Saturday, October 17, 1998

After a lot of seeking, Americans are finding that spirituality means doing

By DEBORAH KOVACH CALDWELL

The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS -- Barbara Sanders found God in her darkened bathroom.

When her children were small more than 20 years ago, she heard an inner voice telling her she needed a relationship with the divine. So every day for two weeks, while the children napped, she closed herself in her bathroom and prayed. One day she saw an inner light, and she broke down crying.

"I knew I'd met the Lord," Mrs. Sanders said.

Today, with her four children grown, she still rises at 5 a.m. for an hour of prayer and Scripture reading. She also teaches other people how to practice spirituality at the Mt. Carmel Center, a Catholic-run retreat center in southwest Dallas.

Without realizing it, Mrs. Sanders is on the leading edge of Americans' latest spiritual awakening, says prominent religion sociologist Robert Wuthnow. We may finally be ready to stop seeking and begin centering -- through spiritual practice of intensive prayer and meditation, Scripture study and worship.

And spiritual practice may represent a middle path through the two approaches to spirituality that have held sway for 50 years but are no longer adequate, he says. For church and synagogue members, prayer and meditation can help them develop spiritual lives separate from the confines of congregational life; for lonely seekers, spiritual practice can connect them to ancient traditions.

"We live in a world of fads and crazes that change from week to week, so we are taught to shop and dabble and search for instant gratification," says Wuthnow, a Princeton University professor and author of "After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s" (University of California Press).

"But spiritual practice takes on an authority over and above one's feelings and desires," he says. "The individual believes, 'I should do this. I have to follow this practice in order to get better at it.' "

It's an appealing message for sober and self-involved America of the late 1990s. That is why, Wuthnow suggests, we are beginning to see renewed interest in silent retreats, Christian prayer groups and Jewish Torah study. People are fasting, reclaiming religious dietary laws, listening to spiritual music, observing the Sabbath and rediscovering the arts.

"The quest for spirituality coincides with the breakdown of institutional systems," said Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. "So now people are creating new inner worlds. They've decided life is not about owning things. It's not about putting crystals in a circle.

"It's about doing. It's about practicing what you're preaching," he said.

At the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration in Dallas, that's already happening.

Last year the church dedicated a tan-and-brown polished terrazzo labyrinth, a spiritual tool developed in the Middle Ages. As people walk along the spiral path of a labyrinth they pray and meditate.

Labyrinths are so popular around the globe that a World Labyrinth Project is working to establish them in cathedrals, churches, hospitals, prisons, airports and parks worldwide.

At the Church of the Transfiguration, people of all faiths walk the labyrinth daily, and the church hosts an event there every week.

"We live such a fast-paced life that people have a difficult time quieting their minds," said Dr. Mary Anne Reed, director of the church's labyrinth project. "Something about the walk helps them experience the interior life."

A deep faith hasn't always appealed to Americans.

In his book, Wuthnow traces modern American spirituality from the 1950s. At that time, he writes, people were content to attend church or synagogue every week and then go home and leave their spiritual lives behind. Building those institutions gave them a convenient sacred space, he writes. Ministers and rabbis functioned as spiritual shopkeepers.

Wuthnow, the author of several seminal books about religion, calls this a "spirituality of dwelling."

Then came the 1960s, with the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the women's movement and all the new emphasis on freedom. Many people shrugged off devotional routines that seemed to reinforce the old loyalties to family and church. Emboldened by college education and increased travel, they began dabbling in new religions -- or no religion.

The era gave birth to the "spirituality of seeking," which is still with us.

The next decade brought transition, Wuthnow said, particularly with Jimmy Carter's election as president.

"We were trying to reassert moral authority by looking to this born-again Southern Baptist to lead us, and yet it was a time of fairly progressive social policies," Wuthnow said.

When Jim Jones and his followers committed suicide in 1978, many people decided new religions were too dangerous, Wuthnow said. And that set the stage for the rise of the Moral Majority and Ronald Reagan's presidency.

"The '80s were years when we were searching for a way to put our lives back in the box," Wuthnow said. "We wanted our children to be disciplined, and we started talking about moral issues.

"The difficulty was that there was still the underlying social complexity that made it hard for people to fully realize these more disciplined lifestyles," he said. "So you see a certain attraction to evangelicalism, for instance, but you find those people were still pretty much looking for the good life on their own terms and not willing to make huge sacrifices to the culture."

Meanwhile, most other people were seeking elsewhere. They tried therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous, channeling, crystals and self-help books. By the early 1990s, the hottest spiritual phenomenon was angels, because, he writes, they provide a delightful and easy glimmer of the sacred in a highly secular world.

But the easy spiritual moments and the continued search aren't enough, according to Wuthnow.

"People who engage seriously in (spiritual) practices may be involved in religious communities, or they may be sojourners whose lives exist on the edges of these communities," Wuthnow writes. "But the quality of their faith is judged by the seriousness of time spent in worshipful communion with the divine."

The idea for the book came to him during research a few years ago.

"I started asking people about their spiritual journeys and found that for many people (religious organizations) commonly weren't where they were finding spirituality," he said.

That made him realize that religious leaders tend to urge their flocks to find a spiritual life through community. Popular culture beckons people to find spirituality through fads and consumer items. Neither is adequate, he said.

"There's a vast number of people trying to piece together their spiritualities, but we somehow don't know how to talk about those people," he said. "They're unsettled, yet not totally isolated. They are seeking, but they are also trying to be serious, dutiful and disciplined in the way they do their seeking.

"If we can understand them, we can understand how to nurture spirituality even amid the fragmented conditions in which we live," Wuthnow said.

During research for the book, he and a team of assistants interviewed 200 people about their spiritual journeys and devotional practices.

They found a lot of people muddling along, trying to do a better job at spiritual practice. They found a lot of shallow seekers drawn to self-help books, Christian pop-rock worship and angel pins.

But they also found a few people who did serious devotional study.

"They are the 10 percent who are quietly known for leading saintly lives," he said. "They're the people who write books or become teachers and spiritual mentors."

Like Barbara Sanders.

Every day she bathes herself in prayer, sometimes repeating the words "Come, Lord Jesus" for an hour, other times making her mind quiet. After all these years of prayer, she said, she has turned her life over to God. "People are wanting something more substantial," Mrs. Sanders said. "If they would just plunge in and find out what prayer is all about, they would realize it's a lot more fulfilling if you take that deeper walk with the Lord."

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Distributed by The Associated Press