Beyond a Soliloquy

 A century ago, Winnipeg’s Caledonian community, as the city’s newspapers called it, gathered to celebrate the birthday of the acclaimed poet Robert Burns. Like this year, the anniversary fell on a Sunday, but in those days, nobody would have considered holding a public celebratory dinner on the Lord’s Day, so it wasn’t until Tuesday that the community gathered at the Hotel Fort Garry to honour the poet. When I first read this, I thought the delay might be related to serving alcohol – what would a Burns night be without it – but while strict Prohibition had come to an end in 1921, it wasn’t until 1928 that public consumption was allowed, and, even then, it was some years before “mixed drinking” was allowed – that is, drinking with men and women in the same room. So the toasts in 1925 were made with juice, unless someone arrived at the hotel with their own flask.

The delay meant that Rev. Marion Shutter, minister of the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis, had plenty of time to fulfill his obligations at church on Sunday, enjoy dinner with his family, and then make his way by train to Winnipeg, where he was the guest of honour and keynote speaker at the Burns night festivities. It wasn’t Shutter’s first visit to our city, and it wouldn’t be his last, for he was a popular public speaker. The business and social ties between Winnipeg and Minneapolis were stronger in those days than they are now, and rail transportation made travel between the cities easy and convenient, so when an out-of-town speaker was needed, those with a reputation for being eloquent and entertaining were often in demand. Beyond the walls of the church, it seems that Shutter most spoke to business organizations such as the retail lumberman’s association, which is dear to my heart as a former lumber retailer myself, and various bankers’ associations. While his lectures always spoke to the higher strivings of humankind, they weren’t so tainted with religion and morality that they spoiled the conviviality of a business luncheon.

Rev. Marion Shutter was considered an authority on Scottish literature, which is why he was invited to Winnipeg in 1925 to address the Caledonians at the Hotel Fort Garry. He didn’t disappoint his audience or the newspaper reporters on hand, who reported extensively on his speech in the next morning’s paper – beginning on the front page, no less.

Shutter intimated that Burns was the very epitome of a national poet, which naturally endeared him to the Scots as he sang to their hearts of their humble lives and grand traditions. So it comes as no surprise that his statue stands of the east grounds of the Manitoba Legislative Building to honour our provinces Scottish community, just as Ukrainian poet Taras Schevchenko stands on the west. Some communities are represented by statespersons, others by explorers, but these two turned to their poets.

While Burns in Scotland, and elevated Scottish values and traditions, he was not for Scotland alone in Shutter’s estimation, but spoke of universal values in the human heart. “He touched the common humanity deeper than the foundations of Scotland’s hills and wider than the prairies of America,” said Shutter, inspiring North American poets such as Whittier and Emerson. “His poems are the property and solace of [hu]mankind.” They were characterized by sincerity, simplicity, and sympathy, coming from the heart and experience of a person who had known pleasure, grief, and remorse.

“There was a drop of his warm life blood in every word,” maintained Shutter. “And Burns was the poet of democracy. In his was seen the earnest, thoughtful reformer of religious and social social life; he was a man who hated all sham and hypocrisy, saw through all masks and stripped away all disguises. He assailed the wrongs of centuries, with the zeal of a patriot, and share and sang the new ideals rising on the night of darkness. … Never was there a more tender heart. His sympathy was for all things that had life and he had such a feeling of fun that he dispelled [people’s] fears so gaily that they joined in his laughter and forgot that they had been afraid.”

These observations of Marion Shutter have haunted me in recent days as the city where he preached the gospel of Universalism and human dignity finds itself under attack by unaccountable and uncontrolled forces driven by a cult of cruelty, nativism, xenophobia, and oppression. As shadows of authoritarianism and brutality descend on our neighbours, and the wrongs of centuries are enflamed by hypocrites hiding behind masks and disguises, it is the words of great poets like Burns, and countless others, that serve to help us forget we are afraid and find whatever reserves of laughter we may still tap.

Marion Shutter was hardly the first Universalist of Unitarian minister to address the “Immortal Memory,” as toasts to Burns are called. On the centenary of Burns’ birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson was invited to address the celebration held in his honour at Boston. He praised him, declaring that, “Robert Burns, the poet of the middle class, represents in the mind of men to-day that great uprising of the middle class against the armed and privileged minorities, that uprising which worked politically in the American and French Revolutions, and which, not in governments so much as in education and social order, has changed the face of the world.” 

