“HELEN KELLER’S RELIGION”

 

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, May 17 ,2009

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

 

            This is a great job I have. 

Three decades ago, when I was a student at the University of Chicago, as I walked to class I would often pass a building with a sign out in front describing it as the “Swedenborgian” center.  Over time I came to hear little things here and there about an 18th century philosopher-theologian named “Emanuel Swedenborg.”  I understood that his followers began a church of sorts called the “Swedenborgian Church,” and it is still around today.  The few things I heard seemed positive.  “Some day,” I thought to myself, “I would sure like to find out what that is all about.”  But life has a way of filling up time, and I never quite had the opportunity to check it out.  But I thought about it from time to time, wondering about this church with a curious name, a name almost as awkward and unwieldy as the name “Unitarian Universalist.” 

            Flash forward thirty years.  I like to give occasional sermons about the religious grounding of great people in history, looking to them for inspiration.  Sometimes, they turn out to be Unitarian or Universalist, though often not.  There are, of course, few names more inspirational Helen Keller.  Her name came to me from time to time.  I knew she wasn’t Unitarian, but I knew very little about her religious views.  When I decided it was time to do a sermon devoted to her inspiring life, I quickly discovered that she was – lo and behold! – a devout Swedenborgian! 

            What a great job I have!  To explore the thinking of Helen Keller requires getting to know something about Swedenborgians, and therefore, to do my job right, I finally accomplish a minor goal I set for myself many years ago! 

 

            But there’s a lot of ground to cover about Helen Keller before we get to Emanuel Swedenborg.  Her name, after all, has become over the years a symbol of courage, a symbol of determination, a symbol of human dignity and worth.  One of the more interesting pieces of Helen Keller’s legacy is that few people know much about her life after about age eight.  People vaguely know that she was accomplished as an adult, lecturing and writing.  Maybe they have some hazy notion that she spoke out on issues of human rights.  But that is about where conventional knowledge ends. 

The bare facts of her very early life are so well known it is almost patronizing for me to review them.  And yet, it is the kind of story that is so unbelievable, that revisiting many times continues to inspire. 

She was born June 27, 1880, in a small town in northern Alabama.  Her father fought with the Confederacy in the Civil War, and settled down to become a “gentleman farmer.”  When she was still a baby – at the age of 19 months – she contracted a serious fever that almost killed her.  Surprising everyone, she recovered, but it became apparent that through the illness she completely lost her sight and her hearing. 

The next few years were devastating to the family, and of course frustrating to Helen.  She was unable to communicate – either give it or receive it – and her understandable reaction was fear and anger. 

In many ways, this story, from beginning to end, is about determination and persistence.  Helen’s mother Kate, for example, stands out in her irrepressible resolve to find a way to happiness for her daughter Helen.  After seeking advice from many sources, she was eventually directed to Alexander Graham Bell, best known as the inventor of the telephone.  Bell had also become heavily involved in working with deaf children, and ultimately recommended working with the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston.  (By the way, Alexander Graham Bell continued a close friendship with Helen Keller.  When Helen was 13, Bell took her to visit the great 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago). 

Eventually, the Perkins school recommended Anne Sullivan as a personal tutor, and Helen’s mother hired Sullivan to come to Alabama to work with Helen.  By then Helen was about seven years old, and there had been little progress in communicating with her.  Helen and her teacher Anne moved into a cottage on the grounds, and the hard work began. 

If you’ve seen the movie or play “The Miracle Worker,” the rest of the story is unforgettable.  The continual struggle and frustration in learning to communicate was accompanied by screaming and fighting.  Anne had been trained to teach by touch, using her fingers on Helen’s hand to spell out words.  It didn’t come easily, but it came.  The magical moment came on April 5, 1897, when Helen finally understood when her teacher spelled the word “w-a-t-e-r” on one hand while pouring water from the pump on the other hand. 

She got it.  She finally got it, and the whole world opened up to her.  It was a transforming experience more profound that any religious conversion or mystical insight.  Suddenly, Helen confronted the world around her that had seemed so cold, even hostile.  She confronted the world, embraced it, and befriended it.  From that point on, Helen Keller had a hunger for learning, and passion for life. 

From the water pump breakthrough, Helen couldn’t get enough new information.  She asked Anne Sullivan the names of everything she encountered, and within a few hours, Helen learned more than thirty words. 

