"Sacred America, " in lucid and poetic prose, is the story of
ordinary people who have dared to follow and trust the voices of
their own souls in the midst of everyday life in the United States.
It is also the story of another America, one not seen on the
nightly news. What Roger Housden finds on his journey across the
country suggests to him that, contrary to popular belief, the
United States is among the most creative and spiritually vibrant
cultures on earth. "Sacred America" is his proof.
Just as Alexis de Tocqueville set out across our country in search
of democracy, so too did Housden, an Englishman, travel throughout
the United States in the waning years of the twentieth century in
search of this country's heart. He discovered that, despite or
perhaps due to the moral turpitude of Wall Street and Capitol Hill,
the spirit of the American people is flourishing. Americans are
continually redefining what it means to be human, what they want
from democracy, and, most important, how a democratic society is an
expression of the sacred.
As an outsider, Housden was both surprised and impressed by what he
found -- the extent to which the aspirations, genius, actions,
wisdom, and compassion of people in all walks of life are woven
into the social and cultural fabric of America. For Housden, this
presence of Being in the midst of everyday life, rather than in
formal places of worship (though he found it there too), is
reinventing what a sense of the sacred means for the American
individual at the turn of the millennium.
"Sacred America" acknowledges that a spiritual materialism prospers
here to an extent that would stagger any European mind; spiritual
techniques and teachings have become major product lines along with
everything else. Yet Housden also finds a genuine human spirit
flourishing, found in small-town Wyoming, on a bus ride to
Manhattan, on a remote Indian reservation, in an artist's cave in
New Mexico, in the life of a letter carrier in California, and even
in Hollywood. Further, he finds groups of people coming together to
share their various faiths in a truly open spirit: at Wellesley
College in Massachusetts; among the politicians of Washington,
D.C.; at Habitat for Humanity; at a retreat center for ex-cons in
North Carolina; as well as in churches, at an Islamic conference,
in Buddhist meditation centers, and in the traditional Hispanic
faith in northern New Mexico.
What is significant, Housden discovers, is that no one is in charge
of this emergence of the human spirit. No one is doing it. This
other America -- so different from the image that much of the world
holds of this country -- is not a cause that you fight for or a
movement orchestrated by any religious or spiritual denomination.
It is something at work, Housden suggests, in the collective
psyche. It is something we participate in, rather than direct or
control. A broader intelligence is at work not as some external
force acting on us but from within us as a collective. It is
changing the way Americans feel about themselves, restoring a sense
of meaning and moral authority to the wellspring of individual
conscience -- Housden calls it the intelligence of the knowing
heart. "Sacred America" is emerging, Housden concludes, as that
growing community of individuals who are interconnected not by the
external dictate of creed or culture but by the prompting of the
heart's intelligence.
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