LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

and universal brotherhood. The brouhaha at Greenacre raises in sharp relief the still relevant question of whether seekers are to keep on seeking for seeking's sake or to identify an end point to their search. Can a solid religious identity be achieved only through the particularity, integrity, and discipline of one tradition? Was the point of pursuing the spiritual life self-expansion, artistic creativity, and endless curiosity or instead self-surrender, obedience, and resignation to God?

      Even as Greenacre's influence declined, other spiritual retreats arose. Among the more important and lasting was Pendle Hill, a community of contemplatives, activists, and seekers led by the Society of Friends (Quakers) and founded in 1930. In the final chapter, an influential group of Quaker intellectuals, all of whom doubled as spiritual guides at Pendle Hill and elsewhere, is explored. Between 1900 and 1940 Rufus Jones, a professor of philosophy at Haverford College, pioneered the liberal transformation of the Society of Friends. He remade them as the archetypal “seekers” in part by resurfacing that category from the seventeenth-century literature of English sectarians and then applying it in a universalized way to the modern religious world. Any number of twentieth-century seekers might suggest the earnestness of these striving souls, but certainly an excellent exemplar is one of Jones's own acolytes, Thomas R. Kelly, who swerved desperately out of academic philosophy into devotional discipline in the late 1930s. He stands in a long line of Quaker-connected spiritual writers in the twentieth century: from Douglas Steere, Howard Thurman, and Elton Trueblood to Richard Foster, Parker Palmer, and Mary Rose O'Reilly. The mysticism of Jones and Kelly as well as the broadly inclusive retreat at Pendle Hill made the Society of Friends disproportionately influential in the shaping of a contemporary American spirituality of seeking. In unpredictable ways, these mystic Quakers even became entangled with an estimable group of émigré writers in Southern California, including Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, and Christopher Isherwood, all of whom were quintessential seekers on the opposite coast.

      The story, of course, continues well beyond Kelly (he died young in 1941). But the culture of seeking was, by then, in place, and after Kelly (and this includes the much ballyhooed rupture of the 1960s) it is historical epilogue. The continuing popularity of Max Ehrmann's “Desiderata,” a prose poem first published in 1927, suggests some of the echoes still resounding from the seeker culture of the early twentieth century. Its imperative of being gentle on oneself and finding serenity amid chaotic social churnings became a widely quoted spiritual motto on posters and plaques in the 1940s and 1950s; it even climbed the pop charts in the early 1970s as the title piece of a Grammy-winning album of Les Crane's; and it continues to circulate now as a “survival guide” for twenty-first-century life. Widely seen as symptomatic of the therapeutic, privatized, and individualistic bankruptcy of today's seeker spirituality, Ehrmann's piety proves, on closer inspection, much harder to caricature. Draining the puddle of syrup and surmounting the heap of satire that have overwhelmed Ehrmann is more than a concluding historical exercise. The recovery of his story serves as a closing parable for a much larger project: namely, the serious reengagement of the interwoven history of liberalism, progressivism, and spirituality in American culture. Given the ease with which the religious right now monopolizes “moral values” as their own distinct turf, it is all the more important to know the history of the spiritual left in order to reclaim an alternative vista from which to view the outworking of American democracy.

      Throughout the book, the American spirituality crafted by these seekers is taken with the seriousness of the introspective brooding and liberating vision that gave it birth. Much of the contemporary commentary on American religion is suffused with the tropes of the marketplace—as if economic models of free competition, entrepreneurial promotion, and consumer demand are the most reliable guides to the spiritual ferment. From this perspective, all this spiritual sampling is but an inner mirroring of the surfeit of choice in America's megamalls. Religious seeking becomes comparable to test-driving various automobiles to see which delivers the most satisfaction on Whitman's open road. This book resists such analogies and analysis not because they are irrelevant, but because they now seem all too obvious. In an age in which conservative pundits caricature liberalism as a shallow ideology of trendy consumerism—“latte liberals” or “Volvo liberals”—it is especially important to probe deeper than brand labels in exploring the cultural import of seeker spirituality.²⁰

      Already in 1930 Woodbridge Riley complained in The Meaning of Mysticism about the “sordid” and “ridiculous” aspects of “commercialized mysticism,” which “spends not hours with the mystics, but minutes with the mystics.” Notwithstanding the thinness of his own book, he was caustic about how the market trivialized “a genuine search for the interior or hidden life.” “Go to any large department store and ask for books on mysticism and they will offer you books bearing such titles as these, ‘How to Strengthen Your Will,'…‘Silent Exercises’ and the like. By means of such apparatus adults can do their daily dozen in mental gymnastics.” In a market society, spiritual practices can be turned into commodities as much as spoons, handguns, or Halloween treats. This book takes for granted that commerce has been a powerful agent in the production and distribution of everything from Bibles to balloons; likewise, inner quests, even for off-the-grid simplicity or spiritual enlightenment, never transcend the market. Indeed, the consumer culture all too clearly feeds those very yearnings in its advertising images of spas, sports-club yoga, and alpine retreats.²¹

      How else to understand the “Off-the-Cuff Philosophy” bracelet available from a recent catalog called Signals: Gifts That Enlighten and Entertain? In sterling silver, the bracelet features a saying dubiously attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “beloved author, minister, activist, poet, philosopher, and lifelong believer in America”: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” How else to fathom the advertisement for the Chevy Tahoe that promotes it as the perfect vehicle for “self-discovery” with a line from Thoreau's Walden? Thoreau's words—“I never found the companion so companionable as solitude”—bless the image of the forest-tucked SUV. The consumer culture encourages spiritual desires, just as it cultivates any number of other desires, and then offers the goods to assuage (temporarily) those cravings and anxieties. But a cynical narrative about commercialization is hardly the primary story of modern interiority. At this point it seems appropriate to give the trope of spiritual shoppers a much-deserved rest. And the same goes for all the smorgasbord, buffet, cafeteria, and deli imagery that one hears in relation to contemporary spirituality—as if religious seekers were little more than spiritual gluttons gobbling up anything and everything that they can heap on their plates.²²

      Even as it offers an inner history of restless souls, this book remains inextricably tied to outer lives. It is a recurring rap on the “new spirituality” as well as on the eccentric individuality of Whitman and friends that they quickly sink into solipsism and become politically and ethically weightless. Narcissism and consumerism are serious issues—in the study of American spirituality as in the study of other aspects of American culture—but they are not uniquely Emersonian, romantic, or liberal problems. Evangelical Protestantism, which has produced more than its share of critics of the “new spirituality,” has also given rise to more than its share of Bible-based diets, gospels of wealth, and guides for the maximized erotic pleasures of married heterosexual couples. In other words, a therapeutic culture of self-realization and a consumer culture of self-gratification are at least as much “evangelical” as they are “liberal.” Yoga studios and aromatherapy hardly hold a candle to the conglomerate of T-shirt fashions, aerobics videos, and apocalyptic best sellers that makes up the Christian Booksellers Association.

      The same liberal spirit that led to a critique of conventional Christianity and organized religion readily energized strenuous activism and self-denying social engagement, including innumerable reform causes from abolition to suffrage, from international relief to workers' rights. Commonly contained within this seeker spirituality was a critical social and political vision; repeatedly, self-reliance and solitary retreat were held in creative and effective tension with a sharply honed social ethics. By the 1920s and 1930s, the joining of “prayers and pickets” was a given of liberal spiritual practice. The religious and political vision of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s and 1960s gained much from that combined inheritance from Thoreau to Mohandas Gandhi. A handful of nineteenth-century religious liberals, after all,

Скачать книгу