Monkey Mindfulness

[Over at Monkey Mind, Providence Rhode Island minister James Ishmael Ford is writing about the role Joseph Campbell played in the renewal of the "spiritual" aspects of our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition. Here's a copy of the comment I posted there, which I'm posting here as well simply because it's such an easy thing to do.]

In 1978 I wrote my Senior Honors thesis at the University of Washington on Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God (a document now thankfully forever lost to posterity). The following year at HDS I continued to pursue those interests through coursework in Buddhism and the Buddhist/Christian dialogue, The Interpretation of Religious Experience, and James Fowler's theories of Faith Development.

My point is that even then -- a decade before the Moyers interviews -- some of us had already picked up on the idea of Unitarian Universalism as a "reasonable mysticism" -- a faith tradition which had grounded itself in science, "natural theology" and the other intellectual tools of the Enlightenment, but was still open to non-rational (as opposed to irrational) ways of knowing, and had a rich heritage of intuitive, "mystical" knowledge as well, "peak experiences" (in Maslow's terms) which could be described phenomenologically, and even recreated with some reliability through the use of certain kinds of time-tested techniques and practices.

Perry Miller's famous essay "From Jonathan Edwards to Emerson" makes almost this exact same point about Unitarianism's Enlightened Puritans and their Transcendentalist offspring, who looked back to their grandparents in order to re-embrace the emotional and spiritual intensity of that spirit-filled world. Finally, the work of (UU - although I didn't know it at the time) Frederick Streng on "Emptiness," along with the theories of German Sociologist of Religion Ernst Troeslsch (a major influence on James Luther Adams) about "Church," "Sect" and "Mysticism" as the three building blocks of Christian communities, helped me to pull a lot of these pieces together, at least in my own mind.

Our UU churches are places set apart (like a sect) from the rest of the world, where we can come to safely explore more deeply within ourselves (mysticism), and then return to the world with a redemptive, sacramental gift of grace (the Church) which has the power to transform the world....a cycle which (not coincidentally) exactly parallels Campbell's Heroic Journey. Anyway, that's how I learned it at Harvard, 30 years ago. Do you think I ought to ask for my tuition back?