The Luckiest Man Alive?

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Through the course of his spiritual research, Keeney has been forced to confront his embarrassment about coming from a line of Southern Baptist preachers. His first act of rebellion as a teenager in Smithville, Missouri, was to attend Unitarian services, and he later reveled in the sophisticated secular status of being a scientist and professor. But today, amid all the wondrous totemic objects from five continents on display in his office—animal skins, beaded vests, a three-foot carved giraffe, an ostrich egg etched with drawings, a genuine poison arrow—his grandfather’s Bible has a place of honor right next to the desk.

One of the chief lessons Keeney draws from his globe-trotting explorations is that, ironically, you can set out on a spiritual search anywhere. “You don’t need to fly to an exotic locale and take an exotic herb, you don’t need Sufi dancing or Brazilian rituals,” he says. “You can start by looking at the religion that was given to you as a child, where your grandparents worshipped. If you were raised Catholic, you can look to what you learned about love from the priest and what you felt in hearing the bells. That can help you find what you need inside.”

The next step, he suggests, is simply to look around you. Every community, no matter how small, has some saint right in its midst, he says. “It may be a church elder, or just some local rascal. You’ll find they have a light inside, one they will share with you, that leads you step by step.”

A guiding light for Keeney has been Amos Griffin, a mechanic and deacon of the African American church in Minneapolis that Keeney and his wife, Mev Jenson, a psychotherapist, attended before moving to Arizona. They joke that while they’re traveling the world to meet powerful spiritual figures, they measure everyone’s AQ—the Amos Quotient, which refers to “the amount of gentle and sweet love a person exudes.”

Coming back to the Baptist Church, especially a predominantly black congregation, reconnected Keeney to another touchstone of his youth: music. The joyful noise of gospel choirs, with everyone rocking and amen-ing in the pews, stirred much the same feelings in him that he later found dancing with the Bushmen in Africa. He now writes gospel music for fun, and the Ringing Rocks Foundation will be sponsoring a night of gospel music at next year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. His research has taken him to black churches in New Orleans and on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. In these music-filled, African-influenced services, he finds hope for the survival of indigenous people’s healing traditions.

Though the foundation lends a hand to organizations working to support indigenous people’s rights and their way of life, Keeney knows these cultures will inevitably be changed by contact with the modern world. The sacred wisdom found in ancient cultures, however, can live on in new forms, just as it has in the gospel churches of America, or on the Indian reservations he’s visited, or among the mestizo cultures of Mexico.

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