Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Winter 2024 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Kathy, Gann "A Tapestry of Compassion: Changing the World for Good" Quest 112:1, pg 19-22

By Kathy Gann

The letter was clear and unambiguous, even blunt in places. It said that Theosophy must not consist merely of theory and useless talk, but that Theosophy had to be made practical if it was to be of real value to the world. Furthermore, it emphasized that the goal of putting Theosophy into action was to alleviate suffering: “It is esoteric philosophy alone, the spiritual and psychic blending of man with Nature, that, by revealing fundamental truths, can bring that much desired mediate state between the two extremes of human Egotism and divine Altruism, and finally lead to the alleviation of human suffering.”

 The letter (which can be found as letter 82 in Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom, Second Series, edited by C. Jinarajadasa), explained that the great mission of true Theosophy involved ethics and duties whose value we could test and discern for ourselves because it “would satisfy most and best the altruistic and right feeling in us.” The letter admitted that modeling these ethics was laborious, requiring strenuous and persevering effort, but it promised real spiritual progress in return for the efforts. Here, it said, was a way of simultaneously diminishing both self-centeredness and suffering in the world, if only we would put forth real effort and stick with it.

 To the extent that the letter was clear and direct, it was equally mysterious. Nobody knew exactly who wrote it or, perhaps fortunately, to whom it was written, as it reprimanded a pompous gentleman claiming that because he was a Theosophist, he somehow had a right to judge others. H.P. Blavatsky gave her word, documented in a paper at Adyar, that the letter was written by a Master of the Wisdom. A modified version was published as an article titled, “Some Words on Daily Life” in an early edition of Lucifer, the magazine of the Theosophical Society.

Fast forward to 1908, and life was good in many ways. The new year was celebrated with New York City’s first dropping of the lighted ball in Times Square. Dutch artist Piet Mondrian found Theosophy, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, and the Summer Olympic Games were held in London. Terms such as “world war,” “global pandemic,” or “Great Depression” had no place in anyone’s vocabulary.

At the same time, 1908, like all years that came before and after, saw tremendous suffering in human beings, animals, and the environment. People in cities like London and Delhi died prematurely because air pollution was much higher than today’s levels. Animal experimentation, including vivisection, was widespread and largely unregulated. The labor laws and social safety nets we take for granted today were unheard of. The result was a widespread and heartbreaking level of suffering.

In Madras (now Chennai), India, sixty-year-old Annie Besant, newly elected international president of the Theosophical Society, studied the mysterious but adamant letter-turned-article, which stated, “Theosophy must be made practical; and it has, therefore, to be disencumbered of useless digressions, in the sense of desultory orations and fine talk.”

Captivated by the idea that Theosophy put into practical action could reduce human misery in the world, in February 1908 Besant founded the Theosophical Order of Service (TOS), whose mission was to unite all who love in the service of all that suffer. The goal was for TS members to put Theosophy into action so that suffering of all types in their communities could be alleviated.

Since that time, the TOS has continued to serve as a haven and structure within which volunteers release, bit by bit, the inexhaustible light that lies deep within their hearts and integrate it with their mental, emotional, and physical natures to ease the world’s suffering. Today, as in Besant’s day, TOS projects reflect the widely varied interests of its members. More importantly, today’s TOS still plays a dual role in the life of its workers: (1) selfless service to those who suffer, and (2) the inner transformation of the server who loves.

Today the TOS continues to function as the service arm of the TS, and the two organizations are inextricably linked. The president of the international TS serves ex officio as the president of the international TOS, appointing a secretary (currently Nancy Secrest) to oversee the operations of the TOS in national Sections.

As the TS fulfills its mission to make Theosophical teachings available to the world, the TOS gives its members and workers the opportunity to put those teachings into practice in order to reduce suffering of all kinds. It’s a simple yet profound formula: Theosophy in action changes the world for good! The very reason for being of the TOS lies within the First Object of the TS, with its emphasis on universal brotherhood.

How has the TOS in the United States put Theosophy into action over the years? Any attempt at a detailed history would be beyond the scope of this article, but even a bare-bones summary will show the enthusiasm and life force poured by Theosophists into the alleviation of suffering.

Early workers, such as Max Wardall, inspired a great deal of activity in several departments: social service, animal welfare, world peace, arts and crafts, healing, and going back to nature. “Mr. Max,” as he was known, was a passionate speaker, writer, and worker who not only championed TOS projects but also lauded the efforts of Theosophists who worked through and within other organizations. Unfortunately, Max succumbed to illness and exhaustion and passed away in 1933. His death, combined with the Great Depression, led to a brief decline in TOS activities during the early 1930s.

In 1934, Robert Logan headed the TOS-USA, assisted by two energetic members, Edith Lee Ruggles and Blanche Kilbourne. Together they kept TS members posted about service opportunities and asked them to engage as activists for the causes of the day, including abolishment of capital punishment, antilynching legislation, protesting the import of monkeys from India to the U.S. for vivisection, and protesting Sonora Webster Carver’s diving horse act, in which horses were trained to jump off diving ramps from heights up to sixty feet! Each issue of the American Theosophist magazine contained more and more appeals. Kilbourne wrote to members, “The test of sincerity of one’s beliefs is action in support of them. Let’s be doers . . . not readers only.”

