Welcome Prelude Lighting the Chalice and Unison words Opening words: Margaret Fuller Chris: "Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow." Linda: “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it." Chris: "A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body." Linda: Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman." Chris: "The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency. Linda: I never lived, that I remember, what you call a common natural day. All my days are touched by the supernatural, for I feel the pressure of hidden causes, and the presence, sometimes the communion, of unseen powers. It needs not that I should ask the clairvoyant whether "a spirit-world projects into ours. " As to the specific evidence, I would not tarnish my mind by hasty reception. The mind is not, I know, a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open. Yet it were sin, if indolence or coldness excluded what had a claim to enter ; and I doubt whether, in the eyes of pure intelligence, an ill-grounded hasty rejection be not a greater sign of weakness than an ill-grounded and hasty faith." Chris: I am 'too fiery' … yet I wish to be seen as I am, and would lose all rather than soften away anything. Not for Children Only Song#1026 If Every Woman In the World Meditation Joys and Sorrows OfferingWhen I think of Margaret Fuller, the words of May Sarton come to mind. “Now I become myself.” A woman who wanted to be all she was and could be, living in a time and place that would not allow it. This year we celebrate her bicentennial and through a curtain of two centuries we hear again her voice and we are reminded again of the struggle each of us has in order to say, Now I become myself. I tell you her story, in honor of her life and so that you can know something of this brave Unitarian forebear. While each of our stories retains its particularity, good stories contain elements of the universal. Your story speaks to my story. In the life of Margaret Fuller, I catch glimpses of my own and I learn from that. This is why we tell stories. In making the acquaintance of Margaret Fuller today, may we also make a deeper acquaintance of ourselves.
According to historian Joan Goodwin (www2.uua.org), “Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810-July 19, 1850) "possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time." So wrote Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in their 1881 History of Woman Suffrage. Author, editor, and teacher, Fuller contributed significantly to the American Renaissance in literature and to mid-nineteenth century reform movements. A brilliant and highly educated member of the Transcendentalist group, she challenged Ralph Waldo Emerson both intellectually and emotionally. Women who attended her "conversations" and many prominent men of her time found Fuller's influence life-changing.” Yet how many of us know her?
Margaret Fuller was the eldest of eight children born to Unitarian parents, Margarett Crane and Timothy Fuller, Jr. . . . Her mother has been described as “lively, affectionate, well-read and independent in her thinking.” Her father, a lawyer, served as a state and federal legislator. Goodwin describes Margaret’s childhood thus: “Determined to give his daughter the best possible education, (Timothy Fuller) taught (Margaret) himself. . . . Margaret seemed a sponge for many disciplines, including Latin, begun at age six, English grammar, mathematics, history, music and modern languages. Margaret herself thought the price paid for this early and intensive drilling, sometimes late into the night, was sleeplessness and nightmares as a child and a lifetime of poor eyesight and migraine headaches. . . . Her ardent spirit and astonishing accomplishments appealed to several young collegians who soon became her intimates, among them (Unitarian) James Freeman Clarke, . . . (who) commented that a conversation with Margaret "could not merely entertain and inform, but make an epoch in one's life." . . . A cluster of girl friends completed a happy social circle as Margaret came into her own in her late teens and early twenties.” Nevertheless, throughout her life, Margaret Fuller embodied great contradictions. Undersized, delicately framed, with a childlike laugh, as her friend Caroline Dall commented, Fuller also possessed an outsized intellect, big emotions, and a habit of speaking bluntly. People loved her; people hated her. Depending n who was describing her, Margaret either had the neck of a swan, or a snake.
(Timothy Fuller's) “sudden death of cholera in the fall of 1835 threw the family into financial crisis. . . . (Margaret) struggled to take her father's place, protect her mother's interests and see to the education and welfare of the younger children. From that time forward, financial difficulties plagued her life.” For a while she supported herself and her family through teaching, one of the few career opportunities open to women at that time. But greater things were in store. (Her friends) “urged Emerson to befriend Fuller, and . . . She first visited the Emersons for three weeks in the summer of 1836 . . . As many were on first acquaintance, he was put off by Fuller's "extreme plainness," her "trick of opening and shutting her eyelids," and her "nasal voice," predicting that we would "never get far." Soon however, as many were, he was won over and wrote to Elizabeth Peabody that his guest "has the quickest apprehension & immediately learned all we knew & had us at her mercy when she pleased to make us laugh. She has noble traits & powers & cannot fail of a permanent success." As the friendship grew, their correspondence revealed Emerson's growing respect for Fuller's intellect, and her dissatisfaction with his cool reserve.” (Goodwin)
Margaret Fuller had a gift for friendship. Emerson himself said, "She wore this circle of friends, when I first knew her, as a necklace of diamonds about her neck. They were so much to each other that Margaret seemed to represent them all, and to know her was to acquire a place with them. The confidences given her were their best, and she held them to them. She was an active, inspiring companion and correspondent, and all the art, the thought, the nobleness in New England seemed at that moment related to her and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest."