            The popular understanding of Helen Keller ends pretty much where the movie ends.  But for this incredible life, it was only the beginning.  Helen went on to attend and graduate from the Perkins School in Boston.  She enrolled in New York at the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and the Horace Mann School for the Deaf.  Soon after, she was admitted to Radcliffe College, and in 1904, at the age of 24, Helen Keller became the first deaf-blind person to earn college degree.  Anne Sullivan was her companion and coach through all of this, and would remain at her side for many more years. 

            There is no question of her intellectual brilliance.  She read constantly through Braille books or being read to through the hands of her teacher/companion.  She also became quite proficient in German and French, subscribing to foreign language journals.  She also, just for sport, I suppose, learned Greek and Latin.  Why not?  Don’t all of us with sight in this sanctuary read books in all these languages?  And she wasn’t just reading novels or even current events.  She read deeply of history, classic philosophy, and anything else that struck her interest. 

            Helen’s story quickly became well known.  She wrote her autobiography at age 21, and it became a best-seller.  In 1919, she appeared in a Hollywood silent movie about her life, a movie called “Deliverance.”  She wasn’t quite 30 at the time.  In Hollywood, she became friends with Charlie Chaplain, who remained close over the years. 

            Other famous people came into her life.  As a child in Boston, she became a regular visitor to Oliver Wendell Holmes.  One of her closest friends throughout life, and in some ways her patron, was Mark Twain.  She met every U.S. president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson.  She traveled the world extensively on speaking tours, visiting almost 40 countries.  She became especially popular in Japan.  Most of those travels were fundraisers sponsored by her own charitable foundation or the American Foundation for the Blind. 

 

            This was Helen Keller who has become an icon to American values of hard work and accomplishment, of overcoming obstacles and pursuing goals.  This was the Helen Keller story that was the subject of Broadway plays and Oscar-winning movies, the subject of countless children’s books.  This Helen Keller story is taught to most American children in school, providing a model for success in life.  This was the Helen Keller story that all children learn about in school for making something of yourself. 

            But there is part of the story that is usually left out.  There is part of the story that caused her to come under suspicion from J. Edgar Hoover and under regular surveillance by the FBI.  Helen Keller became an advocate for all who were underprivileged – and not just with physical disabilities.  She spoke on behalf of people who were born in poverty or trapped in poverty. 

She gave voice to the rights of women, advocated for women’s suffrage.  She felt moved by stories of women who knew no freedom.  She became an advocate for birth control -- an extremely controversial practice in those days -- and became friends with Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. 

Hers was a passionate voice for equality, and she became a supporter of the newly formed NAACP, the leading organization supporting rights of African Americans.  Hers was a passionate voice for human rights, and she was among the original founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. 

He spoke out against child labor and against capital punishment.  She believed that one of the greatest disadvantages people face is poverty, and in those days of wealthy industrial leaders, now called “robber barons,” in the days called the “Gilded Age,” in which the gap between the rich and poor was wider, with even less middle class than now – in those days she was an avid defender of worker’s rights.  In the first decades of the 20th century, she defended socialism, joined the Socialist Party, and worked for the election of Eugene V. Debs as president of the United States. 

No wonder she attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who was suspicious of anyone who disagreed with him.  You can be sure that some of her activities incited wrath from certain quarters of society.   Especially her socialism.  Many newspapers were owned by wealthy business owners, and she became the subject of much vitriol in editorials.  Suddenly, they began to blame her opinions on her disabilities.  Because she couldn’t see or hear she was easily duped, they said.  One newspaper began its editorial with this sentence:

 

“It would be difficult to image anything more pathetic than the present exploitation of poor Helen Keller by the Socialists” 

 

              Keller replied in a speech that, “I do not like the hypocritical sympathy of such a paper. . .  but I am glad if it knows what the word ‘exploitation’ means.” 

             In later years her politics moderated somewhat.  She would later write a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt admitting that “some of the things I said at the time are now out of date.”  And then she added, “but the spirit of revolt. . . remains!” 

 

              Helen Keller’s life was devoted to making a better world for people with disabilities.  It is often overlooked that for her the idea of disability extended to those who were locked in poverty or exploited by industry, those who faced discrimination because of race or gender, and those who were inhibited from expressing their rights and exercising their freedom. 

