BENDING TOWARD JUSTICE

A few weeks after emerging from a two-year experiment in simple living at Walden Pond, Unitarian Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau ran into his local tax collector. Talk about bad luck, the tax collector demanded that he pay six years of delinquent poll taxes on the spot, or be arrested. Thoreau was a strident abolitionist, and on moral grounds due to his opposition to America's current war with Mexico that sought to expand the territory of legal slavery, he refused to pay one cent to the government and was promptly arrested.

And it is said that late in the evening of that day, Thoreau's old friend and mentor, Unitarian Minister Ralph Waldo Emerson, came to visit him. Upon entering the jail, separated by thick iron bars from his friend and student, Emerson remarked, "Henry, what are you doing in there?" To which Thoreau replied, "Waldo, my good friend, the better question is, what are you doing out there?"

This moment was a true breaking away from Emerson for Thoreau, as Emerson held at the core of his personal philosophy that evil and injustice were to be engaged only at the highest levels, and that the kind of personal and isolated acts that Thoreau was taking were a self-indulgent waste of time. Thoreau had wrestled with this idea for a long time, personally feeling that any engagement with an unjust system was support of it, and he longed for another way. It is very clear from his writing that this experience, of living his values to their fullest, of refusing to participate in a system he considered to be unjust, and of resisting that system non-violently, perhaps even more so than the two years, two months and two days he had just completed living in the woods by himself, had a profound effect on Thoreau.

While Walden may be his most famous work, it would be the essay he created out of this experience, originally known as Resistance to Civil Government and more famously referred to as On Civil Disobedience, that would truly change the world in ways that could never have been imagined in that moment. In his own time, in fact, Thoreau's writing was barely noticed. Forced to self publish, he famously said of his unsold copies of a different work, "I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes over 700 of which I wrote myself." But time does amazing things, and although it would take over fifty years and a ten-thousand-mile journey, Thoreau's writings on civil disobedience would indeed change the world.

And so it was that in the early twentieth century an Indian lawyer fighting for minority rights in South Africa would be handed a copy of this work. In 1907, in the midst of his first non-violent civil rights campaign, or satyagraha, Gandhi wrote a translated synopsis of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience in explanation of the work he was engaged in. He remarked years later to America, "You have given me a teacher in Thoreau, who furnished me through his essay on the 'Duty of Civil Disobedience' scientific confirmation of what I was doing in South Africa." In essence, Thoreau's work ended up being an essential part of the backbone of the entire Indian freedom struggle. Think about that for a moment. Because Henry David Thoreau never got to, he died assuming his words never reverberated beyond his small yet influential circle of New England intellectuals.

The Indian freedom struggle alone is an incredible consequence for one person's work to contribute to. But it hardly ends there. You don't have to take it from me. Hear these words from the man whose legacy we are here to honor today, Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote in his autobiography:

During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience for the first time. Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.

So that moment in Concord certainly looks a whole lot different when we can view it through a longer historical lens. Who could have possibly guessed that this small act of righteousness by one man could have such an enormous ripple effect through the history of the human fight for freedom. From Concord, to South Africa and India, and then back to the United States in our own civil rights struggle.

Which brings me back to the reading that we began with from Rev. Theodore Parker:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Or, as King would paraphrase this down to in making it famous a century later:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

This idea of a moral arc of the universe is one that I strongly believe in, and I think is evidenced in the slow but steady unfolding of Thoreau's message through time. It is tempting to picture a long sweeping arc that we understand and control. It is tempting to imagine that we will fully understand our contributions to that arc, that we will live to see the fruition of our sweat and tears. But the other thing clearly evidenced in this story is that it is a very long arc, and we are but a very small part of it. We must trust that our efforts, no matter how small or insignificant they may feel in the moment, will indeed add up to something in the long run.

I see the proof all around me. I will never forget the first time I was driving by Washington High School here in Fremont when school was getting out. Spilling out the doors of that school I saw the most literal image of King's dream that I had ever seen. Kids of all backgrounds were just pouring out of those doors. It was stunning to this east coaster to see a level of diversity like that. That moment, and so much of what goes on in this town, is a direct legacy to everything I spoke of. This moment is possible because of the hard work of people none of us even knew, and it is our job to do that same work for people we will never know. When Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax, he couldn't possibly imagine what that isolated act of bravery would do for this world, but where might we be now if he never did, if he had just shrugged it off as no big deal, one more act in a life littered with compliance? As I said earlier, when Thoreau died at the young age of 44, he assumed his work had little if any effect on the world. Emerson's eulogy, however, hints that despite his reluctance to join his student behind bars, and his philosophical differences with how he hoped to challenge injustice, he knew history might see things differently. His eulogy concluded that:

The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.

As always, Thoreau said it more simply:

For joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried in it."

If Thoreau's life has any meaning to us now, it is that we cannot judge our actions on how big or small they feel in the current moment, but rather how they feel to our heart, to that deep inner part of our being that innately knows right from wrong. That arc continues to be bent closer to justice one courageous moment at a time, and I trust that though I may not see it with my own eyes, I can indeed divine that it bends towards justice. Amen.