First, I’d like to share some background to this post. This post arose reflection on the following quote from Leonard Sweet:
“Let me say first of all that for me, New Age rhymes with sewage. I have such a low threshold for Gaia worship that in the middle of the movie “Avatar” I had to take a break, so severe was my attack of Gaiarrhea. In fact, I have challenged “new age sensibilities” (which now are known as “integral spirituality” or “Enlightenment,” not “New Age”) for the way in which they goddify the self and expect others to orbit in a Youniverse that revolves around them as if they were a god.
“The Secret” of the universe is not that you can have life your way. “The Secret” is that Jesus is The Way (Colossians 3). Jesus did not come to make us divine. Jesus came to show us how to be authentically what God made us to be–human. Because of the culture in which we live, I have encouraged the daily ritual of starting the day by standing in front of a mirror and saying: “God is God and I am not.”
My first impression of this quote is a rather polemic / hostile take towards people who engage in New Age practices or indeed
New Age religion in and of itself. And indeed after a day of reflection, it still seems to have an especially critical (in a non-constructive way) tone. As I reflected today, I find myself not so much annoyed by the quote as the sentiment and attitude that it represents within the Christian church, that is an attitude of superiority and supremacy, perhaps even hints of a Doctrine of Discovery with respect to the spiritual and religious landscape of the world. These are the thoughts that I want to explore in this post.
Let me first share a little bit about me. I am part of the institutional religious community, well, actually two: Episcopal / Anglican Christianity and Vajrayana Buddhism. Both are very institutional, and in many ways hierarchical religious traditions. I’ve dabbled in the New Age, and have had lots of opportunities to engage it in many forms throughout the years. I’ve studied Reiki, Crystals, Ascension / Ascended Masters, Esoteric Healing (in the tradition of Alice Bailey), as well as some precursor literature including Rosicrucianism, Yogananda, Helena Blavatsky’s almost incomprehensible tomes on Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner’s spin-off called Anthroposophy and more. I am not sharing this to “toot my own horn”, or to burnish my credentials. However, I am sharing this as someone who has engaged this tradition, in many deep ways.
New Age is not for me, and I’m definitely not a fan. To me it represents a spirituality that is (and here I do agree with Leonard Sweet), quite self-centered in its approach. It is also a spirituality, that I feel, in the end does nothing to alleviate suffering in the longer term (whether you believe that as an eternal period after this lifetime, or whether you believe in reincarnation, I leave up to you), it is a spiritual tradition that focuses on now, and “fixing” one’s self so that one can be “spiritual fit”.
In this reflection I want to focus on three things: the first is a little bit of a digression, and is an exploration of how New Age fills a need in the lives of those who engage in the practice; the second is a deeper reflection on our attitudes as followers of established, ancient, religious traditions whose histories span millennia, towards those who follow the New Age movement, and correlating this to our attitudes towards the different; third and finally, is a reflection on our contact and communication with those who practice New Age, and how we might relate, communicate, and perhaps share our own religious traditions and plant the seeds of transformation.
Understanding the Niche of New Age and Differentiating it From Mainstream Religion / Spirituality
New Age was in the beginning, a uniquely American phenomenon. The beginnings of New Age can be traced to perhaps the early 1980s, just after the Eastern spiritual boom of the 1960s and 70s that brought to us many Buddhist and Hindu spiritual teachers. It is very important to make a key distinct between New Age and the Buddhist / Hindu spiritual organizations that formed in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the Buddhist and Hindu organizations formed in this era still exist today and have a strong base of dedicated, disciplined members who have engaged in their spiritual practice in the same tradition for 40 or 50 years (many of them face similar issues to Mainline denominations, but that’s for a separate blogpost).
New Age on the other hand developed in the late 1970s and 1980s and is a tradition that is highly unstructured, and is indeed, one of the side-effects of the American “pioneer spirit”. New Age practitioners are just about as diverse as any religious tradition can get. Ranging from polytheists to deists, and from those who believe in fairy dust to those who believe that spiritual growth is a scientifically measurable and understandable thing, and any combination thereof. There are vary diverse streams of practice and understandings, sometimes, even practices that utilize systems that seem to be very contradictory. To characterize New Age believers as “followers” seems to be a bit of an odd oxymoron. With a few exceptions, New Age practitioners cobble together various pieces to create a web of techniques and practices that suit them. They may include any variety of things.
