Unmasking Tradition: The Way Forward

Linda Ware

Let’s pretend that the two poems I just read were my introduction and let me simply announce the three separate things I want to talk about this morning: first, how the Larkin and Frost poems relate to our situation, second, how the conflicts in the Unitarian church of 1805 in Boston relate to our mission, and third, how I talk to students on the first day of class. These narratives may seem unrelated, but stick with me: they may help us to deal with our uncertainties about the project we are embarking on this weekend, At best, they may give us a way forward to revitalizing our vision and transforming our building.

If you think for a minute about the rhythms of the Larkin and Frost poems I just read, you can sense alternations back and forth between opposites: In "Church Going," Larkin moves from the outdoors, with its bicycling narrator, the rain, sheep, grass, brambles, to the indoors of the old church, with its musty stone, parchment, brass, organ-pipes--all these reminders for the poet of beliefs now gone and a building now perhaps obsolete. That alternation is even clearer in Frost's "Mending Wall," which moves from the neighbor's stolid concern for fallen boulders and stone wall to the narrator's mischievous affection for apple orchards and pine and frozen ground. Both poets were thoughtful and pained agnostics, exploring the tensions we all perceive between old and new, between closed and open, between strong stone and green life. 

Consider Frost's narrator. Though he initiated the repair project, and he seems to understand his neighbor's dark refusal to entertain open boundaries, the speaker in this poem is calling attention to the “something” in all of us that doesn’t like walls, that feels shut in. He stands up for questions, for breaking out of some traditions. This aging Yankee actually speaks whimsically of elves, and of using a spell. I've always argued that this poem is about the two sides of Frost's own nature, perpetually in conflict with each other. If you've read much Frost, you know he's usually the grouchy conservative. But not here. The other man is unwilling to rethink their common task:

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness, as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

Ironically, the line everyone quotes as the point is, in fact, the concept Frost is challenging. Enclosures are not always good. Habits can keep us moving in darkness. We need to question them.

And listen to the longing for meaning in Larkin's last two stanzas: his tourist visit has been mildly interesting. What on earth will these old buildings and their little-used furnishings ever be good for? “This special shell” of a church has a powerful hold, however, on the human imagination, tied as it is to rituals of death and marriage and birth. It will always draw people with a spiritual longing, a need to gravitate to such ground. Such stone enclosures keep their magnetism.

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much can never be obsolete . . . .

Another modern poet, by the way, had a theory about contraries, which he described as masks. William Butler Yeats speculated that we wear masks in an attempt to become our opposite. We tend to think the reality is what's behind the mask: "I act this way in public, but the real me is different." But the reality, he felt, is actually in the struggle between the masks. The tension itself is what we must learn to value. This is a deconstruction of our usual definition of a mask--something that both hides and portrays something else. But the mask you choose is as real a part of you as the face behind it.

So hold this thought from the poets: it's the tension and the interplay between differences that offers us real electricity and growth--the tension between tradition and change, old enclosures and open nature, for instance.

Now let’s turn from these poets of solitary places to some group history with a personal edge. In 1997, Jack Holzhueter of the State Historical Society was lecturing on public radio on the early years of Frank Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin. He described a pattern of intellectual movement that came with groups of emigrants from Boston to Madison, and his example was the Robert Ware family of Dedham, Massachusetts. I e-mailed him: that’s our Ware! It’s been fun to learn about the genealogy of Lane's family, thanks to Emma Forbes Ware, who wrote letters and did research: she was trying to find any Wares alive after the Civil War and influenza had killed her immediate family. Lane's father Gordon--that's what the G. stands for--and our son Justin both worked on bringing Emma Ware’s family research up to date.

