Brad and I just finished watching Bill Moyers’ multi-part interview with the late professor of religion, Huston Smith (1919-2016). If you haven’t seen it yet, we highly recommend diving right in.
Called “The Wisdom of Faith” and filmed in 1996, the series provides an inspiring overview of the world’s “major” religions, corresponding to Smith’s widely read book on the subject. But the main reason to watch is to absorb Smith’s heartfelt appreciation for all the myriad ways that human beings conceive of and foster relationship with the sacred. His passion for religion is contagious, his smile genuine. If you have not yet fallen in love with holiness in all its forms and expressions, then have a little talk with Huston and he’ll help you drop those lingering fences and defenses.
Lucky for Brad, he attended Smith’s religion class when he was an undergraduate at M.I.T.. One of the things Brad appreciated most about him was his integrity. Even with his wealth of knowledge and commitment to the daily practice of multiple traditions (yoga, Zen meditation, Islamic prayers, Christian prayer, etc.), Smith never laid claim to any experience he didn’t have. And he spoke honestly about grappling with ideas that were still beyond his reach. This helped create the climate of earnest curiosity and openness to other traditions for which his classes were known. Huston Smith kept it real—arguably the most important prerequisite for growing a spiritual life.
During the whole semester that Brad sat in Smith’s classroom, he never once told him that just a year or so prior at the age of 19 he experienced a rare and powerful mystical illumination that profoundly rewired his whole being.
After spending several delightful evenings with his former professor last week, Brad and I thought we might as well tell him now.
So, we wrote him a letter.
Dear Professor Smith,
Thank you for the life you lived as a tracker of divine truths, champion of diverse wisdom, and seeker of common ground. Many years ago, Brad had an experience that we think would touch your heart and delight your spiritual imagination:
On a January afternoon in 1971, I took a walk and was unexpectedly filled with extreme exhilaration. I felt guided to a small chapel built of stone where I entered and sat on the front pew. I immediately knew this was the beginning of the most important experience of my life.
The curtain that separates intimate closeness with infinite divinity opened to reveal an indescribable glory. As this took place, a concentrated, pulsing fireball of energy gathered at the base of my spine and began its holy climb with a steady advance, like molten lava flowing upwards. The liquid fire rose and radiated a blazing emotion that broke my heart wide open. My body trembled, quaked, and shook with a force I had never known possible.
Steadily and assuredly the inner ball of fire advanced until it finally reached the crown of my head and came out in front of me as an external white light. It took the shape of a luminous egg that was about my height, close to the front pew on which I sat. I stared into this numinous luminosity and, transfixed by sacred emotion, I saw a figure standing with open arms.
Jesus opened his robe that evening and said: “All of this I hold inside my robe. They belong to the Kingdom of God.” I then saw a multisensory, multidimensional presentation of saints, mystics, and spiritual teachers, one after another. In this parade of holy ones, their shining eyes sent more electrical current into my heart. There appeared the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the disciples, and what seemed like an introduction to the major icons of religion and sacred traditions: Black Elk, Buddha, Muhammad, Krishna . . . it seemed to never end. While I recognized many of the divine teachers that appeared, others I would not meet until later in my life. . .1
Like you, Professor Smith, eventually God sent Brad around the world to meet healers and teachers from many spiritual traditions. Whereas your mission was to open the curtain on the world’s major religions and bring them to a wider audience, Brad was led to those who lived on the outskirts and to traditions few people knew much about.
But like you, no matter where he went Brad found that the same divine fire burns inside the hearts of all those who tend its tender flame.
You were raised by missionary parents in China and then later became a Methodist minister. Yet according to you, it was Swami Satprakashananda’s talk on Jesus given at your local Vedanta Society that fed your soul more than any sermon you had heard to date. You would later write, “God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.”
We both share your love for the vast fabric of wisdom traditions woven of many threads of light. This fabric is the same luminous robe that appeared in Brad’s vision. Our work now is to keep weaving, never forgetting what you also knew: only in perceiving and honoring difference can we awaken to the pattern that connects and lends the fabric its beauty.
As the Buddhists chant: Vast is the robe of liberation, a formless field of benefaction. . . Let us re-enter that robe of light right now. We dedicate this prayer to you:
Dear Lord, please help us never stop seeking shelter under your luminous cloak and re-entering your big room of mystery—the home of extreme love, playground of grand joys, theatre of earth-shaking laughter, and crucible of creation where all the ways and means of reaching you are free to keep changing and cross-pollinating.
Here Persian sages deliver poems that reignite the sacred heart as Islamic kalam, divine speech, meets word souls voiced by Guarani shamans. Both point to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life that now holds Bushman holy firewater ready to quench the thirst of a Buddhist monk sitting in a lonely cave wanting to take a stand and march with the saints in a New Orleans second line parade. In the midst of this second-coming outbreak of the St. Vitus dance, another Kalahari healer is pierced with an arrow dipped in wine from the cup held by Jesus during his last supper under the Big Dipper.
Open our hearts ever wider so that we may receive a drink from that celestial ladle the day it finally tips toward this love-thirsty planet.
Lift our eyes to the stars that have born witness to every prayer, every song, every laugh, every war, and every droning pious bore who came unplugged from your electricity but was at least trying to point the way back to you.
Like a Zulu sangoma, open our ears to the eternal cacophony of joy and suffering, remembering that the only way to be an able vessel for your work is to feel the heartbreak and exhilaration of being inseparable from everything.
Take hold of all our senses so that we may see, hear, smell, taste, and feel your never-ending divine movement! Help us come alive inside your whirling Ouroborean serpent where every moment is always the first spin of creation. We yield to your impossible-to-freeze truth as we honor, celebrate, and love divinity and all its holy names.
