WIDER THAN THE SKY
Emily Dickinson & Spirituality
James Ishmael Ford
2 May 2004

Text
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Tell all the truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –

Jan and I don’t get out of town very much, so two weekends ago when we drove out to enjoy the western part of Massachusetts (as well as see the southern part of Vermont); I determined I wasn’t going to think about the Society or District events or the Zen group or any of the regular run of things, and simply revel in a real spring weekend. I’m pleased to report I did rather well. One time a thought about the canvas tried to poke itself into my skull, but I thought to myself, there’ll be plenty of time for that later. And, miracle of miracles, it said, “Okay,” and went away.

The next day a thought about where we’re going to be holding the next Zen retreat tried to sneak in, as well. But I cut the darned thing off at the root. ‘Twas wonderful. Such beautiful country out there and we spent most of our time actually enjoying it. We particularly love Northampton and Amherst. While in Amherst the high point was spending some serious time visiting the Dickinson homestead and reflecting on that woman who might be the greatest American poet.

While there I have to admit I thought to myself, just briefly, there’s a sermon here. To my credit, except for some extra attention to details, and a minor quest in the area’s used bookshops, which Jan might suggest I’d have done anyway, I waited until I came home to start thinking about a sermon on Emily Dickinson. But once here the outline came quickly. Emily, if you’ll forgive the intimate usage, but she is an intimate, indeed she is a deeply personal guide for all of us who wish to find depth within our liberal spiritual tradition. And that’s what I’d like to explore in our time together today. How Emily Dickinson points to a way into depth and authenticity for us, for you and me, in our shared lives as Unitarian Universalists. She really is one of our teachers.

So, first the briefest of biographical detail: Emily Dickinson was born in December, 1830, to a prominent Amherst family. She spent a year at Mount Holyoke under the tutelage of its founder the remarkable Mary Lyons, but could not adjust for many reasons, including the fervent Evangelical Christianity that was constantly preached there, and so returned home after only two semesters. Emily traveled very little, a brief stint in Washington with her father during his single term as a US congressman, some time in Cambridge for medical treatment, and not a lot more than that.

Except for a brief interval during her childhood, a time of financial hardship where the family lived in another house but still in Amherst, Emily lived her entire life in the house where she was born. Much has been made of her propensity to wear white, but no one knows for sure what it actually meant to her. Increasingly reclusive, for her last twenty years Emily rarely left her home even to cross the yard to visit her beloved sister-in-law. Still she had a small circle of genuine friends centering on her sisters and brother and just a couple of others. They would prove invaluable in preserving and presenting her poetry to the world following her death in May, 1886.

She wrote her first poem at nineteen. When she died a few months shy of fifty-six, Emily had published seven poems, or maybe ten, my sources for this differ. Interestingly of that tiny number whatever it actually was, several were in fact printed without her consent. She did not write for the general public. Nonetheless she was prolific; she was the author of 1,775 known poems as well as about 1,100 letters. Like many, perhaps all poets she wrote in any number of voices. So, it is a dangerous task to pick a few of her poems and to assert they reflect her thinking. But preachers are often willing to go where angels and indeed the prudent fear to tread.

I justify this by asserting I love Emily. I love her idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation, the horror of so many of her editors, now only completely restored in publications of the last few decades. And I love her language. Her idiom was that of the rich literary tradition of the early middle part of the Nineteenth century with its first opening to the treasure trove of world religious culture. At the same time the core of her language and metaphor was found in the Bible, and particularly in the oral transmission of the King James Version.

As possibly one of the last generation to be taught to read out of the King James Bible, I love her cadences and echoes of phrase. However, in the same way she engaged everything else she drew upon for inspiration, while her usage of scripture runs a current throughout her writings, it is a current with a difference. She didn’t simply slavishly repeat what she had read and heard. She looked slant and found something fresh and new. And this I love most of all.

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These are the Signs to Nature’s Inns –
Her invitation broad
To whosoever famishing
To taste her mystic Bread –

These are the rites of Nature’s House –
The Hospitality
That opens with an equal width
To Beggar and to Bee

For Sureties of her staunch Estate
Her undecaying Cheer
The Purple in the East is set
And in the North, the Star –

She was baptized into the Congregational church as an infant, but never had that “quickening of the spirit,” the experience of Jesus’ unique saving grace that allowed her full membership in that orthodox Calvinist congregation. Rather, like so many of us in this hall, she found her salvation in nature and the vast expanses of the human mind. Over the years she’s been claimed by many, including with some justice by our own Unitarian Universalist tradition, our claim to Emily resting on her close association with the Transcendentalist movement. However, she was not strictly speaking a Transcendentalist, as she joined no club or church during her lifetime.

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I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Their’s –
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading – too –

Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, Of Grace –
Unto supremest name –
Called to my Full – The Crescent dropped –
Existence’s whole Arc, filled up,
With one – small Diadem –

My second Rank – too small the first –
Crowned – Crowing – on my Father’s breast –
A half unconscious Queen –
But this time – Adequate – Erect,
With Will to choose,
Or reject,
And I choose, just a Crown –

She read Emerson and Thoreau and admired them. Indeed Emerson read her, as well, in manuscript, and expressed his own considerable admiration for her thinking as well as her abilities as a poet. Without a doubt she walked in that august crowd of nature mystics, claiming direct apprehension of what is. And, push come to shove, it is hard to describe her theology as anything but Transcendentalist.