 

            All of which brings us to her religious conviction.  She was not silent about her religious convictions any more than her political opinions.  She was devoted to the Swedenborgian movement.  She even wrote an entire book about it. 

            When Helen Keller was a teenager, she was introduced by Alexander Graham Bell to John Hitz, a former ambassador from Switzerland to America.  Hitz was a Swedenborgian and introduced Helen to Swedenborg’s writings, which Helen devoured and adopted.  At the time, her father had just died, and she was initially attracted to Swedenborg’s mystical visions of an afterlife, but eventually subscribed to the wider vision of his theology.  This was the religion that stayed with her for life. 

            Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Sweden in 1688.  His early career was as a talented and quite accomplished scientist and inventor.  He studied physics, mechanics, geometry, chemistry and metallurgy.  He also studied philosophy and theology, and as his life unfolded he was drawn increasingly in that direction. 

            He had a major conversion experience, though, in 1745, with what he described as a vision of God, and from then on he devoted himself to the study and writing of theology.  It was his belief that Christianity had strayed far from its original intent, and it was his wish to correct its course.  Many of his ideas were progressive, so progressive that he was put on trial for heresy by the state church of Sweden, which was Lutheran.  The trial ended unresolved. 

            Like Jesus, Emanuel Swedenborg had no intention of founding a church.  He was merely interested in reform.  But his writings achieved a great popularity, not only in Europe, but also in America, that within a few years of his death his followers successfully created a Swedenborgian Church.  It is sometimes simply called “the New Church.” 

            Swedenborg has influenced some significant people over the years.  Other than Helen Keller, the next best known Swedenborgian in America was John Chapman, otherwise known as Johnny Appleseed, who considered himself a Swedenborg missionary to the American wilderness lands.  Though not necessarily followers of Swedenborg, many other significant people were influenced by him, including poets Robert Frost, William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Walt Whitman, author Henry James, philosopher William James, and psychologist Carl Jung.  The Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay about Swedenborg’s life and thought, most of which was positive, some of which was critical.

 

            There is no question that Swedenborgianism is progressive within the Christian tradition.  There are parts that are quite compatible with our Unitarian tradition, and some that aren’t so compatible.  But one of its heresies in particular is our heresy too. 

            As I implied earlier, Swedenborg had a mystical side, including the belief that we can communicate with angels and spirits of those who have died.  The more mystical parts have been increasingly downplayed by his followers in recent years. 

            Some of what Swedenborg taught is more familiar today than it was then.  Parts of his teaching resemble today what we call “New Age” religion – religion that emphasizes the positive thinking, emphasizes our direct connection to the divine n the world.  New Age thought has some similarity with 19th century American transcendentalism, and it is no surprise that Swedenborg found popularity among some transcendentalists. 

            The notion of “positive thinking” is a central piece of each of these traditions.  Positive thinking is the idea that the world responds to our ideas, and if we think positively, good things happen.  If we think negatively, bad things happen.  It is no mystery that when Helen Keller’s book on Swedenborg was republished in the 1960s, the foreword statement was written by Norman Vincent Peale, the king of the American school of positive thinking. 

            But there were more specific pieces of Swedenborg that attracted Helen Keller.  Swedenborg made a sort of Platonic division between the material and the spiritual worlds, where the spiritual was real, the physical was ephemeral.  This notion appealed to Helen Keller, for it encouraged in her the acceptance of herself as a spiritually complete person even if her physical capacities were limited.  Here is one way she described her encounter with Swedenborg’s works:

 

“Here was a faith that emphasized what I felt so keenly – the separateness between body and soul, between a realm I could picture as a whole and the chaos of fragmentary things and limited physical senses met at every turn . . . As I realized the meaning of what I read, my soul seemed to expand and gain confidence amid the difficulties which beset me. . . . As I grew to womanhood. . . I took more and more to the New Church doctrines as my religion. They have lifted my wistful longing for a fuller sense-life into a vivid consciousness of the complete being within me.”  

 

            Interestingly, Swedenborg was criticized for his strong denial of the doctrine of the Trinity.  He believed the Trinitarian creed was the greatest stumbling block for good relations between Christians and Jews, Christians and Muslims.  Jews and Muslims were true monotheists, believing in one God, and they couldn’t get past the Christian trinity of three Gods. 

