in its advertising images of spas, sports-club yoga, and alpine retreats.21
How else to understand the “Off-the-Cuff Philosophy” bracelet available from a recent catalog called Signals: Gifts That Enlighten and Entertain? In sterling silver, the bracelet features a saying dubiously attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “beloved author, minister, activist, poet, philosopher, and lifelong believer in America”: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” How else to fathom the advertisement for the Chevy Tahoe that promotes it as the perfect vehicle for “self-discovery” with a line from Thoreau's Walden? Thoreau's words—“I never found the companion so companionable as solitude”—bless the image of the forest-tucked SUV. The consumer culture encourages spiritual desires, just as it cultivates any number of other desires, and then offers the goods to assuage (temporarily) those cravings and anxieties. But a cynical narrative about commercialization is hardly the primary story of modern interiority. At this point it seems appropriate to give the trope of spiritual shoppers a much-deserved rest. And the same goes for all the smorgasbord, buffet, cafeteria, and deli imagery that one hears in relation to contemporary spirituality—as if religious seekers were little more than spiritual gluttons gobbling up anything and everything that they can heap on their plates.22
Even as it offers an inner history of restless souls, this book remains inextricably tied to outer lives. It is a recurring rap on the “new spirituality” as well as on the eccentric individuality of Whitman and friends that they quickly sink into solipsism and become politically and ethically weightless. Narcissism and consumerism are serious issues—in the study of American spirituality as in the study of other aspects of American culture—but they are not uniquely Emersonian, romantic, or liberal problems. Evangelical Protestantism, which has produced more than its share of critics of the “new spirituality,” has also given rise to more than its share of Bible-based diets, gospels of wealth, and guides for the maximized erotic pleasures of married heterosexual couples. In other words, a therapeutic culture of self-realization and a consumer culture of self-gratification are at least as much “evangelical” as they are “liberal.” Yoga studios and aromatherapy hardly hold a candle to the conglomerate of T-shirt fashions, aerobics videos, and apocalyptic best sellers that makes up the Christian Booksellers Association.
The same liberal spirit that led to a critique of conventional Christianity and organized religion readily energized strenuous activism and self-denying social engagement, including innumerable reform causes from abolition to suffrage, from international relief to workers' rights. Commonly contained within this seeker spirituality was a critical social and political vision; repeatedly, self-reliance and solitary retreat were held in creative and effective tension with a sharply honed social ethics. By the 1920s and 1930s, the joining of “prayers and pickets” was a given of liberal spiritual practice. The religious and political vision of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s and 1960s gained much from that combined inheritance from Thoreau to Mohandas Gandhi. A handful of nineteenth-century religious liberals, after all, had led the way in creating an open spiritual and ethical exchange with like-minded leaders in India and threw their support behind the anticolonial Buddhist revival in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The ongoing call to “Free Tibet,” the fruitful alliance between American religious progressives and the Dalai Lama, has a history behind it that a bumper sticker can hardly compress. Or when Rabbi Michael Lerner speaks now of the possibilities of an “Emancipatory Spirituality,” when he sets that vision against the reactionary dimensions of American religion and politics, he is engaging the historical idiom long joining the material work of liberal progressivism to lived spiritual practice.23
It does not require a commitment to religious liberalism to recognize its historical importance in giving birth to modern American spirituality. It is quite possible that traditionalists of whatever flavor will read this history as a tale of religious loss and cultural incoherence, a long train of evidence that self-reliance has run roughshod over community in the United States. It is equally possible that those who cherish a newfound spiritual eclecticism will read this history as a tale of far-seeing prophets to be acclaimed for their vision of progress and cosmopolitanism. Poised with the historian's caution between criticism and celebration, Restless Souls strives for a fair-minded depiction of the origins and unfolding of the American preoccupation with spirituality.
CHAPTER ONE
MYSTIC CLUB
A ONE-TIME SPY FOR THE DANISH military, Carl H. A. Bjerregaard (1845–1922) hastily left Denmark in 1873, a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant absent without leave, and headed for New York. In the United States Bjerregaard started a new life, first as a factory worker in New Jersey, and then through employment at the Astor Library (soon to form the core of the New York Public Library). In Denmark he had briefly helped curate a natural history museum, so his joining the library staff in 1879 to classify books and recatalog them was not wholly out of character. Soon his military service faded into the past; he spent the rest of his career with the New York Public, eventually heading up the main reading room. That was only his day job, though. In his spare time, with all the library's resources at his fingertips, Bjerregaard fashioned himself into a philosopher, artist, and mystic.
By the 1890s, he was lecturing widely on mysticism, nature worship, and kindred topics. “I address you as Pilgrims of the Infinite,” Bjerregaard told an audience in Chicago in 1896, “for you are pilgrims; I can see that on your faces. You are not pilgrims either from or to the Infinite, but you are of the Infinite. From and to indicate space and time relations, but in the Infinite we recognize neither time nor space; there is no to-day and to-morrow; no here and no there. Eternity is no farther off from the Mystic, than the moment in which he speaks. You are Pilgrims OF the Infinite.” Bjerregaard's summons to explore the “Mystic Life” was heady stuff. It was, among other things, an affirmation of the supreme freedom of spiritual aspirants to seek the truth for themselves and within themselves. The call seemed to resound everywhere: Bible passages, Taoist sayings, pine trees and cones, Jewish Kabbalah, Zoroastrian fire imagery, yoga, Sufi poetry, American Transcendentalism, and the Christian mythology of the Holy Grail.1
Bjerregaard's spirituality, like the faith of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), was especially in synchrony with the American lecture circuit. Bjerregaard's favorite place to speak was Greenacre, the summer community that the visionary Sarah Farmer (1847–1916) founded in Eliot, Maine, in 1894. He saw Farmer's experiment as a realization of his ideas about a universal mysticism and was lavish in his praise of its design. When he gave personal examples of his own exalted experiences, they almost always circled back to Greenacre, whether to a sunrise worship service led by the Zoroastrian Jehanghier Cola or to barefoot walks on the dew-drenched grass. “Greenacre is a revelation,” Bjerregaard remarked. “When you rise from the cool waves of the Piscataqua [River], you rise out of the quiet place of your own soul.” As a lecturer, Bjerregaard believed in presentations that were personal and experiential; like Emerson, he did not want to offer secondhand news or disinterested scholarship. Make lecturers, he said, “give their own experiences and not something they have read in books and only poorly digested…. In soul life no abstract teachings are worth much.”2
Sarah Farmer's Greenacre community in Maine, with its tent village surrounding a large inn on the shore of the Piscataqua River, provided the setting for C. H. A. Bjerregaard's lectures on mysticism and spirituality in the 1890s. (Eliot Bahá'í Archives, Eliot, Maine.)
His time at Greenacre in the 1890s provided him with that firsthand material. Of one glistening experience there in 1896, Bjerregaard was especially jubilant:
The first evening I spent at
