Huston Smith - And Live Rejoicing: Chapters from a Charmed Life — Personal Encounters with Spiritual Mavericks, Remarkable Seekers, and the Worlds Great Religious Leaders

My idea of heaven (on earth) is sitting in a room and listening to Huston Smith.

Sometimes [Huston Smith] becomes as spontaneous and radiant as the ineffable beauty he talks about..A clean wind of truth blows through his presence. He always makes me feel more alive! He knows, and lives, and loves whereof he speaks.

I read Huston Smiths The Worlds Religions as a teenager. It was the most influential event in my life. He has shaped my thinking and my lifelong quest, and guided me to where I am today.

Huston Smiths words serve me well in traversing my spiritual path.

Huston Smith approaches religion with the wisdom of a philosopher and the wonder of a child. He looks for similarities that unite, not differences that divide. He comes armed with knowledge and blessed with understanding.

[The Worlds Religions] is the one book on religion I cant do without. I return to it often and always with reward.

Copyright 2012 by Huston Smith

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Huston.

And live rejoicing : chapters from a charmed life : personal encounters with spiritual mavericks, remarkable seekers, and the worlds great religious leaders / Huston Smith with Phil Cousineau.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 195) and index.

ISBN 978-1-60868-071-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Smith, Huston. 2. Religion historiansUnited StatesBiography. 3. Religions. 4. Religious leaders. I. Cousineau, Phil. II. Title.

BL43.S64A3 2012

200.92dc23

First printing, September 2012

ISBN 978-1-60868-071-9

Printed in the USA on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To our grandchildren,
Serena, Sierra, Isaiah, and Antonio,

and to our great-grandchildren,
Aubrey, Gil, and Sasha

M y earlier autobiographical Tales of Wonder sketched the outline of my life and those moments that helped illuminate my path. This sequel fills it in by describing episodes way stations or stepping-stones, if you will that stand out as exceptionally significant in connecting to the title of this volume. These episodes and encounters reveal many of the influences in my life that have affirmed a life of joy, even in this vale of sorrow.

Many readers will recognize that I have drawn the title of this book from Oh, Happy Day! a mid-eighteenth-century hymn by English clergyman Philip Doddridge (based on Acts 8:35), which was popularized by the gospel group the Edwin Hawkins Singers in 1967, and later by folksinger Joan Baez in 1971. The key stanza describes my outlook in life:

Oh happy day, oh happy day,

When Jesus washed my sins away.

He taught us how to watch and pray,

And live rejoicing every day;

Oh happy day, oh happy day,

When Jesus washed my sins away.

I gloss that hymn as follows: Happiness is the human birthright, and by extension we ought to cash in on that birthright and live rejoicing every day. We do this without denying it must immediately be added that sooner or later we all encounter tragedies that will beset us and show us that life is not a nonstop joyride. As the title of a true story (camouflaged as a best-selling novel) has it, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

Still, lifes challenge is to make the joy an inclusive, allembracing category that encompasses tragedy and transforms it in the way that Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a seventeenth-century Carmelite monk, articulated: that is acting in our lives, and that it is our Father, full of love, that allows us this state of humiliation, pain, and suffering, then all the bitterness is removed from them and they contain only sweetness.

That sweetness bodies forth in a second song from the nineteenth century, My Life Flows On (How Can I Keep from Singing?), which was written in 1868 by the American minister Robert Lowry:

My life flows on in endless song,

Above earths lamentation.

I hear the sweet, tho far-off hymn

that hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife

I hear that music ringing;

It finds an echo in my soul

How can I keep from singing?

Finally, who can forget the challenging words of the Roman poet Horace, who wrote something in the first century that has echoed down the centuries for two millennia: