COMMENSAL ISSUE 103

It has be said that any intellectual woman, deprived of educational opportunities, will turn her attention to religion. This may be because the Bible stands handy next to the telephone book in her limited home, and her philosophical bent, common to most of the highly intelligent, finds no other body of information available to worry. Thinly populated Central Maine is an educational wasteland, and here men as well as women lack intellectual meat on which to chew.

In this northern extension of the Bible Belt one can attend a new church each week in search of an interesting and invigorating preacher. This kind of buzzing from spiritual flower to spiritual flower seems to feed a mental hunger and energizes the somnolent imagination.

We encountered a wide selection of differing beliefs when we strayed outside the circle of mainline Protestant country churches, as also Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Universalists, Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, each claiming to have the one true faith, can be found in any sizable town. For the curious explorer it is easy to attend their services as most congregations are eager to welcome you, and members are often willing to come right to your home in order to engage you in refreshing debate. It is also an advantage that their dogma, however startling sometimes, can be found in print, where you can examine it after the departure of the missionaries.

Some much farther-out religious groups, with only a very slender written creed, are also very common in this old fashioned Maine setting. There are the Dowsers, the Noetics, Eckankar, Bahai, the Spiritualists and many more. We sought them out, observing their similarities and differences, cautiously side-stepping the knock-down-drag-out arguments so dear to our analytic hearts but so conducive to being asked to leave in a hurry.

The Noetic people, who were trying to discover a new system to satisfy all, were interesting, but too varied in their approaches to present any kind of united creed for our consideration. Every person present had his own system of belief, though perhaps the fact that they met at the University had exacerbated the problem. One day I stood up and asked everyone in turn about his or her strongest held belief and found the following, no two alike, all crammed into the same room.

With a few exceptions the attendees appeared to be sober and quite rational. But It did not seem as though these varied dogmatists would ever be able to combine into a new knowledge, and after the number of Taoists increased to three and started taking over, there was considerable attrition, especially when they began electing officers. I suspect that the unwieldy mixture was due to there not being enough supporters of a single belief to form a congregation, and that they had originally clumped into this heady group out of loneliness, following their trek to Maine in flight from materialistic urban blight, for few of the participants proved to be of local origin.

The Spiritualists, on the other hand were chiefly long residents of Maine. We attended a number of sessions at a Spiritualist campground that had been established in Etna more than a hundred years earlier. Probably because there was no dogmatic body of literature in use to remind them, the concepts of spiritualism had changed over all those years. Though there were still mediums to pass on messages from the dead, I heard grumbles from some conservative participants that it was no longer obligatory to produce physical manifestations in order to prove one's contact with the souls that had passed over. The appearance of visible ghosts made of ectoplasm was out of fashion; all that was required in these degenerate days was the feeling that ghosts were there.

The ghosts of former campground attendees were said to be present, sometimes through spiritual contact with the trees; there was a visible elf reported living in one apple tree. Spirit Guides were still called up by mediums and messages delivered from the dead, but they had added laying on of hands to their armamentarium along with cures by music or aromas.

They performed regular services in their own church, singing popular hymns whose words had been adjusted a little and generalized, as had been the Universalist hymns. Selected psalms were also read. God was addressed as Infinite Intelligence or as Spirit. Some of the members professed to be also Christians and the chief medium was a Catholic who admired Carl Jung. These Spiritualists were also harboring a not yet unfrocked Catholic priest who had slipped into ecumenical Voodoo.

They all talked a lot about Energy, an indefinable substance, similar to both magnetism and electricity, swirling constantly around the world. An adept could seize hold of it and ride with it and receive many kinds of power from it. One could see that they did not limit themselves to worship but fancied themselves as magicians who could control the elements by means of personal power, acquired from God by means of meditation. They held hands and meditated in order to attract it; they called it channeling.

The Dowsers too, proved to be interested in attracting the same sort of energy by group meditation. This most enthusiastic gathering had been active for over twenty years, with monthly meetings in a private home. It was also connected to a national organization, as were the Spiritualists and Noetics. This was not a group of "incomers"; there had been associations of Dowsers in Maine since the start of the nineteenth century. The practitioners used clairvoyance or a rod or pendulum, and it was noticeable that nowadays they dowsed for everything but water; the only lady concerned with water preferred to locate it on a map of the property by dangling a pendulum over it, getting 'yes' or 'no' as an answer, according to the way it swung. The pendulum would also answer questions on almost any topic.

