PSI Annual Journal 1999

Charting the cycles and meanings of American history is conjectural and subjective. Yet certain patterns can be made to emerge enlightening our present conduct and even illuminating future possibilities. This nation is near the end of its third Great Awakening, or outpouring concern with spiritual realities. The first two saw extremely significant roles played by liberal religion. We began the third vigorously, but have lost our way. This essay will attempt to chart a course for liberal religion to regain a leading role in the spiritual development of this time and people.

Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere is helpful in explaining the dynamics of spiritual development. We are familiar with the word biosphere, indicating the interrelationships of living organisms, their dependence, and unity. Noosphere, from the Greek, nour or mind, posits a level of interrelatedness of minds, or consciousnesses. This is easily seen in some vulgar areas of fashion, fads, and trends. It is also discernible when examining the permeation of certain ideas through a culture, such as minority rights, sexual permissiveness, or inflation. According to Chardin, the noosphere also works on more rarified, nearly invisible levels, and thus tracing the evolution of our collective minds in the same way the biosphere charts biological evolution.

Keeping this concept, let us now examine the movement of the American noosphere and the role of liberal religion in its development, beginning with what is called the first Great Awakening. The great spokesman of this phenomenon is Jonathan Edwards, who began preaching in 1734 and whose “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is the apotheosis. This ultimate expression of Calvinism, with its vivid message of a humanity absolutely unable to cope with its existential situation, and couched in the most dark and violent imagery, represents the New Land’s need for grim discipline and obedience to implacable natural law. Opposing this trend were two more subtle impulses. The first was the small faithful voices of early American Universalism like George de Benneville, the second elite reasoned voice of European Enlightenment which was also the progenitor of Unitarianism in New England.

Both were minor chords struck amid the lockstep martial hymns of Calvinism. Spiritually they represented the necessity of the human hand to work the New Land into a new nation, not by merely obedience to natural law, but by creatively using its truth to build something uniquely suited to carry humanity to a kind of freedom it had never before accepted, a legitimate heritage for the great number of its citizens.

These minority ideas, with their freshness, and by the strength of the minds, which projected them, came to dominate the old ideas of obedience and helplessness, even though the old ideas still held many captive. Thus the Revolutionary War was fought as the triumph of a new spiritual impulse at work, an impulse carried in no small measure by liberal religion and those willing to risk sharing unpopular and dangerous representations of a truth yet to be unfolded.

As the new nation grew, and, because of the freedom it demanded, became a more complex and diversified culture, the spirit moving through it developed more diverse channels. The landmark of the Second Great Awakening therefore cannot be isolated by one ideology or movement, nor represented by a single person or manifesto.

Joseph Smith found his golden tablets of Mormonism in 1827. This movement combined a special Old Testament-like revelation for America with suggestions of occultism and esoteric priesthoods and hierarchies. They saw themselves as God’s Chosen American People.

A few years earlier a Baptist minister named William Miller, after two years of arduous Bible Study, announced that the second coming of Christ would occur between March 21, 1843 and the same date the following year. He was not alone in his conviction and these millennialists became an important American cult. As the fateful date approached, their numbers grew, and interest increased in their beliefs. Even when this wicked system of things survived 1844, the movement did not die, but simply recalculated the date. Miller’s group survives today as the Seventh Day Adventists, and his contribution to American development is found in many areas from Jehovah’s Witnesses to the doom sayers of the Born Again movement.

Also running throughout the nineteenth century and equally alive today is that stream of quasi-scientific inquiry which began in Europe with Mesmer’s animal magnetism, was transformed in America by P.P. Quimby in Portland, Maine as “mind cure” and popularized by his patient, Mary Baker Eddy as Christian Science. The true parent of all positive thinking cults, hypnotism and holistic healing, it has yet to be accepted by hard science, which refuses to recognize its unified field theories. At the same time, advocates blur for themselves and others the distinctions between systems of empiricism and systems of faith.

This increased interest in the effect of the spirit world on this one naturally also manifested in spiritualism, a general phrase for a variety of techniques used to bridge the invisible barrier between the quick and the dead, the material and ethereal.

Ethereal realms were also of great concern to that rebellious cadre of young Unitarian romantics called the Transcendentalists, who saw within and beyond life a level of meaning and participation which their parents, whose beliefs reposed in the civilized territory of eighteenth century Reason, could neither recognize nor affirm. Emerson and Thoreau led the movement from the natural to the supernatural without breaking the laws of logic and credulity. Whereas other movements depended upon suspension of the rational, Transcendentalists used all of life for its vision. It is precisely this totality which provided its significance and rightful place as the most highly valued spiritual movement in the history of liberal religion.

Emerson’s essay of 1841, “The Oversoul” shows the depth and breadth of Transcendentalist concern. Two ideas from that work combine to outline the contribution of liberal religion to the spiritual evolution of the Second Great Awakening. The first is identifying the oversoul itself as “that Unity within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all others.” The connection is of both mind and body, and therefore encompasses both noosphere and biosphere in one individual entity, and all people within one People. This higher expression of what in its time was called The Brotherhood of Man found voice in both mainline Unitarianism and Universalism with concern for abolition and penal reform, as well as participation in spiritualist activities like the Hopedale community and the spirit mediumship of John Murray Spear.

The second idea is that of direct personal experience. Emerson says, “one class (of teachers, preachers, poets) speaks from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons. It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree that transcends all others.” Clearly, here is the impulse of Parker’s “Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity”, the Enlightened reason informed by a Romantic sensibility which rescued liberal religion from its past yet kept it from flying toward the ignorant folly of cults spontaneously generated by inchoate visions of another world.

