It might surprise you all to learn that I was not raised in any particular church or spiritual tradition.
My father had been brought up as a Quaker, and caused a family rift when he left the church as a young adult. I suspect it was less about Quaker piety and silence, but rather more about rejecting his overbearing mother's influence. My mother was raised a Southern Baptist, but left her church when she moved away to her first nursing job and found the congregation in her new town unwelcoming. She dropped active church membership when she married my father.
My minimal exposure to traditional American religion was mainly through courtesy church attendance when we visited my mother's relatives half-way across the country. Two of her many brothers were preachers, which pretty much made church attendance mandatory if we were guests. One of the brothers was a minister in a rather liberal denomination, and the other was ordained in a super-fundamentalist Baptist offshoot (his family didn't even have a TV). I was told that family reunions could get quite lively when the two brothers started arguing doctrine. My Mid-western relatives (including my parents) would have fitted right into Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon.
My parents found a semi-spiritual outlet through the Rosicrucian Order (AMORC). Maybe you remember those ads in the back pages of popular magazines headlined "What Secret Power Did They Possess?" That's them. The Rosicrucians are not a church. They are actually more of a social organization somewhat like the Masons, except that men and women mix freely rather than having separate lodges. They have strong moral and ethical teachings, largely Judeo-Christian based, and belief in a higher power. The Rosicrucians are open to exploring the teachings of all religions, and welcome members of any faith. I remember that the local group included a Parsi family from India. The Rosicrucians also dabbled in flying saucers and other off-beat topics, but hey, this was the 1950s.
The Rosicrucians' schtick is ancient Egypt. Their headquarters in San Jose, California, is a fascinating "Karnak Disneyland" of lotus-columned buildings, papyrus gardens, and murals of Egyptian pharaohs careening about in chariots. It also includes a really fine Egyptian museum with real mummies and other cool stuff which to a ten year-old were simply amazing.
A mural from AMORC'S headquarters in Rosicrucian Park, San Jose, California.
In those days AMORC members received the Order's teachings through regular printed lessons called "monographs". (I don't know how they disseminate their teaching now, but I wouldn't be surprised if the monographs are sent electronically.) My parents tried to get me involved in the Order's youth program, the Junior Torch-bearers, by subscribing to their special monographs for youngsters. I read a few of the Torch-bearer monographs, but found them uninteresting. Since I am mildly ADHD, I had a hard time staying in focus with the material, and just stacked them up unread (I did the same thing with Boys Life, the scouting journal, later replaced in my teenage years by largely unread Playboy magazines -- I did look at the pictures). For several years my parents produced the local Rosicrucian group's monthly newsletter on a messy hand-cranked mimeograph machine kept at our home. The closest I came to involvement in the order was being drafted to turn the crank.
Everything changed when I was about 17. One day I noticed several digest-sized magazines called Vedanta and the West on my mother's bookshelf. These magazines were published by the Vedanta Society of Southern California, a religious organization associated with the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in India. Sri Ramakrishna was a 19th century Bengali mystic. Upon his death in 1886, some of his disciples renounced the world and became monks. Their leader was Swami Vivekenanda, the first Hindu guru of note to teach in America. He arrived as an independent delegate to the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, and took the event by storm with his forceful personality and excellent lectures (to the annoyance of the official Indian delegates, whose own lectures had disappointingly low attendance). Swami Vivekenanda went on to found meditation groups across the United States until his early death in 1902. I didn't know this background stuff then, but I was dealing with a case of spiritual dynamite, and the fuse had just been lit. There will be more about Ramakrishna and his disciples in later chapters of this story.
The first article I read was a transcribed lecture by Swami Vivekenanda called "Fun". In simple terms, his teaching described God as the universal soul or Atman-Brahman, a deity that is not only the source of all creation, but who IS creation itself. He/She is engaged in a great lila (creative sport), a sort of play in which God is author, director and all the characters.
I was completely floored by this concept. My ideas about God had been formed from popular culture featuring an angry Old Testament deity (think of the movie The Ten Commandments). I had never been comfortable with the concept of God as a huge bearded figure on a throne reading from a book recording all our sins, and ready pull the lever on a trap door sending us down to eternal damnation if we didn't measure up. Or maybe it was St. Peter at the Pearly Gates doing the dirty work, as you so often see in cartoons.
Even though I didn't have the background yet to appreciate all the articles in Vedanta and the West, I devoured all six issues and took them with me to college the next year. My mother never missed the magazines, and when I later told her I had them she said I could keep them. And keep them I did. They are still on my own spiritual bookshelf, joined by two more issues I stumbled upon over the years. Sadly the magazine long ago ceased publication.
