souls for their enrichment and through such offerings imagined themselves immersed in nothing less than “the piety of the world.” The creation of that cosmopolitan, sympathetic disposition fueled one innovation after another in American spirituality. It was a sine qua non of a seeker culture.
One of the results of the growing American encounter with Asian religions was a heightened emphasis on the practice of meditation and the value of the concentrated mind, and that distinct history is chronicled in the fourth chapter, “Meditation for Americans.” The importation of yoga as a serious practice began in the 1890s, and much of its popularity centered on the disciplines of mental focus and composure in a swirling, rushed, anxiety-ridden culture. Significantly, Americans took up yoga in the context of an increasing interest in the implications of positive thinking for health, harmony, and well-being. In 1902 William James surmised that it was not evangelical Protestants but “mind-curers” who were responsible for the growing presence of “methodical meditation” in American religious life.19 He was right about that: meditation came to more and more Americans not through a retrieval of venerable Christian practices, but through the rise of “New Thought,” as the optimistic gospel of mental healing and positive thinking was then dubbed. The burst of interest in meditation involved a peculiarly American conversation among Transcendentalists, liberal Protestants, Reform Jews, Vedantists, Buddhists, and mind-cure metaphysicians. A significant swath of New Thought was simply liberal propositions put into practical dress. Ralph Waldo Trine, one of the most popular American guides to a contemplative mind and a harmonious body, shared much more than his first and middle names with Emerson.
In the fifth chapter the saga of Sarah Farmer and her grand experiment unfolds. Inspired by the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, a much-watched international gathering of religious representatives of different faiths, Farmer set out to create an ongoing center of learning at which leading spiritual teachers from diverse traditions would congregate in pursuit of a global spirituality. To that end, she created a summer community called Greenacre in Eliot, Maine, in 1894, a gathering that would throb from one year to the next with religious variety and innovation. Under pines and in tents, mental healers communed happily with Hindu swamis, Buddhist practitioners, university professors, accomplished artists, and Concord sages. Though a stunning success—the Greenacre gatherings thrived for more than two decades; the World's Parliament lasted all of seventeen days—the community nonetheless fell into division. A fault line cracked open between those who remained loyal to the original design of eclectic seeking and those who came to favor submission to one claimant to universal spirituality. Farmer's pilgrimage into the Bahá'í faith—“the Persian Revelation,” as she called it—capped a life of religious inquiry in which elements of everything from Buddhism to Spiritualism commingled. Her new allegiance sorely tested liberal notions of freedom and open-mindedness, even though the movement she embraced echoed the wider values of peace, harmony, and universal brotherhood. The brouhaha at Greenacre raises in sharp relief the still relevant question of whether seekers are to keep on seeking for seeking's sake or to identify an end point to their search. Can a solid religious identity be achieved only through the particularity, integrity, and discipline of one tradition? Was the point of pursuing the spiritual life self-expansion, artistic creativity, and endless curiosity or instead self-surrender, obedience, and resignation to God?
Even as Greenacre's influence declined, other spiritual retreats arose. Among the more important and lasting was Pendle Hill, a community of contemplatives, activists, and seekers led by the Society of Friends (Quakers) and founded in 1930. In the final chapter, an influential group of Quaker intellectuals, all of whom doubled as spiritual guides at Pendle Hill and elsewhere, is explored. Between 1900 and 1940 Rufus Jones, a professor of philosophy at Haverford College, pioneered the liberal transformation of the Society of Friends. He remade them as the archetypal “seekers” in part by resurfacing that category from the seventeenth-century literature of English sectarians and then applying it in a universalized way to the modern religious world. Any number of twentieth-century seekers might suggest the earnestness of these striving souls, but certainly an excellent exemplar is one of Jones's own acolytes, Thomas R. Kelly, who swerved desperately out of academic philosophy into devotional discipline in the late 1930s. He stands in a long line of Quaker-connected spiritual writers in the twentieth century: from Douglas Steere, Howard Thurman, and Elton Trueblood to Richard Foster, Parker Palmer, and Mary Rose O'Reilly. The mysticism of Jones and Kelly as well as the broadly inclusive retreat at Pendle Hill made the Society of Friends disproportionately influential in the shaping of a contemporary American spirituality of seeking. In unpredictable ways, these mystic Quakers even became entangled with an estimable group of émigré writers in Southern California, including Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, and Christopher Isherwood, all of whom were quintessential seekers on the opposite coast.
The story, of course, continues well beyond Kelly (he died young in 1941). But the culture of seeking was, by then, in place, and after Kelly (and this includes the much ballyhooed rupture of the 1960s) it is historical epilogue. The continuing popularity of Max Ehrmann's “Desiderata,” a prose poem first published in 1927, suggests some of the echoes still resounding from the seeker culture of the early twentieth century. Its imperative of being gentle on oneself and finding serenity amid chaotic social churnings became a widely quoted spiritual motto on posters and plaques in the 1940s and 1950s; it even climbed the pop charts in the early 1970s as the title piece of a Grammy-winning album of Les Crane's; and it continues to circulate now as a “survival guide” for twenty-first-century life. Widely seen as symptomatic of the therapeutic, privatized, and individualistic bankruptcy of today's seeker spirituality, Ehrmann's piety proves, on closer inspection, much harder to caricature. Draining the puddle of syrup and surmounting the heap of satire that have overwhelmed Ehrmann is more than a concluding historical exercise. The recovery of his story serves as a closing parable for a much larger project: namely, the serious reengagement of the interwoven history of liberalism, progressivism, and spirituality in American culture. Given the ease with which the religious right now monopolizes “moral values” as their own distinct turf, it is all the more important to know the history of the spiritual left in order to reclaim an alternative vista from which to view the outworking of American democracy.
Throughout the book, the American spirituality crafted by these seekers is taken with the seriousness of the introspective brooding and liberating vision that gave it birth. Much of the contemporary commentary on American religion is suffused with the tropes of the marketplace—as if economic models of free competition, entrepreneurial promotion, and consumer demand are the most reliable guides to the spiritual ferment. From this perspective, all this spiritual sampling is but an inner mirroring of the surfeit of choice in America's megamalls. Religious seeking becomes comparable to test-driving various automobiles to see which delivers the most satisfaction on Whitman's open road. This book resists such analogies and analysis not because they are irrelevant, but because they now seem all too obvious. In an age in which conservative pundits caricature liberalism as a shallow ideology of trendy consumerism—“latte liberals” or “Volvo liberals”—it is especially important to probe deeper than brand labels in exploring the cultural import of seeker spirituality.20
Already in 1930 Woodbridge Riley complained in The Meaning of Mysticism about the “sordid” and “ridiculous” aspects of “commercialized mysticism,” which “spends not hours with the mystics, but minutes with the mystics.” Notwithstanding the thinness of his own book, he was caustic about how the market trivialized “a genuine search for the interior or hidden life.” “Go to any large department store and ask for books on mysticism and they will offer you books bearing such titles as these, ‘How to Strengthen Your Will,'…‘Silent Exercises’ and the like. By means of such apparatus adults can do their daily dozen in mental gymnastics.” In a market society, spiritual practices can be turned into commodities as much as spoons, handguns, or Halloween treats. This book takes for granted that commerce has been a powerful agent in the production and distribution of everything from Bibles to balloons; likewise, inner quests, even for off-the-grid simplicity or spiritual enlightenment, never
