which would make it no wasted journey. When I found that passage from the Apology inscribed on a historical marker in Athens, the words no wasted journey jumped out at me, for I was on my first trip around the world, and they captured my mood perfectly. Not only was girdling the globe not a waste. Neither was life's journey, for I was learning so much!
I mention this because, though the prospect of writing my memoirs has never appealed to me (not even for grandchildren), I have toyed with the thought of what an appropriate title might be were I to do so, and in early manhood, “No Wasted Journey” was the obvious choice. In my forties, though, it gave way to “That Strong Mercy,” for I underwent a midlife crisis which only mercy (it felt like) pulled me through. And in these later years, “Bubble Blown and Lived In” displaces both preceding candidates. For though I am not a constructionist, it does feel (now) as if I have spent my years sweeping out a horizon of beliefs, soap-bubble thin, that I could live in.
How that bubble took shape, together with the iridescent colors that swim on its surface, I have been invited to recount. Some things that I wrote in the introduction to the book I co-authored with David Griffin, Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology, apply equally to the start of my story, so my first several paragraphs will follow that earlier statement closely.
SEARCH
I was born of missionary parents in China, and spent my formative years there. I don't suppose one ever gets over that. Because we were the only Americans in our small town, my parents were my only role models, so I grew up assuming that missionaries were what Western children grew up to be. As a consequence, I came to the United States for college, thinking that I would return to China as soon as I was theologically accredited, but I had not reckoned with the West's dynamism. Never mind that my landing pass was Central Methodist College, enrollment six hundred, located in Fayette, Missouri, population three thousand. Compared with Changshu (or even Shanghai of that day) it was the Big Apple. Within two weeks China had faded into a happy memory; I wasn't going to squander my life in its backwater. The vocational shift this entailed, however, was small. Instead of being a missionary I would be a minister.
My junior year in college brought a second surprise: ideas jumped to life and began to take over. To some extent they must have gained on me gradually, but there came a night when I watched them preempt my life with the force of conversion. Returning from a meeting of a small honor society that gathered monthly for dessert and discussion in the home of its faculty sponsor, several of us lingered in the corridor of our dormitory to continue the arguments the evening had provoked—as unlikely a knot of peripatetics as ever assembled. My excitement had been mounting all evening, and around midnight it exploded, shattering mental stockades. It was as if a fourth dimension of space had opened and my mind was catapulting into it. And I had my entire life to explore those endless, awesome, portentous corridors. I wonder if I slept at all that night.
In retrospect it seems predestined, but at the time I could only see it as providential that the faculty sponsor of our discussion group was a protégé of Henry Nelson Wieman, who had founded the school of naturalistic theism almost single-handedly. Wieman was at the University of Chicago, so it was inevitable that I proceed there for my graduate study. Having earlier shifted my vocational intent from missionary to minister, I now moved next door again by opting to teach rather than preach—although in moments of misgiving I suspect that I have friends who think I never accomplished that move. When Charles Kingsley asked Charles Lamb if he would like to hear him preach, Lamb replied, “I don't think I have ever heard you do anything else.” That's too close to home for comfort.
Because those vocational adjustments were obvious and small, they occasioned no soul-searching; but as I think back, I am surprised that I didn't find the collapse of my youthful supernaturalism disturbing. I entered the Divinity School of the University of Chicago a committed Wiemanite. Despite World War II—I was headed for the chaplaincy, but the war ended before I made it—Chicago was an exciting time for me. Via naturalistic theism, my vocation was clear. It would be to align the two most powerful forces in history: science and religion. I was a very young man, and fresh to the world's confusions.
I can remember as if it were yesterday the night in which that entire prospect, including its underlying naturalistic worldview, collapsed like a house of cards. It was four years later, in Berkeley—but before I relate what happened, I need to explain how I got there. Chicago proceeded as planned, with one surprise. Although in my first year I would not have believed that such a thing was possible, in the second year I discovered something better than Wieman's theology, namely, his daughter. Two years later we were married. We celebrated our golden wedding anniversary last fall.
As I was now a member of Wieman's family, he couldn't direct my dissertation, but he did suggest its topic. Stephen Pepper at the University of California had written his World Hypotheses, one of which was pragmatism (or contextualism, as he called it), which was close to Wieman's metaphysics; so he sent me to Pepper to explore the fit. With a wife and an infant child, I spent 1944–1945 in Berkeley writing my doctoral dissertation, “The Metaphysical Foundations of Contextualistic Philosophy of Religion.”
In the course of that year I chanced on a book, Pain, Sex, and Time, by Gerald Heard, who is credited for moving Aldous Huxley from his Brave New World cynicism to the mysticism of The Perennial Philosophy, and reading it brought the collapse of my naturalism that I mentioned above. The mystics hadn't figured much in my formal education, but when I encountered a sympathetic presentation of their position, I responded from the soles of my feet on upward, saying, Yes, yes! More than any other outlook I had encountered, it was their vision, I was convinced, that disclosed the way things are.
Mysticism pointed toward the “mystical East,” so, Ph.D. in hand and teaching now, I cut back on philosophy to devote roughly half my time (as I have ever since) to immersing myself in the world's religions; immersing is the right word, for I have always been devotee as much as scholar. During my eleven years at Washington University (1947-1958) this involved weekly tutorials with a swami of the Ramakrishna Order who grounded me in the Vedanta and set me to meditating. When I responded to MIT's call to strengthen its humanities program by adding philosophy to it (my years there were 1958–1973), I shifted my focus to Buddhism and undertook Vipassana [a type of meditation] practice in Burma, Zen training in Kyoto, and fieldwork among the Tibetans in their refugee monasteries in North India. Angry at the hammerlock that analytic philosophers had on the field—in those days Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell constituted a “Bermuda Triangle” in which “planes” that entered from outlying territories disappeared professionally—I welcomed a bid from Syracuse University to move from philosophy to religious studies, and invested my last decade in full-time teaching (1973-1983), primarily in its graduate program. Asia-wise, that decade brought Islam into my lived world, through Sufi sheikhs [spiritual masters] that I encountered in pre-Khomeini Iran and North Africa—their five Arabic prayers continue to frame my day. On retiring from Syracuse we moved to Berkeley to be close to our children and their families. Until this year I continued to teach half-time: semesters here and there across the country, an occasional course at the Graduate Theological Union, and the last three years at the University of California. The new incursion on my religious front has been the primal religions. I helped edit a book with Reuben Snake (a leader of the Native American Church), One Nation Under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church, to help restore to that Church the rights the Supreme Court stripped it of in its 1990 Smith decision.
This all sounds flagrantly eclectic, and I can't argue that it wasn't, for the truth of the matter is that in culling from the world's religions what was of use to me, I was largely ignoring their differences. What they said about reality seemed sufficiently alike to carry me as I stepped from one to another like a hunter crossing ice floes, but I had no real idea what to do with their differences. I had been avoiding that question for some time when, in the course of a year-long around-the-world seminar that I co-directed in 1969-1970, I ran into Professor S. H. Nasr in Iran, who pointed me to a small group of thinkers who had the answer I was
