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by Ira Rifkin
On a blustery Sunday evening in November 1997, the Orthodox Christian Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I came to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and the faithful, more than a thousand of them, packed Christ the Saviour Cathedral for this once-in-a-lifetime religious experience. Among them was a local family with a severely disabled son. The youth, his body contorted by cerebral palsy, appeared to be a teenager but at twenty was really more a young man. He sat in a wheelchair, his body jerking uncontrollably. Saliva dripped down his jaw, and family members took turns wiping it away. As did everybody, the family stayed in place for hours in advance of the late-arriving patriarch, who was wrapping up a long tour across the United States.
A history of devastating floods has brought Johnstown a measure of notoriety. But Orthodox Christians are familiar with Johnstown for a more gratifying reason; it has one of the most devout and varied Orthodox communities of any small American city. In the mid-twentieth century, immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Balkans flocked to the town, founded more than a century earlier by Joseph Johns, to work in the area’s then-thriving steel mills and coal mines. They brought with them the multiple ethnic strains of Orthodoxy that had nurtured their ancestors for centuries.
Even today, Johnstown remains tied to its ethnic religious roots and is still home to seven Orthodox churches, serving some fifteen hundred congregants out of the town’s total population of about twenty thousand. There is one Greek, two Serbian, one Ukrainian, one Russian, one Antiochian, and one Carpatho-Russian congregation. Christ the Saviour Cathedral—with its tan-and-brown brick exterior and three cupolas, the onion domes that give Orthodox churches their distinctiveness—is Carpatho-Russian, and it is the mother church of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese of the USA.
The temperature that night was below freezing, and a light snow fell. But it was stifling inside the cathedral. Its walls, ceiling, and icon screen that divided the congregation from the altar were resplendently covered with the Byzantine-style paintings of Jesus, Mary, and the saints so venerated by Orthodoxy’s theology of the image. The young man and his family sat in the first row of the nave, placed there to make it easy for the patriarch to bestow his blessings upon them. I had been traveling with the patriarch as a reporter, a non-Christian observer trying to make sense of a tradition I knew little about. Johnstown began for me as just one more stop in the patriarch’s overcrowded schedule, an evening that would warrant no more than a paragraph or two in the wrap-up story on his trip I was to file the next day.
I made my way to the front of the church to await Bartholomew as well, and as I did I noticed the wheelchair-bound youth and his family. The father wept openly, and his body language spoke of the burden he must carry with him every day of his life. At first the father’s pain was my entire focus, and I imagined how I would feel if I were in his place. Then my attention shifted to an appreciation of the lavish communal and spiritual support the family received from the congregation and its patriarch. Later I learned that the father was not Orthodox. He was Protestant and had married into the Orthodox embrace. But his religious identity did not prevent him from reaching out for divine help in whatever form it presented itself.
The patriarch eventually showed up, and after concluding the doxology, or noneucharistic prayer service, he moved toward the youth. Bartholomew—believed by the Orthodox to be the 270th successor in an unbroken line to the apostle Andrew, and looking every bit the part with his gold crown, long white beard, and red-and-white outer vestments—placed his hands upon the young man’s head and briefly stroked it, as the father wept even more. Tears also began to flow from the other family members, as fellow congregants seated nearby touched and hugged them in an outpouring of compassion and understanding. I cried as well. So much for maintaining a professional demeanor.
I remember noticing what looked to be a smile on the youth’s face, but whether it was in fact a smile I could not tell. I do know that I found the experience spiritually meaningful in an extraordinary way. I have since come to understand that the night in Johnstown—its mingling of millennia-old tradition, its universal themes of human frailty and otherworldly longing, the crossing of once rigid sectarian barriers—also spoke volumes about religion and spirituality in the twentieth century.
Pope John Paul II called the twentieth century the most violent in history, and surely it would be tough to counter that assessment. But the hundred-year period was also a time of remarkable material progress that, to varying degrees certainly, benefited much of the world’s population. Dramatic technological advances lowered the barriers of time and distance, allowing events and ideas that reflected both the best and the worst of humanity to become global experiences.
The realm of the spirit was no less transformed. Time is a continuum, of course, and in many ways the twentieth century was a mere continuation of events and processes that can be traced back hundreds of years, to the Enlightenment and the philosophical, social, and economic changes that flowed from it, and even further into the recesses of human history. Yet the implications of the changes unfolding over time seemed to come together more quickly in the twentieth century than ever before.
Suddenly, it seemed, religions and their underlying spiritual philosophies were free to break their cultural constraints, giving rise to unprecedented interfaith exchanges. Secularism and consumerism became dominant traits of Western culture, leaving traditional faiths scrambling to adjust and in danger of being left behind. Eastern forms moved westward to fill the resulting spiritual voids, even as Western culture spread eastward to undermine the very same Eastern ideologies being embraced half a world away. New religious movements developed; some were the offspring of established faiths, some were the freeform creations of charismatic individuals, and some represented the reemergence of paths long neglected. The atmosphere of greater freedom, greater choice, and greater openness led to the Second Vatican Council, the ordination of women in many Protestant denominations and within Judaism, and the involvement of religious leaders in political and social liberation movements in the United States and elsewhere.