The Transcendentalist vision of the Oversoul enabled the higher reaches of scholarship and social responsibility to maintain communion with the beautific simplicity of the natural world and the spiritual longings of the common people. The effect was a new vision of American greatness. The result was Civil War.

Both Great Awakenings developed new spiritual avenues in the American noosphere. The first was the concept of nation itself; the second was the concept of Great Nation. Conceived in the minds of our most highly evolved thinkers, both concepts were born by the trauma of war. While war appears to be a battle in the material world for concrete goals of land and plunder, and indeed can be understood that way, a spiritual interpretation sees war as the grisly remnants of metamorphosis, the changing of whole systems to allow on the material plane that which has already come to be on the spiritual. Liberal religion did for both Great Awakenings the task of providing a forward thrust to spiritual evolution. Without it both changes could very well have resulted in political and social atavism. Jonathan Edwards’ Calvinism without Enlightenment temper would have created an economically strong but spiritually repressive colony; it could never have brought forth a nation. The blind occultism and psychic meanderings of the decades before the Civil War without the direction of the Transcendentalists influence would have produced a people lost in their own diversity, incapable of union. History reveals that Lincoln was a spiritualist who quoted Theodore Parker.

The Third Great Awakening, which has dominated the American noosphere in the second half of the twentieth century, is even more complex than the second, as the second was from the first. Its origins are in the Free Speech, Ban the Bomb, and Civil Rights movements, social ideas, which suggest and reveal the limits and horrors of nationhood. Its crisis was the assassination of John Kennedy, which remains the one unifying spiritual/political event in the lives of Americans, and from which we are yet to emerge. Just as the death of Lincoln represented the beginning of union in America, the death of Kennedy began its disunion. Since then we as a people have lacked a common vision, and resembled in the variety of spiritual paths we have traveled, the Second Awakening without the rudder of Transcendentalist sensibility. Chaos of ideas demons of the spirit, and entropy of culture have combined to dissociate completely the evolution in the noosphere, which is building up a great reservoir of frustrated energy, waiting for direction.

Why has not liberal religion provided a direction, a tempering counterforce against reactionary spirituality? Partially because so many of our strongest minds have been confined by a materialistic scientific vision which does not speak, understand or acknowledge the reality of the noosphere and its vital effect upon life on the planet. We erroneously think that improvements in the material realms of life will bring improvements in the spiritual. This is backwards and is why liberal thinking no longer touches the great vastness of western humanity which longs for spiritual enrichment.

We have also, in discovering the inadequacies, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies of American history and culture, overlooked the goodness there which is the seed of our redemption. Liberal religion as a movement, and much of American culture, has been lost in infatuation with strange religions of other lands, the psychology-religion bereft of history or poetry, and the humanism which provides no sustenance for the hidden source of life.

And yet there is an undiscovered twenty-first century of Oversoul which awaits the prophetic voice of its articulation and can be for us and the world what Emerson’s was to the nineteenth. Due to its eternal nature it will still find its definition in that which contains and makes every person’s being with all others. It will still be voiced by those who speak from experience of within. But its rhetoric and platform is yet to be found; its prophets yet to be fully proclaimed and anointed.

There are presently signs of spiritual truth trying to break through the tough mind of the scientist, the nationalism of the politician, even the safety and security of the parish minister. For the scientist, it is the necessity of a wider paradigm to accommodate the metaphysics of quantum mechanics and the awesome possibilities of a cybernetic technology ready to both serve and master. For the politician, it is the crap game of annihilation and the certainty of scarcity. For the parish minister, it is the new lines of suffering appearing on the faces of the comfortable faithful. All of these are moving with increased desire for some New Way, which, depending upon the courage of those who have hope for a greater, more alive and thankful humanity, will come to the world out of the horror of utter global conflagration or through the realization of the Oversoul more completely than even Emerson could have imagined.

As we grow closer to that year of the new millennium, 2000, we also grow closer to a time of spiritual rebirth that cannot be resolved by the relatively local upheavals which followed the first two Great Awakenings. For Chardin’s noosphere is growing ever more interconnected. Emerson wrote of his Oversoul two years before the first telegram was sent The communication network and the network of interdependency has grown and multiplied such that the resolution of this Great Awakening will not be merely national, or accomplished merely by the efforts of Americans. This we must realize, as we also must encourage the intermingling of areas of consciousness and understanding previously separated by specialization and discipline.

The Transcendentalists were able to combine spiritualism, mysticism, reason, naturalism, Christianity, and social concern into something which in turn helped pull together these diverse interests within its culture. Unitarian Universalism has for too long been satisfied with a loose and sometimes antagonistic confederation of conflicting interests, with every subgroup having little respect or consideration for some other subgroup whose reason for being seems to them frivolous or specious. It is time to take account of what among us contributes to the search for a true twenty-first century Oversoul and what are the vestiges of an overexercised individualism or the shell of a once vital liberal response. Most importantly, it is time to seek for the agreements which can unite us, to search, find and proclaim the noosphere that courses through our churches, fellowships, and world, and to leave behind the toys of spiritual adolescence. Our scholars must find the strains in the culture which exhibit the bursting force of new expressions of old truth. Our scientists and politicians must invent new grids to explain the squiggly lines of new realities. Our preachers must proclaim the nearness of destiny and the vision of a future with room for a new humanity, preached from within. Unitarian Universalism must demand from their leaders an end to the acceptance of the lowest common denominator, and hope that beyond it still lies the potential for our greatness.

We have yet to make a response to the Third Great Awakening worthy of that which was made to the first two, and which contributed to America and the world the recognition of a palpable spiritual thrust working through history despite the strictures of no longer useful ideas and institutions. We walk blindly in the midst of the eternal. May we acknowledge our blindness and use other, finer senses to connect us with the unbounded vastness that is our true home, which every age must proclaim anew.

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 1999