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Faith, Hope, and Clarity
By Betsy Carter, November & December 2004
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Several religious leaders told me that baby boomers are
increasingly taking matters into their own hands: they're
starting small faith groups to supplement or replace their
regular houses of worship. With numbers of devotees dwindling,
churches too are reacting by changing to attract those people
looking for a different experience. Nowhere is this more evident
than at any of the new sprawling "megachurches," where
you can eat fast food, shoot hoops, go to the bank, or pray 24/7.
One example is the Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston, which
recently opened a McDonald's. Another is the
58,000-square-foot sports center of the Southeast Christian
Church in Louisville. Frederick Lynch, 58, a professor at
Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, who has made
a study of baby boomers, described these as
"nondenominational supermarket churches" because they
provide something for everybody. But the overriding thing they
provide, as I see it, is the good old-fashioned sense of
belonging to a community. Taking some of the austere edges off of
the traditional church experience can make it an easier choice
for boomers who want to worship but don't have the tolerance
for some of the old ways. Lynch, a lapsed Episcopalian, also told
me what I guess I already knew: many of us just don't have
the obedience that traditional religions demand. "We want
the old ceremonies and trappings but not the old
authoritarianism," he said. He pointed out that church
imagery is often masculine, very doctrinaire, and a real turnoff
to many.
The idea of mixing and matching beliefs appeals to me: I like the
openness and fluidity of it. But I wanted to see it in actual
practice. That desire led me to Daniel Meeter, 51, the pastor of
the Old First Reformed Church of Brooklyn, a Protestant church
founded in 1654. He gave me an example of religious mixing: last
year he held a memorial service for Martin Luther King Jr. led by
himself, a president of a mosque, a Catholic priest, a black
Protestant minister, and a rabbi. His church, he says, is
"rooted and nonjudgmental. We don't go around saying bad
things about other people. We're one of the churches that
accepts gays." I asked him if he would perform a gay
marriage ceremony. "Nobody's asked yet," he
answered, "but I might."
40 percent of Americans over 45 say the most satisfying religious
or spiritual act is helping others.
For so many of us, that's the catch. How can you be religious
without standing in judgment of others? How can you find religion
without being told what to believe or condemning people who think
differently from you? I am looking for a faith that is free from
that pressure. One that respects freedom of thought but can still
grant me a feeling of safety and, in capital letters, PEACE OF
MIND. I realize this is a tall order. The problem—or maybe
the solution—is that I probably won't be able to find
everything I'm looking for in one place.
For peace of mind, my search led to an afternoon with Sally
Kempton, a practitioner and teacher of meditation in the North
Indian Tantra tradition. Blond and willowy, she exudes inner
contentment. Kempton found her own bliss one afternoon in the
'70s while she was listening to a Grateful Dead song. At that
moment, she said, she felt her heart open and her mind become
superbly quiet. Determined to hang on to that good feeling, she
eventually became a swami. She now travels the country to teach
meditation.
I caught up with her at one of her workshops. We sat on the
second floor of an old, creaky building. The smell of pizza
wafted up from a store, and you could hear an air-conditioning
unit heaving and roaring like a jet engine. Kempton sat before
the class on a wooden straight-backed chair, one leg tucked
underneath her. Her voice was gentle and her words were precise.
She encouraged us to let the distractions become a part of our
meditation. She told us the capacity to meditate is hard-wired in
all of us: "It's a bandwidth we can all access if we
train ourselves to do so." For 20 minutes she had us
focusing on our hearts, in particular the spot where we store all
our pain.
She told us to picture that place as a flower and watch it bloom.
Breath by breath, step by step, we would get closer to the flower
and the flower would slowly open. The smell of pizza subsided,
and the grumbling air conditioner was barely audible. After about
20 minutes, she rang a tiny bell. It was a pure, full sound: one
note, many reverberations. Opening our hearts was the source of
our emotional strength, she said. "Sometimes it's about
realizing what you want to do and allowing yourself to do
it." I found it a relief to quiet my thoughts, and the idea
of giving myself permission to "just be" felt like a
gift.
This morning I was running in the gym, listening to Emmy Lou
Harris and Neil Young on my CD player. My thoughts were
free-floating; my mind was as quiet as it gets. I was aware of
the other people running on the machines and how I liked having
them there. Even though they couldn't hear the music that was
being piped into my head, having them around me made the music
that much sweeter. At that moment, we were like-minded people
engaged in the same ritual. It reminded me of going to the
Baptist Bible school and singing with the other kids. It reminded
me of my father and how much the feeling of belonging meant to
him. And it made me realize what a pain in the neck my diatribes
against religion must have been to him.
Rabbi Kula's words came to me as I ran: community and meaning
are what bind people to any spiritual group. "A sense of
belonging and a sense of connection to something bigger than
yourself, that's the transcendence, the 'meaning'
piece," he said. "It works hand in hand with
'community.' It's hard to have meaning without some
social structure."
As I get older, I want to realize some sense of connection to
something bigger than me. The question of whether I've made a
difference looms large. Many of the people I talked to expressed
the same thought and referred to the old Peggy Lee song "Is
That All There Is?" How we travel to answer that question
and whom we choose as our traveling companions are part of the
journey. But what I've come to understand is that asking the
question is where it begins.
Betsy Carter is a contributing editor and the author of
Nothing to Fall Back On (Hyperion Books), a memoir.
To find out more about the spiritual lives of older Americans,
AARP surveyed 1,625 people ages 45 to 79. Click here to read a summary of the
survey or read
the full report at AARP.org.
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