Potter, Melville, and Longfellow:
Followers of the Creative Force Within

Sermon Delivered by

Sandra Wilson

August 6, 2006

I just returned from a wonderful and busy week in California with all of my family. This is wonderful and productive in its own way, but it is not conducive to work. Therefore, I am in the midst of an important learning experience on the path to my becoming a full-fledged minister – how to write a sermon and create a Sunday service without the luxury of being able to put in endless hours in preparation and worry over the details. I thank you for being part of this learning.

I’m going to read for you - the first verse of Longfellow’s short little poem, “The Arrow and the Song”.

The Arrow and the Song

I shot an arrow into the air
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

Human beings are endowed with the power to create. It is within each of us. It is necessary to our wholeness as human beings to exercise this power in whatever way we are called to do, to make our own unique contribution to the world.

Our creativity is, I believe, something divine and sacred. Exercising that power is a pathway that connects us with our spiritual selves - with our souls - for our power to create is the force that directs not only our own individual lives, but the course of the world.

"It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God." That is how Mary Daly, a contemporary theologian, assesses the human power to make wholly new things happen in the universe, to come up with wholly new ideas.

Whatever we are called to do has a value in the universe - a value that can be immediately recognizable or never publicly recognized, but none the less has value and has been put forever into the make-up of the universe..

We are creative beings and we are free beings - free to create for the good or to create destructively. We are though obligated by the conscience with which we are also endowed, not to create against the dictates of that conscience.

Today I will take for granted that all who are gathered here to listen to this sermon also listen to their conscience within and would not be inclined to create destructively. I will speak simply of creativity called up by a positive voice from within that seeks to add some kind of goodness, however small it might seem, into the world.

II

I am sure that the three famous writers - Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Beatrix Potter - that we Unitarian Universalists claim as our own don't need introductions, for they are household words as are the titles of their most well-known works - Melville's Moby Dick, Longfellow's Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, The Village Blacksmith, Paul Revere's Ride, and Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

Nor is it my purpose this morning to discuss their works or give detailed biographies, but my purpose is to look at each of them as a person who heard the call from within, who listened to that call, and who then heeded it. In heeding that call they created expressions that have lived on after them which continue to connect humans together over boundaries of space and time in experiencing and reflecting upon those qualities that make us human - compassion, joy, wisdom, humor, justice, and history.

Longfellow, Melville, and Beatrix Potter are examples for us here because they are our "Famous Unitarian Universalists" for this week's sermon. We could though choose any person who has listened to the call to create that comes from within and then struggled against adversity to heed and act upon that call.

Let us take a moment for an aside here though, to look at our UU claims upon these famous and notably creative people. We claim Longfellow as a Unitarian based on his associations with the Transcendentalists, many of whom were definitely Harvard 'Unitarians, and because his daughter Alice is quoted as saying that her father "was born a Unitarian and remained one all his life".

Melville was formally a member of The Unitarian Church of All Souls (I'm 75% sure that this is the All Souls' church in New York City as he lived and worked there from his mid-forties until his death decades later).

I don't know why we claim Beatrix Potter though. I can find nothing that verifies her as a Unitarian or a Universalist. (If you have some information on any religious affiliation for her I would appreciate knowing about it.) The only reference I have found to her religious sentiments is from a Smithsonian Magazine article that says this of her. "A critical maverick ..., she took a dim view of the established creeds of her day." The article then quotes her as writing "prejudice and tradition count for three-quarters in matters of religion". The article goes on to say that she "found solace in the language of the Psalms, as well as in the poems of Wordsworth and the letters of Matthew Arnold". Our claim to her might be tenuous in a formal way, but it certainly sounds as if we share the same sentiments and would have much in common with her free-thinking ways.

Creativity

So, let us come back ... There are a few lucky people whose creative energies, talents, and work bring them fortune and fame. There are those who spend lifetimes struggling to have the fruits of their creativity recognized and appreciated, and the recognition never comes. There are those people who cease altogether to hear any calls from within because the calls to create anew in the world have been determinedly 'tuned out' by other issues and concerns or by fears.

And, there are those who live their lives faithfully following the calling to live and create authentically in the world according to the dictates and urges of one's true self. The Sufi poet Rumi went so far as to say in a poem called Forget Your Life1, "If you are here unfaithfully with us, you are causing terrible damage".

Martha Graham, the great dancer, choreographer, and teacher explains why we are obligated as individual human creators, to first of all listen to the voice within, and then to live out in the fullest way we possibly can, the dictates of that voice of the creative urge. She says, “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."

