To Live with Zeal ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 9, 2022
On a summer day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau wrote these few words in his journal: “July 5. Saturday, Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.”
And live there he did, for two years, two months, and two days, until the Emersons asked him to return to their house to help manage while Waldo went on a European speaking tour. Thoreau recorded his departure at the end of what is now regarded as an inspiring and life-changing experiment with these words: “I must say that I do not know what made me leave the pond. I left it as unaccountably as I went to it. To speak sincerely, I went there because I had got ready to go; I left it for the same reason.”
Our theme this month, so appropriate for January, is Living with Intention. And when I thought about intentional choices, Henry David Thoreau came to mind. But I found myself wondering, “Why exactly did he decide to remove himself to a one-room cabin he built himself on the shore of Walden Pond?” In his journal, he himself doesn’t seem to know, exactly. The words in his journal do not offer a picture of an intentional decision.
But in the course of writing Walden; Or Life in the Woods, Thoreau was able to articulate his deepest feelings on the subject, in a passage that has become perhaps one of the most recognizable in American literature:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
“To live deliberately.” “To live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”
What Thoreau is describing for us is a spiritual practice. And maybe I should stop for a second and define spiritual practice for us now, so that you know you have permission to create your own. You may think beyond meditation, or yoga. One of my seminary professors used to say frequently that a spiritual practice is anything that you do with attention and devotion. Making music, dancing, photography or painting, walking, and so on and so on. Anything you do with attention and devotion. To that, I might add: anything you do that fosters your creativity and feeds your love of life.
This spiritual practice has a name: Zeal. Now, often, we might think of zeal in somewhat negative terms. Zeal can sometimes have religious connotations: a new convert to a religious practice might be thought of as a zealot, for example. Maybe we don’t want to go there!
To live with zeal means to be fully aroused by life. This is something of a challenge these days. Just as we were beginning to enjoy some of the activities that make our lives meaningful: seeing family and friends, sharing meals, attending church and concerts and other cultural events, life has been brought back almost to a standstill. Just as the cold and wet weather was descending on us, the short days, another extremely contagious variant of Covid, named Omicron, also has caught the country and the world in its grip. It’s hard to get up every morning and suck the marrow out of life when we’re anxious and worried and haven’t been to a movie in two years. And if you’re finding it too hard this time around and you are feeling dispirited, please reach out. We don’t have to be silent.
“Let us love the world through our heart and our mind and our body,” we heard in our Call to Worship. That is zeal – loving the world, loving our lives. Practicing zeal asks us to use all the tools available to us to love the world and life. Those tools are many, and they are different for each of us. Perhaps zeal would not lead you to move to an unheated cabin with no running water. Certainly that would not be the direction I would follow. But let’s try naming some of the other many tools we could find to help us live with zeal.
What arouses you to life? What makes you feel your heart open? Just as I wrote those words I had a sudden answer: a beautiful red fox suddenly walked out of the woods, down a rock outcropping in the snow, and trotted down my driveway. I got up and went to the window to watch him make his way, and I sent out a little prayer: may you be safe. I felt a little surge of emotion for this glimpse, for this truly unexpected vision of life, and for the many forms life’s presence takes among and around us.
What calls you to open to life? Perhaps human connection: a commitment to nurturing your personal relationships, and also to fostering the common good. Thoreau practiced this connection. While he was best known for living in solitude at Walden Pond, he also was a fierce anti-slavery and anti-war advocate. He once refused to pay his poll tax to protest slavery, and the American war with Mexico, and was jailed overnight until a mystery person paid his tax for him. The story goes that Emerson stopped by to see him while he was in jail, asking him, “What are you doing in there, Henry?” Thoreau is said to have replied, “What are you doing out there, Waldo?”
Zeal, then, finds expression in many ways throughout the course of every life. The practice of zeal allows us to embrace all of life – the solitude and the companionship, the appreciation of nature and the woods, and protecting the common good and pursuing justice for all. Fostering zeal in our lives allows us to open ourselves to all that is offered so freely to us. It’s interesting that a zealot would be someone who would focus entirely on one aspect of life and care only about that. But to practice a life of zeal would mean to expand one’s focus – to be a part of all that is, to ‘suck all the marrow out of life.’ Living with zeal is to live abundantly – to love, to care, to grow and change, and to open ourselves to all that is around us.
What calls to you? Perhaps it is care of yourself – seeking opportunities to grow, to try new things, to learn to play an instrument, to learn a new language, to care for your body in new ways.
Zeal is not the same as joy, which we talked about last month. The result of embracing many of the practices I’ve suggested here might help us to be happier, but they are not the same as joy. Zeal is more closely related to Intention. How do we choose to live? To what do we give our heart, our spirit, our attention and devotion? Zeal is a form of love – devotion – how do we choose to love the world and all of life within it? “Let us love the world through heart and mind and body.” To practice zeal, to live with zeal, is a commitment to live abundantly, devotedly: to respond to opportunities that might arise that offer us the fullness of life. It is an intention; a choice. It is a decision to live for love, to live with love.
To practice zeal, to live abundantly, is to open ourselves to all of the love in the universe, to all that is holy. We open ourselves to the spirit of love, the spirit of life, the source, to the highest that we know, whether or not we have a name for it.
What if we decide to use this time right now, when we once again need to put down our regular lives, to wait; what if we decide to use this time as a chance to explore what living with zeal might mean for us? Perhaps this is a time to pause and reflect, to spend time with ourselves and live deliberately. Perhaps we don’t need to go to the woods; perhaps in a sense the woods has come to us. To what might you give your attention and devotion?
Our second poet this morning, Dawna Markova, put it this way:
“I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.” (Dawna Markova, “I Will Not Die an Unlived Life”)
May your heart feel like a wing.
May your intentions become a torch,
And may your life be full of love and promise.
Amen.
Blessed Be.