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, on this day in 1759, the oldest of seven children and grew up in a thatched house working on his parents’ farm, although he later became a civil servant. William Burness, his father, was “a moderately well-educated farmer who did some of the teaching of his children and occasionally provided private tutors.” William prepared a “relatively liberal catechism for his children as an alternative to that of the Westminster Assembly,” while Robert read widely, including works by the philosophers John Locke and Adam Smith.  He wrote his first poem at the age of 15 – a love poem, as it happens.

At 21, he founded the Tarbolton Bachelor’s Club, the constitution of which demanded that its members have “a frank, honest, open heart; above anything dirty or mean.” The club debated questions like whether or not “we derive more happiness from love or friendship” and whether or not people in so-called primitive societies were happier than “the peasant of a civilised society.” 

If Robert Burns had lived in the era of social media, his relationships with both women and religion would have undoubtedly read, “it’s complicated.” In addressing religious matters, as with other topics, Burns employed “satire as his weapon,” forgoing complicated doctrines and embracing ideas that were essentially simple and sympathetic.

“Shall I write you on politics or religion, two master-subjects for your sayers of nothing?” asked Robert Burns in a letter to Provost Maxwell. “Of the first I daresay by this time you are nearly surfeited; and for the last, whenever they may talk of it who make it a kind of company concern, I never could endure it beyond a soliloquy.” He had more than a passing interest in religious questions and was counted among Scotland’s religious liberals of his era, favouring its heresies over its orthodoxies.

Notwithstanding the fact that, today, Burns is celebrated by Presbyterian divines the world over, whatever else he may have been, Robert Burns was a heretic, pure and simple, whose heterodox views alarmed the leaders of the established church in Scotland.

“Not Latimer, not Luther struck more telling blows against false theology than did this brave singer,” opined Emerson. “The Confession of Augsburg, the Declaration of Independence, the French Rights of Man, and the Marseillaise, are not more weighty documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns.” And this is no doubt why he was quoted extensively throughout the labour movement in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. It’s no wonder that his poems were always on the lips of Tommy Douglas and J.S. Woodsworth, Stanley Knowles and more recently Bill Blaikie.

As a young man, Burns studied religion and read liberal theological works, such as John Taylor’s 1740 discourse on The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin. He admired two local ministers, William McGill and William Dalrymple, who held liberal views on both the Trinity and salvation, and he appears to have been familiar with the teachings of English Unitarians Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey. He was sometimes referred to as “Rab the Ranter,” and he inflicted his heretical religious views on his neighbours, some of whom shunned him as a result.

In his writing, he mocked Calvinists, both ministers and laypeople who sought to impose Calvinist dogma and morality on those around them. In “The Ordination” he lampoons Old Light churchmen, while his satirical poem “Epistle to John Goldie” ridicules the bigoted and superstitious, and “The Holy Fair” mocks outdoor revivals. 

It is his poem “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” though, that reveals his Universalism and surely endeared him to Marion Shutter:

O Thou, that in the heavens does dwell, 

Who, as it pleases best Thyself, 

Sends one to heaven and ten to hell, 

        All for Thy glory, 

And not for any good or ill

        They’ve done before Thee! 

 

O Thou, that in the heavens does dwell, 

Wha, as it pleases best Thysel', 

Sends ane to heaven an' ten to hell, 

        A' for Thy glory, 

And no for onie guid or ill 

        They've done afore Thee!

This was a frank criticism of the God that his neighbours worshipped, and, as a consequence, his words were viewed as scandalous. Oh, we sing his love poems, and on New Year’s Day, we gather round and sing “Auld Lang Syne,” but some of his poems only survive today because they were recorded in books, not because they were necessarily popular.

And in his satirical poem, “The Kirk’s Alarm,” Burns revealed his sympathy for the Arians, or Unitarians, of his day. It is a long poem – a very long poem – so I can only quote a few verses to give you a sense of its flavour:

Orthodox! orthodox, who believe in John Knox, 

Let me sound an alarm to your conscience: 

A heretic blast has been blown in the West, 

"That what is no sense must be nonsense," 

Orthodox! That what is no sense must be nonsense.

Doctor Mac! Doctor Mac, you should streek on a rack, 

To strike evil-doers wi' terror: 

To join Faith and Sense, upon any pretence, 

Was heretic, damnable error, 

Doctor Mac!  ‘Twas heretic, damnable error. …

D'rymple mild! D'rymple mild, tho' your heart's like a child, 

And your life like the new-driven snaw, 

Yet that winna save you, auld Satan must have you, 

For preaching that three's ane an' twa, 

D'rymple mild! For preaching that three's ane an' twa. 

