“Darwin and Lincoln: The Stars Aligned”

The Rev. Carol A. Huston, Community Unitarian Church at White Plains, February 1, 2009

First Reading
From the Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln, 1865

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. . . Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. . .

“. . . Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . (Perhaps) we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came. . . Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills, it (may) continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. . .

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Meditation on an Image
In 1837, in one of the small field notebooks that he had with him on his journeys, Darwin wrote the words “I think” and then sketched an image symbolic of his insights on evolution. There it was, full-blown, but it took him another 22 years to bring it to publication.

Second Reading
from Darwin’s correspondence with fellow scientist Asa Gray

“With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me – I am bewildered. – I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own I cannot see, as plainly as others do, and as I did wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe and especially the nature of man, and conclude that everything is brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”

Sermon
In recent years, our lunch-time Science and Spirituality group has taken two field trips, both related to Charles Darwin – one a retrospective on Darwin at the Natural History Museum and the other, .last June, a recreation of Darwin’s garden at the Botanical Garden. Both were wonderfully inspiring and educational.

While I was on sabbatical, another Darwin event came up, and I’m sorry in retrospect that I did not alert the Science and Spirituality group to it. It was a multi-media performance at Brooklyn Academy of Music, called “Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln.” Created by a Haitian American musician and performance artist named DBR, Daniel Bernard Roumain, it had started out as a piece about Lincoln, intended for BAM in the 200th anniversary year after Lincoln’s birth. At some point in his research he discovered this strange fact: that another seminal figure in world history, Charles Darwin, was born on the very same day as Lincoln. Gradually DBR realized that he could combine the two in the piece which featured projected words and pictures, readings and music.

At first DBR expected to put these two thinkers and leaders together simply around their views of slavery. A few moments ago I read you words from Lincoln that gave voice to his sense that the war might be seen as punishment in full measure for the evils of slavery. Darwin also wrote about the weight of this sin. “Those who look tenderly on the slave-owner and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter. . . It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendents with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”

But the lines of coincidence between the two men kept expanding, and even became personal for DBR in the references to Haiti, DBR’s home. There was an expressed respect for the Haitian people in Darwin’s writing. He never visited there, but the revolution of the slaves in Haiti in the late 1700’s truly impressed him. And for Lincoln there was a personal tie to Haiti – his barber, William Johnson whom he took with him from Springfield to Washington, was an immigrant from Haiti.

How else did the stars align for these two men, born on the same day? UU’s don’t often quote astrological charts, but I was interested to find in a Newsweek article that one of you sent me an astrological description that would fit both: “as Aquarians, they would both be stubborn, visionary, tolerant, free-spirited, rebellious, genial but remote and detached.” All of this points to similar personalities, including a tendency toward depression.

Further, they were united in the trajectory of their lives, especially in the losses that they met. Both saw their mothers die when they were 8 or 9 years old. Both lost children as well – two of four for Lincoln, three of 10 for Darwin. Of course it was common to lose children in times before the mid-20th century. Let us pause for a moment to think on the blessings of modern medicine, which have defeated this likelihood of loss for much of the world. But it is also significant that each of them lost a child at a time of great pressure. One of Lincoln’s sons died while he was in the White House, in the same week as the first Union victory at Ft. Donelson, Kentucky. And a baby died in Darwin’s family – with Darwin at the bedside -- during the very month when he was under the intense pressure to complete a version of Origin of Species for publication. The stars were aligned, we might say, to bring them sorrow, but also to bring them strength to persevere through sorrow.

That month of June 1858 when baby Charles died, and Darwin’s theory was finally assembled for publication is interesting, and if you read or listen to anything about him in the coming days you will probably hear about the fact that Darwin published his theory only when he knew that a naturalist named Alfred Russell Wallace was ready to publish the same ideas. I don’t intend to discuss the ethics of that today, but as you listen to what others might say, please keep in mind at least that Darwin engineered the simultaneous publication of Wallace’s work. His treatise was published much sooner and with more notice than it would have had otherwise. Wallace was always comfortable with this resolution of things.

This publication, however, is one of the clouds that some place over Darwin’s name, and this is another way that the stars aligned with Lincoln. They were both vilified in their time and later. Darwin for opening the door to atheism and also for opening the door to what we call Social Darwinism, the progressivism that allows the victor to look down on what seem like evolutionary losers. Actually Darwin never wrote with this idea in mind. His contribution was the definition of the mechanism for evolution – survival of the one which can adapt to changing circumstances. And Lincoln was vilified in his life and later for bringing on war on the one hand, and on the other for being such a gradualist in the abolition of slavery, and for not fully understanding the humanity of the African. The images of both men were mixed – but they of course were human.

Both men understood and, as we saw from the readings, struggled with the theological implications of what they were doing. They brought new ideas to questions about what it means to be human, and what and where is God in all this. Theological reservation was probably part of the reason that 22 year delay between the field journal sketch and the publication of his theories. He understood the firestorm that would come down on him. Lincoln espoused a belief in God, but he could not draw from that any reassurance that he was working on the side of that God.

Two people at the forefront of world revolutions! I urge you to come and talk about them and further honor them on Thursday. February 12 at 11:30 a.m. or at 7:30 p.m. We will have the chalice burning in the memory of both of these intelligent, patient, sorrowful men. And we will have birthday cake as well. As a UU congregation which values social justice, which views with awe and wonder the way creation has evolved, and which shares a tendency to religious doubt and questioning, it is right to honor them.

Another Way the Stars Aligned
As I was thinking about bring that image of Darwin’s “Tree of Life” to you today, I received an e-mail from the chaplain at White Plains Hospital. He wanted to tell all the White Plains Religious Leaders that four substantial wooden sculptures had just been unearthed from a closet at the hospital. They had probably been part of the décor of a chapel which the hospital took out of operation 30 years ago, but nothing else was known about them Four sculptures: a Cross, a Star of David, a Corpus (body of Christ), and a Tree of Life. A Tree of Life! Father Rick was offering them up for adoption, and I went right over, loaded the Tree into my car, and brought it to be with us today – and into the future.