During World War II, Esther Renshaw and Edith Ruggles coordinated projects for wartime relief for TS members in Europe, including shipping food and supplies to members in war-torn areas.

Joy Mills joined the TSA staff in 1942 (later to become the Society’s president) and recalled, “At Olcott I remember packing boxes of donated items: warm clothing, basic foods, personal essentials, to be sent to members in Europe . . . it involved the entire Olcott staff (we were such a close-knit community in those days, everyone lived in the main building), so in the evenings we would gather in the basement to fill boxes and ready them for shipping.”

Inspiring pamphlets and pen-pal letters were sent by members to servicemen and women serving abroad in the war. Many families were grieving because of the many deaths during that time, so members in the healing department sent copies of C.W. Leadbeater’s leaflet “To Those Who Mourn” to provide comfort.

 To help traumatized soldiers returning from the war reintegrate into civilian life, the TOS established the arts and crafts department, which included a national weaving guild known as the Olcott Weavers. TOS workers saw this creative work as a therapeutic necessity for soldiers suffering from shell shock or battle fatigue (now known as posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD) long before the condition was well recognized.

Diana Winslow and Marion Swift kept the momentum of the TOS going with their Bundles for Korea movement during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Starting in the mid-1960s, Jean Gullo headed the TOS-USA and worked to rekindle interest in the organization by making members aware of its activities and work. As a national speaker for the TS, Jean traveled extensively and wove her enthusiasm for service into her work for the TS.

For the next few decades, the TOS, through several dedicated volunteers, published newsletters keeping members abreast of opportunities for service in parenting, animal welfare, healing, environment and energy conservation, peace, and social service, to name a few. In the 1970s, Jean’s husband, Joe Gullo (who recently died at the age of 102), became an invaluable TOS worker as well. In 1982, Joe suggested that the various newsletters be combined into one magazine: For the Love of Life. The TOS raised funds to help refugees in Bangladesh, orphanages in Saigon, and Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, India.

 One project that began in 1979 deserves special mention. TS member Karole Kettering began a TOS project in her home, collecting food for needy families in the area near the Olcott campus in Wheaton. Originally called the Senior Citizen Project, Karole’s work flourished to the point that her project eventually became a separate nonprofit organization, the Humanitarian Service Project (HSP), now overseen by her husband, Floyd Kettering (now national treasurer of the TSA). So dedicated and successful was Karole’s work that she received special recognition awards from the state of Illinois prior to her passing in 2013. HSP continues its mission through three main programs: the Children’s Project, the Senior Citizen Project, and the Christmas Offering. TOS workers who live near the Olcott campus still volunteer regularly at HSP.

From the 1980s to 2006, TOS member Joseph Tisch focused on hard-hitting issues, with a special interest in the plight of the poor and the needs of those who were incarcerated. Joseph regularly visited and counseled prisoners near his home in Melbourne, Florida. When prisoners were released, Joseph provided them with clothing and basic toiletries and helped them find housing and a job. Under the direction of Deni Gross, the peace department became one of the TOS’s most active endeavors until her retirement in 2006.

From the 1980s into the 2000s, Karen Schulz-McCormick headed the family department. For a number of years, she gathered and personally delivered warm winter clothing for children and seniors, as well as school supplies for children each fall, to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Candi Phillips continued the work of the animal welfare department.

From 2007 to 2013, the TOS adopted the Chushul Orphanage in Tibet, providing over $30,000 to provide necessary supplies and build new bathrooms and showers for the children. TOS support came to a reluctant end when Chushul was closed by the Chinese government.

When the COVID pandemic confined us to our homes, the TOS still found ways to help. To bring relief to overburdened hospital personnel, TOS volunteers in Chicago and other cities worked with restaurant owners to provide nourishing vegetarian meals and snacks to hospital personnel. Medical caregivers loved the thoughtful support, and the restaurant owners appreciated the business. Another win-win solution was woven into the TOS tapestry of compassion.

Through an ever-changing group of directors, officers, and volunteers, TOS-USA provides much needed support for diverse causes including the environment, animal welfare, homelessness, hunger, education, and healing. The TOS sponsors two healing networks—one for people and one for animals. The networks consist of dozens of groups and individuals who regularly perform a healing ceremony designed by Geoffrey Hodson, invoking the cooperation of devas to send healing energy to people and animals suffering illness, injury, and other challenges. (You may submit recipients’ names for healing via the TOS-USA website: TheoService.org.)  Recently, TOS-USA launched the Meditative Action Network, a group of volunteers who meditate on infusing difficult world situations with light so they may be resolved in accordance with Highest Will.