The poem goes on for 18 verses, eviscerating the orthodox preachers and nodding with an approving wink to the liberal ones. For today, suffice it to say that Burns saw God as an “object of our reverential awe and grateful adoration” and believed that the divine promise – that is, the hope for salvation – extended to everyone, not an elect few, while he esteemed Jesus as, in his words, a “great personage.” God is "almighty, and all bounteous" and Jesus Christ, “a great Personage.”

From the liberal catechism he learned at his father’s knee to the end of his days, Robert Burns advocated for a religion that was down to earth, rational yet romantic, and grounded in the human experience. He emphasized sincerity and feeling – an internal, emotional, and rational experience – as the basis of religion. He believed in a benevolent. a benevolent deity who created happy, equal beings. His religion was grounded in nature and immorality. Even though Burns’s own morality was clearly unconventional and controversial, he believed that personal struggle was a part of the religious experience, and that we could never grow deeply without it. He was critical of the priesthood in all of its forms, even after it had supposedly been reformed.

Burns celebrated the passions as a gift from God and believed that pleasure was not a sin. He denied original sin, declaring to Frances Dunlop, “I believe in my conscience that the case is just quite contrary. We came into this world with a heart and disposition to do good for it …”  And he rejected those theologies which seemed to be merely tools of clerical power, robbing life of its emotional vitality and satisfaction. This is the Burns you will not hear about at a Burns Night dinner. This is the Burns who would still scandalize most of the people who attend them. This is the Robert Burns that makes him our kindred spirit in religion.

In the end, it is the quality of our lives that matters most. In one of his letters to Clarinda, he wrote: “My definition of worth is short: truth and humanity respecting our fellow-creatures; reverence and humility in the presence of ... my Creator.”  That was enough faith for Robert Burns, and, quite honestly, it’s more than enough for me.

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg on Robert Burns Day.

Works Cited

Marion Shutter, Burns Night Address as reported in The Winnipeg Tribune (Wednesday, January 28, 1925).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Robert Burns,” a speech at the celebration of the Burns centenary, Boston (January 25, 1859).

Peter Hughes and Andrew Hill, “Robert Burns,” in Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, 2001.

Peter Esslemont, Brithers A' Robert Burns, 1959.

And the Wonder Grew

 We live in disenchanting times, where modern life with its trappings and technology, its comforts and conveniences, its conflicts and compromises, often displaces whatever sense of enchantment we may have once known. It is hardly a new phenomenon, but this sense of alienation is something that has grown exponentially over recent centuries – more or less since the Industrial Revolution.

Indeed, more than a century ago, the prominent Unitarian minister Samuel McChord Crothers, who served in St. Paul before heading east to Cambridge, Massachusetts, lamented the tendency to see human beings as machines, an idea that had taken hold when Paley compared creation to a watch and God to a watchmaker. Crothers insisted that if we were going to compare humans to machines, then the essence of such a “thinking, loving, hoping machine is just as wonderful as if you called it a soul.”

Crothers saw religion, whatever else it might be, as our human response to wonder. Definitions and dogmas pale in comparison to experiences and expressions. And religious communities are somewhere we can come together to share those experiences and give expression to what they mean to us, to find our humanity amidst all that distracts us. Throughout the generations, people have been lured to religious community, in part, to make sense of their wonder. “They saw something that made them wonder,” said Crothers; “and the wonder grew ...”

In the preface to his book of Yiddish poetry, Abraham Joshua Heschel aptly summarized his own search for the holy when he wrote, “I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder; and you gave it to me.”  How different our lives might be if, in place of success, we too asked for wonder!

Now I will confess that before I read Heschel, many years ago now, I had not considered success and wonder to be polarities, so I was jarred at first by how he linked them. But as I reflected upon what he had written, I came to recognize how our desire for success in life often gets in the way of our enjoyment of life. We spend so much time cooking that we forget to savour the food. And so I was forced to acknowledge that my own ambitions and desires for success – yes, ministers can be ambitious – often intruded upon my ability to simply savour life, experiencing its wonders as ends in themselves. Even in the earliest years of school, I wanted to be first in my class, whether or not I actually learned anything. As an adult, I have sometimes cherished the prestige of a position more than I have been satisfied by the work alone. When playing a game, I play to win – and when I repeatedly lose at a particular game, I lose my enthusiasm for it and stop playing. Just ask my wife about billiards. Or Scrabble. While I can’t honestly say I’ve fully shed this tendency, I’ve been increasingly drawn to activities that inspire awe and wonder, that pique my curiosity, that allow my mind to wander where it will.

