THE PILGRIM SPIRIT
by Forrest Church
November 24, 2002
One hundred and eighty three years ago fifty New Yorkers got together, meeting first in small groups in one another’s living rooms, to establish this church. We think of churches as simply being there. One moves to a city, goes church shopping, finds a religious home and gets involved. Think of it as going to a religious restaurant. When your soul hungers for spiritual sustenance and seeks out a community where this will be fostered, you check out the local religious restaurants. You read the menu. You try the food. Everything is already there waiting for you. The chef. The waiters. The ambiance. But what if none of the places you tried nourished your soul’s hunger. Do you give up, or settle for the least unsatisfying fare. No. Not if you were one of those fifty New Yorkers one hundred and eighty years ago. What you do instead is to establish your own restaurant. You build a building, furnish it, write your own menu, hire a chef, and go into business. Can you imagine how spiritually hungry one has to be to go to that much trouble. After all, there were hundreds of churches in New York City in 1819. To those fifty people, many of them small merchants, none of these churches would do. Why? Because they wanted a Unitarian church. There were only a handful of Unitarian churches in the entire country in 1819. The American Unitarian Association wasn’t founded until 1825. Yet these people had heard tell of a way of being religious without being dogmatic, a way of reading the Bible without taking it literally, a faith that placed deed above creed, honored freedom of conscience, and placed reason on a higher pediment than belief. How did they find one another? Can you imagine how many one on one conversations took place?
"I wish I could find a church where I could worship without checking my mind at the door?"
"I too. And I’ve looked, but there isn’t one."
"We should start one?"
"You and I, start a church?"
"Why not. I’m sure my sister and brother and law would be interested. Why don’t you and your wife come over for dinner and we'll talk about it."
Today we celebrate not only our anniversary but also the 23 year ministry of my predecessor, the eighth minister of All Souls, Walter Donald Kring. Among the things about Walter that we celebrate in stone on the beautiful new monument erected in his memory is that he was historian of All Souls. What a gift that is for us and future generations here. His three books encompassing our history are filled with anecdote and inspiration, especially rich in stories about our members themselves. Who they were. What they believed. How they acted on their beliefs.
In Liberals Among the Orthodox, Walter’s first volume, which traces our beginnings from 1819 to 1839, there is a wonderful quote from the novelist Catharine Sedgwick to her Boston friend, Eliza Lee Cabot. In this letter she describes the congregation as it was in 1823.
"It requires no little zeal and skill to make the discordant elements of which our church is composed, mingle. Excepting one or two little knots in the church they are strangers here from inland and outland, English radicals & daughters of Erin, Germans and Hollanders, philosophic gentiles and unbelieving Jews. . . . In our association there is at least one of every sort. There are also those who have been seen "righteous in this generation," a peculiar people zealous of good works. It seemed becoming that those who pased by on the other side when all the popular charities of the world were going on, should have something of their own trying to do good. A free school for some of the ten thousand children of this city that are without any instruction was determined on."
As when we look back at old picture albums and see our features in the child we once were, we can recognize All Souls today from this early snapshot. But we miss the extraordinary labor pains that brought our church into existence only four years before. What dedication our founders had, and what generosity—just think of the cost. Rather than supporting an already established institution with their annual tithes, they built a church from scratch. And four years later they were establishing a free school. These men and women didn’t take their freedom for granted, certainly not their freedom of belief. They invested it for others. They built a home for it.
And yet, all they were doing is following in the footsteps of their own forebears. This country was itself founded by men and women who crossed the ocean to a wilderness in order freely to practice their own faith. Even as we take All Souls for granted, and therefore must pause once a year to offer thanks for all those who came before us leaving this church as their bequest and our inheritance, on Thanksgiving we pause to give thanks as well for the freedoms we enjoy in this nation.
When I was doing my research for The American Creed, I discovered that five of my ancestors came to American on the Mayflower. Three (John Howland, John Tilley, and Richard Warren) accompanied Miles Standish on a four-day mission to reconnoiter the coastline in search for a place to settle. It was early December, 1620. The Pequot Indians attacked their encampment shortly after dawn the second morning. It was a brief, fierce battle, but no blood was shed. One year later, half the party of 101 settlers had died of disease or malnutrition.
How strange it was to contemplate that if Elizabeth Tilley had died that Winter rather than her parents I would not be here this morning. In fact, I would not be anywhere this morning. But that is the way the wheel has spun for each of us, going back to the very beginning of time. Every one of our ancestors somehow made it to puberty and then coupled at precisely the right instant to ensure the continuance of our genetic line.
None of the Pilgrims would have survived that Winter had they not found a way to co-exist with the Native Americans, who taught them how to plant corn and modeled life in a forbidding wilderness. This reminds us of another thing about our histories. Each of us, not only those related to the Pilgrims, owes his or her existence to the kindness of strangers, many of whom found that kindness repaid unkindly. I say that because simply to be here, no matter what the recent history of your family or race may suggest, at myriad points over the history of time, your ancestors survived at the expense of others whose ancestry was thereby diminished. For every survivor of the vagaries of history, there are hundred of unborn witnesses, their own lifelines severed by the inexorable laws that enhance the prospects of the victor and subdue those of the vanquished.