TOS-USA cooperates with other TOS sections around the world to ensure that help is at hand where it is most needed. American Theosophists have taken great joy in helping to support the Golden Link College, a project of the TS/TOS in the Philippines, which provides Theosophical education to students from preschool to college. Most students are from low-income families and rely on scholarships to pay their tuition. Donors love knowing that their support (up to $18,380 this fiscal year) is doubled by a generous matching grant from the Kern Foundation. A donation of $120, for example, is matched and becomes $240, enough for one elementary school student’s annual tuition at Golden Link.

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, TOS-USA sent substantial support for refugee relief and other urgent projects in war-torn areas. The most basic human needs such as food, water, shelter, clothing, and hygiene products were provided to people in areas cut off from supplies, often at great personal risk to those making the deliveries. With donations flowing from TOS groups around the world, the TOS in Ukraine has wisely partnered with like-minded organizations to form a tapestry of compassion that’s making a huge difference in a time of unthinkable suffering.

Local groups around the U.S. have undertaken a rich variety of projects through the years. In Houston, members regularly worked at a food bank to ensure that those living in food-insecure households had plenty to eat. They also assembled and delivered care kits to the homeless. Members of the Cleveland-Besant Lodge participate in and support numerous organizations in their area dedicated to animal welfare and children and families. They regularly perform a TOS healing ceremony, and one member not only provides free Reiki healing weekly but also conducts Reiki training (called attunements) at no charge.

Members of North Carolina’s Research Triangle Study Center assembled lunches in lovingly decorated bags for people experiencing homelessness, which were distributed by an outreach center run by Raleigh Catholic Charities. The Salt Lake City study center raised awareness about plastic pollution in the ocean through large events in cooperation with the First Unitarian Church and a local university. Their events educated local residents on simple adjustments to their daily routines that would help lessen the amount of plastic that ends up in our oceans.

Each December, Denver members focus on projects for animals and children. In 2019, members donated blankets and comforters, which were shipped to the Ironwood Pig Sanctuary in Marana, Arizona.

During the pandemic, TOS members kept their service projects alive through the magic of drop-shipping. In 2020, Christmas gifts for traumatized children with mental health issues were drop-shipped to a member who delivered them to the Denver Children’s Home. Members purchased warm winter clothing and wish-list items for the Lakota Waldorf School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. For the past two years, members have purchased Christmas gifts for children at Warren Village, an organization providing housing and services for single-parent families who have experienced homelessness or housing instability.

Members of Philadelphia’s Abraxas Lodge worked with a local organization called the Joy of Sox to provide new socks to the homeless, proving that Philadelphia truly is the City of Brotherly Love.

In 2016, Milwaukee Lodge raised and delivered $550, along with carloads of goods, to Daystar, Inc., a local long-term transitional housing facility for women who are victims of abuse and poverty. The TOS Dharma Group in Wheaton provided copies of the Quest book and audiobook War and the Soul by Edward Tick to local veterans’ organizations to provide combat veterans with a means of healing. Members of the Portland Lodge purchased backpacks and stuffed them with food for a local school’s backpack program. Backpacks were delivered to children who would otherwise have gone hungry during weekends and school holidays.

With the COVID pandemic receding into the rearview mirror, local groups are once again emerging and looking for ways to alleviate suffering in their communities. In May 2023, the Wheaton-Olcott TOS group helped their local post office “Stamp Out Hunger” by sorting and packaging food items donated by postal customers. The food was distributed to community members in need by the Humanitarian Service Project.

A thread here, a project there—bit by bit, year by year, TOS volunteers continue to build a tapestry of compassion that started with Besant’s brilliant idea and has grown through the actions of countless TOS volunteers, known and unknown. Why do they do it? Perhaps it’s because their inner natures have become such that they have no other path to go, no other way to be, than to put Theosophy into action to change this world for good.

Kathy Gann has studied Theosophy since 1994. She has served numerous terms as secretary of the Denver Study Center and served for twelve years on the TSA board of directors, including a term as vice president. She currently serves as president of the TOS-USA (theoservice.org).

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Printed in the  Winter 2024 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Richard, Smoley "Active and Contemplative Lives: An Interview with Carl McColman" Quest 112:1, pg 12-18

By Richard Smoley

Many TS members will remember Carl McColman from his talk at the Summer National Convention in July 2023.

McColman is a spiritual director, retreat leader, and internationally known speaker and teacher on mystical spirituality and contemplative living. He is particularly well known for his work with the contemporary contemplative practice known as Centering Prayer. His latest book is The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism (Broadleaf).

In this conversation, McColman discusses how mysticism, contemplation, and the ways that mystical Christianity can restore the radical wisdom teachings of Jesus as an authentic, perennial tradition of inner liberation and transformation. He also explores the future of organized religion and the present state of spirituality in America.

A full version of this interview can be found on YouTube.

 

Richard Smoley: In The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism, you define mysticism as “living with the mystery of the love of God.” Could you go into that?

Carl McColman: If we’re going to talk about mysticism, it seems to me that mystery is a good place to enter.