By the end of a century that endured fascism, communism, the threat of atomic annihilation, and the excesses of capitalism, the world seemed in need of spiritual succor, and religious revival blossomed. In the West, studies repeatedly stressed that the so-called baby-boomer generation was engaged in a frenetic search for a faith to call home. New Age and exotic Eastern faiths were sampled widely and incorporated into the spiritual worldviews of many. More and more young people, particularly in urban areas, abandoned family religious ties for new ones of their own choosing.
Traditional faith was, for a time, relegated by some to the dustbin of history. Witness the now ludicrous-seeming mid-1960s Time magazine cover that arrogantly asked, “Is God Dead?” Not only is God or, more precisely, faith in God alive and well, but traditional religion and its pious spirituality seemed the most robust of faiths at the century’s conclusion, even as bitter and sometimes violent disputes raged over whose definition of God should prevail. Conservative Evangelical and Pentecostal churches grew faster than their liberal kin in the West as well as in Latin America and Christian areas of Africa. Traditional interpretations also came to dominate in Hindu India and across the Islamic world. The end of the twentieth century saw the human desire for understanding of its place in the world as unquenchable as ever, if not even more confusing.
What, then, is a “spiritual innovator” in an age of nonstop transformation? Let’s begin by trying to define spiritual. We can start by opening a dictionary or two. There you will find references to sensitivity or attachment to religious values, or the quality or state of being spiritual, or an encounter with transcendent reality—dry definitions that fail to impart the sense of poetic mystery associated with the true spiritual state. I think the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber probably came closer. Spirituality, he said, is recognizable in those “moments of silent depth in which you look upon the world-order fully present.”
But what if you have never recognized such a moment? Perhaps it is easier to understand the sublime by turning to an example from the profane. In the American political debate over what constitutes hard-core pornography, the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart commented that even if he could not define the offending material, “I know it when I see it.” What cannot be articulated is readily apparent to the eye. The same may be said for spirituality, as opposite an experience to pornography as there is. Using words to describe spirituality is ultimately as dissatisfying as looking at a map to understand the grandeur of California’s Big Sur coast or Nepal’s Mount Everest; all it can do is point the way. Spirituality, then, is about an inner feeling of connection, no matter how brief, with the mystery of creation—that Higher Power spoken of in Alcoholics Anonymous and understood so very differently by Buddhist, Muslim, and tribal shaman.
Defining the term innovator is far easier. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines it thus: “to introduce as or as if new … to make changes, do something in a new way.” And a spiritual innovator? Sure he or she introduces or does something in a new way within the realm of ultimate truth. But, here again, words do not convey the important quality that elevates an individual to the level of true spiritual innovator. The noted American journalist Garry Wills put his finger on that quality in writing about Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker community. She was the sort of inspirational leader, said Wills, “who makes you say, after meeting them, ‘I’ve got to be better than I am.’”
Seventy-five such individuals are profiled in this book. Why seventy-five? Because it is a number large enough to provide a broad sweep of the century’s diverse spiritual innovators, yet small enough to force us to limit this volume to those whose contributions, at this stage, appear the most far-reaching. Our choices were made with the help of experts from different traditions, and we sought to be inclusive of varying and sometimes conflicting viewpoints, and to include representative figures from around the world. Militant atheists are included with devout monotheists, strict sectarians as well as universalists, overt proselytizers and those who preferred quiet witness, some with saintly personalities and others critics might dismiss as charlatans or as having political agendas. Still, we recognize that not everyone will agree with our choices. Frankly, that is the nature of spiritual questions: one person’s heaven is another’s hell. But we make no claim to omniscience, and any oversights are our responsibility.
We also recognize that innovations come in many forms, and in response we sought to categorize those profiled according to their primary contributions. This classification is obviously inexact. The very nature of innovation seems to defy clear categorization. Moreover, the century’s advances in communications and travel further blurred the lines that divide. How else can you explain the Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhist monk and pop culture phenomenon at the same time?
It is appropriate, then, to open this book with a chapter titled “They Shook Things Up.” If nothing else, the spiritual status quo was unrelentingly challenged during the twentieth century. It is equally appropriate to end the book with a chapter titled “They Spoke from the Power of Silence,” for silence, say the mystics, is at the core of spiritual transformation. In between, we profile those who died or otherwise suffered greatly for their spirituality and in doing so profoundly affected the world around them; and those who became larger-than-life figures in the way that only the twentieth century’s enveloping mass media could make them. We also devote chapters to innovators whose main contributions were their extraordinary intellects, and to those whose writings on spirituality seized the intellects of readers. Additional chapters focus on individuals who turned their inner convictions into mass public demonstrations of love for others, and those who were able to see beyond sectarian visions by fostering common understandings.
Regardless of their contributions, the innovators profiled here affected the world in a grand manner. For the rest of us, the inner process unfolds in a less dramatic fashion, moments of insight that build, often imperceptibly, on those that came before. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was one such moment for me. A glimpse of the spirituality inherent in a religious tradition I had previously regarded as exotic, and even threatening to my own, unexpectedly but incrementally altered my worldview. And is that not spiritual innovation in its most basic and common form?
A cautionary note: This book is meant as an introduction. Our goal is to inspire readers and motivate them to seek out more information on those spiritual innovators to whom they feel drawn. But nothing here is meant to be a substitute for spiritual experience. That, as the term implies, can only be gained experientially. The only way to truly glimpse the understandings that motivated this book’s collection of spiritual innovators to act as they did is to seek out the experiences that shaped who they became. Step into the emptiness of the holy of holies for yourself.