Searching Again for the Sacred

SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT MAN--II

Last week TIME began a four-part series that focuses attention on those ideas that are challenging the current generation's established wisdom--the related concepts of liberalism, rationalism and scientism. In the first part of the series, TIME's Behavior section described the limits--and potentialities--of human nature as now seen by certain behavioral scientists. This week the Religion section examines some developments both within and outside the churches that are working subtle changes in the spiritual face of America.

No book captured the popular theological mood of the '60s better than Harvey Cox's The Secular City. "Men must be called away from their fascination with other worlds--astrological, metaphysical or religious--and summoned to confront the concrete issues of this one," wrote Cox, a professor of religion at Harvard Divinity School. His call for social involvement was a capstone to decades of religious this-worldliness. Ever since Theologian Walter Rauschenbusch began to preach his social gospel at the end of the 19th century, there had been a growing feeling in U.S. Protestantism that religion was not a thing of pious Sundays but of vigorous, shirtsleeve weekdays. Many Roman Catholics and Jews were also trying to involve their churches and synagogues more directly in the struggles for racial justice and economic equality. The decade of the '60s brought enthusiasm for secular religion to its peak.

God, for the moment, took the back seat, in a slightly moribund state. Some theologians, borrowing a leaf from Nietzsche, said that God was dead. What most of them meant, of course, was that certain concepts of God could no longer work for modern man: the personal, loving father-figure God of the Bible, for instance. While that God was dying, a New Morality was being baptized, a "situation ethics" that told man that moral judgments were dependent on individual circumstances, not on rigid rules.

But the liberal, optimistic vision of the secular city and of the human race was at odds with a growing undercurrent of disillusion about man's ability to transform either himself or his world. A Teilhard de Chardin might confidently view man's physical and spiritual evolution in the new scientific world as a limitless upward spiral, but Hitler and Hiroshima suggested that the spiral could also spin downward into new dimensions of evil.

Slowly, as out of a fog, life began to be a matter of basic questions again. Who am I? Why was I born? Why must I die? What is life all about? Who--or what--makes it run?

While many people had never forgotten the questions, more than a few were at a loss for answers. The fluidity of religious choice in the U.S. had left a large part of a generation without familiar touchstones. Unhampered by family or social pressures, often raised in an atmosphere of benign tolerance--even indifference--the young especially were virtually impelled to go on their own quest for religious roots.

Few are finding what they seek in liberal churches or synagogues. Since the mid-1960s, mainstream Protestantism particularly has slipped in numbers. Together with liberal forms of Catholicism and Judaism, the progressive Protestant denominations are hoist with their own petard. Their very creedal flexibility precludes the certitude that attracts converts. In fact, believes California's Episcopal Bishop C. Kilmer Myers, Christianity may be losing its power to grip the imagination. "We have become imageless," he says. "We have no symbols like Moses' passage through the Red Sea. We are empty people. The elements of mystery in the church have been almost systematically removed. But hunger for the mysterious is widespread in all people. We cannot be human unless we have the experience of transcendence."

Many Americans are finding a measure of transcendence in the growing ranks of the doctrinally conservative Protestant churches, some of them evangelical, some of them frankly fundamentalist. The most impressive example of growth is the Southern Baptist Convention, which has maintained a staunchly biblical faith. Young people of all faiths are also turning to one aspect or another of the Jesus movement (TIME, June 21, 1971). Some elect the totalitarian disciplines of the Children of God; others choose milder groups, stressing love and salvation more than hellfire and brimstone. On campuses and in outdoor extravaganzas like last year's EXPLO '72 in Dallas, many are opting for the handbook pieties of the Campus Crusade for Christ. The uncompromising focus of all these groups is the same, quoted from the Gospel of St. John: "I am the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me."

Many Reform Jews are returning to some of the observances of Halakhah (Jewish religious law), and Conservative Jews are tightening their own practices. The ranks of Roman Catholic traditionalists are growing, especially such militant reactionaries as Catholics United for the Faith. Some run their own schools, eschewing all sex education and teaching the officially discarded Baltimore Catechism ("Why did God make me?" "God made me to know, love and serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next"). One of the two major U.S. Eastern Orthodox communions, the Orthodox Church in America, last week issued a bishops' encyclical attacking the ecumenical movement for its "secularistic Christianity."

