Rev. Tom Disrud

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

April 19, 1998

---

We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.

We enter the little circle of each other’s arms
And the larger circle of lovers, whose hands are joined in a dance.

And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance,

To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it
Except in fragments.

-- Wendell Berry

A few years back, as I prepared to leave Duluth, Minnesota, and head off to seminary, I was having a farewell lunch with my minister in her home. As I left she pulled out two books, black with gold lettering, serious looking books. They were on the history of Unitarianism and they were written by someone named Earl Morse Wilbur. “If you’re going to be a minister,” she said, “these are books you will want to read. They tell the history of our movement. I give them to you with my blessing.”

It wasn’t long before I came across Earl Morse Wilbur again. I arrived in Berkeley, California, and entered the main classroom at Starr King School for the Ministry. And there he was, in the form of a large painting that dominates the room. It is a painting of a wise old man with spectacles. He is seated, legs crossed, in the chair, looking pensive. It was Earl Morse Wilbur, the first president of the school. He still keeps a watchful gaze on all that happens there.

And three years ago, when I came to candidate at this church, there he was again. As I passed through the hallway outside this sanctuary for the first time, I saw a younger man, new to the ministry, at ease. He came here way back in 1890, when he was just 24 years old.

Now, when I’m hurrying from one meeting to another or when I take a few minutes to come and sit here in the sanctuary to be still, I pass his photo.

My life is not Earl Morse Wilbur’s life, but when I’m in a situation that feels new and scary, it is always good for me to be reminded that I’m not the first one who has faced such times. Others have as well, and the church is still strong healthy.

That is one of the gifts of history. And in this church, I’ve come to know that we have a strong sense of that history. The lives of those who have gone before us are not the same as ours, but they too struggled with many things in their lives. They came to this place looking for community, to explore ideas, to understand who they were and how they were connected to everything around them. They showed a commitment to this institution that still grounds us as we look ahead to our future as a church. They left us a great legacy.

This is the story of Earl Morse Wilbur and it is also our story.

Earl Morse Wilbur was born the year this church was born—in 1866. He was born in Jericho, Vermont, on April 26, the oldest of two sons of LaFayette and Mary Jane Morse Wilbur. Both sides of the family were farmers and both sides descended from Puritian stock from England. Wilbur’s father was a country lawyer in their small town, outside of Burlington. His mother was active in church and temperance work. Earl was active in his Congregational church as a child. In fact he worked for the church for some years, earning just 5 cents a day.

He graduated as valedictorian from the University of Vermont in 1886. He taught languages at an academy in New York for a year before going to Harvard Divinity School to train to be a Congregational minister.

He loved the academic study at Harvard, but at the end of his time there he ran into some problems that would prove to be a turning point in his life. Congregational ministers of the time were expected to pledge a creed of belief in Jesus Christ. Young Earl, perhaps influenced by all those Unitarians at Harvard, refused to do that. He was denied a license to preach in the Congregational Church.

One of his best friends at seminary was William Greenleaf Eliot, Jr., whose father, Thomas Lamb Eliot, was the minister of a young and growing Unitarian congregation way out in Portland, Oregon. It seemed the church needed an associate pastor. It was Will who told Earl he should apply. Before long he was headed West. It should be noted that Will, too would become a minister of this church—from 1906 to 1934.

When Wilbur arrived in 1890, Portland was growing by leaps and bounds. In 1891, Portland, East Portland and Albina would merge to form one city, making it the third largest west of the Omaha, surpassed by Denver and San Francisco. It was especially a time for growth of transit companies, power companies and bridges to serve the growing city. New tracts of land were being plated for housing. A small circle of men held most of the wealth and power in the city, many of them members of this church.

The Unitarian church was just 24 years old when Wilbur arrived. It was thriving with about 300 members and a Sunday school that was even larger. The church, in its short history, had grown to be a major voice in the city. This was especially true of its minister, Thomas Lamb Eliot, called the most influential minister in the city at the time by historians. Under Eliot it established a Post office mission to get Unitarian materials to those who sought them, it was active in the temperance movement, and the Boys and Girl Club of Portland. In 1887, the William G. Eliot Fraternity, named for the minister’s father in St. Louis, brought young people together for entertainment, charitable work and the study of literature.

The church was in its second building, built in 1879. It was built to accommodate the growth of the congregation. In 1891, a fire seriously damaged the building, but the congregation rebuilt and were continued on.

When Wilbur arrived, he got right to work. He wrote faithfully to his parents back in Vermont at least a couple times per week. He tells of getting to know the church and the city. In one letter he talks about his new preaching suit. And in one letter shows he didn’t exactly know what he was getting into coming west.

In September of 1890, he writes, “Last evening I dined at Mrs. Burrell’s, one of the pillars of the church and had a very pleasant evening. I find almost all the refinement among people here that I should back East. Perhaps I was wrong not to expect it.”

