So I'm just going to conclude here with a piece.
This is from a chapter of my new book, Utopia Drive.
It takes the form of a road trip.
I just take this road trip beginning at--
Fenton and I grew up down the road from each other
from a Trappist monastery where Thomas Merton lived.
And my road trip moves to Gethsemane and then
to a Shaker village and to this place in Indiana
called New Harmony.
And it winds all the way up and ends in Oneida,
New York with a group called the Perfectionists.
So it starts with the Shakers and it
ends with the Perfectionists.
And the Shakers believe that, you know, no sex.
It was just they were completely chaste.
And they were founded by a woman named Mother Anne Lee.
And the Perfectionists believe, it
was a Christian belief like the Shakers,
it was founded by John Humphrey Noyes.
And their belief was that because we
are sinless through Christ, we can do whatever we want.
So it's like, free love, people.
So it was a free love community.
So I was explaining this to my wife and she said,
so if a woman starts the community,
they don't have any sex.
And if a man starts the community,
they have all the sex they want.
I hadn't really thought about it, but that's kind of the way
it all panned out.
So this is a piece.
I just want to pick up on my theme of the unroofed church.
And I'll end with this.
But this is I'm rolling in to the town of New
Harmony, Indiana.
And the cheapest place I found is
a place called the Old Rooming House,
cheapest place I could find to stay.
"The old rooming house, which shed its paint long ago,
is the cheapest place to stay in New Harmony.
Ideal for artists and writers, according to the website.
And I find my own door unlocked with a note
from the proprietor, Jim Stinson,
compelling me to make myself at home.
The room is nautically themed, with paintings and models
of ships, shell lamps, a porcelain Marlin,
and a shelf of maritime books.
An incongruous set of roller skates sit by the door beside
a sign that reads, 'to the lifeboats'.
In the morning,
I meet the loquacious hotelier, Jim Stinson.
He seems to be in his 60s with untamed gray hair
in the face of a man who has spent a lot of time in the sun.
He wears faded jeans and a brown shirt that at some point
had an unfortunate encounter with bleach.
Jim untangles a couple of old bicycles
from the Virginia creeper that is indeed
taking over one side of the house, then says,
if you don't mind parking your male ego,
we can go for a ride on these bikes.
He quickly pumps up the tires of both bikes.
Egos in check, we start off swerving down the road.
In 1814, the German millennialist, George Rapp,
bought 7,000 acres on this bend of the Wabash River,
and with 500 of his followers built
the town of New Harmony on a five block
by three block grid that still defines the town today.
On the corner across from the bank stands the original house
that George Rapp built for his own large family.
Like the Shakers, George Rapp and his followers
believe that the fall of man occurred
when the female element of the divine
was separated from its male counterpart.
Like the Shakers, the Rappites practiced celibacy, confession
of sin, and common ownership of property
as first advocated in the book of Acts.
And the Rappites were every bit as industrious
and as successful in business as the Shakers.
By the time George Rapp sold New Harmony a decade
after its founding to the Scottish socialist Robert Owen,
there stood over 150 buildings surrounded
by a vineyard, orchards, and a five acre garden.
Today, descendants of Owen still live in the original brick
house that George Rapp built for his family.
It is surrounded by a tall brick wall with green, wooden gates.
When Jim and I ride by, the front gate
is open, something that apparently surprises Jim.
He quickly doubles back and pulls up on the sidewalk.
Two women, one older than the other,
are sitting on the front porch near the gate.
This is probably a real violation of your space,
Jim calls up to them, but do you mind
if we look at Gabriel's footprint real quick?
It's too faded to see now, the older woman replies.
Jim goes on.
Could we have a look anyway?
No, she says.
And both women quickly retreat indoors.
What was that about?
I ask.
Jim explains there is a slab of limestone
behind the house that looks to be embossed
with two human footprints.
In 1819, George Rapp claimed that the archangel Gabriel had
paid him a visit, and as proof, left that footprint
in the limestone.
According to Jim, Rapp told his followers, Gabriel spoke to me.
And here's the proof.
So you guys need to all get in line.
Robert Owen's son, the geologist David Dale Owen,
concluded years later that the footprints were
carved by indigenous people.
And Rapp's own records show he had hauled it
by oxen from the bluffs of the Mississippi
River near St. Louis.
Apparently, Rapp worried that as the hard work of building New
Harmony came to completion, idle hands might soon
do the devil's dealing.
So in 1824, Rapp decided to relocate his flock
to Pennsylvania where they built it all over again.
This new community just outside Pittsburgh, Rapp
called Economy in reference to the divine economy
of communal sharing, the exact phrase the Shakers had used.
Rebuffed by Owens progeny, we peddle over
to a much more modern structure, the roofless church
built by the international architect, Philip Johnson.
The stark, rectangular, brick wall
that frames the church, that is the church,
owes something to the less is more aesthetic
of Johnson's mentor Mies van der Rohe.
The foundation of the walls was cut
from the same local limestone in which Rapp claimed to have
found Gabriel's footprint.
The roofless church was commissioned
by Jane Owen, the wife of Kenneth Dale Owen,
and the inheritor of her own father's oil fortune.
When Owen first met Johnson--
when Jane Owen first met Johnson in the '50s,
she decided that he had quote, 'poetry in his soul'
to carry out her vision of a church in which,
quote, 'only one roof is wide enough, broad
enough for all worshipping humanity.
