The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith
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span was agog with, can color the complexion of religious truth. To cite one example: people who died used to stay dead, but now medical technology can occasionally resuscitate the corpse. In these near-death experiences (NDEs) the resurrected, reporting their “other side” experience, seem for the first time to actually demonstrate death terminating people's life but not their consciousness. Huston's modus operandus was not merely to observe and record but also to participate in the changed and changing human inwardness of the twentieth century. He may have begun his life as a Christian and may be a Christian today, yet through such involvement—through his love-hate relationship with science, for instance, or in his exploration of other faiths—he has reinterpreted what Christianity can mean today.
In 1896 Andrew Dickson White published his influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, and that war was still waging when Huston was young. He recognized how in modernity science had replaced religion as the force that would redeem the world; it was science (and a social scientist) that told Huston that he did not count. Huston took up the challenge: in books and essays he argued that while science was valid and valuable, “scientism”—a materialist worldview extrapolated from science—was unproven, hence even unscientific. Yet even as he wrote, science was changing its tune. Dark matter, observer-determined reality, particles interacting across millions of light-years, and so on, all were so fantastical as to make angels dancing on pinheads seem positively mundane. Huston was almost incredulous: science was on his side now? Folks who believe in more than what can be vouchsafed by the five senses used to be dismissed as poets or lunatics; now they were called physicists and cosmologists. “Science that saddled us with reductionistic materialism is going beyond that position,” Huston exulted. “Materialism is now old hat.” Science, formerly the rebuttal to a speculative or nonmaterialist worldview, had become its corroboration. The mountain had come to Muhammad.
It was a new era. Huston felt its newness in the changed way religions were relating to one another. Throughout history each faith had been largely sequestered in its own territory or ideology. Now they were suddenly in each other's face: far had become near, and a slight familiarity with one's religious neighbors was a good reason for hating them. Each religion, feeling hemmed in and threatened on an ever more claustrophobic globe, developed a militant fundamentalist strain that was preaching hate or, worse, lighting dynamite. Yet there was also, across at the other end of the spectrum, a “liberal” concern as religion became plural, religions. It was the right and progressive thing to say that all were valid, but did that not dilute the absolute truth value of any particular one? If all religions are true, the worry was, then in a sense none are. Huston's response to this quandary was neither fundamentalism nor the “spiritual supermarket”: he showed a third possibility besides jihad or ecumenical conference. He had practiced Judeo-Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam and gotten some benefit from each and more from all of them together. Why straitjacket yourself? Everyone has different personae—a wife can also be a mother, a daughter, and an accountant simultaneously—and Huston likened the world's religions to humanity's various personae. Personally he had tried them all on for size, and they all fit. This may be Huston's chief lesson for the twenty-first century (in one sentence): empathizing with your enemy/neighbor is better than blowing him—and in the process, yourself—to smithereens.
Huston knew the dark, destructive side of religion, yet he chose to write about its positive aspects for the same reason that one listens to good, not bad, music. How else, he said, can you gain some personal benefit from it? Throughout his career Huston, by taking religion so seriously, was looked on by his colleagues as an atavism, a curiosity, out of step with his times. Now, in retrospect, it seems that it was he who had his finger on the pulse, after all. This Reader conveys the best of Huston Smith's endeavors to understand, finger on the pulse, spirituality in our time. More than understand: not academic monographs, his writings themselves came to play a part in the story of religion, as he attempted to make it meaningful, and helpful, for his contemporaries.
WELCOME TO THE READER
A Reader is obviously a book, but it is a distinctive kind of book. Most books, be they novels or works that convey information, flow smoothly from beginning to end. Not so with most Readers; they can seem disjointed in the sequence of their chapters. In this particular Reader, however, there is a sequence as one section leads into the next, and the whole of it, I hope, not only coheres, but becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Readers have a rationale, a reason for being published, and the rationale for this book was straightforward. I wanted to bring together essays and selections from books that I wrote at different times and that were published in a variety of places.
I wanted to do this because the reading public has changed. The first generation of readers has passed on, but the “worldview” that the essays present should continue to be of interest to everyone who has a reflective bent. Some chapters are likely to jolt readers, springing on them things they have not thought of before. We might think of this volume as a data bank of reminders that bring to conscious awareness what for the most part is simply taken for granted.
In any case, here it is. If the reader enjoys and learns from it, I will be very pleased.
Huston SmithMarch 2011Berkeley, California
BOOK ONE
A Personal Starting Point
1
No Wasted Journey
A Theological Autobiography
Socrates told his tribunal that he didn't fear his sentence because if death was the end it would be like falling into untroubled sleep, while if his soul migrated to another realm he would meet the heroes of the past and a just tribunal, 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.