Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine
An Autobiography by Huston Smith with Jeffrey Paine
Tales of Wonder is the autobiography of Huston Smith,
well known scholar, student and teacher of the great religious
traditions of humankind. Smith has authored countless works and
is, perhaps, best known for The Religions of Man,
originally published in 1964 and later reissued as The
World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. His most
recent books prior to this autobiography are Why Religion
Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief
and The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition. The
former, released just prior to the events of September 11, 2001,
could not be more topical and significant, given not only the
caricature of religion in much of the “secular” world but the
abuse of the great traditions at the hands of fundamentalists of
all stripes. The latter is a personal and foundational apology
for Christian faith from the mind and heart of a most dedicated
adherent.
Smith, who turned 90 and entered an
assisted living facility in 2009 just as he was completing this
autobiography, makes clear that this is his last book. He opens the
book, most appropriately for one who has always seen his life as
response to the summons of mystery, by invoking a warning of a Hindu
teacher of his. The teacher, recounts Smith, “told me that if I did
not write my life story I would be reborn pen in hand.” And so, “I
step from behind the curtains – from behind my previous books and
subjects: comparative religion, primordial wisdom, postmodernity,
science versus scientism – to meet you, as it were, face-to-face.”
(p. xvii) For the reader, this meeting is an extraordinary
encounter, not only with the biographical details of Huston Smith’s
life, but also, through the simple yet profound account of that
life, with the awesome mystery in which “all of us are born, in
which we live, and in which we die.” Huston Smith is not primarily
a scholar of religion but rather a “disciple” of it and, thus, a
self-described “religious communicator.”
Truth in Advertising. I am not a religious
scholar. What I do is try to show people how they can get something
of value personally from religion, which is why I concentrate on its
positive side. How you might label me is “religious
communicator.” (p. xxii)
As one reads this last and most personal of Smith’s books, one
realizes the depth of his communication, not merely about the
mystery in which we are born, live and die, but of the presence of
that very mystery.
The literary form of the autobiography or
memoir is, at least in the western literary tradition, as old as St.
Augustine’s Confessions. Recent years have witnessed a
tremendous surge in the publication of memoirs by persons from all
walks of life and segments of society. Given the pervasive
influence of psychology in our self-understanding, many of these
memoirs are highly introspective and analytical. In this literature,
as well as in our culture at large, it is difficult to escape the
sense that our mode of self-analysis and introspection have left us
filled with anger and resentment. We tend to be acutely aware of
the ways in which others have failed us, and thus, too often, a
memoir becomes an act of self-justification and even occasionally
retribution. But from the very beginning of Tales of Wonder,
we are aware of being drawn into an experience of human life that is
much more compelling than anger or resentment. Huston Smith, much
like St. Augustine before him, does not analyze his life in a search
for self understanding but rather reflects on the key moments of his
life as summonses to a uniquely personal call from God to service
and responsibility. This mode of transcendent reflection gives rise
not to anger and resentment but rather to an all-pervasive gratitude
for everything in his life, both past and present. As Smith was
leaving a monastery in Japan after a very intensive time of Zen
practice, the Abbot said to him:
Make your whole life unceasing gratitude. What
is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all
things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite
responsibility to all things future. (p. 134)
In our secular and psychological age, we
have come to know only the introspective mode of attending to our
lives and our life experiences. For this mode of presence
“unceasing gratitude” seems inauthentic, if not impossible. But not
the least of the wonders in this extraordinary life story is that
the omnipresent sense of unceasing gratitude lacks any tinge of
falseness or sentimentality.
The persons past and present who constitute
the interpersonal dimension of Smith’s formation field are described
both realistically and appreciatively. Depreciation and resentment
come from an introspective mode of presence that is separate from
the horizon of mystery out of which every moment comes forth. There
is a profound sanity evident in Smith’s capacity to describe the
coolness and distance of his father while recognizing that his own
recognition of the call to “infinite service to all things present”
comes from his father. This capacity to, as Theresa of Avila said,
“live in the truth of who we are” is present as Smith relates his
experiences of encountering so many of the extraordinary people of
our age as well as his description of the most painful experiences
of his life. These include the death of his daughter Karen at age
fifty and the murder of his granddaughter Serena in her early
twenties. When Smith is asked by a reporter if these tragedies had
shaken his faith in God, he finds the question ridiculous. He
thinks:
What about the Holocaust and all the other
catastrophes we know as history? They did not make my own loss less
but kept me from imagining that I had suffered a unique vengeance
that impugned the idea of God instead of making God more necessary.