The scholar Martin Bickman explains “The Transcendentalist vision… (insists) the mind can apprehend absolute spiritual truths directly without having to go through the detour of the senses, without the dictates of past authorities and institutions... In this sense particularly, it was the logical--or supralogical--extension of both the Protestant reformation and American democratic individualism.” Here is the place that Emily Dickinson lived, and certainly the perspective from which she wrote much of her poetry, and how she comes to us today into this hall as a spiritual guide. Just listen to her wisdom coming to us slant.

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The Brain – is wider than the Sky
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –

The Brain is deeper than the sea –
For – hold them – Blue to Blue –
The one the other will absorb –
As Sponges – Buckets – do –

The Brain is just the weight of God –
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –
And they will differ – if they do –
As Syllable from Sound –

In her essay “Let Emily Sing for You Because She Cannot Pray,” one of my heroes, the novelist Kathleen Norris reflects how “Finding herself unable to contain her religious feeling within the bounds of orthodoxy, Emily Dickinson spent a good part of her life battling God directly… It was her confrontation with religion that helped shape her life and poetry… and like ( that other spiritual forbearer of ours Walt Whitman) she developed what can rightly be called a ‘heterodox faith’ that had little to do with churches or doctrines and a great deal to do with inner experience as well as nature itself.”

Here I feel we find common ground not only with her as a Transcendentalist and therefore a more or less direct spiritual ancestor of ours, but also as a living exemplar of our peculiar, mysterious and beautiful contemporary spirituality. She lays it out for us, cleanly, if a tad slant. So, let me try, for a moment, to present it straight.

Susan Rieke in her essay “I’m keeling – Still -: A Study of Emily Dickinson’s Siege on the Sacred” writes of Emily that for her “categories of the sacred and the secular are not distinct or separate classifications: the secular is decidedly holy.” For Emily, as I suggest, for us in our contemporary liberal religious tradition, authentic depth is found when we surrender our assumed categories, our ideas of the proper order of things, and instead look honestly and fully at the “is-ness” of it all. And we find that “is” here, in our own hearts, yours and mine.

In her brilliant essay “Adjusting the Symbols -: Emily Dickinson & Her Sacraments,” Sarah Klein, upon whom I relied, if indirectly, for much in this sermon, summarizes how Emily “has refined and made the sacrament personal – and this remains, in the material form of the written poems, a literary and spiritual legacy.” I think about that personal, this path of intimacy and what it reveals.

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I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

The glory and of course the shadow of our liberal spirituality lies in how we raise up the individual: it’s our first principle: celebrating the inherent worth and dignity of the singular person. Now we’ve learned, hard, how this assertion needs to be tempered. We find our individual best, I believe, only as we come together and test ourselves in the fires of companionship. But, really that’s another sermon. Here I want to speak to Emily’s gift to us, of a call to a fierce individualism, undeterred by convention or creed, and just how important this is.

Here is, I think, the secret of our way. Our human body, our human mind, if we allow it full, thinking and feeling, reveals all we need to know; that which saves, that which heals, all that which can be called holy. Here’s Emily’s secret, and ours. You and I are the gates of the divine. Our eyes the eyes with which God sees. Our hands, God’s opportunity to act in the world. You and me, poor, incomplete, stumbling, foolish and grasping, we are the hope of the world.
Emily’s way into that hope is through fierce honesty. And in doing so she transforms the small into the great, you and me from our foolishness into our sacred potential. Another commentator on Emily’s way, Krystyna Grocolski, suggests that fierce honesty is part of her spiritual tool-kit, which also included “Self-analysis, self-discipline, and self-critique (as those) tools of her search.” All of which we should attend to, so I repeat them: honesty, self-analysis, self-discipline and self-criticism. Here Emily shows us how we can engage in our own search for our true heritage, our natural home. I say this because I believe she found it for herself. Listen to her brief but telling verse:

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Not “Revelation” – ‘tis – that waits,
But our unfurnished eyes –

I have no doubt Emily found those unfurnished eyes. And because of that she can be your teacher and my teacher on our quest. This is a quest for the authentic, for the real, for the sacred ordinary. This is the path of Unitarian Universalism. Now, some truth in advertising: in a sense this is also a madness. Because it is a step beyond just being in it for ourselves, what might be called the Way of the World. This is a different call. This is about discovering the true nature of who we are, ourselves: and it is a divine madness, a different way of being, a way of intimacy. So she invites and cautions all at once.

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Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demure – you’re straightaway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –

Divine madness. A dangerous thing. But, oh so important, for those who seek truth and meaning, love and justice. It is that important. Her last written words appear to be in a note composed just before she slipped into a terminal coma: “Called back.” I suggest her whole life was a calling back to our true home, calling back to our true joy. Dear sister Emily, our teacher, calls us back, calls us over the ages and generations to that same glorious madness, that same home, that same joy which the wise win.

May each of us seek it.

And may each of us find it.

Amen.

(A Note: Emily Dickinson did not title her poems. There are several methods of numbering them. Here I use that of R. W. Franklin in his now standard edition The Poems of Emily Dickinson Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998 as presented in the Reading Edition.)