            He was right when he claimed that the Trinitarian doctrine was foreign to the early church.  It was created at the Council of Nicea in the year 325.  What he advocated instead was something of a unitarian view of one God.  But that one God was Jesus.  Some call this “Unitarianism of the Second Person,” Jesus being the second person of the trinity.  But God and Jesus are not separate “persons.” 

            But perhaps the most telling view of Swedenborg in understanding Helen Keller was his belief about the ongoing Christian argument about “faith” and “works.”  Martin Luther, and the Lutherans that followed in Sweden, taught the doctrine of “Sola Fide,” or “faith alone.”  This doctrine said that faith is the only road to salvation.  You cannot be saved through good deeds in life.  Only genuine faith in God and Jesus will save your soul. 

            Swedenborg strongly objected.  He believed that religion was about both faith and deeds.  A life of religious integrity is a life of service, and commitment to true charity of spirit toward others.  The reason to have faith is in order to serve others.  Faith alone, “sola fide,” gets you nowhere. 

            This is an important part of the Unitarian tradition as well.  This is where Unitarianism and Swedenborgian theology cross.  For us, religion is about what one believes, it is about how one lives in the world.  It is about the values that direct our lives.  Our beliefs can affect the way we live, of course, but beliefs are the tools we use to shape a good life, not the goal of life itself.  Nineteenth century Unitarians often used the phrase, “salvation by character.”  They specifically used this in contrast to the orthodox notion of “salvation by faith.”  Swedenborg, it seems to me, was saying something similar. 

            It also appears that this is the crucial religious element in how Helen Keller lived her life.  Her life was devoted in service to those who were disabled or disadvantaged.  This was Helen Keller living out her religious conviction.  This was the consequences of her Swedenborgian commitment.  One might even call it “salvation by service.” 

            For Helen Keller, the whole point of religion, the whole point of the Christian Bible, was helping others.  The Bible called it “charity,” which we often translate as “love.”  “Faith, Hope, and Love abide,” the scriptures famously tell us, “but the greatest of these is Love.” 

            Helen Keller once put it in these words:  “Every parable, every spiritual truth in the Bible, demands our faithful performance of every service essential to the health, enlightenment, and liberation of humankind.” 

            Could it be plainer than that what Helen Keller’s religious views were all about?  One finds spiritual wholeness in service. 

 

            In a letter to her spiritual mentor John Hitz, Helen Keller wrote this: 

 

“Swedenborgianism is more satisfying to me than the creeds about which I have read.  For the very reason that it is the most spiritual and idealistic religion, it best supplies my particular needs.  It makes me feel as if I had been restored to equality with those who have their faculties. . . .  I feel weary of groping, always groping along the darkened path that seems endless.  At such times the desire for freedom and the larger life of those around me is almost agonizing.  But when I remember the truths that you have brought within my reach, I am strong again and full of joy.  I am no longer deaf and blind; for with my spirit I see the glory of the all-perfect that lies beyond the physical sight and hear the triumphant song of love which transcends the tumult of this world.” 

 

            There is a line in that statement that stands out to me, not as profound, necessarily, but certainly as instructive.  Helen Keller simply says that Swedenborgianism “best supplies my particular needs.” 

            What could possibly be a more concise statement for the foundation of religious tolerance.  Religion is, in fact, what addresses our spiritual needs as human beings.  Could it be that we each differ in what we need from religion?  Could it be that different religions are created because our spiritual needs are different?  Some people need a religion that offers authority.  Others need religion that offers freedom.   Some people need religion that is grounded in tradition, ritual and liturgy; others need religion that is grounded in creativity. 

            Helen Keller needed a religion that affirmed her sense of wholeness.  She found it.  She needed a religion that encouraged her toward service to others.  She found it. 

            I completely believe that the test of religion is not the truth of its claims.  The test of religion is the character it builds in those who follow it.  Whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Muslim, Buddhist or Swedenborgian, I have seen religion supply integrity of character to those with whom it fits well.  When it works, that integrity of character is transformed into charity, into service, into love. 

            Helen Keller surely found the religion that was “best for her particular needs,” and her entire life was profoundly blessed because of it.  Helen Keller found the religion that was “best for her particular needs,” and the whole world became eternally blessed because of it.