I'm afraid what I liked most about this saga was that Ware, England, which they left to come to Massachusetts, was famous for a bed, the Great Bed of Ware. The Inn at Ware had an elaborately-carved black oak bed that slept 11 people; it was so grand that Shakespeare mentions it in The Merry Wives of Windsor. I love that. It’s so much more fun than being famous for a refrigerator or a brand of peanuts. I was hoping also that we were related to the poet T.S. Eliot, whose father from Boston was Henry Ware Eliot. I wanted an Uncle Prufrock.

It turns out that we are. In fact, the Ware name goes back to the early leadership of not only Harvard, but also the Unitarian Church, first in Boston and then in Madison. Glenda helped me to find sources and learn about Henry Ware, Sr. and Henry Ware, Jr. both of whom held chairs of Divinity at Harvard. My favorite part of that story is the 1819 Dedham rebellion, where departing dissenters from Calvinist doctrine tried to take the communion silver and had to return it to the parish after a court case. The court decided that the parish district got to keep the property even if the majority of the church left. The dissenters finally concluded, “They kept the furniture but we kept the faith.” You might figure out that my fascination with this historical stuff has more to do with interesting mischief than with ancestral reputation. I have hesitated, however, to share this connection to the early American church, because I could not see a point to make about it. But now I do.

Let me go back to Henry Ware, Sr. In the early 1800’s, religious liberals challenged several theological positions that pervaded the Congregational Churches of Boston. They were questioning biblical authority when it was asserted from “isolated verses wrenched entirely out of context;” they were questioning the metaphor of the Trinity; and they were asserting the fundamental goodness of God and the potential of human nature. The Calvinists saw God’s power as more important than his goodness and humans as powerless sinners. Some of you may remember the sermon in early American literature anthologies, Jonathon Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” (That’s what I was raised on, fear and trembling at the Presbyterian Church in Ashtabula, Ohio.) From what I can figure out, however, the Unitarians’ beliefs were rather pragmatic: they thought that seeing God as benevolent would be better for human beings trying to use religion as a basis for moral and personal improvement.

In any case, the election of the liberal Henry Ware, Sr. as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard created the first major denominational schism between Congregationalism and the emerging Unitarianism. The more conservative group left to form Andover Seminary, and the Unitarians formed Harvard Divinity School. His son, Henry Ware, Jr., became a Harvard professor as well, and a major speaker. He was apparently more magnetic and emotional than his father: his sermons were more “calculated stimulant than doctrinal exposition.” (That makes me wonder if this one is either.) Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, he tried to bring “a religion of the heart” into the classical and rational Unitarian ethos. He argued that a religion that is “concerned wholly with the state of society in general” allows an individual “to neglect the discipline of his own affections and the culture of his spiritual nature.” What was innovative about this was that he linked moral engagement to spiritual devotion. As well as the public good, we need the inner life—

perhaps in order to create the public good in less self-righteous and more thoughtful ways.

There are later Wares connected with Harvard, and there is Ware, Massachusetts, with the Mary Lane hospital, but a group left and came to Wisconsin, according to Holzhueter’s research on Wright. One descendant, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, founded the Madison Unitarian Society, and another relative apparently arranged a “disastrous” blind date between his Ware cousin May and Frank Lloyd Wright. I don’t know why it was disastrous; that’s not in the account. Maybe she didn’t like the black cape.

But how does this anecdotal and distant history relate to us here? Now, I’m no theologian. When I joined this church in 1967, I thought it was like the Baha’i. I used to joke, “If you want to persecute a Unitarian, you put a burning question mark on their lawn.” I could relate to the unity part of Unitarian: whatever we think God is, she/it/he is a totality. And Universalism meant that however we define redemption, or peace, or goodness, it is available to everyone. I often feel like an agnostic, nonetheless, and I think that to be described as a secular humanist is a very nice compliment.

