those are mindful activities. I know from experience, though, that we also can encounter the source of our creation by experiencing intimacy with another human, and I don’t just mean emotional intimacy, I mean sex.

For a contrary view, I offer this quotation from 1^st Thessalonians 4:3. Before I do, remember that I view the Bible as a human document that contains some of humankind’s most profound wisdom. This particular passage isn’t one of them, though. “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from fornication; that each one of you know how to control your own body in holiness and honor, not with lustful passions . . . .” Here is my reply to my namesake, the apostle Paul: poppycock.

Am I saying that all passion is divine? that you should follow every urge your body feels. Of course not. I would say the same thing about prayer and meditation. People claiming to have discerned God’s will through contemplation have engaged in a lot of ungodly actions. Our mental impulses are just as susceptible to deception as our physical ones. In both cases, we should discern what is in harmony with the divine by checking our impulses. One way is to hold them up to a standard. I suggest turning to our principles. We don’t have a lot of rules governing sexual ethics, but my experience is that if we honor the inherent worth and dignity in our partners, we treat them with justice, equity and compassion, and we acknowledge our interdependence, our relationships will look a lot more like Emerson’s essay than if we don’t. So, I’ve added another layer here. I’m not saying we’re only as good as our biology. There are spiritual truths that transcend our instincts, things like love and respect, and our challenge is to integrate them with our physical selves.

The problem is that many of us were raised to think of these spiritual principles as trump cards—that is, that love, for example, is better than lust. Of course they can be separated, but they don’t have to be. Both historically and contemporaneously, teachings like those from Thessalonians are used to makes us feel guilty about the very feelings with which were created. What Emerson is saying, I think, is that we have to integrate spiritual principles with everything that makes us human because, ultimately, who – or what—made us human is divine. Put another way, it’s perfectly normal, healthy and even beneficial to feel lust if, when we act on those feelings, we are grounded in sound spiritual principles.

Does this mean that there is some level of love, some knowledge of the divine that is inaccessible to people who are not in physically intimate relationships. No. What Emerson described is just one path. The larger point is not that we experience divinity through love, but that we experience divinity by being ourselves. Let me repeat that: we experience divinity by being ourselves. Most people do end up with other people. Yet, many don’t, both voluntarily and involuntarily. For those among us in the involuntary camp, have faith. If we are open to love, love will find us. Still, there are many people living contemplative lifestyles, perhaps solitary and perhaps in a community, but certainly celibate. They have powerful testimonies of their experiences of God, and I have absolutely no reason to doubt them. We have no nuns or monks here. Yet, on a continuum with the monastic lifestyle at one end and marriage and family at the other, there are people here who feel more closely drawn to the contemplative end of that continuum than the other end. Follow your heart and you will find God.

There are two reasons, though, why I have focused on physical love today. First, it’s the week of St. Valentine’s day. Don’t forget gentlemen: it’s next Saturday. Second, no one has ever disputed that people can know God outside of physical relationships. The contemplative tradition to which I just referred goes back at least 2000 years. Yet, for those same 2000 years, people have been taught that when they follow their natural urges they are being drawn away from God, that so-called desires of the flesh are, literally, evil. Once again, poppycock!

So, I’ll close with this assignment. Normally, I ask you to go home and think about one thing or another, to reflect on some question I’ve posed during the service. Today, I want all of you who are in loving and committed relationships to go home and, recalling the words from our reading this morning, let all your troubles go away, just for an hour or two, and give yourselves the experience of ten thousand wild, dizzy kisses and then ten thousand infinitely slower ones.

[i] Richardson, Robert D. Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire, University of California Press, 1995, p.3.

[ii] Id., p. xi.

[iii] Channing, William Ellery, “Unitarian Christianity,” reprinted in Channing, Emerson, Parker: Three Prophets of Religious LIberalism, Beacon Press, Boston, 1961. p.54.