Longfellow, Melville, and Beatrix Potter

Longfellow, Melville, and Beatrix Potter are creative giants, but no matter what their area of creativity, creative giants, it has already famously been said, stand upon the shoulders of those who came before. And those who come before don't know how the product of their urge to create will be made use of years, centuries, millennia, into the future. So, no matter what it is that the sacred voice within calls us to, it is a voice to which we must therefore, attend.

Longfellow, Melville, and Beatrix Potter all attended to the voice within - each in his or her own way, each struggling to overcome the obstacles that life continuously set in the way.

Of the three, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's was probably the most straightforward creative path. He was brilliant, began attending school at age three, entered Bowdoin College at age 14, was invited to teach there upon his graduation, and wrote from the earliest years of his life. He was associated with the Transcendentalists and achieved and enjoyed fame, prosperity, and wide-spread popularity as a writer of poetry in his lifetime and beyond. He lived from 1807 to 1882.

Herman Melville too, was brilliant, associated with the Transcendentalists, and immensely driven to write. His though, was a creative path that struggled to make its way more through the depths of the valleys than ever on the summits of the peaks. Although he came from a socially prominent New York family, financial difficulties plagued his life and forced him into many corners.

One of the corners into which he was forced early in life put him aboard a ship as cabin boy. From this though, came some of his earliest published stories - Typee and Omoo. Further adventures in his young years as a sea-farer gave him material for travel writings and short stories that brought him a short period of success and a bit of fame as a writer. But it was short-lived, for the literary works he was called to create were not what people were ready to read.

Melville was essentially ignored as a writer in his lifetime, but he never stopped writing. He suffered immensely because of the lack of attention or acceptance for his work, but still he answered the call.

He died in 1891 at age 72, hardly noticed. In fact, the New York Times didn't even get his name right - they listed him in his obituary as Henry Melville.

Beatrix Potter was born in 1866 into a very proper and well-to-do Victorian family in London. Her childhood was secluded and sheltered. Her only companions, other than her governess, parents, adult visitors, and late in childhood her brother Bertram, were the little animals she was allowed to keep.

She had an intense love of animals and of nature and devoted her energies to studying and drawing natural things in great detail. She was very interested in entomology, paleontology, and geology and on trips to the country with her family devoted herself to studying the natural world and recording her findings in beautifully detailed illustrations.

She was passionate though about mycology, the study of fungi. A paper she wrote and illustrated while a young woman, about the spores of molds, was presented to the Linnaean Society of London, but unfortunately not by Ms. Potter herself because women were not allowed to attend meetings of the society. Her scientific work, her first love, was never taken seriously because she was a woman and because she was considered an amateur even though the quality of it is of the highest standards for the time.

The beautiful little children's books for which she is so famous were begun quite incidentally - as a story-letter to the sick son of her former governess. Eventually, in an effort to become independent of her parents, who dominated her life well into middle age, she submitted Peter Rabbit to six different publishers. All rejected it. She published it herself and it sold like hotcakes. Her success led her to again submit it to a publisher. She chose Frederick Warne & Company because their rejection letter was more courteous than the others. And the rest is history. Her books brought her fame, prosperity, and independence.

In 1913 at the age of 47, she married. Now she was no longer lonely. She stopped writing her little books and became a passionate sheep-breeder, farmer, and conservationist.

Her creative path never meandered, but it did change course. She followed the course of that path, listening always to the voice within, until her death in 1943.

III

We are the beneficiaries of the creativity of these giants, just as we are the beneficiaries of the creativity of all our ancestors who listened to their voices within, who followed their own unique paths to making a contribution to the universe - whether the contribution be consciously noted by the world, known only in the family, or silently absorbed by the universe with no acknowledgements - whether it be the cooking of good meals, a quilt sewn by caring hands, a song sung from the heart, a great problem solved, an artistic masterpiece, or simply a life lived out speaking authentically for itself. We are the beneficiaries.

We are the providers for the future. We are invited to pay attention to the voice that calls to us from within, to hear it, and to feel the creative urge as it calls us to make our own unique contributions to the world. "To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have keep your soul alive."

And now the ending verses of Longfellow’s poem –

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?


Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroken;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

 

Blessed Be and Amen


References
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor And Other Stories. Intro. By Frederick Busch.
Penguin Books, New York, 1986.

Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak. Jossey-Bass Inc, Publishers. San Francisco. 2000.

Dawna Markova, The Open Mind. Conari Press, Berkeley, CA. 1996.

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way. Penguin Putnam Inc. New York. 2002.

1 Rumi, "Forget Your Life", in The Enlightened Heart, ed. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper collins, 1989) p.56
 

©2007 Sandra Wilson