Like any other human institution, churches are full of people who, while driven to seek success, come to church looking for “something more.” We discover that, even with the accumulation of wealth and the achievement of fame, our appetites are never fully satisfied. Public acclaim and personal comfort never quite mask the sense that there is “something more” which somehow eludes us.

Now I generally advise against consulting dictionaries as a method to uncover the meaning of a word, since dictionaries are notoriously conventional, literal and shallow. That is, dictionaries have a tendency to reinforce orthodoxies, and to limit thinking as much as they might channel it. But in the case of wonder, my dictionary turned out to offer … well … a wonderful definition. It describes “wonder” first of all as a “miracle, prodigy, strange or remarkable thing or specimen or performance or event.” I love the strange part in particular. It goes on to say that wonder is also an “emotion excited by what surpasses expectation or experience or seems inexplicable, surprise mingled with admiration or curiosity or bewilderment.” When, like Abraham Joshua Heschel, we “ask for wonder,” we long for it in both senses of the word – we want to see firsthand the miraculous and the remarkable, and we hunger to experience that feeling of excitement when life surpasses our expectations.

In more traditional religions, this sense of wonder may derive from the supernatural, or a magical understanding of the miraculous. In our tradition, the sense of wonder is more likely to be found in the marvels of nature, which includes experiences that may seem everyday and commonplace – at least on the surface. But when we are open to surprise and the time is right, even the most mundane can lead us to feelings that are as deep and profound as the mystical experiences of others, which spark a sense of awe within us. Unitarian Universalists speak of the “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” This transcending mystery and wonder is experienced in many ways – when we gaze upon a beautiful vista, when we are caressed by the excited touch of a lover, when our ears tune in to the songs of the birds or the melodious strains of a violin, when the poems of the heart tumble from our lips, or when the golden silence of creation surrounds us in meditation or prayer.

An openness to wonder is something that seems to come more easily to children than to adults. Perhaps we adults are so busy seeking to understand and explain the world, if not actually control it, that we are unable simply to experience it. So wonder, in its pristine form, would seem to be the special province of children. In The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson opined, “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder, so indestructible that it would last throughout life – as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Orcas (Photo - Diane Maddox / Pexels)

I cannot help but think back to my own childhood and recall the numerous occasions when, with my father and grandfather – sometimes with both – I discovered the world of nature. In some ways, the memories of walks with my grandfather are more vivid, if only because they were less frequent. Grandpa’s farm stretched down to the ocean, where together we would wander along the tidal flats, watching the tiny crabs along the water’s edge and looking for the telltale signs of clams hidden beneath the sand. The first time I ever saw an orca rise from the water was not at an aquarium, but just off the coast of Point Roberts, a tiny American enclave south of Vancouver. Their common name – killer whales – frightened me, and I didn’t want to be near one, until Grandpa coaxed me to turn around and I saw one of these gentle creatures leap gracefully out of the water. On other occasions, the two of us would wander out to Lily Point, past the “no trespassing” signs at the end of the road. There the sandy cliff rises high above the ocean, where gulls and eagles alike soar above the wooden pilings – all that remains of the old cannery wharf – stretching out into Boundary Bay. The towering trees and the deer that took their refuge among them, the crashing waves and the rocks that glistened beneath them, the abundant life of the tidal flats and the gentle wisdom of my grandfather – all alike instilled in me a sense of awe and wonder that I have never been able to shake. And the wonder grew.

All of these childhood memories and countless others came flooding back to me years later when I accompanied my daughters to Cattle Point, near Victoria. Although we were some forty miles southwest of Grandpa’s farm at Point Roberts, across the Strait of Georgia, the familiar sight of Mount Baker hovered on the eastern horizon. I was hesitant about the excursion at first, but Cindy took the girls out onto the rocks and I couldn’t help but follow along. The salt air and the gentle breeze, the cool water and tidal pools teaming with life – it all conspired to overwhelm me. So familiar and yet so strange, I found myself gripped by the wonder I knew as a boy – but this time, I was cast in an unfamiliar role. Rachel Carson maintains that, “If a child is to keep alive [their] inborn sense of wonder … [they need] the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with [them] the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.”

