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I don’t remember much about my high school English literature classes. Not that I didn’t have great teachers. I did. It’s just that it was forty years ago now. I have vague memories of trying to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. (I assure you “trying” is the important word in that last sentence.) I also have faint memories involving John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. But the one book that I do clearly remember having an impact on me as a teen was Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.
Which is why I took advantage of a cracked window of time last Friday morning to visit the site of Thoreau’s cabin and walk around the lake the book is named after. Just outside Concord, Massachusetts, the lake is not a big one—around two miles in circumference. And the cabin was certainly not a big one—about 150 square feet. In it he kept only what he considered the essentials: a twin bed, a writing desk, and three chairs (“one for solitude, two for friendship and three for society.”) “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life,” he wrote in Walden, “are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
Thoreau built the cabin when he was 28 years old for $28 (equivalent of $900 today) and he moved in on July 4, 1845 (180 years ago this summer!) He lived there for two years, two months, and two days before returning to Concord to serve as a tutor and general handyman for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s family and a maker of quality graphite pencils. He continued to write, mostly about his observations of the world around him, until he succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 44. One of my favorite lines of his comes from his death bed. When his aunt asked him “if he had made his peace with God,” Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.” Now that is the way to go!
But it is not the line that wooed me out to Walden Lake last week. The line that drew me to the place is the line that I still remember from my teen years…the line that most readily associate with Thoreau…the line that is posted on the site where the remains of his cabin can be found:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life…”
I think there are many today (and I'm guessing you might be among them) who resonate with Thoreau’s desire. We like the idea of living in the woods. We fantasize about getting to write without disruption. But what really tugs at us is the desire to live life deliberately. To not feel as if we’ve rushed through life without ever truly experiencing it. To not worry that life came to us as an amazing gift, and we never fully opened it.
When working on Redeeming Power, I found myself spending a lot of time in the opening two chapters of Genesis (the Biblical stories of creation) thinking about how to best understand the human vocation. I think what Genesis tells us is that to be human is to live in the world as if it were the Garden of Eden. To receive it as a treasure. To enjoy it. And then to contribute through the work of one’s own hands to help the whole of creation to realize its full potential. To nudge it toward a forever-right-around-the-bend Seventh Day of profound harmony and wholeness. Thoreau in his short but very intentional life seems to have tried to embrace the human vocation.
A special treat for me in my visit to Walden Pond was getting to buy my son a copy of Walden for his 30th birthday next week. Micah is one of those amazing young adults who, like Thoreau, is always calling me back to the radical vision of young adulthood. Among his ever-growing bodies of expertise in music, sound engineering, European futbol, and houseplants, he is also a Marie Kondo wizard. In his studio apartment that was once a garage, he is always trying to figure out how to do more with less space and less stuff but not less joy. Over the New Year holiday this past year, he helped me declutter and reorganize our home. I thought we lived pretty lightly in the world having moved so many times, but Micah helped me unload another dumpster full of things I did not need and I’ve not missed a single item of it. If you’ve not met the wonder that is Micah yet, I’d like to introduce you to him here. Micah was the sound engineer for the whole Waking Up Goliath podcast series that I did. It was a super fun project for the two of us to work on together and as a way of wrapping up the effort, I made him the last person I interviewed. There is something that not only Thoreau but others who are in that period of their late 20's have to say to us. Micah was so insightful in this interview and I think got right to the essence of power. He’s someone who lives deeply and intentionally and I think that is what I admire about him most.
And if you are in the LA area and would like to see him perform, he and his band will be at the Troubadour in West Hollywood on June 23rd! (It will be almost exciting as my podcast interview with him.)
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Also to have on your radar for summer enjoyment: Lay Eucharistic Preaching in a Synodal Catholic Church is now out from Liturgical Press! This book, edited by Fr. Greg Heille, OP, is comprised of many wonderful essays emerging from the synodal listening process hosted by the Dominican Preaching Network at Aquinas Institute of Theology in March 2024. I wrote about this Spirit-filled gathering earlier here so am so happy that the insights gleaned can now be shared ever more widely. As far as I know, it is the first substantive theological work on the topic of lay Eucharistic preaching in several decades. Check it out here.