But when I saw an early draft of our Mission statement, I was struck by how little mention there was about this being a church. Initially, the first item was focused on outreach, helping to create social change in the community. That reminded me of the concern of old Henry Ware, Jr., that a religion that is “concerned wholly with the state of society in general” allows an individual “to neglect the discipline of his own affections and the culture of his spiritual nature.” I know the Mission statement has been changed, and it’s still in evolving draft form—so this is not a complaint. It’s looking good. What we learn when we go back to these antique theological disputes, which were of intense importance to those congregations in 1805, is that we still have the same oppositions. We still argue the same questions. And that is a source of great pleasure to me, because, as Yeats argued, the reality that we must learn to value is the back-and-forth between the masks.

And now, my third and last point. Several years ago at orientation, a prospective student asked me dutifully what qualities someone would need to succeed in my class. It was kind of a phony question; I made up something. But I thought about it later, and I came up with three qualities for survival: curiosity, civility, and tenacity. We need curiosity when we begin something new and untried, a readiness to become interested in things we have perhaps rejected before. "Stop announcing you don't like to read," I would tell the class. “Don’t keep saying things like ‘geography is boring.’ You don't know what you're going to find yourself getting excited about." (I had a subpoint under curiosity--"if you don't have it, fake it.") It's like smiling: the exercise of those muscles creates endorphins that cheer you up. “Interested faces,” I’d say, speaking of masks. ”Don’t be afraid to study something you think is highbrow; complex and strange can be good.”

Civility I rarely had to emphasize: our university students were usually so polite they would barely ask questions or argue with a professor. I would remind them that it implies not only tolerance but the courteous assertion of new information and differing views. Tenacity I often had to define, but it was the most important: the sheer will to do the task, a stubborn determination to succeed.

It seems to me now that these qualities are what we will need for this fixing and building project. Maybe they can be our precepts as we go forward. We already embrace them. Universalist Unitarians typically want intellectual stimulation from their services more than other denominations because we value curiosity. We’re not afraid to learn about other religions because we value questioning. Well, we'll need that curiosity and those “interested faces,” when we look at designs we're not used to, pedagogies that make us nervous, and technologies we don't understand.

We're pretty civil; we’re not a church filled with acrimony. We complain about the sanctuary arrangements, about too much or too little music, about paper cups and Powerpoint, but no one seems prepared to take the communion silver and move to Merrill. We’ll need that civility, though, as we balance our checkbooks, as we write new mission statements, as we move out of entire worlds, as we lose things to dust and disagreements.

But tenacity is what we'll really need. We’ve never had a campaign and a project like this before. We're going to grit our teeth and write checks that send us back to prayer. We're going to pitch in and help with plantings and cupboards and pews and children's toys. We're going to do this. And the way we'll do it is by rejoicing in the tensions, by deconstructing the masks of our differences in order to become ready to move ahead with this pretty amazing adventure.

Think back finally to Frost and Larkin, who sought to sum up in a conversational narrative both sides of an age-old set of contrasts. They used images of past and present, closed and open, antiques and green space, boulders and bicycles. I believe we can find our own ways to respond to those alternatives: we can have both strong Wausau Red Granite and triple-glazed glass. We can have a “serious house on serious earth” and still have “power in games and riddles”; it’s not an either-or question. But we have “promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep,” if we’re going to make “mending walls” into “church going.” I hope you’ll join us in that quest.

Linda Ware October 16, 2005

Professor Emerita

University of Wisconsin Marathon County

Works Cited

Hamilton, Mary Jane, with Biebel, Anne E., and Holzhueter, John O. “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Madison Networks.” Frank Lloyd Wright and Madison: Eight Decades of Artistic and Social Interaction. Ed. Paul E. Sprague. Madison: Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, 1990, 1-8.

Howe, Daniel Walker. The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan UP, 1988.

Robinson, David. The Unitarians and the Universalists. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Ware, Emma Forbes, comp. Ware Genealogy: Robert Ware of Dedham, Massachusetts (1642-1699) and His Lineal Descendants. Boston: Charles A. Pope, 1901.

Wright, Conrad, ed. Prophets of Religious Liberalism: Channing, Emerson, Parker. 2^nd ed. Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1986.