The Dowsers had a huge variety of energy applications. Some extracted or harnessed the Energy from rocks, water, light or sound, either by thinking about it or by using favorite rocks, fountains, prisms or drumming to attract it. Unusual diets were recommended. Some made pilgrimages to South America to sit at the feet of shamans and share their drugs and unearthly thoughts; some traveled to England or other distant places to collect strength from important stones. Nearly all felt their sensitivity heightened in the presence of these "tools". We never heard the word "magic" mentioned despite the emphasis on personal powers rather than on the concept of God. The emphasis on power rising from cooperating but unthinking substances seemed to teeter on the borderline between magic and pantheism.

Proponents of complex systems of life management also appeared at the Dowsers meetings, supported by diagrams of the human body and its spiritual aspects. They had discovered mystery in various geometrical patterns, in Numerology and Astrology. A side trip to Eckankar, a group trying to mount a celestial ladder to Godhood from an office over a store, offered further diagrams setting out the correct route upward. There was more than a touch of Hinduism or Buddhism in all these mixes. Besides Yoga and several oriental healing systems there were Tai-chi and other exercises accompanied by flutes or drum beats. In none of these belief systems was much allowance made for the charity so important to Christian churches. Members were willing to use their spiritual powers to help other members drive away invading evil influences, but most offered little practical assistance.

Each meeting produced a speaker with some interesting or amusing new discovery to offer, followed by delicious refreshments. I thought of these monthly meetings as a sort of esoteric salon. The members were not poor and there were included a certain number of scam artists who wandered in, trying to make themselves look interesting and available. Several people offered healing either by touch or concentration and there were some witches in flowing garments. I will never forget the werewolf who had filed his front teeth down to make his canines appear larger. There were not too many emotional eccentrics; most appeared rational. Lapsed Catholics were common and there were splendid opportunities for argument as a number of attendees were heavy readers. There was much talk of meditation but I always found it poorly defined.

We were lured by one young lady to yet another curious group held in a Catholic high school, which was a puzzle in itself. We had a bible-sized book called a Course in Miracles. It purported to be the words of Jesus Christ channeled to a lady psychologist in New York. It was written in archaic language, with many non sequeturs, and its purpose appeared to be the removal of guilt by encouraging the sinner to forgive himself. He must love (undefined), and if he does that he can do anything else he wants to. One of the members had lately deserted his wife and children and was tearfully grateful to the Course for sparing him from the bad feelings normally connected to his action.

The most interesting thing about the Course was its training method. One had to stare cross-eyed at a chair or some other common object until it no longer made sense. There were many exercises, all calculated to destroy the mind's contact with reality, and when I protested, I was told not to approach the Course intellectually but to just give in to it. We were advised by a theological historian, who seemed to be travelling the same exploratory path we were, that the Course was one of the mind-altering religions, along with Christian Science and the Unity Church. According to him they had all been based on the teachings of Marcus Quimby who had influenced Mary Baker Eddy to found Christian Science by curing her of an illness.

We were not looking to have our minds altered, so we resigned from the Course, urged on by hints from the membership. But not until I had asked a quantity of questions in my efforts to identify what we were talking about. The members, like all those in the varied mystical groups, were prone to mention prayer, a word used rather loosely. I asked them. not what they prayed for or to whom they prayed, but rather in what direction they sent their prayers. Was it up toward the sky or was it directed elsewhere? One and all said they directed their prayer somewhere into their chests, where lay their chacres (locatable on a diagram) and where God was said to be found. They did not like to think of God as a personality outside themselves, but rather as a kind of omnipresent glue connecting mankind to both the physical and immaterial worlds.

Until then I had never dreamed that our new friends were redefining God as a kind of personal power located within themselves. Had I read a little theology at the time or taken advice, I would have recognized in this giddy reversal of God's position the ubiquitous Transcendence-immanence controversy so dear to the hearts of the chattering classes. That is: whether God is out there directing operations or is He a power scattered and included throughout the universe. I was a little uncomfortable to find so many rational-appearing people worshipping themselves as well as sticks and stones, for I still clung to my childhood impression that God was a bearded old gentleman in a night-shirt.

When a Jehovah's Witness, who visited my house regularly, learned that we were frequenting a number of heretical New Age dens she was sure I would be swept away and lose my chance at her form of Heaven. She finally confessed her belief that Christ had no greater divinity than I had, because we were both "Children of God" and I recognized that she was also speaking of personal power rather than the monotheism on which I was raised. She appeared to be truly frightened for my future, but I assured her that I was not easily uprooted, even by her.

