Walt Whitman's "Great New Doctrine" (Part 3)

As an undergraduate in the late 1970's, early 1980's, I began to take control of my own religious education. Put another way, I began to develop a syllabus of works that I found personally instructive, redemptive, transformative ..."religious" in a broad and not particularly sectarian sense. I was reading "outside the box" of the usual suspects of "religious" literature and finding as much (and sometimes more) of value there than in the Bible and related writings. D. H. Lawrence's late essay "The Risen Lord" achieved scriptural significance for me, as did Henry Miller's essay, "The Wisdom of the Heart." In the latter work, Miller makes a Whitmanian remark that helped to wean me from an education in Christianity that had convinced me that I was a moral reprobate in need of salvation:

"...salvation, like fear or death, when it is accepted and experienced, is no longer 'salvation.' There is no salvation, really, only infinite realms of experience providing more and more tests, demanding more and more faith..."

These words struck me with their plainness and matter-of-fact acceptance of the death of "salvation religion"--at least where I was concerned. For I had become convinced, long before I had read these words, of the bankruptcy of such an understanding of religion. What I needed was someone to intervene and tell me, "Yes, of course, living for salvation is living for oneself and living for oneself is a pathetically impoverished way to go through life. And besides, it doesn't work--for there is no salvation, really..." Getting "saved" saves one from nothing--for life carries on and what it takes to get through life is, in the immortal words of Lou Reed, "a busload of faith."

As I have grown older, I have increasingly begun to understand that "faith" in Whitmanian terms: as a fully embodied engagement with the world, its problems and possibilities. Rather than looking for a way "out" (through salvation), I keep trying to find my way "in"--into the path of the great souled ones who follow their own genius, the wisdom of their hearts and blood, as it leads them towards an ever receding horizon that they chase relentlessly like Ahab his Leviathan--only not to slay the beast in an orgy of vengeance, but to pay their respects, in an act of sympathetic witness.

And no sanctimoniousness either. There is no room for sanctimony in the life of the great souled ones. The burden they bear is the burden of sympathetic witness (see Qur'an 25: 63).