In another vein, many spiritual pilgrims are returning to an appreciation of mysticism. More Jews today--especially the young--are delving into the mysteries of Hasidism, and Christians are re-examining their own great mystics: Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and Soeren Kierkegaard. Many mainstream Protestants and Catholics, while staying mostly within their churches, are caught up in the rapidly expanding Pentecostal movement. The Pentecostalists seek to renew their belief through an ecstatic personal encounter with the Holy Spirit, manifested especially in glossolalia, the speaking of mysterious tongues. These neo-Pentecostalists tend to be more subdued than the "classic" Protestant Pentecostalists whose churches date back to spiritual revivals that began toward the close of the past century. But even as churchgoing members of mainstream denominations, the new Pentecostalists keep their special spiritual exercises quite separate. The Roman Catholic Pentecostalists are currently the fastest growing: they number well over 100,000, up from a mere handful six years ago.

Reflecting some of the same communal spirit as Pentecostalism is the widespread "small-group movement," which concentrates on Bible and prayer meetings in both Catholic and Protestant homes. These small groups, and other new religious patterns, were discussed at an ecumenical conference on the future of U.S. religion held in Chicago last January. The participants examined 27 "trendsetting" religious communities of a wide variety. They included King's Temple in Seattle (an independent middle-class Pentecostal church), Lighthouse Ranch in California (a prospering Jesus movement commune) and Tail of the Tiger in Barnet, Vt. (a Tibetan Buddhist meditation community founded in 1970).

Analyzing the trend setters studied at the meeting, University of Chicago Church Historian Martin Marty pointed out that most of them see themselves as minorities. They tend to be "post-liberal," and have given up trying to reform the world on a massive scale. They assume, however, that a small group, moved by God, can have an impact far beyond its own numbers. Another characteristic, Marty notes, is that the new groups are expected to "deliver personal rewards. Their members quest for immediate experience."

In an essay called Rebirth of God, The Death of Man, Critic Leslie Fiedler observes that "the New Religious are determined to be no inert congregation rehearsing the words of dead Visionaries and half-mythological Saints, but a living church of actual Visionaries and Saints." To them, writes Fiedler, the death-of-God theology was talking about the death of a method--its own--rather than a subject, God.

While the majority of the New Religious have remained in one or another of the faiths of their fathers, others are looking for guidance to the great Eastern religions--mostly Hinduism and Buddhism--and their modern Western offspring.

No one knows how many Americans are involved today with Eastern practices. One informed estimate comes from Robert S. Ellwood Jr., author of Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America. Ellwood believes that there are at least 500,000 members of various Eastern religious groups in the U.S., not counting the practitioners of transcendental meditation. Fellow travelers--students of yoga, readers of books on mysticism--may number several millions, he says.

Hindu philosophy has long attracted Western minds. The poetic thought of the Upanishads helped nurture the 19th century American transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. But it was only in 1893, when a charismatic young man named Swami Vivekananda came to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, that Hinduism first put down roots in the West. The message the swami brought was Vedanta Hinduism, a classical Hindu school revived and refined by the 19th century Hindu mystic, Ramakrishna.

Like Ramakrishna's ascetic but joyous Vedanta (which is once again growing in the U.S.), the Hindu imports of today tend to concentrate on various meditative disciplines. The most famous is the transcendental meditation of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose early converts were the Beatles. TM is, however, a basically nonreligious self-therapy.

The most visible form of Hinduism in the West is the Krishna Consciousness movement, founded in the U.S. in 1966 by Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta. Its saffron-robed "Hare Krishna" chanters are found on the street corners of many American cities. Like many Hindus, they abstain from meat and alcohol--even from eggs, which they see as embryonic life. A married woman is expected to renounce sex when she is 30 and send her children away to a school in Texas. Like austere Christian monks, the group members rise in the middle of the night to pray. Their Hare Krishna mantra is somewhat akin to the famous repetitive "Jesus prayer" of Eastern Orthodoxy.

To the Krishna Consciousness people, Lord Krishna is "the sweetest" god. Generally Hindus acknowledge an entire panoply of personal deities who are seen as manifestations of the Infinite--the ultimate reality or Absolute which they understand in many ways and most often call Brahman. The principal focus of spirituality is union with that Absolute. Above all else, the Hindu desires a release from the physical world of appearances in order to realize his identity with Brahman. This oneness is not easy to achieve; it is the reward of the holy man, who can then finally break out of the cycle of endless reincarnations.