Her concern was something I had already considered. Like young experimental drug users who are out for a lark or searching for intellectual variety, but instead discover themselves caught in a well-baited trap, I might find that my cheerful dabbling in the occult would lead to a downward slide from my own organized settled religious beliefs into madness, or at best, into Inanity. So before these visitations into the lion's den I would prepare to maintain my integrity and was careful not to engage in any deviation from it, however charming the speaker, or dazzling the demonstration. I also made a point of never engaging in any rituals, for which I was glad, after observing the tricky brain washing methods of the Course in Miracles, which at this writing has attracted over five million devotees world-wide. When my various mystics sat in a circle being instructed in meditation by a leader, I mused on something else. When the more energetic members set out to dance on the lawn during the summer solstice I remained in my seat, and thought about being very young again and in enthusiastic search for exotic intellectual pleasures, here masquerading under the disguise of terribly important spirituality.

Although it might have been amusing to draw out these zealots by pretending to be at one with them, I preferred not to engage in deceit but reminded them from time to time of my Christian position, usually encountering some pitying protest. It was evident that most of them had spent years of internal argument in arriving at their formed opinions and would not be lightly shaken, especially not those who had made a career of it, or attracted a following to themselves.

I have the impression, from the occasional momentary expressions of uneasiness that I sometimes saw flitting across a face, that some of these dabblers in the occult are perfectly aware of their frenetically imaginative states and would be only too happy to return to the milder beliefs of their Childhood. But they have become entrapped in the self imposed logic of their complex games. A perusal of Jan Huizinga's Homo Ludens (Man Playing) might have revealed to them the temporary and frivolous nature of their activities and saved them from painting themselves into corners, of the sort that can only be escaped by completely repudiating a whole system of belief, with the resultant public embarrassment at one's paint-splotched plight.

These excursions have proved to be both satisfying to my analytic urges and to a desire for company in this nearly empty stretch of countryside I suspect that most of the people I encounter are motivated by similar wants. For they are exuberantly friendly and welcoming, and on days where there are few attendees they all jump chattering in to dissipate the gloom and get the party going. Certainly I have never encountered more talkative people.

Ann Kucera

Ann : This is a most fascinating piece. I have always felt slightly embarrassed at holding religious beliefs because of what I had perceived as a general rationalism within society and a feeling that, if one claims to have some nostrum that is the ultimate cure for all ills - the complete answer to the "what's it all about then" question - then one ought to have it all worked out much better than I ever did. I often argue with sceptics (of the "all religion is tosh" school), who say that they have a hard time getting through to people in a society where religion is rife, with the point that society is becoming increasingly secular. From your experience, the opposite seems to be the case.

As for small religious groups, - I was, for some years, a member of The Berean Forward Movement, an ultra-dispensationalist Christian group (the name comes from the Bereans in Acts 17:11 who "searched the (Old Testament) Scriptures daily to see whether what Paul (the Apostle) said were so". This group concentrated very much on Bible study in order to derive sound doctrine from it; doctrine, of course, that the sloppy exegesis of the mainstream churches had missed. It involved "seeing the mystery" as the expression went. A "mystery" (from the Greek mysterion) being a sacred secret revealed by God. This mystery (revealed to the Apostle Paul and expounded by him in such books as Ephesians) was that God had temporarily interrupted his plan of salvation centred on Israel (the Jews, not "the Church") and was dealing with gentiles independently of the Jews until the latter would be restored to favour at the end times after passing through "the great tribulation". We didn't think of ourselves as altogether distinct from the rest of evangelical Christianity - who were "weaker brethren", even though part of the elect - but as "an election within an election", or so went the party line. The group attracted a number of highly intelligent individuals who "weren't getting anything out of their local churches", but also, as it was a social group with families, a number of members who didn't really understand the doctrines very well, or at least couldn't derive them. While the movement was founded (in the early 1900s) by a couple of fairly charismatic individuals, they didn't pretend to private revelation but only to have seen something in the Scriptures that was already there. In fact, the movement was dead against "raving Penties" (meaning Pentecostalists). Being a small group (albeit with tiny branches world-wide - this added to the exclusive aura) we were always very welcoming of newcomers - though I think we'd have quickly spotted the roving sociologist.

Incidentally, was your title a reference to Legion in Mark 5:9 ?

Theo