Meditating Fairfield, Iowa and Unity Village Kansas City, Missouri

[Doug Hamilton]

“Elders-in-Transition”

Elders transitioning from independent living to move to assisted or dependent living. 

A challenge the Unity movement is currently seeing particularly with these elders-in-transition is that their mature, deeper and sustaining check-books also move away along with these elderly to relocation away with their boomer children or away to assisted living facilities. The evident consequent of those deeper check-books moving away is the loss of their ready support to their local Unity churches and the larger Unity movement. In trend, the baby-boomers are not necessarily as able or as interested in keeping up this financial support of churches behind their parents.

Telltale, a hired security person there on the grounds reflecting on the Unity Village campus spoke in 3^rd person about how just 10 years ago Unity V. was still a happening and hopping place with a lot of people there and since then has really since dropped off to not much now in the last five years or so.

Now the baby-boom in trend: the demographic of “spiritual but not-religious” atheistic individualistic 'in-it-for-yours-truly' sorts, are not yet there towards supporting altruistic civic communal works. A couple of the California ministers were saying for instance a challenge in Marin Co. California where they live is that only 4 percent of their populations attend a church. 4 percent. The rest? They go hiking for themselves, have membership in fitness centers, and may be go to a yoga studio for their community and spirituality. Both Unity and TM with the David Lynch Foundation are busy re-contextualizing themselves in the marketplace of spirituality and religion. Unity by partnering with mindfulness schools of Buddhism for practices and TM fusing science and meditation as a modern spirituality.

The Unity ministers I interviewed over coffee were front-line with active large church communities who were visiting back on a ministry conference at Unity Village who were sharing their movement's challenge by comparison. Within TM this trend is seen too as TM elders who facilitated the late 1950's, 60's, and 1970's TM movement with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi have pretty much all passed away now, with their check-books gone too. There are some baby-boomers who are able and community minded with resources but they are fewer now too from the heady days of a large and popular movement of a few years ago. Some lots of middle and upper-middle-class TM meditators also left or moved away from the TM movement during the 1990's.

In talking with these active Unity ministers their experience is also like what has been seen in TM, that the WWII generation that recognized what was going on spiritually and shared their success and support by the checkbook is pretty much demographically gone now. The traditional WWII generation is pretty much gone now.

These particular practiced ministerial communitarian spiritual Unity Church ministers I spoke with are strategically extremely focused and busy right now at providing services to people with younger families now and looking out for their elderly who are still active but potentially "in transition"; those older who though elderly are independent and well in time before moving toward assisted living or moving away to where their kids live or moving to nursing homes or hospice end-of-life. Talking with these active ministers is like talking with the active David Lynch Foundation TM teachers and some of the successful TM.org field teachers working now out in the meditation centers of the TM movement. As activists they invest a lot of life-energy in to their work of facilitating programs for people.

In Unity congregations, programs serving both families with children and the elderly-in-transition are conscious policy strategies intertwined for a succession. Likewise in TM the Maharishi Foundation is very consciously looking at teaching TM again to student populations something which was for so long neglected by the TM-Sidhis-centric movement of Maharishi's administration in his last years and last decades gone by now. Likewise the Unity ministers also recognize that the generation of the 1980-90's were skipped over, that X-er's characteristically neglected within their studies the liberal arts, the classics and transcendent spirituality for pursuing their MBA's, technical and professional degrees and hence as a generation they were missed almost entirely by spiritual movements, evidently a lost generation.

Transcending meditation, TM ? One of the Unity ministers from California told of an active younger Unity laity minister who had just started TM and found it very helpful spiritually. Everyone 'older' at the coffee table discussion acknowledged starting TM 'back in the day', “Oh yes, TM everyone [each] started with that years ago.. tried and true”. “Nice technique well taught”. . But then in their particular individual spiritual lives they went on to other things spiritual like affecting healing-prayer and meditation sort of like the Patanjali Yoga Sutras of TM-sidhis of the subtle system in practice of healing and prayer in higher levels of spiritual practice and community service inside the Unity Church movement. As like within so many other current spiritual movements I am told in anecdote that Unity is administrated at top levels by the experience of some former TM movement people. That is not uncommon in popular spiritual groups today. TM'ers in moving sideways to other movements as apparatchiks it seems were very well trained in running spiritual movements and making gurus, making abstraction real while operating popular movements.

Unity Village is a very nice spiritual place to visit if simply as an artifact of a spiritual movement of a time passed like museums of Shaker villages or the villages of Amana Colony. The Unity movement is a little older than the TM movement. I hope Unity in Kansas City can hold it together as a place too in the same way I hope the Maharishi Foundation Trustees can continue to pull it together too for TM and Fairfield, Iowa.   Unity Village, Missouri is a unique spiritual village, like Fairfield, Iowa.  Both groups evidently are contemporaneously working very hard at transitional succession planning.