Most gurus teach one or another form of yoga (the Sanskrit word means a yoking, or union), practical methods by which the student can strive to unite with Brahman. The discipline that concentrates on psychophysical exercises to purify and strengthen the entire body is called hatha-yoga. Raja-yoga employs meditative exercises to focus the mind, and bhakti is the yoga of love and devotion.

One of the scores of gurus who have come to the U.S. in the past decade is India's Swami Satchidananda, who gained national attention by opening the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. Satchidananda teaches "integral yoga," a combination of yogic disciplines, in 15 metropolitan centers as well as two new live-in communities in Middletown, Calif., and Pomfret, Conn. Catholic nuns and priests often attend the integral-yoga weekend retreats.

The late Sri Aurobindo of Pondichery, India, who died in 1950 at the age of 78, taught a different kind of integral yoga. Departing from the usual teaching of yoga, which speaks in terms of freeing the spirit from domination by the body, Aurobindo stressed perfecting the body by bringing the spirit more completely into it. Rather than looking toward an escape from the cycle of existence, he envisioned a this-worldly utopia of new consciousness. "It is the descent of the new consciousness that is the stamp and seal of my discipline," he wrote. Like Teilhard de Chardin, Aurobindo had a huge revolutionary hope for mankind. His "new" consciousness would be a "supramental" state, man's next step on the ladder of evolution. Aurobindo reasoned that a synthesis of the several disciplines of yoga would help those who follow it to be "conscious collaborators" in their own evolution.

Today Aurobindo's teaching--which comprises 30 volumes in English--is being studied at ten centers across the U.S. and has its own thriving laboratory in the Aurobindo ashram in Pondichery, as well as a new international community, Auroville, being built near by. Run today by a 94-year-old French mystic known as "The Mother," both are attracting the growing number of Americans who travel to India on a spiritual search.

The Hindu imports spin on and on in the catalogue of current U.S. spiritual movements. So, too, do the offshoots of Buddhism, which began in India as a reform movement within Hinduism in the 6th century B.C. Gautama Buddha, the Enlightened One who founded the Buddhist family of religions, de-emphasized the Hindu gods; some schools of Buddhism--Zen, for instance--still reflect a kind of agnosticism. But the basic spiritual focus in the many forms of Buddhism is the attainment of nirvana, an ineffable state of liberation and union with ultimate reality in which suffering is eliminated, and compassion and wisdom are attained.

The current fascination with Buddhism in the U.S. centers on three distinctly different varieties: Zen, Tibetan and Nichiren Shoshu of America, the U.S. branch of Japan's 20th century, militantly evangelistic Soka Gakkai, which bears little resemblance to classical Buddhism of any kind. Nichiren Shoshu claims more than 100,000 members in the U.S.--mostly neat, middle-class individuals who commit themselves to hour after hour of chanting the sect's brief ritual prayer, often for the material prosperity and success that they believe such chanting brings.

Zen and Tibetan Buddhism are far older and weightier. Zen, a school of meditation that developed its distinctive coloration in 6th century China, was the first Buddhist import to attract large numbers of Americans, most memorably with its flowering as the philosophy of the Beat movement of the 1950s. Now it is growing again. It has a popular mountain retreat at Tassajara Hot Springs, Calif., a seminary in Mount Shasta, Calif., under the leadership of an English abbess, Jiyu Kennett Roshi, and about ten other major centers of practice across the country.

The classic Zen puzzle, the koan, which is designed to break the mind away from logical categories, has a special appeal to Western intellectuals. The purpose of the koan, however, is not mental gymnastics but rather a wordless insight into reality. One famous exercise, which requires meditation on the "sound of one hand clapping," has even become something of a cliche. But perhaps the most effective appeal of Zen is that it is a highly specific discipline that emphasizes practical methods rather than philosophic speculation. "Zen is down to earth," says Philip Kapleau Roshi, 60, an American who has established a thriving Zen center in Rochester, N.Y. The intensive period of Zen practice known as sesshin is "sustained self-effort," he explains in his book, The Three Pillars of Zen. "Whether satori [enlightenment] follows or not, one cannot seriously participate in a sesshin and not return home chastened in heart, strengthened in mind, and with a startlingly fresh vision of an old familiar world. One is liberated by one's own unfaltering, indefatigable exertions."

Tibetan Buddhism reflects a more mysterious frame of mind. The practices of Tibetan Buddhism, inspired by the sacred texts known as Tantras, include mystical mantras to be chanted, esoteric exercises to be perfected and a menagerie of frightening gods and spirits to be evoked. But all of this is in the service of a highly developed spiritual discipline that leads to the same goal as any other Buddhist's--the attainment of nirvana.

