• HARRIET TUBMAN
Growing up in a white town in Ohio, Jennifer Bailey—Reverend Jen, as she is known today—first felt the heat of racism when she was five. As she was jumping off a slide in a park, a classmate asked: Why is your face dirty? She ran into Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and felt embraced in the quiet of that space. Years later in the same church, she would hear Sister Oliver play on the organ and feel that cashmere blanket of sacred sound. In these experiences, she awakened to a big idea:
I am beloved in the eyes of God.
In her teens, Bailey served the impoverished and unhoused. At divinity school she found inspiration in scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr, but felt agitated to transform Christianity into a more inclusive and diverse faith. Today her organization, Faith Matters Network, engages thousands on questions of spirit, faith, the soul, and the Divine. She ministers in skinny jeans, quoting Beyoncé alongside the Bible and other sacred texts.
We speak on the phone during a fraught time: she is pregnant as COVID-19 is just overwhelming New York, proving particularly deadly to people of color. At the beginning of our conversation, Reverend Jen takes stock of spiritual tendencies today. The numbers of the religiously unaffiliated are rising, in particular among people in their thirties, like her. They don’t attend church regularly, follow a single dogma, or identify with one religion or another. It is an era of rising religious homelessness. At the same time, people today are deeply spiritual. This has been the case since humans began being humans, for relating to the Divine is a deep human universal. Two-thirds of young people in the United States, and 90 percent of all Americans, believe in the Divine, that some kind of spirit, or vast force, animates the course of their lives, and that there is a soul that persists beyond the life of the body.
When I ask Reverend Jen where she finds mystical awe, her answer comes easily: the strength and courage of African American women. Her grandmothers fled the terrorism, lynchings, and segregated spaces of the Jim Crow South of the 1950s. Her mother, raised in Chicago, was a student in the first integrated high school class of the 1960s. In thinking about these women, Reverend Jen slows. She cites how the trauma of racism is passed from one generation to the next in the damage it inflicts upon the cells of our bodies. She expresses reverence for how African American women from the past and present overcome. They do so, she says, in spirit. Spirit they find in the kitchen. In telling stories, laughing, singing, and dancing. And in church. There, in soulful community, they “make a way out of no way,” as one of her grandmothers liked to say.
It was faith that sustained these women. Faith in God. In love. In justice. In hope. She feels this spirit today at spoken word events, in coffeeshops, at improv shows, in music, and at the dinner table. And most recently, at the “die-ins” she has led to call attention to police brutality. She feels guided by spirit, as Harriet Tubman did leading slaves to their freedom.
As Reverend Jen’s story of awe makes its way to the present, she pauses. After a brief silence, she reflects: “I guess I am composting religion.”
For thousands of years we have relied on nature metaphors to describe mystical awe, the feelings of encountering what we call the Divine, what we feel to be primary, true, good, and omnipresent. In some Indigenous traditions, Hinduism, and Taoism, for example, images and metaphors of the sun, sky, light, fire, rivers, oceans, mountains, and valleys are invoked to explain the Divine. Here is Lao Tzu describing Tao, the vital life force, or “way”:
Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefitting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way.
Reverend Jen’s metaphor of “composting religion” may feel particular to our twenty-first century of organic farms, urban gardens, plant-based diets, and farmers markets. Composting, though, is thousands of years old. When we compost, we gather raw materials—food scraps, grasses, leaves, animal manure—and let them decay in a place of storage. Over time, microorganisms, bacteria, fungi, and worms break down the raw materials, consuming what is toxic and distilling a humus, an amorphous, sweet-smelling, jellylike black mixture of plant, animal, and microbial origin. The nitrogen of humus is absorbed by the roots of plants, nourishing life.
Reverend Jen’s composting metaphor suggests that mystical awe follows a pattern of decay, distilling, and growth. This would seem to fit her own life story, of breaking down the sexist and colonialist strains of Christianity, distilling a spirit she found in the faith of African American women, and growing mystical feeling with others in her ministry. Perhaps our own experiences of mystical awe, or spiritual experience, if you like, follow this pattern of the decay of the default self’s preconceptions about the world, which results in the distilling of some essential feeling that gives rise to the growth of our own spiritual beliefs and practices. Perhaps the 4,200 religions active today are doing much the same, transforming in a process of decaying, distilling, and growing as cultures and humans evolve.
Spiritual Humus
When Malcolm Clemens Young was in sixth grade, he and his classmates traveled to Ashland, Oregon, to attend a few Shakespeare plays. At night, they camped. At four o’clock one morning, Malcolm awoke and wandered outside his tent. In the quiet of this moment, he was awestruck by the patterns of moonlight on a nearby lake. In recalling this event, Malcolm told me what he wondered about in that moment of natural awe: “What could create such beauty?” A beauty that he could “feel at any time.” It felt like an “extraordinary gift from God.”
In his teens, Malcolm read the Bhagavad Gita, the Sutras of Buddhism, Thoreau and Emerson, and the Bible many times. After graduating from college, he had an unfulfilling stint as a financial consultant, so he enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. There, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he tells me, he lived a few houses away from where Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his historic Harvard Divinity School address on July 15, 1838. To only a handful of faculty members assembled, Emerson exhorted people to let religious dogma decay and go in search of their own distilled experiences of mystical awe:
The perception of this law of laws [for Emerson, that a benevolent life force unifies all living forms] awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that the Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.
For Emerson, mystical awe is intertwined with nature—mountain air, the scent of rosemary, hills, the song of stars. It heals like myrrh (a resin extracted from trees used as incense and medicine). It is the provenance of virtue, more so than cold thought or science. It is a pathway to our highest happiness—of feeling integrated into something larger than the self.
Malcolm would make his way to becoming dean of Grace Cathedral, which sits augustly atop Russian Hill in San Francisco. Over lunch, I ask Malcolm about his earliest experiences of awe, hoping to catch a glimpse of a spiritually inspired child and hear of visions, perhaps, or callings, or premonitions in dreams of a young mystic. After describing his experience by the lake, he smiles broadly and tells me about . . . the first time he dunked in a pickup basketball game.