I'll confess that it was only a few years ago that I was reaching a weary stage. I was bored with life. I didn't have much of a sense of what the future might hold for me. I didn't really care as much as I once did. And then I became a grandfather. I am now the old man in the story. and what I have discovered is that children in our lives lead to our re-experiencing the world as a wonderful place – that it is small children who lead us to rediscover the joy, the excitement, indeed the mystery of a world we once knew.

While this echo across the years reminded me of walks with my grandfather, and taught me the importance of children in keeping us enchanted with the world, it was not a singular event, but one of many. I noticed it because of the seashore – and the expectation, or at least the hope, of whales nearby. But there were, of course, countless times and numerous places when my daughters rekindled my sense of wonder – accompanying them on outings with their own grandfather, feeding the graylag geese in the heart of Reykjavík, gazing at the paintings in the Van Gogh Museum, listening to the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, or welcoming the deer and foxes at our country retreat. We are surrounded by wonder, both natural and human crafted, if we only stop to notice it. And it is often the children in our lives who demand that we pause and insist that we pay attention.

Science and technology sometimes erode our childlike sense of awe, even though there is no inherent conflict between science and wonder.  While I would never seek to stand in the way of the progress of scientific knowledge and technological advancement – well, hardly ever (AI is currently testing my feelings in this regard) – a part of me quietly rebels against the disenchantment of nature that has accompanied our expanding frontiers of knowledge. Simply put, the magic of a trick is often lost when it is explained. Though it is not true that ignorance is bliss, I take great delight in those scientific discoveries and explanations that raise more questions than they solve! My sentiment echoes that of Harry Emerson Fosdick, who once remarked, “I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.” Yet, even at the risk of disenchantment, I have an insatiable appetite to know and understand.

Of course, at its roots, the scientific spirit springs forth from the curiosity that wonder evokes. Just think, for a moment, of the late Carl Sagan … or Jane Goodall and Stephen Jay Gould, for that matter. Are not scientists such as these intoxicated with a sense of wonder? As Sagan said with such eloquence and enthusiasm at the beginning of Cosmos: “our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millenia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival.”  

Whether by accident or design, it seems true that we have evolved to wonder and it is equally true that wonder lies at the heart of both science and religion. At least the best religion. Thomas Carlyle observed that, “Wonder is the basis of worship.” Whatever else you may seek here, you probably don’t arrive at church on Sunday morning seeking just another everyday experience. I would imagine that, whether you are conscious of it or not, you come here Sunday after Sunday – in some measure, at least – to exercise your sense of wonder, the same quality of wonder you first knew as a child.

In most religious communities, worship centres on showing devotion to God, but that singular focus doesn’t work for us – it’s insufficient, perhaps even alien to our needs and desires. Liberal worship or services, call it what you will, has many purposes, one of which is to help us reclaim for ourselves a childlike sense of wonder without succumbing to the merely childish or infantile. We know how religion has often served the latter rather than the former. But to the extent that our worship can nurture in people that childlike sense of wonder, encourage our curiosity, and motivate us to ceaseless exploration, then the church will be – dare I say it? – successful in its mission. This will not be mere success – success as a goal – but rather profound success, which is a consequence of our quest for knowledge and understanding and authenticity. It will not be the kind of success we might ask for, or some imagine that we deserve, but rather the quality of success that comes as an unmerited gift to those who stand in awe before the unfathomable majesty of creation.

There is a poignant scene in Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, in which the central character, Emily, returns to her hometown, nine years after her death, to look upon a scene from her childhood. As she readies herself to return to her resting place, she turns for one last look at the people and place she knew as a child. “Good-by,” she says, “Good-by, world.  Good-by, Grovers Corners … Mama and Papa.  Good-by to clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you.” She looks toward the narrator and asks through her tears, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?” The narrator nods, “No,” then, pausing briefly says, “The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.” Even across the threshold of death, Emily retains her childlike sense of wonder. “Oh, earth,” we say with her, “you’re too wonderful ...”

If we open our hearts and minds to allow wonder to take hold of us, rekindling our curiosity and reminding us that the earth is precious – that we are precious – then we just might come to realize that despite whatever evidence there may sometimes be to the contrary, this is, as Louis Armstrong used to sing, a wonderful world … and that we are a part of the wonder. Then we will be numbered among the saints and the poets, realizing life while we live it – each and every moment. So let us not ask for success, let us ask for wonder. And may our wonder forever grow.

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.