Peter Adair is the author of the books Sacred Universe and Sacred Earth.
WESTMINSTER WEST-Unlikely as it may be, Vermont has been either the incubator, seedbed, or birthplace of founders of seven important religious movements.
Our hills, it seems, generate and support independent and distinctive modes of spiritual development. Seven Vermont farmhouses have nurtured soul as well as soil.
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Whitingham (1801)
Sharon (1805)
Born the ninth child of John Young and Abigail Howe on a farm in Whitingham in 1801, Brigham Young's family moved across the border into New York state in 1804. Growing up in a half dozen towns in upstate New York and working as a carpenter and painter, Brigham became a Christian seeker as a young adult after becoming dissatisfied and unfulfilled as a member of traditional churches.
This spiritual unrest continued until 1830, when Young encountered The Book of Mormon and met its author, fellow former Vermonter Joseph Smith, in 1832.
Inspired by Smith, Brigham converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Young had found a spiritual home at last, and he became an ardent teacher and preacher of the new religion.
One of 11 children, Joseph Smith grew up on the family farm in Sharon until successive crop failures forced the family to leave Vermont and settle in western New York State in 1816. Joseph was eleven years old.
Starting at age 15, Smith began experiencing visions and encounters with angels. Among the visitations was a revelation in 1827 of inscribed plates, whose transcriptions became the manuscript for a book entitled The Book of Mormon.
Smith proselytized for the new religion until his untimely death in 1844. In 1847 Brigham Young was elected the second president of the movement, serving 29 years and spearheading the establishment of the center of Mormonism in Salt Lake City.
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Poultney (1803)
Low Hampton, Vermont/New York (1815)
In 1786 the family of 4-year-old William Miller settled into a farming community in Low Hampton, a territory just west of the Rutland County line, claimed by Vermont from New York. The dispute over which state the land belonged to was resolved in 1790, in New York's favor.
After marrying Lucy Smith in 1803, William moved into her family farm in Poultney, just 10 miles east of Low Hampton. In 1810 he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Vermont militia. During the War of 1812, he was promoted to captain and fought at the Battle of Plattsburgh (also known as the Battle of Lake Champlain), where American soldiers and sailors succeeded in repulsing a British force twice their number.
It is William's brush with death at that battle that formed the seed for a new religious idea of faith and salvation.
Returning in 1815 with his family to a newly purchased 200-acre farm in Low Hampton, William commenced an intense analysis of the Bible, deriving from it a time for the second coming of Jesus: between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. He began writing and preaching the prophecy in 1831.
By 1840, Millerism had become a national movement with tens of thousands of adherents. Millerites were evangelizing in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada.
After the dates passed without incident - an event known as the Great Disappointment - the Millerite group splintered, with the prophecy now interpreted spiritually rather than literally. One of the splintered groups was formally established in 1863 as the Seventh-Day Adventists.
Miller's teachings also became the basis for the formation of another sect, the Jehovah's Witnesses, co-founded by a former Millerite in 1876. (It is worth noting that in Germany prior to World War II, Jehovah's Witnesses were the sole Christian denomination outspokenly opposed to the Nazi regime from its inception, for which they were severely persecuted.)
William Miller died in 1849, having been the progenitor of three significant religious movements. His funeral was held in Fair Haven.
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Putney (1836)
And then there is the peculiar case of John Humphrey Noyes, born in Brattleboro in 1811.
While studying at Yale Theological Seminary, Noyes underwent a religious conversion, concluding that Jesus had already returned and established a new age in which man could be free of sin and perfect.
The sect of Christian Perfectionism allowed a freedom from traditional moral standards, and when Noyes returned to Putney to a farmhouse-turned-common house in 1836, a community gathered along principles of complex marriage - sexual liaisons with female converts, whether married or single - and children raised collectively rather than in a traditional family structure.
Forced to flee Putney in 1847 due to this radical Christian behavior, Noyes settled in Oneida, New York, leading a utopian socialist community that eventually numbered 300, with branch communities in New York City, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
In 1879 Noyes was forced to flee again - this time to Canada - and the community dissolved in 1881. He never returned to the U.S. and died in 1886.
One of the community's sustaining businesses, Oneida tableware, would find worldwide success and would continue as an independent company.
Considering the Noyes heritage, is it merely coincidence that Putney, Vermont, according to voting records, is the most progressive/liberal town in the most progressive/liberal county in the most progressive/liberal state in the country? It must be something in the water.
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Chittenden (1874)
From 1873 through 1875 the Chittenden homestead of the brothers William and Horatio Eddy was renowned as the mecca of spiritual seances. Materialized spirits, apparitions of deceased relatives, music played by invisible hands, disembodied writing, and levitation were some of the occult attractions.
Among the audience of a dozen or so people attending a meeting in October 1874 was Helena Blavatsky, a Ukrainian-Russian woman of aristocratic heritage who had traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, exploring esoteric traditions and paranormal phenomena.
Having experienced visions and visitations in her own life, she was intrigued after reading a news story about the Eddy brothers' farm.
Also at the meeting was retired colonel Henry Olcott, a Civil War veteran and former special commissioner in the War Department in Washington, D.C., who had participated in the investigation into the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He had a longtime association with Spiritualism and was now a reporter for a daily New York newspaper, investigating the psychic claims of the Eddy brothers.
Their encounter at the farm led to a convergence of hearts and minds and the founding in 1875 of the Theosophical Society in New York. Theosophy was a new religion, an amalgam of Buddhism, Hindu Brahmanism, and Western esotericism that included among its members Thomas Edison, Abner Doubleday and William Butler Yeats.
In 1879, the Society relocated to India, where it thrived and played an important role in reviving India's religious heritage.
Among the Theosophical Society's spawn were the well-known and well-regarded 20th-century mystics Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rudolf Steiner.
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Barnet (1970)
In January 1960, a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks and other refugees climbed out of the Himalayas and finally reached India. Among the leaders of the group was 20-year-old Chögyam Trungpa, a monk who had fled his home monastery after the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959.
During the nine-month escape, Trungpa had faced enemy gunfire, scaled 19,000-foot peaks, occasionally became lost and wandered in darkness in freezing cold, and was compelled to eat leather belts and pouches to avoid starvation. The trek is regarded as one of the great sagas of survival.
While in exile in India, Trungpa, a brilliant and charismatic individual, learned English and in 1963 attended Oxford University. In 1970 he married an English woman and together they moved to Canada, arriving in Ontario.
In the same year, students of Trungpa purchased what was once a dairy farm in Barnet. The former farmhouse was renamed Karmê Chöling, and under Trungpa's guidance became the first major teaching and retreat center of Tibetan Buddhism in the western world.
In 1973 Trungpa established a headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, where his teaching style and personal behavior would provoke controversy. The next year he founded Naropa Institute, the first Buddhist university in North America.
A preeminent meditation master, teacher, scholar and translator of many Tibetan Buddhist texts, he was also a noted poet and artist, as well as responsible for founding more than 100 meditation centers around the world.
When Trungpa died in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1987, his body was conveyed to Karmê Chöling, where it was cremated and interred.
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In many surveys Vermont is ranked the least religious state in the country. Alternatively, in light of the state's political and social history, one could say Vermont is the most open to independent thinking and freedom of expression and that these qualities extend into the religious domain as well.
Vermont is a garden where different spiritual perspectives - whether through founders being born here, or movements sparked here, or teachings brought here - can be cultivated. In our land and people there are compelling roots of authenticity that nurture inspired ways of living.
This Voices Essay was submitted to The Commons.
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