Moving Beyond Mauve

I write this early in the morning, looking out my office window at Unity Institute in the quiet moments before the day begins. A mauve sky arches its back over Kansas City as the world awakens to a new day, the first day of spring. I find myself pondering a connection to Unity’s past which that lavender-pinkish sky brings to mind. The 1890's were sometimes referred to as the "mauve decade" because that was the era when the new color became popular. Varying shades of mauve became mandatory for chic women's fashion, for fabrics in the parlor, and for artists who wanted to make an avant-garde statement. It was the hot color in the Victorian world, very trendy, and those who clothed their lives in mauve were living in the Now. But the Now was, alas, the late 19th century, which isn't Now any more. Just ask any follower of Eckhart Tolle.

Unity was founded in the mauve decade, and many of the terms and concepts in its foundational literature reflect this 19th century point of origin. For example:

1) "The Law of Cause and Effect" is built on Newtonian physics with its clockwork cosmos. In Newtonian thought, given the same circumstances, every outcome is totally predictable and every action produces the same effect at all times and all places. Today, quantum physics with its uncertainty principle has shattered Newtonian regularity. Science speaks of aggregate tendencies instead of absolute law as the heart of the physical universe: “...a picture of the submicroscopic world emerges as one of statistical probabilities rather than measurable certainties.”[1]

2) "The ethers, " which the American Heritage Science Dictionary calls, "A hypothetical medium formerly believed to permeate all space, and through which light and other electromagnetic radiation were thought to move. The existence of ether was disproved by the American physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887. " Charles Fillmore continued to use this 19th century pseudo-scientific idea for much of his life, grudgingly admitting in the first edition of his book Prosperity that "about half the leading physicists assert that the ether exists and the other half deny its existence..." (p. 4) He later added qualifying words like spiritual, sacred, or invisible ethers. Such distinctions would not have been necessary in the mauve decade when New Thought pioneers like Mr. Fillmore were hammering out their theologies.

3) “Science” - Even the terms science and scientific no longer mean the same today as they did when early forms of the Christian sciences were getting themselves organized in the mauve decade. Today something is generally considered "scientific" if it is empirically verifiable through repeated observations or double blind experimentation. New Thought founders used the term much more loosely, i.e., something was "scientific" if people could try it in their lives and prove its validity for themselves. There was a passionate drive to unify science and religion during the mauve decade, which is still a noble goal, but one which can lead to convolutions in both theology and science.

Not every spiritual principle will have its correspondingly accurate proposition in the physical sciences--after all, can you quantify love? Not every scientific concept is a happy match to spirituality. The concept the eternal nature of God's creation disturbingly runs into trouble from cosmologists. Current astronomical theory holds that the last star will burn out in 100 trillion years, leaving an eternally dark, cold cosmos. And spiritually based concepts of ecology and evolution have to take into account the enormous costs of every advance. The whole ecosystem is built on higher creatures killing and eating lower members of the food chain, both plant and animal.

While science is not the enemy of spirituality, it can never be relied upon to provide answers to questions of value, meaning, and purpose. Science is about the how questions, whereas religious thought is about why and why not. This is a gross oversimplification, but the outlines of a true distinction between science and religion can be seen in the above.

Perhaps the Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878 - 1969) gave the best advice about the progressive nature of religious thought: "The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth."

I look out my window, and the mauve sky is now golden with dawn, the first day of spring. The 21st century is well upon us, and mauve has become the sign of an antique, something you bring to an auction house and a TV commentator tells you how much that upholstered chair is worth in today's money. We stand too close to the first decade of the new century to feel the kind of certainty about our symbols and values which men and women shared in the last decade of the 19th. Yet, something of its hope for regular demonstrations of Divine Order has endured. The principles work if you work them, although perhaps not like Newtonian Cause-and-Effect clockwork every time. With persistence and faith a person today can still experience the same kind of healing, prosperity, and spiritual insight which invigorated the great ones of the past. New images, new insights, new sciences. Same One Presence/One Power.

With a little patience, it is possible to note that mauve skies usually turn golden and spring returns year after year.

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[1] “Uncertainty Principle,” Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition; online source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-uncertai.html - Accessed 03-20-08