On an early October evening in 1849, the passengers aboard the ship St. John were having a party. The St. John was known as a famine ship because it was filled with passengers fleeing the mass starvation devastating Ireland at the time.
These sojourners, traveling across the ocean to Boston, had been at sea for 30 days. Finally, with only one day’s sail remaining, they were reveling in the impending end of their journey, as well as celebrating their dreams for better lives in America.
As dawn arrived the next morning, the ship was caught in a northeaster. As the winds and the waves drove it toward shore, the ship crashed on the rocks just outside Cohasset Harbor in Massachusetts.
Those on deck were immediately swept overboard, while the passengers below drowned when the hull collapsed. Within an hour the ship was completely demolished, with all but 20 passengers losing their lives.
A day or so later, a native Massachusetts man in his early 30’s learned of the wreck and went to see the site of the disaster.
There he found scattered evidence of the wreck. Bodies of the victims washed ashore were laid in rudimentary wooden boxes, while the living attempted to identify the deceased.
Surveying all this, the local man wrote that he wasn’t as impacted by the scene as he expected to be. He spoke of sympathizing with the winds and the waves, “…as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day.”
He went on to speak of moving forward and acceptance if this was the law of Nature.
Regarding those who could no longer enjoy walking along this shore, he wrote, “Its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still.”
You might have correctly surmised by now that the local was Henry David Thoreau. His response to this event was as unique as the entirety of his person.
Here’s a quick snapshot of his life:
Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in 1817 in Concord, a rural town 20 miles outside of Boston.
Thoreau decided to change his name from David Henry to Henry David when he was a fledgling writer trying to establish his identity in the literary world. He might have thought Henry David sounded more sophisticated.
Perhaps he thought he needed to revise his name to compensate for his appearance. A self-description of our David Henry turned Henry David was calling his nose ‘my most prominent feature.’ Thoreau also wore a neck beard for many years, which he insisted many women found attractive.
However, Louisa May Alcott mentioned to Ralph Waldo Emerson that Thoreau’s facial hair ‘would most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man’s virtue in perpetuity.’
Another well-known author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was not much kinder: “Thoreau is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty.”
I’m not sure if the neck beard had anything to do with it, but after the one woman he was engaged to broke off her association with him, Thoreau never returned to the dating world again, remaining a bachelor for life.
As a 16-year-old he enrolled in Harvard, where one classmate recalled his “look of smug satisfaction like a man preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance.”
Following graduation, he worked as a school teacher and director before working as a surveyor and in the family pencil factory. He died at age 44 of tuberculosis.
There was a 2015 article written by Kathryn Schultz in ‘The New Yorker’ entitled “The Moral Judgements of Henry David Thoreau: Why, Given its Fabrications, Inconsistencies, and Myopia, Do We Continue to Cherish “Walden”?
I initially read the subtitle to be ‘Why, given its fabrications, inconsistencies, and myopia, we continue to cherish Walden’ (not a question, but rather a statement).
The presence of that 2-letter word “do” completely changes the title’s tenor.
One is an indictment…Why do we still esteem this guy and his book?
The other is an endorsement…Why, despite X, Y and Z, we continue to revere this man and his writings.
Because I didn’t see the “Why DO we” part, I kept reading the article, absorbing the author’s critiques, knowing that at some point she’d bring it home with a “Yeah, but, this is why he’s so great.”
She doesn’t.
There is some sprinkling of positivity, such as when she acknowledges that Thoreau was an outspoken abolitionist, serving as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and going to jail over his refusal to pay the tax on the grounds that it sustained the institution of slavery.
Generally, though, it’s an indictment,
Among her pithy points she maintains:
“The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, quoting him to say, ‘Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded.’”
The author goes on to describe him as “…fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling.”
And then she ends (bringing it home, alright) with her last sentence: We made a classic of the book, and a moral paragon of its author – a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us.
Pointed as her position is, she makes some compelling points.
So, I paused and considered the question…Why do we revere this man?
I’ve got an idea about the reason.
Despite his brusqueness, occasional inconsistency and ego, when he hits the nail on the head, he hits it good.
Thoreau speaks to our spirits’ longing, things that we recognize as pure. And the light from his wisdom is brighter than the sludge of what this article’s author calls “pond scum.”
Here are some examples of Thoreau’s wisdom:
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see,”
This quote highlights the importance of perception, that true understanding comes from looking beyond the surface and seeing the deeper meaning or significance in things and people.
This speaks to understanding that people are more than their behavior, and behind what is displayed and sized up by us onlookers is a myriad of circumstances and dynamics that we may never be privy to.
It speaks to the choice to withhold judgement about what we’re looking at, based on our vast limitation of information.
It brings to mind two other quotes: There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception. – Aldous Huxley
“We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.” – Virginia Satir
Jesus spoke to this as well, when he explained that He spoke in parables so that those who are not receptive to truth would not understand. This illustrates that true perception requires more than just hearing words or looking at… it requires a receptive heart and mind.
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads,”
This quote suggests that the sacred and the divine can be found in the everyday world and in our immediate surroundings, not just in a distant or otherworldly realm.
We’ve talked about this, and Jesus did too as he reminded people that God created the world and is present everywhere in it.
“We need the tonic of wildness,”
This quote emphasizes the importance of nature and wilderness for maintaining well-being.
This is also close to our NCC hearts and theology, as it was to Jesus when he would speak of being sowers of seeds, and considering the birds of the air and the flowers of the fields.
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”
Thoreau suggests here that true wealth lies in one’s ability to detach from material possessions and focus on experiences and values.
It mirrors Jesus asking, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world if you forfeit your soul? What can anyone give in exchange for one’s soul?
This is similar to something else Thoreau said: The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
We think in terms of price being money/currency. However, the amount of life one pays is very real, but not talked about much – time, energy, attention.
“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us,”
This beautifully highlights the importance of inner strength and self-awareness in navigating life’s challenges.
Jesus often spoke about folly about worrying about tomorrow, and the grace of focusing on one’s inner life.
While he was raised in a Unitarian household, Thoreau was not connected devoutly to any one religion. Clearly, though, he thought and spoke not only about Christian values, but values common to most religions because of their spiritual richness.
Do you see shades of our belief statement in his messages, tools that help us to foster Jesus’ message?
With the exception perhaps of Jesus, it seems that there are moments of inconsistency and lapses of love in all of our words and behavior.
Certainly, this applies to one Henry David Thoreau. It’s a part of the complexity of our humanity.
You hear the richness of Thoreau’s complexity when he said (regarding his writing of “Walden”): I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
This reminds me of Mary Oliver’s Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.,
And that’s what Thoreau did, in his life, in his writings, and certainly in his creation of Walden.
He said, “It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak, and the other to hear.”
May we, as fishers for truth, cast our nets wide, ever open to sources of truth –
[and as our founders set forth…] the truth contained in the Mystery which moves us to awe, which our logic cannot define or our spirits deny.