In our culture, I think there is a kind of idolatry of dogma or certainty. The path of the mystery invites us out of that addiction to dogma into a place where we can listen to the deep well of unknowing in our own hearts; in that place, everything becomes possible. Spirituality becomes less about a framework of doctrines or teachings to which we need to conform and more a field of radiant possibility, where we discover the beauty and majesty of our own soul.

This brings us to the word God, which is a fraught word.  God is a concept by which we measure our possibility, our love, our compassion, our capacity to wonder, our capacity to be beings of the miraculous. God is a mystery about which we have all sorts of narratives: the old man in the sky, the Gandalfesque figure, the Force from Star Wars. If you move into nontheistic traditions like Buddhism, the word God is essentially meaningless. I think approaching God mystically allows us to hold all of those different narratives with a sense of wonder and possibility rather than a need to nail down the one truth.

We can also speaking of living—of life. Mysticism, at its heart, is life-affirming; it’s biophilic. The mystical path says yes to life in its most expansive and inclusive and radically egalitarian way.

Smoley: What you say about the idolatry of certainty is true, but it seems to be the consequence of a much larger lack of certainty. People are clinging to certainty, not like a rock on the shore, but like the last piece of flotsam of a broken ship. That’s why it seems so desperate.

McColman: I think the opposite of certainty is not uncertainty, but possibility. The beauty of a mystical approach is that it invites wonder and dialogue. That’s what mysticism invites us into. Even in the New Testament, Jesus teaches that with the Divine, all things are possible. Those are mystical teachings, and we need to keep them in mind when we approach the problems that dogma or doctrine present to us.

Smoley: Let’s explore a major theme in the Christian tradition, which you discuss in your book: the contrast between the active life and the contemplative life, symbolized most famously in the story in the Gospel of John about Martha and Mary.

McColman: For anyone who may not be familiar with that story, the idea is that Mary is sitting with Jesus and the disciples, engaging in spiritual conversation with them. Martha is the hostess, working in the kitchen. She’s getting the food ready, and she gets angry that Mary is not helping her.

Anything in Scripture has to be read on a metaphorical level. So it’s not just a couple of sisters that are having a little tiff because one of them wants to hang out with the boys and the other one wants to make sure that dinner is served. Beneath that surface, Mary represents the contemplative life, a life of deep engagement with the Divine. Martha represents the life of radical service, which came to be known as the active life: working to make the world a better place, setting up hospitals, setting up orphanages, campaigning against slavery, bringing the values of the spiritual life into the material world.

Church history is not my primary focus, so I speak with the knowledge of a layperson, but for some reason it seems that at about the time that the Roman Empire fell, Christianity turned its mystical heart into the cloister, into the monastery. From around the year 500 to about the time of the Protestant Reformation, nearly all of the mystics are either monks or nuns, living a cloistered life.

In the Gospel story, Jesus says that Mary has chosen the better part. The monks and nuns took that idea and ran with it—the idea that the contemplative life is higher than the active life: we shouldn’t be worrying about injustice or worldly conflict; we simply need to turn our entire attention towards the spirit, towards the interior life, and everything else will take care of itself. I can see that argument, and as somebody who is psychologically an introvert, it has a lot of appeal to me.

But especially around the time of the Reformation, you see something else emerging. I’m thinking of Teresa of Avila, the wonderful Spanish mystic, who teaches that when you get to the seventh mansion of the “interior castle”—in other words, the end of the mystical life—what is emphasized is the sisterhood between Mary and Martha. Mary and Martha even merge and become one. Being immersed in the contemplative act and what the East calls the bodhisattva vow—to be of radical service to others—become as unified as breathing in and breathing out. There’s an essential unity of finding the Divine in service and finding service in union with the Divine.

Many of us go toward mysticism because we’re seeking that interior presence of the Divine, but then we find that it pushes us out—into relationship, into community.

 Smoley: What you say about the active versus the contemplative life seems to be very accurate and compelling. But I’m going to disagree with you on one major point, and that’s the major difficulty I have with your book. It’s not true that in those centuries, all the mystics were monks and nuns. There were many mystics who were not monastics: the Cathars, the Beguines, the Brethren of the Common Life. Most of these had one thing in common: the Catholic church disapproved of them, or approved in only the most equivocal way. Even Meister Eckhart died before the Inquisition could get its hands on him. Yet all of the mystics you have in your book are those approved by Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Did these alternative Christianities have nothing to say to us?

McColman: I don’t dispute anything you’re saying. We could chalk it up to marketing. If I want to introduce people within the institutional church to the mysteries, and I start talking about the Gnostics, they’re going to just toss me out; they’ll just say, “Sorry, not interested.”

The primary audience for this book is people who are within the church. They are not familiar with the mystical life and may even be scared of the mystical life. Sitting here talking with you, I’m assuming that the primary audience of this conversation is going to be people in the Theosophical world, which has an entirely different understanding of history and an entirely different understanding of mysticism. This book is probably going to be kindergarten for many of them. But that doesn’t make the book useless: we need kindergarten literature.