. . . The fact that all the things we hold dear and love are
transient does not mean that we should love them less but – as I do
Karen and Serena – love them even more. Suffering, the Buddha said,
if it does not diminish love, will transport you to the farthest
shore. (p. 94)
It is a great act of courage to keep our hearts open to life and
mystery as it comes to us in all its manifestations, including
suffering. Much or our anger and resentment is a refusal to
continue to be taught by suffering to “love even more.”
Smith dedicates the book to his beloved
wife Kendra, quoting in his dedication from a love poem of the Sixth
Dalai Lama:
I asked so much of you
in this brief lifetime,
Perhaps we’ll meet again
in the childhood of the next.
After sixty-five years of marriage, Smith writes that “I am the way
I am because she is the way she is. . . . If Kendra and I, different
as we are, were united in the same person, that person would be, I
believe, a complete human being.” (p. 93) In the middle of their
marriage, however, Smith experienced the one life event that made
him “both scared and afraid. . . . It was the night that Kendra
said, ‘You know I am thinking of leaving you.’” The very different
nature of this memoir can be seen in the brief paragraph that
details this significant experience. Smith relates, quite simply,
that the night Kendra told him this he sobbed himself to sleep.
Instead of falling into self-pity or sentimentality, Smith proceeds
to offer an example of transcendent presence to experience and of
the call to responsibility that comes out of such presence.
It is painful, even now, to admit Kendra had
reasons for leaving. I am a workaholic. . . .There are worse kinds
of infidelity than the sexual. I was living with one of the most
interesting women in the world, and too often my attention was
elsewhere. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne cautions us to
show the world, if not our worst, at least that by which our worst
can be inferred. I regret that I showed my worst to, of all people,
Kendra. Fortunately, she did not leave; I attempted to make amends
and began of all difficult challenges perhaps the most difficult –
to actually change. (p. 88)
Absent embarrassing personal details and morbid introspection, this
simple relating of a pivotal life experience becomes in its honesty
and responsibility and profound teaching in the most necessary
disposition for committed relationship – the willingness to change.
The second half of the book takes up “the
vertical dimension” of Smith’s life, that is his “religious” life as
a practitioner first of Christianity but then of Hinduism, Buddhism,
and Islam. Finally he speaks of what he calls “three final
frontiers,” his exposure later in life to what he calls primary
religions, entheogens, and ultimate reality (or psychic
experiences). In each case we are introduced to how each tradition
or viewpoint opened for Smith new perspectives on the mystery. In
the final chapter “Reflections upon Turning Ninety” we see how all
that has gone before has prepared Huston Smith for this challenging
but still wondrous final stage of his life.
I left Kendra, my
intimate companion of sixty-five years, to cohabit with people in
wheelchairs or depressed or with Alzheimer’s. . . . The first night
after the move was a dark night of the soul. Religion relies on that
successful plot device, the happy ending. I still believed in one,
but after my first night in the assisted-living residence I thought,
the happy ending will now have to wait until I am dead.
And then, after three
days here, it became acceptable, perfectly fine. The move seemed no
more than turning the page of a book. On the previous page I had
been on Colusa Avenue and on this page I am here, but the story
itself has not changed. And ninety, I discover, is a good age for
making new friends. (pp. 177-8)
“We become persons in the fullest sense to
the extent that we allow the formation mystery to sound through our
dispositional life-form as it develops in dialogue with our
successive life situations.” (Adrian van Kaam, Formation of the
Human Heart, p. 51) It is through attention to and
responsibility toward the mystery that we become distinctively human
persons. Tales of Wonder offers us stories of the
formation of one who by attention, gratitude, service and
responsibility continues to be formed into an extraordinary human
person. The greater service, however, may be this beautiful text’s
invitation to each reader to discover the wonders that constitute
his or her own life