In his sermons during this time he often preaches of the need to live the good and moral life. To stay out of trouble, to rid ourselves of bad habits, and to constantly work to perfect ourselves. His message is optimistic. He calls us to continue to move onward and upward forever in our lives.

This message of morality may have been called for at the time. Portland was still a frontier town, a time when vice was growing. Ministers of the time were called to speak out against it.

Wilbur has been described as an earnest, bookish young minister, a lovable introvert, patiently stoic and naturally optimistic. He was a good pastor.

Wilbur took great care to attend to the congregation. His letters to his parents talk about his long days at the church. They indicate a great deal of dedication. During this time there were lots of boys in the church named Wilbur and Earl. They joined many Eliots and Thomases in the church.

Though it is clear Earl could be consumed with ideas, it appears he also had a sense of the practical, what it would take to minister to the young people.

He writes his parents early in 1892: “I went by invitation last Wednesday evening to a card party, at which, bearing in mind the feelings of Mrs. Drew and mother, I did not play; but I suspected that thereby I lost more influence with the young people than I gained.”

Wilbur didn’t spend all his time at the church. He was one of the founding members of the Mazamas, a club organized to climb Mount Hood. In 1892, he made his first climb and in 1894, the Mazamas were organized and 193 people (38 of them women) made the assent. Wilbur was elected the temporary chairman of the group and would later be elected vice president and secretary. He would go on to climb Mt. Hood six times and throughtout his life would climb mountains. Seems that Wilbur may have been living out the 7th principle of our faith before we formally had it.

Thomas Lamb Eliot during this time was more and more drawn to community work. He left more and more of the pastoring to Wilbur. In 1893, Wilbur formally became minister and Eliot became minister emeritus. The minutes of the annual meeting of January 10, 1893 report an enthusiasm for Wilbur: “Rev. Mr. Wilbur, so efficient as Dr. Eliot’s associate, now takes the helm, and with hopeful courage and tireless zeal will continue the voyage with us.”

That zeal would soon be tested. The economic panic of 1893 hit and the next years would be hard ones financially as the city and the church. The annual letters to the congregation during this time speak of the financial troubles and the need for contributions. In his letters to his parents, Wilbur talks about the church having a hard time paying him and his frustration from that. As the church struggled for money, many more people also turned to the church for help, which put more on Wilbur. All in all it was a hard time.

But Wilbur was naturally an optimist. There were many things to keep him in Portland. He loved the church. He greatly admired Thomas Lamb Eliot. And perhaps most of all, he came to fall in love with Dorothea Dix Eliot, called Dode , the oldest daughter of Thomas and Etta Eliot.

Dode was outgoing and politically savvy. She knew about the politics of churches. This was a good complement to the quiet, somewhat more naïve Earl. Over the months they spent more and more time together. Earl writes his parents of their bicycle rides in the city and their walks in the afternoons.

On June 30, 1898, 100 years ago this month, they were married, and planned for a year-long trip to Europe as a honeymoon. It would be a time for Earl to rest after years of hard work and to visit some of the libraries of Europe. The wedding was the lead in the society column of that Sunday’s Oregonian. The music of Mendelsohn was featured, as it is in our service today. It should be noted that thanks to Earl’s meticulous accounting, we know the entire year in Europe only cost $1,865.

When Earl and Dode left for Europe, it was left open if the church would call Earl back at the end or not. The finances of the time made it difficult to predict where the church would be. It was that precarious.

At the end of that year, the church decided not to call Earl back to Portland. It is not entirely clear why this was, but apparently it had to do with the difficult financial situation and the simple fact that he had not been around. Perhaps the leaders of the church were not pleased that he had left them during this difficult time.

Earl and Dode were hurt by the decision. Their went to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where he was parish minister for five years and where he was on the faculty at Meadville Theological School.

He loved the teaching, and in 1904 was called back to the West Coast to Berkeley, California, to be a organizer and dean of a new seminary on the West Coast to be called Pacific Unitarian School, which would later be named Starr King School for the Ministry.

In those early days, Wilbur did everything at the school. He kept the books, interviewed students, taught, wrote the catalog, raised money and cleaned the floors. The school grew and in a couple years he was named the school’s first president.

For his time, he did some remarkable things. He was intentional in getting students from around the world at the school, from Japan, from Transylvania, from New Zealand, from Burma, from Canada. He went out of his way to encourage women to study for the ministry. The school had several women graduates in the 1920s.

He worked to get financial support for students so they left seminary debt-free. That, I can testify, is not something that happens today.

And it was at the seminary that his passion for history burst forth. This would be the defining work of his life.

