A Winter Reflection
Wednesday I took a long walk through the snow to visit a member of my congregation. It was a lovely experience. I enjoy walking. It makes me feel connected with my environment. As the light dimmed, the snow fell and the wind picked-up I was transported to some sort of ethereal otherworld. I thought of Emerson and his attack on Barzilai Frost in the Divinity School Address. Emerson attacks Frost, though he never mentions him by name, for not being a good preacher. Emerson writes that listening to him one would have no indication that the man had ever lived. Emerson believed that Frost’s sermons and preaching were not rooted in his experience.
Thinking about Emerson and the Divinity School Address made me think of a sermon I once heard about Frost. In it, the preacher argued that Frost was a decent minister. He may not have been a great preacher but he cared for his people, visited with them and tended to their needs as best he could. Pastoral work might be an ordinary sort of greatness but it seems to me that it is something available to all of us. Not all ministers may be great preachers but we can all visit the members of congregations, provide them with pastoral care and tend their needs as best we can. I suspect that much of the root of great ministry lies as much with these former actions as it does with skillful preaching.
Incidentally, when I was trying to figure out how to spell Barzilai Frost I stumbled across what appears to be the text of the sermon I heard. It is by Joel Miller, currently the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo. You can read the whole sermon here. The passage that struck me reads:
Emerson had resigned as the minister of the Second Unitarian church in Boston in 1832, four years before publishing Nature… Emerson’s 3 or so years with Second Church were good years…and those same folks gently overlooked the fact that Emerson was a really terrible pastor. He was so bad at visiting and reaching-out to the people of his church that one famous example of his pastoral skills tells of the time when Emerson went to visit the family of an old revolutionary war veteran who was dying. Emerson was so awkward that the dying man woke up from his deathbed and told Emerson to go away.Barzilai Frost, on the other hand, was profoundly present for the people of the First Parish of Concord - he was so beloved by the folks in that Unitarian church he served for decades that when I was in Concord…I saw his picture displayed prominently in their Parish Hall. It’s been there for about 150 years, and this is in part because even though Barzilai Frost was not the world-class public speaker that Ralph Waldo Emerson was, Frost was a good minister. Emerson should have regretted his judgments against Frost. The congregation he served felt Frost was a very good practitioner of his profession - he apparently succeeded where Emerson failed: Frost converted life into truth simply by being able to listen to and care for his people - his Unitarianism was far closer to what we would recognize as the Living Tradition: the practice of growing the community, nurturing the web of relationships that welcomes us with our individual narratives, complete in themselves… yet at the same time willing to risk the dangers of creating a larger, shared story about who we are together.