Through these contacts Margaret began to hold a series of “Conversations” in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore “that attracted women of the city and surrounding area who were intellectuals and social activists. . . . Though women might be taught the same subjects as men, they had little opportunity to use their learning. Fuller provided a setting where they could discuss what they knew, free to explore ideas and speak their own thoughts on such topics as classical mythology, education, ethics, the fine arts, and woman. . . . Income from the conversations supported Fuller . . .
At Emerson's invitation Fuller had begun attending meetings of the Transcendentalist circle, . . . and the following year she agreed to serve as editor of the new Transcendentalist journal, the Dial. . . . “ From her work with the Dial grew the book for which she is best known, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. “On finishing it, she described to William Henry Channing "a delightful glow as if I had put a good deal of my true life in it, as if, suppose I went away now, the measure of my foot-print would be left on the earth." (Goodwin) This treatise for women’s rights and call for equal status is monumental. Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, who offered Margaret a job writing essays, reviews and criticism, for which she left New England and moved to New York, wrote of her book, "If not the clearest and most logical, it was the loftiest and most commanding assertion yet made of the right of Woman to be regarded and treated as an independent, intelligent, rational being, entitled to an equal voice in framing and modifying the laws she is required to obey, and in controlling and disposing of the property she has inherited or aided to acquire . . . hers is the ablest, bravest, broadest, assertion yet made of what are termed Woman's Rights."
In 1846 Margaret was assigned to Europe as the Tribune’s foreign correspondent. As Joan Goodwin describes it: “On the eve of the 1848 uprisings in Italy, Austria and France, Fuller plunged into the turmoil. No longer the "outsider" she had seemed in New England, she felt at home in Italy, free to express her fullest sense of self. When war broke out, she saw a role for herself "either as actor or historian." To her the revolution meant freedom and human rights for the laboring class and for women. . . .
Soon after her arrival in Rome she met the handsome twenty-six-year-old nobleman, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Then in her late thirties, she had survived several unfulfilled love relationships. She enjoyed the attentions of this young man in what soon became a serious attachment. In the summer of 1848, she retreated to the village of Rieti where her son, Angelo Eugenio Filippo Ossoli, was born . . . . in May, 1850, the Ossolis sailed for New York on the merchant freighter, Elizabeth. Not long after leaving port, the captain died of smallpox. Baby Angelo caught the disease but recovered during the voyage. The inexperienced mate who took command after the captain's death miscalculated his position and was unaware of an approaching hurricane. During the night before the ship's expected landfall, it struck a sandbar within sight of Fire Island and began to break up. Some crew members managed to reach shore, but the wind and high surf made it impossible to launch a lifeboat. The Ossoli family perished on July 19, 1850.
Emerson sent Henry Thoreau to search the wreckage, but no trace was found of their bodies or personal effects, including Fuller's manuscript history of the revolution.” Only baby Angelino’s body ever washed up to shore. Thoreau walked the beach at Fire Island for days. Margaret’s friends James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing and Emerson gathered her papers and published her memoirs posthumously. Emerson’s words in the introduction give a taste of the frustration Margaret must have felt with him. He says: “In our noble Margaret, her personal feeling colors all her judgment of persons, of books, of pictures, and even of the laws of the world. . . . Whole sheets of warm, florid writing are here, in which the eye is caught by ‘sapphire,’ ‘heliotrope,’ ‘dragon,’ ‘aloes,’ ‘Magna Dea,’ ‘limboes,’ ‘stars,’ and ‘purgatory’—but one can connect all this or any part of it with no universal experience. In short, Margaret often loses herself in sentimentalism; that dangerous vertigo nature, in her case, adopted, and was to make respectable. . . . Her integrity was perfect, and she was led and followed by love; and was really bent on truth, but too indulgent to the meteors of her fancy.”
James Freeman Clarke gives us another view: “Margaret’s life had an aim, and she was, therefore, essentially a moral person, and not merely an overflowing genius, in whom impulse gives birth to impulse, deed to deed. . . . It gave dignity to her whole career, and made it heroic. This aim, from first to last, was self-culture. . . . the profound desire for a full development of her whole nature, by means of a full experience of life.”