This book is for people who are afraid of mysticism from soup to nuts, because their church has told them to be afraid of mysticism. If I can’t get them to be pay attention to the Cathars, can I at least introduce them to Howard Thurman, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa? The reality is that there are a lot of people that are even scared of Julian of Norwich.

Smoley: That’s very fair and understandable. But a large number of Christians and ex-Christians are not afraid of Julian of Norwich. They are afraid of the church—on the basis of their experience.

McColman: I would say it’s the institution. The mystics and contemplatives have always been on the margin; I’m on the margin of the institution. You could argue that the Theosophical Society functions on the margins; that’s where the mystics tend to be. The monasteries have been on the margins.

Here is a metaphor, and I think about it a lot: institutional Christianity is like a building that’s on fire. Even Pope Francis, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, or the most conservative evangelical would probably agree with that.

The church needs to be asking, is our primary job to save the building, or is it to save the people in the building? You can look at how the Catholic church has dealt with the abuse crisis: the institution is far more interested in saving the building than saving the people in the building.

I think this book has the potential to help the people that are in the building, but I don’t say, get out of the building. If they start reading the mystics, they’ll find their own way out.

I’ll be honest with you: when I first wrote this book, I was more in the institution than I am now. At that time, I had an idealistic idea that we could save both the people and the building.

At any rate, I do draw a distinction between institution and church, because I believe that mystical Christianity is a community, a communal mysticism. We need one another. Human beings need to be in a relationship. A church, when it’s functioning, is simply a relationship of mystics. It’s a relationship of people who are drawing from a shared spiritual system, from a particular wisdom lineage.

Institutionalization leads to the hunting of heretics, to the kind of violence and aggression that we see in the church to this day. All you have to do is go on social media to see how many people are spewing incredible aggression in the name of Jesus. It’s a betrayal of the wisdom teachings of the Master, yet for whatever reason, the institution seems to facilitate that. So burn down the institution, but let’s try to preserve some sacred community.

Smoley: You’re saying that the institution may be a building that is condemned, but there’s a community that needs to be perpetuated. Could you tell us about your vision of what this community might be like?

McColman: I wish there were people who were forty years younger than you and me in this conversation, because I think their vision would be a lot different, and probably a lot more creative and with a lot more potential. If you go into your average neighborhood Christian church—I don’t care if it’s Catholic, Protestant, evangelical—chances are, most of the people you’re going to see in there are sixty and over. Young people from the millennials on down have largely given up on church.

So what do young people need in terms of building community? Now I don’t want to go too far down this particular rabbit hole, but I do think there are political forces at work in our culture that militate against the formation of healthy spiritual community. That has to be addressed. But I think a bigger part of the problem is how the churches have betrayed their own mission, which is to be conveyors of wisdom, to pass wisdom down through the generations.

First of all, I think we need a community that listens. Those of us who are the older ones need to be doing most of the listening. We need to be radically curious about what our children and our grandchildren need. We need to be radically curious about people who are different from ourselves. So straight people, be curious about queer people; queer people, be curious about straight people.

You do get into systems of privilege and oppression, so there are some political dynamics here. But we need to be a community of wonder, a community of listening, a community of profound silence—and a community that is radically committed to compassion as well as ruthless in going after violence.

Institutions tend to have incredible pockets of violence or aggression. It’s not necessarily overt, but a matter of stripping people of their voice, shaming people, creating hierarchies of who’s in and who’s out. Whenever we see situations like that, we need to take a step back and ask, what is it we’re really promoting here? Are we promoting radical, egalitarian liberation? Or are we just creating another club? I think the future of any spiritual community will have to address questions like that.

We have become complacent with aggression in our culture and our systems of privilege, which will rot out spiritual communities from the inside.

Many of the people that you mention in the esoteric tradition were violently suppressed. You mentioned Meister Eckhart: at least they let him die. Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake. John of the Cross was held a prisoner by his own monastic brothers, and they beat him every week. We have to unpack the incredible violence that is at play in the spiritual life.

Then we get into gender-related violence or sexually related violence towards queer people, or people who are transgender or nonbinary. A lot of unpacking has to be done if we are going to be faithful to the wisdom that is encapsulated in Jesus’s message. Love the divine, love yourself, love one another, and even love the people you experience as enemies. There’s the mystical life in a nutshell, and we all fall incredibly short of it.

Smoley: What specific forces in our society do you see as the most debilitating toward spiritual community?

McColman: I’m only going to speak about the United States. In the last forty years, we have created an economic structure that hoards wealth—toward one tenth of 1 percent of the superwealthy, which has decimated the middle class. It’s a regressive movement, to a culture of a very small percentage of people who control 90-plus percent of the wealth, with the vast majority of people struggling to get by.

The philosopher Josef Pieper wrote a book called Leisure: The Basis of Culture. He doesn’t just mean culture in the sense of entertainment. He means a culture that has the capacity to pray, the capacity to contemplate, the capacity to cultivate one’s interior life.

