Free The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld by Justin Hocking Page B

solitary back-row seat, I check out the artwork hanging above the altar. A large, three-dimensional piece made from hundreds of intertwining strings, it apparently represents the unity and interconnectedness of all things, like a more elaborate version of the cross-shaped “God eye” I made from popsicle sticks and orange yarn back in Sunday school. The shape of this Unitarian “God eye” is vaguely reminiscent of a Christian cross, but the overall effect is ambiguous—an apt symbol for the Unitarians’ ambivalence about Jesus and the Christian faith.
    I feel a little awkward about being here—I’m one of the few single, youngish people in the room—but flipping through a Unitarian hymnal gives me some encouragement. Many of the hymns are adaptations of writings from the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist chants, Native American stories, and two of my favorite transcendental writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both famous Unitarians. I like the idea of this inclusive, literary brand of worship, especially since it involved Melville, who isn’t easily classified as a Unitarian or Transcendentalist, but nonetheless was concerned with the history and future of Christianity.
    Though Melville’s connection to Unitarianism is questionable (Melville scholar Herschel Walker claims that Melville “hated Unitarianism” and only attended to appease his wife), his hope for a more universal, inclusive approach to religion is written all over Moby-Dick . It’s evident in Ishmael’s embracing of the tattooed pagan Queequeg, and also in his knowledge of Eastern ideas like meditation. It’s likely that Melville, like his Berkshire neighbors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, drew from his knowledge of mystical Asian texts like the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, and was moved by the description and actual practice of meditation. And like Emerson and Thoreau, Melville cited the fourteenth-century Sufi poet Hafiz as an influence. Like other famous ecstatics—Rumi, Ramakrishna, and Saint Francis—Hafiz believed that all individuals contain a spark of the divine: “You are a divine elephant with amnesia / Trying to live in an ant / Hole. / Sweetheart, O sweetheart / You are God in / Drag!” In letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, after reading the older writer’s positive response to Moby-Dick , Melville evokes similar feelings of mystic union: “I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book … I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.”
    A young minister named Galen Guengerich leads the Sunday service at All Souls Unitarian. Dressed in a billowy maroon robe that seems straight out of a Harvard commencement ceremony, he looks handsome, pedigreed, slightly reserved but altogether kind, like a pious member of the Kennedy family. Given his appearance, it comes as a surprise that his service centers around the lyrics from a recent Green Day hit, a melodramatic ballad of urban alienation conveyed via the familiar trope of a solitary, defeated soul walking down Hollywood’s broken-dream boulevards. I first heard it playing at the deli counter of the Midtown skyscraper where I work, and it’s annoying in the way most Green Day songs are, but now that I’m living a somewhat isolated life in a shadowy leviathan of a city, I can relate to the sense of loneliness the song evokes. The point of Guengerich’s talk is that in a community like All Souls, you don’t have to go it alone, that you can instead walk together with others on a spiritual journey, connected and supported, with life’s dark paths illuminated by collective grace. The lecture is polished and sincere, and I appreciate his attempt to reach out to a younger crowd, however transparent the effort. I’ve never much liked