Tibetan Buddhism came to the U.S. only in recent years, in the wake of the Chinese Communist takeover in Tibet and the subsequent diaspora of many of its lamas and monks. "It is one of the most complete and powerful spiritual systems that has ever been brought to mankind," writes Jacob Needleman in his perceptive study, The New Religions. Needleman expects Tibetan Buddhism to be as important in the West in the next decade as Zen Buddhism was in the last.

The best-known Tibetan refugee-missionary in the U.S. today is Choegyam Trungpa Rinpoche, 33 (Rinpoche means "precious jewel"). Trungpa Rinpoche now has two study and meditation communities for his followers, Tail of the Tiger in Vermont and Karma Dzong in Colorado, plus eight centers in cities across the U.S. "Buddhism can appeal to intellectuals, including those who have put down the notion of God," Trungpa Rinpoche explains. "Buddhism accepts good and bad, all your negativities, all your neuroses. There is nothing to fight against. It provides ultimate emotional security."

Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, another Tibetan lama refugee, heads a busy study center in Berkeley, Calif. Not long ago, Tulku Rinpoche visited Episcopal Bishop Myers in San Francisco to ask his help in acquiring a farm for young Buddhists. Myers took him to a Franciscan mission to get more detailed information. "A few years ago," Myers chuckled, "the very thought would have shocked a lot of people: a Tibetan lama, an Episcopal bishop and Roman Catholic friars. But we were brothers. It's a great thing that Christians can help other religions find roots here. It will make possible a dialogue."

Myers is already engaged in that dialogue and is trying to recover for Christianity what he calls "the depth of the sacramental experience." If he had his way, Myers says, he would remove all the chairs from San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, turn it into a meditation center and leave it open day and night. Eastern religions "may provide a way into the mystical experience of both East and West," Myers believes. "We don't seem to be able to go the direct way. We have to take a circuitous route. It is almost as if we had to go East and then come back, like the Three Wise Men, to find the Baby again."

Discalced Carmelite Friar William McNamara also understands the lure of the East. "People in the West, particularly the young, are being fed stones instead of bread in churches and schools. They know nothing of the deepest mystical tradition; yet they want inner experience. They hear there's a mystic tradition in the East, and they go over."

McNamara has incorporated strains of Eastern mystical traditions into two ecumenical contemplative centers he has built, one near Sedona, Ariz., and a newer one in Nova Scotia. His visitors, who stay anywhere from a few days to a year, are Episcopal ministers, Catholic priests, Jews and even atheists. Daily meditation periods include readings from Zen, Hindu and Islamic literature, and participants spend long hours in silent and solitary contemplation amidst wilderness surroundings. One notable visitor to the Arizona retreat was Jesuit Theologian Walter J. Burghardt, a member of the Pope's Theological Commission. "What do I think of it all?" he wrote about his contemplative experiences. "Words impoverish. For it was at once tempestuous and calming, a wrestling and a dancing, a stillness and a cry. Nothing in my 57 years rivals it."

McNamara does not applaud all of today's enthusiasm for Eastern religions. "I am troubled," he says, "because the vast majority of people who are into the Eastern religious scene take a bit of this and a bit of that and wind up doctoring their spiritual lives in an experiential, eclectic fashion that tends to take the place of a radical change of mind and heart."

A more serious objection to Western religious infatuation with the East, claim other critics, lies in what they see as an inherent opposition between Eastern and Western spirituality. Zen Master Philip Kapleau disdains Christian enthusiasm for Zen and other Buddhism. "There is no God concept in Buddhism," he says flatly. Both Buddhist and Hindu paths, some Western theologians worry, may lead to a kind of quietism and otherworldliness that remove the spiritual person from any part in the struggles of society.

Despite such criticisms, the differences between Eastern and Western spirituality may sometimes be more apparent than real, the assumed opposition more a matter of semantics than truth. At the root of both is man's continuing quest for the experience of the transcendent, which must work itself out among the tenuous and sometimes contradictory definitions of God, man and universe. The problem for Americans and others caught up in the West's renewed search for the sacred will be just how and where to strike a fruitful balance: between reason and imagination, between discipline and intuition, between a creative awe of the worlds man can only contemplate and a creative concern for the world he lives in.

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