Right now, most people can’t afford that. Why? Because we have created an economic system that concentrates and hoards wealth. We need to be taking a hard look at why. Why have we collectively created this system—or allowed this system to be created—that pits people against one another through divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or religion? We have all these narratives whereby the other person is the scapegoat, and we get caught in them. Meanwhile, the people who are making life difficult for all of us are just getting richer and richer.

Smoley: That all strikes me as very true. On the other hand, there also appears to be a natural tendency toward divisiveness in human nature that these forces exploit. Where do you see that coming from?

McColman: The orthodox Christian answer would be original sin, but I’m not comfortable with that theology, so I’ll just put that to the side. Here I stand only on the authority of my own contemplative practice. But I would argue that the heart of what it means to be alive is God playing hide-and-seek with God’s self.

When we hide from who we truly are, we typically make choices that are not skillful—choices that seem to take us away from the essential teaching of love, compassion, and kindness, so we become aggressive towards ourselves and aggressive towards one another. We play games of one-upmanship; we become hypervigilant about status. You don’t have to be very old before you’re playing these games; they happen in the home, with sibling rivalry, and in elementary school. They seem to replicate in bigger and bigger forms as society gets larger: office politics, Wall Street, regular politics.

By the time we reach adulthood, this game of hide-and-seek has pulled in on itself so many times that we often don’t even know we’re doing it. An associate of mine wrote a book called Good White Racist? It’s a compelling title, because I think many people who are the beneficiaries of racial privilege in our culture are not conscious of it. They would actually protest: “Of course I’m not racist. Of course I want an egalitarian society. I want people of color to have the same freedoms and opportunities that Caucasians have.” The game of hide-and-seek is so well played that people aren’t even aware of it.

 I’m sure you’re familiar with René Girard, the French philosopher who argued that the heart of Jesus’s message is that scapegoating is simply not OK: Jesus came to announce the end of scapegoating. But 2,000 years later, we haven’t gotten the memo.

That’s how the game of hide-and-seek manifests: we become aggressive toward one another, because on a deep soul level, we’re aggressive towards ourselves.

Then, of course, there is the more advanced teaching: the recognition that I am my neighbor; my neighbor is me; we are not two.

Smoley: This leads toward a problematic theme, which is love. In the English language, the word love encompasses an enormous range of meanings, from plain old lust to the highest mystical love of Dante. I think many people have a resistance to love simply because they’re confused about what kind of love they’re supposed to feel. Are they supposed to feel romantic love for their neighbor? Some people love their neighbors—or their neighbors’ spouses—a little too much. I think it’d be much easier if people just talked about elementary human decency.

McColman: Yes, kindness, civility, decency, basic candor and honesty, willingness to admit when we made a mistake.

I would say that eros ought to be a higher dimension of love. I think we live in a culture that has debased and commercialized eros. But the Song of Songs and many of the great mystics’ teachings are profoundly erotic. There’s a profound sense of the sacredness of desire.  It’s not about cessation of desire, but about the baptism or transformation of desire.

Then there is compassion, self-giving love, the love of the bodhisattva: I will deny my own enlightenment in order to be of radical service to you as you work out your own enlightenment.

Like it or not, we’re saddled with this one word—love—that is supposed to carry that full spectrum. But even the best language is limited, so we have to be continually stopping and asking, what do we really mean, and how do we embody it? What does this look like on the ground?

We’ve got to create a culture of civility, a culture of decency. We’ve got to have that conversation with our children, and I don’t know that it’s happening right now. I don’t have children or grandchildren, so maybe I’m just missing it. But it seems to me that our culture has become incredibly cynical, and there’s a pervasive idea that nice guys finish last. Where’s this leading? If that’s what we’re teaching our children, what are we creating? What kind of a future are we inviting them into? I don’t know that anyone’s really asking that question.

Smoley: I think there is another element in the current spiritual situation. People go to church for a sense of mystical uplift: we want to be inspired. But often church is just boring. I had a witty but cynical friend in college who used to say that in heaven, you don’t have to go to church, but in hell, you do.

McColman: I think Christianity made a deal with the Apollonian psyche and repressed the Dionysian, which soon became the Devil.

It’s created a bifurcation in our culture, where church is all about being polite and repressed and supernice. Then what do we do on Saturday night? We go to bacchanalian rave parties, where date rapes happen and where people use too much drugs and alcohol, and then they die in car accidents. We have this split: a moralism, which has become desiccated, and the Dionysian, which has become immoral.

I’m not trying to be a prude here. I’m all for having a good time, for being embodied and sexual. Why don’t we have an integration of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, where church could be a little bit sexier, and secular culture could be a little nicer?

Smoley: The Kabbalah says that God planted the yetzer ha-ra, the evil impulse, in the human heart, along with the yetzer ha-tov, the good impulse. No one, I think, could deny that’s the case: good and evil have been planted in us, and it’s never entirely sure which one will prevail at any given moment. Does that make sense to you?

