In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address, if there’s any one thing the class of students should take from it, it is found in Paragraph 24. Emerson lays out the truth in saying that most of the time people do not want to attend church because the boring organization of prayers, speaking, and repeating can be dry and dull. “It seemed strange that the people should come to church.” He even calls it “thoughtless clamor.” He does not just say this about others but also about himself, “I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more.” He can relate to anyone who’s ever had to go to mass and thought that the ritual was systematically boring and he does this through an interesting anecdote:
“A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow.”
To Emerson, the snow was more beautiful and felt more real than whatever the preacher was saying. This feels like such a human truth: whenever we are bored in a class room, at the DMV, or in a bad movie our thoughts can go somewhere else and find anything else more interesting. Emerson takes this to another level in saying that even the word of God being recited by a bad preacher bored him, but he found the true beauty outside in the snowfall.
Despite this harsh truth about boredom in faith, Emerson offers a solution to these future preachers: “convert life into truth.” His main criticism of the preacher during the snowfall was that he couldn’t communicate the beauty of his own life to everyone. “If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it.” Emerson is essentially pointing out the key difference between a good storyteller and a bad storyteller. We listen to other people and connect better to a speaker when they can relate a truth in life with us. “The good hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and some word that can reach it.” And with that, Emerson surely was able convert life into truth for these preachers to better understand how they should go out and preach.
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