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Andrew Harvey On Sacred Activism,
The Divine Feminine, And Loving George W. Bush
by Andrew Lawler
ANDREW LAWLER is a displaced Southerner living in rural Maine whose writing has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, and Science. When not practicing serenity at airport baggage carousels, he’s learning to accept black flies and use a chain saw.
“This building makes me drunk,” Andrew Harvey says. We’re standing in the middle of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple, a century-old experiment in sacred architecture in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Oak Park. Autumn light pours through the glass ceiling onto cream walls, dark wood, and muted carpet. The temple has the solemn simplicity of a Zen shrine or a New England meetinghouse. It was this project, Wright said, that made him realize the heart of a building is its space rather than its walls. “I love this man,” Harvey says. “This is unity consciousness.”
Harvey is a renegade in the world of the sacred. An Englishman raised in India, he has spent much of his life attempting to unite the spiritual traditions of East and West. And like the brilliant but acerbic Wright, he has stirred his share of controversy. In his book The Sun at Midnight (Tarcher), Harvey attacks the guru system as corrupt, using his own former teacher Mother Meera as an example. His openness about being gay has rattled many in the largely closeted religious world, and he has even taken the Dalai Lama to task for his stance on homosexuality. Harvey has little patience with what he calls the popular “vulgarization” of ancient spiritual traditions, from yoga and Tantra to Buddhism and Christianity. He says, “A lot of people prefer the marzipan mysticism of the New Age,” which predicts that a change in consciousness will occur by “good vibrations.”
With his unruly hair, British accent, and engaging manner, Harvey seems more enthusiastic schoolboy than spiritual bête noire. Though fifty-five years old, he charges through Wright’s masterpiece with youthful vitality. Afterward we walk back to his cozy third-floor apartment, which he calls “my treehouse.” Adorning the walls are a Black Madonna from Venice, a Tibetan tanka tapestry, and a page from a Persian manuscript.
Harvey’s curiosity about faiths of all sorts began when he was a boy living in India, which had then only recently shaken off the yoke of British colonialism. Though sectarian violence wracked the nation, Harvey describes his household as having been a place of tolerance where “everyone felt free to worship in whatever way they wanted.” His English parents were tolerant Protestants; his Catholic nurse imbued him with a love of Mary; the Hindu servants would take him to their temple to hear stories of Krishna; and the family’s Muslim driver spoke of the greatness of Allah. One night, after his parents had left for a dinner party, six-year-old Andrew sat on the balcony and watched as their inebriated cook played a small drum until he was drenched with sweat, then began to chant in a strange tongue. Intrigued and frightened, young Andrew asked the man if he was all right. The cook explained that he was thanking God. “God is everything,” he said. “God is everywhere.” It dawned on Harvey then that “I could be with God directly and talk to God directly whenever I wanted to.” He also concluded that each person in his multicultural house was worshiping the same God.
Harvey spent his school years in England, eventually attending Oxford University, where he studied the theme of madness in Shakespeare and Erasmus and at twenty-one became the youngest Fellow ever admitted to Oxford’s All Souls College, a prestigious humanities-research institution. Though his intellect was well-fed, Harvey felt alone, despairing, and even suicidal. In 1977 he left Oxford to return to India and found his way to the remote Himalayan region of Ladakh, where he met Tibetan Buddhist sage Thuksey Rinpoche. Harvey’s book about the experience, A Journey in Ladakh (Mariner Books), won critical acclaim for its portrayal of one of the last traditional Tibetan Buddhist societies.
Harvey then moved to Paris and began an exploration of Sufism — the mystical tradition of Islam — and the poems of thirteenth-century mystic Jelaluddin Rumi. That led him to write The Way of Passion (Tarcher), in which he describes Rumi’s work as “strange, fabulous, ornate, baroque, and tremendously mysterious.” Other works on Rumi followed. Along the way Harvey became an ardent follower of Mother Meera, an Indian woman he heralded as an incarnation of the divine. He broke with her in 1993 after she asked him to forsake his male lover. (This point is disputed by Mother Meera’s supporters.) Since then Harvey has denounced her and other gurus as phonies more concerned with money, sex, and power than with matters of the spirit.
Shortly before his father’s death in 1997 Harvey had a mystical experience of Christ that renewed his fascination with Jesus and Mary. He took a provocative look at Jesus as a radical mystic in Son of Man (Tarcher) and explored the divine feminine in Return of the Mother (Tarcher).
Having encountered the limitations of both gurus and romantic love (he is no longer with the man he married in 1994), Harvey is devoting himself to melding spiritual disciplines with activist efforts in order to promote peace and justice. He calls the concept “sacred activism” and envisions “an army of practical visionaries and active mystics who work in every field and in every arena to transform the world.” His vision is wildly ambitious and at times feels both messianic and apocalyptic. But sitting at a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed table in his living room and listening to him describe sacred activism’s potential, I found his enthusiasm hard to resist.