There has to be the sky as our roof.'
Standing beside a small grove of linden trees,
a grove made sacred I might say by its presence inside Philip
Johnson's high brick walls, I am beginning to feel
a vague inner stirring myself.
I tell Jim that I think I might sit
for a spell on one of the stone benches beneath the trees
and reflect on my day in New Harmony.
We shake hands and I thank him for being
such an excellent tour guide.
Hey, no problem.
In fact, if you want to stay another night,
I could knock $10 off the price.
I plan to hit the road tonight and get a jump on the long slog
across Indiana.
But Jim seems like he could use the extra scratch.
So I say, sure.
When he leaves, I'm the only person
left in the roofless church.
The first century Greek author and architect Vitruvius
in his treatise on architecture wrote
approvingly of hypaethral temples, ones open to the air.
Henry David Thoreau, who knew his Greek,
wrote that the mind itself should be a hypaethral place,
quote, 'consecrated to the service of the gods' unquote.
And he hoped that his first book, A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers, might be a hypaethral text that does not
smell of the study and library.
Such a sentiment suggests that we should rather
think of the entire world as what Thoreau
called the poem of creation.
Wendell Berry wrote in a recent poem,
there are no un-sacred spaces.
There are only sacred spaces and desecrated spaces.
That is surely an expansive view of the natural world, one
that I happen to share.
Yet we seem to need some form of demarcation.
In this case, Philip Johnson's brick walls,
to remind us of this idea.
We are surrounded by too many desecrated places.
And in the age of the cell phone,
we are surrounded by too much that we simply do not see.
By framing the sky, Johnson's walls
have the effect of calling the heavens down
into this realm, the chthonic world of linden trees
and human beings.
It seems to affirm, to intensify,
something Thomas Merton once said.
'Life is this simple.
We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent.
And God is shining through it all the time.'
If we could only see it.
Not every visitor has been so sanguine
about the roofless church.
Take architecture historian Charles Jencks
who wrote that after Johnson finally
escaped the influence of Mies van der Rohe,
the rest of his work was entirely camp,
a demonstration of his impeccably perverse taste
motivated by historic illusions.
Jencks goes on, 'Hence, the entrance to the roofless church
which recalls those of so many Nazi villas.'
It's a rather startling statement,
especially when you consider that those gates, which
are admittedly gaudy, open on to a memorial
garden for the theologian Paul Tillich who Hitler fired
from his position at the University of Frankfurt
for speaking out against the Third Reich.
Tillich fled to the US in 1933 to teach
at the Union Theological Seminary
where Jane Owen was a student.
In 1963, Tillich came to New Harmony
to deliver an Easter sermon at the roofless church.
Titled Estranged and Reunited, The New Being,
Tillich's message spoke directly to Jane Owens'
ecumenical belief that only the sky was wide enough
to reconcile all religions.
Jesus, after all, was not a Christian.
Tillich didn't come out and say this, but he implied it.
He was a wandering Jew who experienced what Tillich
called alternately, a new creation, a new reality,
and a new being.
One's religion isn't important, said Tillich.
What's important is to enter into
that same transformative religious state in which Jesus
dwelled.
The new creation, this is our ultimate concern, said Tillich.
This should be our infinite passion, the infinite passion
of every human being.
What is it, this new state?
A three-fold renewal of reconciliation,
reunion, resurrection.
First, we must be reconciled to God and to ourselves
since at the core of our innermost self is where
we find the presence of God.
Next, one must be reunited with oneself.
That is to say, one must accept oneself wholly.
One must have what Tillich called in another context,
the courage to be.
The courage to be oneself.
With that acceptance comes the ability
to accept divine union with others.
James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time
that the reason so many white Americans hated
Black Americans was that in reality, they hated themselves.
And Martin Luther King Jr in his letter from Birmingham Jail
quoted Tillich's definition of sin
as nothing more than separation, our separation from God
and from one another.
Finally, said Tillich, we must be resurrected
from the old being of separation and to the new being
of wholeness.
He rejected the literal meaning of resurrection,
the raising of the dead, for the psychological manifestation
of spiritual rebirth.
Where there is a new being, Tillich concluded,
there is resurrection, namely the creation into eternity
out of every moment of time.
Which is to say, resurrection happens now
or it does not happen at all.
The kingdom of God, after all, stands right
before us, made all the more obvious by its delineation
inside the frame of the roofless church.
I walked through the objectionable gates
of the roofless church and into Tillich's garden
where the theologian's ashes were scattered.
A short path winds through a kind of mounted labyrinth
planted only with Norwegian spruce trees.
Beside the trail sits a large white stone embossed with this
Tillich sentence: 'Man and nature belong together in there
created glory, in their tragedy, and in their separation.'
I don't know the context in which this sentence was written
but I like the sentiment, which I read to mean,
we were not inexorably cast out of the original garden,
separate from nature.
We can, as Tillich would say, be resurrected back
in the unity with the natural world.
Certainly, the Enlightenment idea
that man stands above nature has caused
much of the environmental havoc in my home state,
the blasting apart of mountains, because we have figured out
how to blast them apart but have not
figured out a reason, perhaps even a religious reason,
not to.
Our tragedy is our perception that we are
divided from God and nature.
Our salvation is the realization that we are not."
Thank you.