Guest Speaker Richard Higgins.

My sermon will look at the riddle of Thoreau’s spirituality. Although a harsh critic of the Christianity of his day, Thoreau was religious to the bone and had a profound sense of the holy. His critique of churches was matched only by his rapturous encounters with the divine in nature. Although better known for his ecological and political stances, Thoreau was a religious thinker who sought to divorce the religious sentiment from its 19th-century institutional context. In essence, he was a mystic who, while firmly moored to the earth, was on a quest to commune with a divine mystery that was both immanent in the natural world and yet transcendent. He called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God—more often than commonly appreciated. Thoreau’s iconoclastic theological vision and eclectic, experiential and non-institutional spirituality is resonating with spiritual seekers in America today.