And that’s what I take from Margaret Fuller’s story -- the striving for a full development of her whole nature through a full experience of life. How many of us can say that we have, or maybe even want, a full experience of life, a full experience of our whole nature?
Kathleen Cahill wrote a play about Margaret Fuller called Charm, and in an NPR interview (www.publicbroadcasting.net/kuer) she mentions that Margaret Fuller said that our lives are layered in fabric. Our clothes are layered in complexity. Historian Phillip Gura said that Fuller “had so many cells you could peel her like an onion.” Cahill understands Margaret’s life as an effort to get out of the dress, to shed the restrictive clothing of the time which became a metaphor for Margaret’s very life.
Where in your life do you, have you, felt restricted? Where do you, have you, felt unable to be yourself? While the social position of women has changed between our time and Margaret’s, the barriers to full humanhood for all still exist in many shapes and forms. We still walk that balance beam between the thoughts and feelings people want and expect us to have and the ones we actually do have. Between the actions and life paths people want us to take, or circumstances force us to take, and the ones we are called to take.
We are all under great pressure to conform to what we are taught is expected of us, or what we imagine other people expect of us, or what life demands of us. We see our children struggle with this at younger and younger ages. What to wear, who to hang out with, what attitudes to have, what to look like, how much interest to have in school. As adults, we also feel that we can’t really be ourselves all the time. We give away, or we put away, too much of ourselves. The interests we no longer pursue because our partner does not wish to participate in them; the friends we no longer see because they do not fit in with other, newer friends; the thoughts and ideas we do not share because we fear they will not be received well; the way we think we have to look. How much do we miss out on the full development of our whole natures, the full experience of our whole lives? And at the same time, we genuinely want to please one another and we want to be accepted by our friends and family. Of course we do. Our need for love and connection is real, and it sustains us.
I faced this very issue recently with regard to my upcoming wedding. I’m happily marrying another woman yet I hesitated to tell my family because I was afraid of what they might say and do. Believe me, there were good reasons for this. So I had two choices. I could either choose to hide my full self and not tell them, which would keep the peace and the relationship as it was, and it was meaningful. Or I could choose to invite them, to let them into the fullness of my life. Because I love them, because I want them to know me, and because I wanted them to share this important experience, I invited them. Some of them will be here. Others will not. How did Margaret Fuller walk that balance between experiencing the fullness of herself and conforming to the expectations of others and the restrictions of society regarding what she should be? How do any of us? Fuller tried to experience the full nature of life as she could, which meant that she kept trying to find people and communities that would welcome her as herself. Surely that’s partly why she left New England, and then the United States. She kept trying to find love and connection that would not ask her to smother herself in her dress. And the evidence is that she did find this. And the evidence is that she paid a price for it, but I imagine it was worth it to her.
The answer, or the beginnings of an answer, first, lies in our persistence in trying to find people and communities of people who can love us for ourselves and not for what they expect us to be and not for what they want to make us into so they can benefit. This is where the worth and dignity of every person comes in. This is where equal rights come in. In its largest form, this is justice. Second, it means that we pay attention to ourselves so that we know who we are. We can say what we want. We hold onto our own sense of worth and dignity and do not allow ourselves to compromise it. Third, it means that we will meet with disapproval and injustice from some quarters. Finally, it means that we must hold onto our faith in ourselves and in the possibilities of human love and community. That will give us the courage and the strength to keep on.
This is what I have learned from Margaret Fuller. This is what I wish to bring to my own life. Now I become myself.
Song #1053 How Could Anyone Closing words Now I Become Myself by May Sarton Now I become myself. It's taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces, Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning, "Hurry, you will be dead before--" (What? Before you reach the morning? Or the end of the poem is clear? Or love safe in the walled city?) Now to stand still, to be here, Feel my own weight and density! The black shadow on the paper Is my hand; the shadow of a word As thought shapes the shaper Falls heavy on the page, is heard. All fuses now, falls into place From wish to action, word to silence, My work, my love, my time, my face Gathered into one intense Gesture of growing like a plant. As slowly as the ripening fruit Fertile, detached, and always spent, Falls but does not exhaust the root, So all the poem is, can give, Grows in me to become the song, Made so and rooted by love. Now there is time and Time is young. O, in this single hour I live All of myself and do not move. I, the pursued, who madly ran, Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!