Teach us to sing more than we speak. But if speech must come, may it arrive fresh from your oven like this slice of holy bread from Sufi mystic, Ibn Arabi:
O marvel! A garden amidst the flames! My heart has become capable of every form. It is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, and a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba, the Tables of the Tora and the book of the Quran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.
In other words, throw us anywhere, Lord! To a prayer meeting on Wednesday, a sweat lodge on Friday, and a kirtan on Sunday. Ready us to move on the seiki bench, rock with the rabbis, sing with the shamans, paint with the folk artists, whirl with the dervishes, and get swept by a Zen koan, all the while singing Fats Waller’s verse, “Ain’t nobody’s business if I do” as long as we are led by you rather than a fleeting preference for something new.
Help us not be concerned about what form your providence takes or how long the change will last, leave, return, feast, or fast. May we make only one request in the big room:“Thy will be done.”
Move us toward the fire that mystically and musically lights the dark, and lead us away from any passionless, dull, and overly still claim to non-emotional enlightenment that is absent of song. Give us the strength to ignore any unnecessarily imposed sensory restriction, emotional constriction, and spiritual refrigeration.
Help us make the most room we possibly can for your love to take root in our hearts. In return we’ll remember that others shall know us by our fruits, not our moral absolutes. Forgive us our debts, our trespasses, our indolent certainties, and our rigid ideologies as we try harder to be forgiving and more generously for giving.
Never let us forget that the more sacred traditions we can authentically honor and love, the vaster the room of our life becomes and the more we are able to be of service to the unfolding of your great and beautiful mystery.
Amen!
We’d like to conclude our letter, Professor Smith, the way we end all our sessions and Spirit House meetings: with a prescription for mystical action. Please feel free to share it with your friends on the other side, just as we invite all our readers to take part:
It’s time to bring greater immensity to your life, to release you from any small room constriction and place you upon sacred ground within the big room. We invite you to make this your new mantra: “First, go to the big room.” Say this as often as possible. Make it a banner on your wall. Anytime you have an important decision to make, immediately say these wisdom words with a drop of sacred emotion. Allow them to point you to the biggest room, one filled with all the saints and holy ones.
Discipline yourself to stop thinking about the right decision, right understanding, right cure, or right action. Instead, head to the big room. There the right question arises as does cooked thought, vibrant emotion, and anointed deed.
We are now going to introduce an alternative metaphor for the big room of infinite mystery. It refers to a tremendous African desert called the Kalahari. This name is derived from the Tswana word keir that means “the great thirst.” If you wish to set your soul on fire, become spiritually cooked, and quench your greatest thirst, know that you must mystically walk on Kalahari sand.
First, go procure some sand. You will need a little less than a cupful. Spread some of it on top of a table or surface near your bed. Gently place your fingertip on the center of this sand and say out loud, “In the big room, this is sacred Kalahari ground.” Say it as many times as you need to until you feel it.
Each morning when you wake up, place the tiniest pinch of sand inside each shoe. Pray this heartfelt request: “Take my hand as I walk on this sand, and bring me home to the big room.”
Then take each step that day as if you are walking, leaping, and dancing in the Kalahari among our original ancestors who learned to climb the rope to God. Remind yourself that since the universe may be found in a single grain of sand, you are unquestionably walking upon the infinite.
If doubt creeps in to shrink the room, follow the Bushman way and sing a tune. It’s time you mentally appreciate, emotionally own, mystically activate, and ecstatically celebrate the sacred shifting sand upon which you walk each step of your life.
We’ll be conducting this experiment with you every day and night for the next week. As above, so below.
One final thing, Professor. Perhaps you’d like to join us for the next Sacred Ecstatics Guild season? We can introduce you to all our saints who also live in your neck of the heavenly woods. Some of them you have already met, but others are waiting to teach you some things you may have missed along the way. We hope you’re ready to get spiritually cooked, because the Mothers are already in the kitchen cranking up the oven as we speak.
We’ll see you in October!
With love and appreciation,
Hillary & Brad
You can read Brad’s full testimony here on FB, here on IG, and in our book, Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire.
"It’s time to bring greater immensity to your life, to release you from any small room constriction and place you upon sacred ground. We invite you to make this your new mantra: 'First, go to the big room.' Say this as often as possible, aloud or on the inside. Make it a banner on your wall. Anytime you have an important decision to make, immediately say these wisdom words with a drop of sacred emotion. Allow them to point you to the biggest room, one filled with all the saints and holy ones.
Discipline yourself to stop thinking about the right decision, right understanding, right cure, or right action. Instead, head to the big room. There the right question arises as does cooked thought, vibrant emotion, and anointed deed. . ."
The rest of this prescription for mystical action (see the essay) invites you to do something playful - even a bit childlike - with sand. Sand? Yes, sand. Take a stand for sand!
But in all seriousness, have you ever tried to stop the goofy loops of thought, interrupt chilly-shrinky habits, and instead throw yourself into a moment of creative, mystical action? It's not easy. Doubt creeps in. Discouragement arises. But the way of the mystic is to act anyway, rather than surrender too easily to our changing mental and emotional climate.
On the other hand, if the experiment seems too easy breezy, then see if you can make it a bit more challenging. Put some spiritual elbow grease into it. If the ego begins to bristle, then you've begun to hear the holy whistle.
A mystical prescription is potent if it can hold all four directions of ecstatic mysticism wobbling together: cooked sacred emotion, creative expression, clear and inspired thought, as well as absurd humor.
In summary, let's head to the big room. The Kalahari desert of infinite mystery is waiting...
Amen!! First, go to the big room!