 McColman: It makes perfect sense. It reminds me of the folktale that may come out of the Native American tradition: the idea that we all have two wolves, the wolf of hope and the wolf of fear, the wolf of compassion and the wolf of hatred. You only have enough food to feed one of the wolves, so which one will you feed? Most of us tend to give this wolf a little bit, and that wolf a little bit. I think that’s a healthier model to argue than the idea that Christianity often presents: that God is pure goodness, pure light, and the Devil is pure darkness, and there’s a marketing campaign going on between the two. Are we going to go this way or that way?

If we accept that within each one of us is both the light and the shadow, how, then, do I manage the shadow and get what it’s good at? How do I get the energy, the anger, which can be in the service of justice, and the zest, the lust for life, that makes life worth living? And then balance that with the deep compassion and deep care and concern that can help those who are in need and can create joy and love?

If we just try to repress the shadow, we’re really not much better than those desiccated Christians that we were talking about a few minutes ago. But if we just give into the shadow, we join the pervasive cynicism of our culture. We have to bring in a kind of sacred balance that has boundaries but also recognizes that even the shadow has something to offer. This is the beauty of mysticism at its best, where mystics are not afraid of the dark.

Smoley: Could you talk about Centering Prayer—what it is, what value it has, and how a person might integrate it in their life?

McColman: Centering Prayer has its roots all the way back to the Desert Mothers and Fathers of the third and fourth century. But the the key text is The Cloud of Unknowing, which was written in the 1370s. It is the practice of intentionally cultivating interior silence.

You’ll hear people say it’s about emptying the mind, but I don’t think that’s a skillful way of describing it. Because the reality is that our minds are just like our heart. You slow down your heartbeat, but you don’t eliminate it. Eliminating your heartbeat would be to die.

It’s the same thing with the energetics of consciousness. We can slow down our thinking. We can let go of frenzied thinking and enter into places of profound serenity and profound peace. But the mind is never emptied: there’s always something there, even if it’s just supernal light or that rich darkness.

Centering Prayer is a gesture of consent. It’s a gesture of recognition that for many of us, our mind-heart matrix is unruly. It’s been described as the monkey, or wild horses, or a cocktail party in our hearts and minds that is making lots of noise. It tends to drown out the divine voice, which often comes as a whisper—the still, small voice that we find in 1 Kings.

Centering Prayer is a gesture of nonattachment to the flow of thinking and images and daydreams, letting them come and letting them go, and learning to pay attention to the silence that is between and beneath all of our thoughts, all of our images, our feelings.

You don’t have to empty your mind. The emptiness is already there. Your mind and your heart are chalices of deep silence and of divine light. Can I learn to notice that which is already there, and in noticing it, consent to it—consent to the Spirit?

To go back to the beginning of our conversation, it’s a mystery: all the names ultimately fail, but it is that in us which leads us to the compassion, which leads us into wisdom, which leads us into the Union, which leads us into nonduality. We could even argue that we’re already there, but we’re playing that game of hide-and-seek.

Centering Prayer practice is this mindfulness, the practice of radical consent. Spiritual teacher Cynthia Bourgeault describes it as objectless awareness, and I think that’s a beautiful view: you are cultivating awareness without any particular object.

Now the instructions in Centering Prayer are similar to those for other meditation practices: you use a sacred word. It’s a little different from mantra meditation, because in mantra meditation, you continue to use the sacred word, but in Centering Prayer, there is a willingness to even let the sacred word go and simply rest in the objectless silence. Then another thought or another distracting image comes along, and you get caught up in it. We use the sacred word as a tool to let go of those distractions.

Oftentimes the sacred word will function like a mantra—we keep returning to it—but there’s always the open possibility that it all drops away—the distracting thoughts, the daydreams, even the sacred word—and we are simply resting in that which cannot be named or described, but which is always there.

Finding that conscious awareness is deeply nourishing on a soul level; it feels good. But from my own experience, I would argue that it also allows deep interior transformation to take place. To use Christian language, the Holy Spirit gets to work healing us heart and soul. That’s not to say that the Spirit can’t heal us heart and soul even if we don’t do this practice, but the gesture of consent is like a facilitation.

When people learn about this, they often say, “Oh, that’s just Christian Transcendental Meditation; it’s just Christians borrowing from the East.”

It certainly has affinities to Eastern methods, but the teachings are all out of the Christian tradition, from The Cloud of Unknowing all the way back to the Desert Mothers and Fathers. That’s not to say, it’s Christian, so that makes it better, but for the many people who want a Christian practice, this is a Christian practice that has deep resonance with universal spiritual practices.