This is very confusing to many of us who find a home in one of the great religions of the world. In the various great religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, there is some semblance of a system that we adhere to. Some semblance of common vocabulary, common liturgy, and common notions that create our religious and spiritual experience. In New Age, this cannot be counted on. Although, in many ways, I see this as an analogy to the experience that one might have when encountering an indigenous religion for the first time, especially one that is not so corrupted by Western colonial influences. I imagine encountering the religion of one of the Amazon tribes that have not yet been encountered. To us, whose religions have been institutionalized, written down, codified, and described in painstaking detail, their religious practices might be utter and complete gibberish. Much in the same way, when we encounter someone who engages in New Age practices, we might encounter contradiction, confusing language, odd ritual, and more that does not resonate with us.
There are two things that I think are offered to the New Age practitioner that is either consciously or subconsciously a draw: acceptance, and control. In the narrative of the New Age practitioner, we will commonly encounter a story of a quiet withdrawal from established Christianity, or perhaps a story of someone who never quite fit in, who could never find a home in one of the major established religious communities. The New Age offers that person total and complete welcome, and acceptance. If that person’s path is to do Shamanic drumming and mix it with a little Alice Bailey, that’s cool. Or that person’s path is to use crystals, dowsing, and applying knowledge gleaned from a weekend seminar taught by Deepak Chopra, ok. Though, to be sure, there are organizational loyalties among New Age practitioners (to one teacher, or center or another), it is a path that deeply respects each individual person’s path. Secondly, the New Age practitioner also has complete control over what he or she wishes to believe, or not, what practices he or she wants to engage in or not, and so on. This is a natural complement to our consumer culture, which value specificity and control. In a land where one can indeed order a Venti light ice extra soy four shot two-pumps classic three-pumps hazelnut hazelnut one-pump chocolate two Splenda, two sweet-and-low, decaf Latte in a Trenta cup and demand assurances that said drink is gluten and fat free and receive such assurances (and no, this is NOT an exaggeration of how complicated a Starbucks order can be), it shouldn’t be surprising that a New Age practitioner has created a religion in which he or she can quite literally pick and choose the pieces that he or she wants to install in his or her religious landscape. To put a finer point on this, New Age fulfills many needs, which are not being filled by conventional, mainstream religions.
Also, this pieced-together religious experience, should not be confused with the practice of a more mainstream, disciplined religious or spiritual tradition. Leonard Sweet professes illness when hearing about Gaia worship. However, this should not be confused with Neopaganism, which in its own right is a spiritual tradition that is resurrecting the remnants of ancient spiritual practices from the ashes, reviving perhaps what was a more tribal approach to religion than what they encounter in the established religious traditions that already are on our landscape. It does a great disservice to the dialogue with New Age practitioners to equate them with something they are not. But, in the end, it isn’t really that easy to create a distinction between someone who is a New Age practitioner and someone who is a Christian or a Buddhist or whatever. New Age is such a flexible tradition, that if a Christian were to want to use crystals, or to engage in “Gaia worship”, there is a place for them. Is it really possible to distinguish New Age from mainstream, traditional religious practice? Maybe not.
Examining Our Attitude Towards the New Age
My mom tells me a story of meeting someone in Indonesia who described New Agers as people who worshipped chandeliers. This is a funny anecdote, but it is reflective towards our attitude towards those who practice New Age. Leonard Sweet’s quote above is another example of this attitude. It is an attitude of dismissiveness, disdain, and at least in Leonard Sweet’s case, disgust. This prompts us to examine our attitude a little bit more deeply. Jesus called us to “love one another as I have loved you”. How are we doing that here?
This is a really hard question. Because in American Christianity at least, we’ve characterized loving others as being mean. If we really loved them, we would evangelize them and get them to follow Jesus so they could be saved. If we really loved that gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender person, we would tell them that they are not living how God would want them to live and that they should change. In the mainline liberal churches, it’s not quite this explicit in many cases, but it’s close.
Is this in fact love? Not that a New Age practitioner would be reading Leonard Sweet (though one never knows), but how would that person feel about this quote? To re-work this quote:
“Let me say first of all that for me, Christianity rhymes with insanity. I have such a low threshold for Christ worship that in the middle of the movie “Sister Act” I had to take a break, so severe was my attack of Christarrhea. In fact, I have challenged “Christian sensibilities” (which now are known as “Christ-following”, not “Christianity”) for the way in which they goddify this guy and expect others to orbit in a Christ-a-verse that revolves around Christ as if he were a god.”