Thanksgiving commemorates this irony. The event itself, however, was really quite amazing, a model for what might have been and yet can be. In mid-October 1621, the Wampanoag chief, Massasoit, and ninety members of his tribe celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the fifty Pilgrims who made it through the winter and thirty-five recent arrivals who had sailed on the Fortune. The Native Americans brought venison. Drawing generously from their limited stores—supplemented by a turkey-shoot and the bounty of their first harvest—the Pilgrims were hospitable to their new neighbors, "whom for three days we entertained and feasted," as Governor John Bradford noted in his diary.
Even as they dined together, the Pilgrims and Native Americans co-existed in a tenuous state of justifiably mutual mistrust. One legacy of their fateful encounter on these shores was the eventual near extermination of a once proud people. Another was the birth of a nation founded on almost impossibly high ideals. This tension between deed and creed remains both the nation’s shame and its greatest hope. We should remember both as we sit down at our Thanksgiving tables this Thursday.
Beginning as the only festival of a bleak year, Thanksgiving remains America’s most widely-celebrated holiday. And it should be. Though its promise was not fulfilled then, it can be now. Embodying the spirit of E pluribus unum ("out of many one"), Thanksgiving symbolizes everything that should unite us as Americans. Freedom is its watchword, gratitude its expression. For both reasons, thanksgiving remains our most religious non-Christian holiday. No one is excluded from its table. In a sense, it is an American Seder. Not only does a Passover Seder’s meal-centered and family-driven focus evoke the spirit of the Thanksgiving feast, but the ancient Hebrews’ forty year passage through the wilderness to freedom (which Passover commemorates) was the scriptural model for the Pilgrims’ own journey to America.
Were we to open our Thanksgiving Seder with a unison reading of the first sacred text of American history, it would be the Mayflower Compact. In it, a newly free people, after giving lip service to their loyalty to the "dread Sovereign Lord King James," did something on their own for which no other group in England would have mustered the gumption. They determined to "covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation." In short, they created their own government, pledging to "enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony." Noting the contrast between this compact and the laws of the old country, Alexis de Tocqueville exclaimed in wonder, "A democracy more perfect than antiquity had dared to dream of started in full size and panoply from the midst of ancient feudal society."
The Plymouth Colony was far from being a perfect democracy. The form of governance that emerged in Massachusetts was neither egalitarian nor democratic. Nonetheless, at the very outset of our history, the Mayflower Compact espoused the principle upon which the nation would be founded: governments formed by compact derive their power from the terms set by the governed. In practicing their religion and in creating their government, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony acted freely, despite the royal imprimatur of their charter. By so doing, they sounded the keynote of American democracy.
President William Howard Taft reminds us that the Pilgrims "came to American to establish their own freedom of religion, not anybody else’s." As demonstrated most dramatically by the fate of the native Americans, American ideals are often abridged or violated in practice. Yet, the spirit of unity with diversity invoked on that first Thanksgiving continues to inspire what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." This Thanksgiving, Americans of every faith can celebrate a union far more encompassing than the Pilgrims brought to the table. But without what they brought, there would be no feast.
I sometimes wonder whether the Pilgrims were thankful because they survived or survived because they were thankful. Both probably. I certainly know that we cannot thrive unless we are thankful. When we take the many gifts of life—including the miracle of life itself—for granted, our souls languish. We don’t recognize this of course. After all, we have so many little things to complain about that out plate is full. There is always room on it for an extra serving of turkey and stuffing, but not as much room as there should be for the kind of gratitude the Pilgrims felt as they faced their second winter, or the kind of gratitude the founders of All Souls must have experienced when they dedicated our first building. In each instance, that gratitude was enhanced by sacrifice. Yet the sacrifice was worth it, because it was offered in exchange for freedom. Looking back over history, it’s almost impossible today to imagine how precious and rare the freedoms we enjoy in this church and this country actually are. Freedom to believe and worship as one chooses is a remarkable luxury when viewed in the light of history. Yet we, we have a third helping and complain about having eaten too much.
We celebrate anniversaries and holidays for any number of reasons, including simply the fact that they pop up yearly on our calendars. Yet each significant anniversary and holiday is brimful with opportunity, if only we will seize it. Together, they constitute our soul map, charted by those who came before, mysteriously born fated to die, each seeking guideposts for life’s meaning. When we pass such a guidepost on our own life’s journey, it is well to pause and be thankful for those who came before us, charting our way. And as we do, it is also well to reflect on the quality of their own gratitude, and the sacrifice that invested it with such nobility.
I think of that little girl, Elizabeth Tully, her parents dead, her life before her, offering up her thanks to God on that first Thanksgiving. I think of Catherine Sedgewick writing to her friend about this wonderful church that she and her family and their wild assortment of fellow congregants sacrificed so generously to establish. And I say to myself, I can do better. I can do more. I can certainly be more grateful. Fortunately Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Another splendid opportunity lies before us to offer up our thanks. Our thanks for being. Our thanks for being here. Our thanks for being here together.
Amen. I love you. May God bless us all.