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VOLUME 112, NUMBER 1

CONTENTS

 

Active and Contemplative Lives: An Interview with Carl McColman
Richard Smley

A Tapestry of Compassion: Changing the World for Good
Kathy Gann

In the Service of All
Nancy Secrest

Service as a Spiritual Path: Swami Vivekananda's Teaching of Karma Yoga
Jeffery D Long

Florence Nigntingale and Dora Kunz: Perspectives on Nursing and Therapeutic Touch
Janet Macrae

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Members' Forum: Sri Lankan Embassy Commemorates Olcott
Ginger Greenfield

Viewpoint: Light : Is There Sacrifice in Service?
Douglas Keene

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God on Psychedelics: Tripping across the Rubble of Old-Time Religion

Don Lattin, Hannacroix, N.Y.: Apocryphile Press, 2023. 172 pp., paper, $18.                       

Over a century ago, in lectures that prompted his landmark The Varieties of Religious Experience, Williams James said out loud what many of his contemporaries were already thinking: the “Yes function” in human experience—a near, if not fully, mystical mode of consciousness—could be stimulated by psychotropic substances without supernatural aid—for him, substances such as nitrous oxide and ether.

Sixty-something years later, MIT professor and world religion adventurer Huston Smith embarked upon his own version of the transcendental Yes with a psychoactive option unavailable on the Harvard philosopher’s late Victorian menu. Half a day with LSD in Timothy Leary’s Cambridge, Massachusetts living room, Smith said, accomplished what a decade of zazen could only presage. Today, after another sixty-something years, a new phase in America’s chemical quest to trigger James’s Yes is opening—this time with less elitism, greater scientific integrity, and wider institutional support. According to Don Lattin, we are in a psychedelic renaissance.

Lattin, a confessed “skeptical universalist,” is well versed in the full range of responses in the course of Americans’ attempts to settle accounts with ultimate reality. A veteran religion journalist based in the San Francisco area, he has reported on the rise and fall of innumerable movements and messiahs, particularly those gaining and losing traction in the second half of the twentieth century. His mastery of the art of the interview has attuned him especially to the minds of his generation (best and otherwise), a whole class of citizens whose parents grew up in what was quaintly called the Aspirin Age.

Lattin’s previous publications, such as Shopping for Faith, Following Our Bliss, Jesus Freaks, Distilled Spirits, and Changing Our Minds, offer empathetic chronicles of a society of perpetual seekers obsessed with faith, appalled by faith, tempted by gods that fail, and, as Aldous Huxley indelicately put it, too often dying for their drink and their dope. Lattin’s acclaimed book The Harvard Psychedelic Club narrates the now mythic saga of Leary, Smith, Ram Dass, and others in the midcentury intellectual aristocracy who followed in James’s footsteps and inaugurated the first psychedelic age. God on Psychedelics brings the story into the twenty-first century.

An informal literature review reveals a host of recently released self-help manuals, user guides, “bibles,” and adult coloring books—the vast majority with mushroom-themed cover art—designed to familiarize psychedelic novices with the dynamics and dimensions of the new renaissance. Books addressing the spiritually inclined tend to focus on the alternative altars of non-Western, earth-based, perennial, and harmonial traditions far from the American mainstream. What distinguishes Lattin’s work is his interest in psychonauts and their allies active in the mainstream itself, or what is left of it. Concurrent with the psychedelic Second Great Awakening is the dramatic decline of the institutionally rich but now member-poor once highly influential mainline religions.

Lattin’s primary informants include clergy and other religious professionals from the center and left wing of America’s rapidly shrinking religious establishment. A handful participated in the 2017 study of hallucinogenic drugs and mystical experience organized by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and NYU Langone Health—the research initiative that sparked a host of “Religious Leaders Get High on Magic Mushrooms” headlines.

Testimonies from Lutheran pastor James Lindberg, Harvard chaplain Rita Powell, Jewish rabbi Art Green, interfaith chaplain Tony Hoeber, and Episcopal priests Roger Joslin and Hunt Priest, founder of the Christian psychedelic society Ligare, transmit fascinating views from the front lines of the newest new age. Lattin even devotes a chapter to the spiritual journey of his publisher, United Church of Christ minister John Mabry.

Each story communicates a complex blend of yesses and noes regarding the promise of psychedelics for religious belief and practice. Liberative discoveries of mystical rapture mingle with disconcerting doubts about vocational relevance. Chapters on the emergence of entheogenic-plants-based churches and the role of psychedelics in recovery suggest possible shapes for postmainline U.S. religion.

Ultimately what holds this loose collection of vignettes together is Lattin’s respect for other people’s experiences and his generous sharing of insights from his own pursuit of the Jamesian Yes. The prose is light, and so is the willingness to commit to interpretive judgment.

The book’s subtitle warns of clichés ahead. “Tripping” has outlived its usefulness, and “rubble” hardly describes the clout retained in the nation’s premier divinity schools, which have produced some of its most impressive architecture and cultural treasures like Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer.

Sadly, the “God” colorfully advertised on the cover rarely shows up in the text. Lattin’s instincts are sociological and psychological, not theological. Still, the conclusion is clear: what fuels a renaissance is also a sacrament for a requiem.

Peter A. Huff, author or editor of seven books, teaches U.S. religious history at Benedictine University. His article
“The Current State of Unbelief” appeared in Quest, spring 2022.               

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