-Reflections by Doug Hamilton

[Doug Hamilton]

Spiritual Movements in Transition and their “Transitional-Elderly”:

A particular challenge that Unity faces as a movement now with their churches out in the world is the competitive marketplace of spirituality where there are fewer and fewer demographics with strong church-attending people. Unity right now is very busy re-contextualizing itself in the face of modern atheism discussions, religious skepticism, and an increasingly 'spiritual but not religious' secularism in the general population.

While at Unity Village I sat with some Unity Church ministers from California and Texas Unity churches and their particular comment around succession was around their work engaging young families and middle-age 40's with young families through programming like schools, community services and such. A second area of strategic importance for survival additionally are services attending particularly to their “transitional-elderly” who are moving from independent life who often are moved or removed from their independence to dependence, often by their baby-boomer children, commonly being moved away from what had been their active life communities and their local Unity churches in to care facilities or circumstance often located far away from their life communities. The focus here being the transitional elderly.

[Doug Hamilton]

Facilitating Unity and the TM Movements:

As examples, the old Unity movement with their Unity Village in Kansas City, Missouri and the Transcendental Meditation [TM] movement in Fairfield, Iowa have each been significant centers in facilitating large popular movements in introductions to mysticism and transcendent spirituality. Both the Unity and the TM movements in teaching practices of mysticism in their prime-time provided experiential critique to other mainline religious denominations and to materialism.

As like TM now is 'post-founder' in organizational succession so are the Unity foundation boards of trustees working hard to keep engaged successive stalwart-generational members of their Unity Church communities out in the world as the baby-boom generation even now aging and passing away such that some amount of the resources of those check-books can come to support the physical-plant of their ancestral mecca, Unity Village in Missouri.

The originating Unity founding generations (late 19^th Century and early 20^th Century) are passed and gone. The continuing organizational leadership elders of the mid-20th Century heights for their movement (Unity: 1920-30-40-50's) are also mostly gone now too, along with their deeper check-books. The TM movement is facing this demographic transition too right now with many of its own founding generation from the 1950-60's having passed away.   

[Doug Hamilton]

The Fairfield, Iowa Meditating Community:

“We are a group of people who have come together and created a community for a transcendentally important common purpose, which of course is to practice the Transcendental Meditation program and the TM-Sidhi program together as a group, for the sake of bringing coherence to national and world consciousness based on balancing labor and leisure to meditate while working together for the benefit of the community. Our Super-Radiance meditating community includes families of all the TM-Meditators and TM-Sidhas in the Fairfield, Vedic City and Jefferson County area.”

[Doug Hamilton]

To Unity Village, Kansas City, Missouri:

I recently visited Unity Village. On trips passing through Kansas City I was able to stay in very nice lodgings on the old Unity Village campus. Unity Village is quite a lovely place. The old chapels and places on campus there are very nice places of meditation.

[Doug Hamilton]

Artifacts of Time and Inter-Generational Succession,

Unity and TM:

A middle-class spiritual movement of the late 19^th and 20^th century, Unity couched themselves as a movement in 'practical Christianity'. Unity became activated nationwide as a popular movement in its time using what was then the new technology of media in radio and television in addition to traditional publishing. Unity Village in Kansas City, Mo. is something like Fairfield, Iowa is becoming now to the Transcendental Meditation [TM] movement in the USA, an artifact of a time.   

[Doug Hamilton]

by e-mail, 

I appreciate the time you initially took to write your reflections (right on) ~ and now to share them. Thanks . 

Shambhala/Naropa (founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche; currently led by his son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche) is experiencing similar changes. No doubt there are others as well.

[Doug Hamilton]

Hi Doug,

Well these posts are just riveting.  I sense the truth in the comparison between Unity and the TM movement.

I've always felt like Unity was moving in the direction of Christian Science.  If you went to a Christian Science church 20 or 30 years ago, they were all very, very old people attending the church.  Unity had somehow managed to keep an extra generation alive in their churches because they were very decentralized and the local ministers would do what they needed to do to make the church work.

In the 90's Unity made a strategic decision to standardize the churches so they would all have very similar services and standards.  I think this came out of the fear of what happened to the Catholic Church with the pedofiles and the fantastic settlements the Catholic Church had to make. Whatever the reason, I knew this standardization was going to kill Unity.

I see the bigger problem is with Gen X and the entire culture moving away from religion into spirituality. Unless you are in a rural area, churches are no longer the hubs of communities.

I assume you have heard the Fairfield IA 'Grant' program (paying meditators) is dead as of this December.  As our community gets older, I see more poverty among the TM faithful who are counting on Support of Nature for their retirement.  I so hope this is not true.

Thanks for sharing your posts.

On Thursday, September 11, 2014 at 7:00:05 PM UTC-5, Doug Hamilton wrote: