LITMIR.BIZ

      SPIRITUALITY IN THE MAKING

      ONE DAY I WOKE UP and wondered: maybe today I should be a Christian, or would I rather be a Buddhist, or am I just a Star Trek freak?” So one woman playfully told a sociologist who studies contemporary American religion. Reports on the mushrooming growth of a culture of spiritual seeking have become a journalistic commonplace. As the Utne Reader asked in a cover story in 1998 called “Designer God,” “In a mix-and-match world, why not create your own religion?” Eclectic devotions, creedal crossings, consumer sampling, and individualistic expression are widely seen as the religious order of the day. “I cannot describe my spiritual practice as Buddhist,…or as Hindu or Catholic or Sufi, though I feel that in a sense it is all of these,” the feminist spiritual writer Carol Lee Flinders concludes of her wayfaring. “I meditate as best I can on Native American prayers and Taoist verses, on passages drawn from the Bible or the Upanishads, on passionate love songs composed for the One Beloved by a Spanish monk or an Indian princess-turned-minstrel.” Flinders's spiritual exertions are hardly uncommon these days. The act of journeying across the bounds of traditions, denominations, and institutions has emerged as a familiar, if still creative, course of exploration for many Americans. From Jewish-Buddhist contemplatives to yoga-performing Methodists, more and more seekers have been finding spiritual insight through a medley of practices and pieties.¹

      While sociologists, pollsters, and journalists have provided steady commentary on the blossoming of spiritual seeking in American culture, these observers offer a quite limited historical perspective on how such a religious world took shape in the first place. The majority confine themselves to a watershed view of the 1960s and 1970s, a baby-boomer dividing line between a nation of ensconced churchgoers and a culture of unhinged seekers. How over the longer term did the United States become a land of spiritual questing? How was it that so many Americans became so intensely absorbed in something amorphously called “mysticism” or “spirituality”? Restless Souls shifts the prevailing focus away from rambling boomers (as well as their Gen X successors) and makes the recent spiritual upsurge a matter of cultural and intellectual history. In other words, this is not a story about a rootless generation of seekers, a sardonic tour through the spiritual marts of the New Age, or an arch essay on a bourgeois-bohemian “Soul Rush.” All those have been done—and done well. Too well, really, since today's “pastiche spirituality” has come to be seen almost invariably as a marker of a current social trend, a leading indicator of a new religious transformation rather than a historically shaped tradition of its own. The American fascination with mountaintop mysticism and seeker spirituality goes much deeper than any generational fixation allows.²

      If one temptation is to make newness the basis of any news on spirituality, another is to treat such religious experimentation as timelessly American, part of an intrinsic pioneering spirit that has been mapped onto inner frontiers. It is possible, in other words, to regress too far. Put in historical terms, these contemporary spiritualities of seeking are not predictable from the Protestant-heavy colonial world of British North America or even from the sectarian sauna that became so steamy after the American Revolution. The Protestant right of private judgment, the original prerogative of a believer to interpret Scripture by his or her own lights, was a topsy-turvy notion, but the principle had various stabilizers, not least the primacy of the Christian Bible itself. If that oft-exercised right made for an exegetical madhouse full of contradiction, at least most of the faithful shared the same cell of canonical restraints. (The Bible is for infant baptism; no, it is for believers' baptism only. The Bible supports slavery; no, it vows prophetic justice and equality. The Bible demands that women keep silent in public worship; no, it licenses the prophesying of godly sisters. And so on.) Debates were everywhere, but the authority and sufficiency of biblical revelation were not up for grabs in early American Protestantism. Sure, pilgrims wandered ceaselessly into new interpretations of Christianity—with their Bibles firmly in hand.

      Protestants, of course, were not only intense and often eccentric Bible readers, but also practitioners of rigorous self-examination and introspective journaling. Aren't the spiritual pilgrimages of Puritan saints the foundations of American interiority, the ghosts that linger still, across that vast spectrum of evangelical Christianity from the Baptist Jimmy Carter to the Methodist George W. Bush? How can a story about the making of American spirituality pass over (rather than through) the lives of such worthies as Ann Bradstreet, David Brainerd, Jonathan Edwards, Sarah Osborn, Phillis Wheatley, or other exemplars of Puritan and evangelical practices of piety? The spiritual disciplines these early Protestants enshrined—Sabbath observance, private prayer, diary writing, sacramental meditation, communal narration of conversion experiences, Bible reading, and covenant keeping—were vastly influential and remain so within various strands of contemporary Christianity. The point is not to diminish their importance, but to recognize that American “spirituality,” as the term is now broadly configured in the culture, was invented through a gradual disentanglement from these model Protestant practices or, at minimum, through a significant redefinition of them. Only through some dissociation from those Protestant habits does the term spirituality come to be distinguished from religion; only at a step removed from evangelical Christianity does spirituality begin to refer to “direct mystical experience” and “an individual's solitary search” for “the absolute or the divine.”³

      In colonial America, few were seeking “spirituality” per se. Not a term found in Scripture itself, the word showed up in the title of only one American publication before 1800. Even in that case spirituality fronted a collection of hymns in which it referred to a quality of corporate worship, not the interior lives of individual pilgrims: namely, James Maxwell's Hymns and Spiritual Songs…Design'd to Promote the Spirituality of That Part of Christian Worship (1768). Instead, Puritans and evangelicals emphasized practices of piety; they pursued devout, holy, or godly lives; like the Apostle Paul, they juxtaposed the spiritual with the carnal, but rarely did they label their regimen of sanctification “spirituality.” Far from being a keyword in the early Protestant vernacular of personal devotionalism, spirituality was usually employed as a theological term in opposition to materiality. It pointed, in other words, to the fundamental contrast between the physical and metaphysical worlds, matter and spirit. In allied usages, spirituality sometimes referred to a specific attribute of God—alongside omnipotence or patience—or to the immaterial quality of the soul as opposed to the body.

      The connotations that spirituality carried a century later were largely absent from early American Protestantism. “I should say, indeed,” the great American poet Walt Whitman exhorted in Democratic Vistas in 1871, “that only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion come forth at all.” The poet wanted “the subterranean fire” that seemed smothered under the “corpses” of institutions, traditions, and forms. What he wanted, in brief, were “the divine ideas of spirituality,” compared to which “all religions,” including Christianity, were “but temporary journeys.” Likewise, the Harvard philosopher and poet George Santayana, one of whose earliest pieces was a meditation on Whitman, easily marked out spirituality as the “higher side” of religion in his monumental Life of Reason: or, The Phases of Human Progress in 1905: “This aspiring side of religion may be called Spirituality.” A model for a life of simplicity, creativity, and equanimity, in Santayana's view, “spirituality likes to say, Behold the lilies of the field!” That poetic prospect, affording such clarity about spirituality's elevation over religion, remained a largely unimagined terrain among Puritans and evangelicals. Here is the bottom line: the American invention

Скачать книгу