Sacramental Communion with Nature: From Emerson on the Lord’s Supper to Thoreau’s Transcendental Picnic

John Gatta

doi:10.3390/rel9020048

John Gatta

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https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9020048

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Journal: Religions	Publication Date: Feb 3, 2018
License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Sewanee: The University of the South

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For both Emerson and Thoreau, ocular attentiveness was a crucial means of at least disposing the soul toward experiencing moments of otherwise unpredictable, ecstatic encounter with the divine soul of Nature. But the eye alone was not the sole sensory pathway toward receiving such revelations. Especially in later writing, Thoreau focused special attention on eating and drinking as key bodily—yet also spiritual—modes of experiencing communion with the earth. He applied this sacramental understanding to the several processes of obtaining, preparing, and consuming food, but above all to the thankful appreciation of locally gathered, wild fruits and nuts. Such gifts, freely given, presumably invite “us to picnic with Nature,” thereby dramatizing how “man at length stands in such a relation to Nature as the animals which pluck and eat as they go.” Though Emerson never embraced a comparably sacramental vision of Nature, or showed the same interest in gustatory encounter with wildness, one might interpret his attraction toward other diverse and often spiritualized concepts of communion as a compensatory outcome of his ministerial decision in 1832 to cease administering the Christian church’s sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

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For both Emerson and Thoreau, ocular attentiveness was a crucial means of at least disposing the soul toward experiencing moments of otherwise unpredictable, ecstatic encounter with the divine soul of Nature
What implications and consequences followed from his decision? How, despite his disavowal, might he have been looking to preserve—while re-visioning toward his own post-Christian, Transcendental ends—certain principles of “communion” and sacramental worship endemic to Judeo-Christian piety?
How do some of the suppositions mirrored in sacramental communion figure even more pointedly in Henry Thoreau’s subsequent expression of a Transcendental, earth-grounded spirituality, an approach figured in surprisingly gustatory rather than exclusively ocular terms of sensate communion with nature? Such are among the questions I intend to address here

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For both Emerson and Thoreau, ocular attentiveness was a crucial means of at least disposing the soul toward experiencing moments of otherwise unpredictable, ecstatic encounter with the divine soul of Nature. For Emerson most of what qualifies in present-day terms as ritual practice, comprising those patterns of spiritual discipline and development meant to nurture the soul, take the form of individualized rather than corporate worship.

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