Peter C. Emberley: Searching for Purpose

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SEARCHING FOR PURPOSE

BY PETER C. EMBERLEY

 

 

" Spiritualism is on the rise as baby boomers seek meaning and

direction in their lives.

 

Baby boomers, the 8.1 million Canadians born between 1946-1964 are

the best educated, most prosperous, and pampered generation in

history. As they move through their middle years, however, many

boomers are discovering that something is missing. Increasingly, they

are looking for deeper meaning, greater satisfaction and new

direction in life. In this essay, Carleton University political

scientist and philosopher Peter C. Emberley writes of the search for

spiritual purpose, much of it occurring outside mainstream religion.

A baby boomer himself, Emberley, 42, is also director of

Carleton's College of the Humanitarian in Ottawa.

 

" What we really need today is a spiritual version of acidophilus, "

muses a devotee at Baba Haridass's asthanga yoga centre on

Saltpring Island. She is talking about a herbal purgative, and

confiding why she is enduring yet another round of one of yoga's

excruciatingly uncomfortable contortions. " There's a lot to be

scraped off our systems, " she explains. I learn during the next few

days that she is a best-selling author and accompanied consultant,

yet despite prosperity, influence and all the conventional signs of

success, she turns out to be a very unhappy person, profoundly

alienated from the world, and seeking. In Buddhism. Vedanta. New Age.

Kabbalah. Angels.

 

A farmhouse in Ontario. A candle burns in at the centre of a

makeshift altar draped with an embroidered tablecloth. . . . The

healer explains that during her own dark night of the soul she

realized that the human world was torn and afflicted, the result of

centuries of drastically constricting the range of human experience.

Now, " we have to ground our energy in the earth, and open our crown

chakra to the universe, " to reach " being where we are. " And she, too,

seeks. In Shiatsu and Reiki. The human potential movement. Celtic

spirituality. Goddess worship. Wicca. Archetypes.

 

The bells toll loud and long at St. Herman of Alaska, the English-

speaking Orthodox church in Edmonton filled with converts and the

curious. . . . " After centuries of beating the magic out of religion,

we are looking again for a little enchantment, " says a sometime

parishioner. And so he, too, seeks. In the United Church's

community of concern. The Anglican Church's prayerbook society.

Anglo-Catholicism. In Opes Dei and Tridentine Catholicism.

 

Three seekers, each searching for spiritual consolation and

sanctification. Where none of these three baby boomers is seeking,

however, is the mainstream. And they are not alone. For many of the

baby boomer generation, " spirituality " is not happening in the

churches, synagogues, mosques or temples. Canada's premier

chronicler of religious belief and affiliation, Reginald Bibby,

offers incontrovertible data on the decline of membership and weekly

attendance in the mainline faiths. In 1945, 60 per cent of the

Canadians claimed weekly attendance and 82 per cent professed

membership; in 1990 only 23 per cent attended regularly and 29 per

cent claimed to be members.

 

While many babyboomers are uninformed about the richness and

diversity of their own religious traditions, their plaits and

hostility are understandable. Many women have no further patience for

a patriarchal church that evolves glacially at best. Sexual abuse or

hypocrisy by some clergy, historical injustices perpetrated by the

churches on our aboriginals, unwillingness to accommodate progressive

forces all have dimmed the attraction of institutionalized

religion. " In church, it's all just yada, yada, yada, " says a

lapsed United Church parishioner. " We were no longer moved or touched

by wooden rituals, " claim Jewish and Catholic Canadians at an ashram

in the Himalayas. With their exotic swami, by contrast, " we're

listening to revelation, to live scripture. " Charismatic Christians,

Lubavitcher Hasidics, Sufis and New Age shamans all testify to the

scriptural adage - the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth

life. We hear in this clamor, perhaps, the death knell of 20th-

century religion, institutions no longer vital with the spirit that

engendered them.

 

But it is premature to herald the " death of God. " Today, thousands of

Canadians are embarked on complex spiritual searches. . . . Very few

baby boomers admit they are " religious. " They say they are

" spiritual, " a signal that they are distancing themselves from

the authority of creed, dogmatic theology and institution, in favour

of a non-exclusive God.

 

Row after row of books on spirituality . . . pilgrimages, spiritual

labyrinths and wellness retreats; and television shows

proliferate. . .

 

There are also more subtle signs that another " great awakening " is

occurring. Across the country, ordinary Christians, Muslims, Jews and

Hindus meet weekly in private homes to study their scared texts. On

weekends, dozens of groups meet in empty convents and churches,

participating in Alpa and Cursillo retreats, spiritual direction,

meditation - awash in tears, but also, amid gales of laughter,

experiencing the transfiguring power of love and belonging.

 

Why the renewed interest in the sacred? An obvious reason is that the

baby boomers, whose mean age is 43, are brooding on their

immortality. Their bodies - objects of much pampering - are

now showing the signs of decay. Many baby boomers for the first time

are feeling fragile and vulnerable. Equally likely, with sick and

dying parents, children needing moral guidance, ugly custody battles,

and careers and family in sudden unanticipated tatters due to

severances and " restructuring, " many baby boomers are finally

confronting primary questions of existence. Who am I? What am I truly

striving for? What is the legacy I leave for the next generation?

They are struggling at mid-life to achieve order and meaning in their

lives. "                                        

                        

Peter C. Emberley, Searching for Purpose