When teaching Unitarian history, it became clear to him that there was really not definitive text to teach from. That may be because our movement at the time in some ways saw us as springing up out of nowhere. We were not really seen as having a history before the name Unitarian was used in England and America.

Wilbur’s legacy is that he was the first person to bring the strands together of our history that connects us to the Reformation when Luther and others broke away from the Catholic church. He connected us with the so-called radical reformers of the time. Where the mainline reformers like Luther and Calvin wanted to reform in one way, there was a group that wanted to take the reforms further. He showed the evolution of thought and how we are related to people in Poland, Transylvania, Italy, Switzerland, England.

Wilbur worked tirelessly in this process, learning eight languages to allow him to study the original texts of the reformation. When he was traveling in Europe, he would find rare books from this period. Sometimes there would only be two copies, and would get to know the people enough that they would be willing to sell him one of the two copies. He would wire messages to people back in California to send money to allow him to buy the books. Some of those books are now the only copies and they are extremely rare.

Wilbur is considered a great scholar of history. He more than anyone of his time changed the way our movement looked at its history. He looked at both sides of the debate to get as full a picture as he could. He brought it all together in his books. For this we owe him a great debt.

He would go on writing through his life. There are boxes and boxes of his writings—40 boxes to be exact—that he left. He died in 1956, just short of his 90th birthday. Researching this sermon has been a good lesson in history for me. It is easy for me to look back at people like Earl Morse Wilbur and Thomas Lamb Eliot or the pioneers of our church, and want to put them on pedestals. The reality is they did great things, but that they too struggled and worked to do what was right and good. They did not always know the answers.

History is a tricky process. When dealing with figures of the past, it is easy to mythologize them, to only see their qualities that we admire and to forget that they had feet of clay just like all of us. There is a danger in this, of course, because they were not anymore perfect than we are. It calls us to live with the complexity of the history.

I spoke with Wilbur’s grandson a few months back. He is a philosophy professor in Houston and said it can be intimidating when your grandfather founded a seminary, your great grandfather (Thomas Lamb Eliot) founded a university as did your great- great grandfather did as well. William Greenleaf Eliot founded Washington University in St. Louis.

And being a minister in this church, I can sometimes relate to that. The expectations, particularly those I have on myself, can be daunting.

Like any scholar, Wilbur didn’t always see or write about the full picture. This may be a product of his nature or the influence of his times. When he wrote a biography of Eliot, it is a very public biography. It does not talk about any struggles Eliot had weaknesses. It makes a saint out of him. The man almost walks on water.

And Wilbur could be apparently unaware of things that were happening around him. In 1933, he was in Germany, doing research for his history books. He and Dode were in Munich when Hitler was taking power. In his letters, he tells people back home that the revolution has been peaceful and orderly and dismissed reports to the contrary as political fabrications put out to discredit the new regime.

He was not the only writer doing that at the time, but in hindsight the writings are surprising. He saw the world through a particular set of lenses, and that is what he leaves us. It is not the final word, but his interpretation of the word.

How we look at history is a constantly evolving process. Not everyone was at the table and their voices often get lost in the official record. It is not always easy to reclaim those voices.

The scholar Cynthia Grant Tucker is working to do some of that. She is currently working on a book that will focus on the letters of the Eliot and Wilbur women. They share the struggles of the parish life and say the things their husbands and fathers did not. Their writing shows a relational dimension to history that the writings of the men don’t cover. They words bring a much more human face to what was going on during the time. We get a fuller sense of church politics. It helps show a fuller perspective on what was happening.

Heritage and tradition are tricky things. They are not static, but things that evolve. They can be grounding, helping us to know who we are. But they can also leave us feeling like we’re always trying to live up to something. As we interpret them and live out our lives, we are asked to walk a fine line.

It has been said that nostalgia is the dead hand of the living but that tradition is the living hand of the dead.

As we come to know our history, we are called to walk this line, open to what those who have gone before have left us but not to be buried in it.

T.S. Eliot, another ancestor for us, said in his “Choruses from The Rock”

“Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten or ripe…Here upon earth you have the reward of the good and ill that was done by those who have gone before you.

And all that is ill you may repair if you walk together in humble repentance, expiating the sins of your parents;

And all that was good you must fight to keep with hearts as devoted as those of your parents who fought to gain it.”

So history presents us with a challenge. It is one that countless other generations have been handed, and it is one we, too, will hand on.

Wilbur himself said: “We ought to realize that, although these heroes of our faith bore a good witness in their day, God has also placed upon us a sacred duty to continue and complete their work, since without us they will not be made perfect.”

And so as our church moves into an exiting new chapter in its history, may we continue his work and the work of all our foremothers and forefathers. May we know who we are, may we know where we have been and that help us know where it is we’re headed. Working together, hand in hand, we will get there. May this be so. Amen.

---

Copyright © 1998, Reverend Tom Disrud. All rights reserved.