How did that make you as a Christian feel? Did it make you feel good? Did it make you feel that the person saying that really cared about you? I don’t think it did. However, we as Christians do this to people of other religious traditions ALL the time, whether we think we do it or not. We do this to people who don’t fit the box that we want them to fit in.
One of the attitudes that Christianity needs to fix is the attitude of intellectual supremacism. We need to get off the holy mountain where we look down on the downtrodden, spiritually inept idiots that worship Gaia and crystals, or those poor idiots that don’t believe in the Awesome God we believe in. Do we genuinely understand the New Age practitioner, have we engaged them, have we known them? Have we in fact seen Christ in them? It’s one thing to criticize a spiritual path in a constructive way based on one’s appearance and observation. It’s quite another thing to scapegoat it for all the ills of our consumer culture, by saying that anything you perceive to be New Age produces a visceral, physical reaction of disgust. 
I’m not saying that Christians should give up faith, or believing that their tradition is powerful and can act as an agent of transformation in everyone’s lives. What I am saying is to take that belief, that deep personal faith and spirituality and turn it into an attitude of pride, haughtiness or of self-righteousness (even subtly) is wrong. Proclaiming that you have THE definitive answer and THE ONLY truth, is a good indication that you don’t actually have it.
Although New Age is not for me, and I do have concerns about the spirituality and what it does for people, I do recognize that it fulfills a vital need for a connection to something deeper, something more “real”, something more “true” for many people. I also have a deep respect for those who in the New Age tradition have become teachers, and who have a following and who genuinely care for their students. It is a tradition that provides solace, comfort and safety to many people, and I’m not about to rain on their parade.
But this discussion doesn’t just apply to New Age. It applies to how we as Christians encounter and meet the Other, who is different from us. I admit, I have a lot to work on here. But, as a Christian, what is demanded of me when I encounter the other? Is it indeed the call of the faith for me to come up with an acerbic, witty quote to dissuade my conversation partner from a tradition or practice that clearly is of some benefit to them as a person? Is it to point out all the faults and holes in their tradition? Or is it instead to encounter them as they are, where they are, to listen deeply, to be present to them? What is it?
As we enter a pluralistic age where we encounter a variety of religious / spiritual backgrounds, racial and ethnic identities, socioeconomic standings, sexual orientations, gender identities, are we as a Church mentally and spiritually prepared for an encounter with those who are different? If we are to welcome the different, to love them, to accept them, looking down on them is not the place to start.
Re-Envisioning the Evangelistic Dialogue
So, if we are going to be Christians that call on the name of Jesus, and identify Jesus as the motivation for our work, and spread the “good news”, what is the “good news” that we have to spread to someone who is a New Age practitioner? Is that “good news” that they are wrong, and that we have the right answer? Is the “good news” what they consider to be their religious practice causes in us a severe bout of “Gaiarrhea”? I would hope not.
Right now, the way that I see the Church, we offer to people membership in the “right clique” where one can network with the “right people”, and that membership in the “right clique” means that one is “right with God”. The Church is no longer in a place where it can rely on “brand recognition” and “brand admiration” as an enticement to membership, nor can it rely on its own intellectual prowess in debate as its way to convince the masses.
The fact of the matter is that non-Christians don’t really need Jesus anymore, in their minds. Many non-Christians and ex-Christians in our current landscape have suffered near mortal spiritual wounds at the hands of people purporting to represent the Church and the mind of God. Why would anyone in their right mind want to come back to psychological torment and torture? How are we differentiating ourselves from that? Snide comments about someone’s spiritual practice do a bad job of differentiating us from the very Christians we proclaim to not be.
If indeed, the Christian spiritual tradition is alive, then it should be able to respond and adapt to this moment in history. We as Christians need to shift our paradigm in dialogue with those who have not yet met Christ, or who for whatever reason have been estranged from the Church. We don’t need to estrange them further. They are already gone, nor do they have any motivation to darken the doorsteps of our churches ever again at this point.
How are we going to do shift our paradigms to welcome the different, to be in community with them, all the while maintaining integrity to our spiritual inheritance? If we do not answer this question in a meaningful and intentional way, we will find that a dying church will soon be dead, fading into the mists of time.
As far as I remember, Jesus isn’t dead. He established a living church, that was established in perpetuity on the foundation of his apostles. So are we going to be that living church? Are we going to carry to Good News into the future by creating loving community for all people? Or are we merely going to be an artifact of the 20th century to be dug up by archaeologists in a millennia or so?
Phos Zoe 