What to do?

So have you noticed I haven't been round these parts for a while? I'm not loving it, I must say. Turns out I haven't figured a way to help pay for two boys to go to college while working on The Heathen fulltime.

I never set out to write a blog. Several years ago, when I was confused by the believers at war with each other all over the globe, I set out to learn what each of the seven* major religious traditions teaches its newcomers, its potential converts. I was no longer willing to remain on the sidelines, ignorant.

I am still confused and I am still unwilling to just let it go. But I began this blog when it became apparent to me that this task was going to take at least three more years and it seemed a shame to go on that long alone, without sharing the ride, without company and feedback. I guess I also had some hope that, by going this public, I might figure out a way to support The Heathen and my sons' college educations....not so easy to do when allowing advertizing seems wrong and other potential support eludes me.

So I write this to say that I've taken a new job, one that will take most of the summer to sort out. I'll catch The Heathen up to where I actually am - "finished" Hinduism and Buddhism - but I am going to take the next couple of months to consider whether or not to continue with a public blog or to take it down and continue it in private until my effort is complete.




* as identified by Huston Smith in his seminal work The World's Religions.

Meeting Huston Smith

The only thing that is unqualifiedly good is extended vision, the
enlargement of one’s understanding of the ultimate nature of things.

Huston Smith

The World’s Religions

After the days of silence in Olema, I arrived in Berkeley, two hours before I was due at Professor Huston Smith’s home.

The neighborhood around the University of California’s Berkeley campus is filled with small, neat houses. Professor Smith’s was a cream-colored adobe with lavender trim and a gray painted cement walkway leading to the front steps. A silver station wagon in front had a blue bumper sticker that read: “Coexist,” – each letter the symbol of a different religion.

I was nervous, not even certain, precisely, what I was there to do but sure I needed to be there, to tell the man whose book provoked my desire to do this what I was doing, to hear whatever it was he might have to tell me. I hadn’t even turned off the engine when the “what ifs” started yammering in my head with their very creative list of why doing this was stupid, why this wasn’t the “right” time or why my preparation wasn’t “enough” to allow for any prospect of “success” even though I had no clear notion of what success might look like. But stubborn commitment to commitments and curiosity forced me out of the car and up those clean steps to ring the doorbell with a bouquet of pink and white flowers in my hand.

The bell caused several small dogs inside to start barking. After a few moments, Professor Smith answered the door himself. I was instantly sorry I’d brought the flowers. I’d heard Professor Smith, who was eighty-seven, had had some health challenges but I’d never stopped to consider what they were. Or I guess I assumed that, if they were severe, he wouldn’t have been willing to meet or he’d have someone to help him with visitors. None of this was true. This slender, once tall, regal man’s back is giving out. His wife wasn’t home or was elsewhere in the house so he struggled, bent over a walker, to answer the door himself.

He said, “The flowers are very lovely but unnecessary.”

I tried to make up for the misguided gesture. “May I put them in water for you?”

“No, please take a seat in there,” he said, waving the heavy bouquet towards the living room nearby. “The red chair is mine. Take any other you like.” As he turned his walker around with one hand while holding the crinkling bouquet in the other, he said, “And I’ll take care of these. I know my wife will enjoy them even more than I will.”

One of the squat, happy dogs kept his eye on me. There was more hardwood than oriental rug, more clean wall than art, and little in the way of religious iconography. His red chair had a large, well-used wooden writing surface off to one side, ready to be swung into place while another black leather chair stood quite close beside it. The room was set for single visitors with questions. It was clear that a consistent flood of faxes come like mine and he probably says yes a lot more than he says no.

As Professor Smith was sitting down, he apologized in advance for having very little time to talk. A relative he hadn’t seen for decades was arriving shortly and he and his wife were taking him out to dinner and, most of all, he was hard at work writing “his memories.” This warm and generous man, his kind face unfairly slipping beyond his control after nearly nine decades of use, then locked his eyes on my lips to help his hearing. One small dog curled up to sleep on the floor but another Corgi-like dog sat, almost erect, in the middle of a formal loveseat across the small room, as if monitoring the conversation. I felt as conscious as I’ve ever been that time was precious and I had best not use much of his.

After listening to the quickest and shortest explanation possible of my background and plan, he said, “I’ve retired from giving advice. There are only two things I can say confidently and I say to every serious seeker: seek and ye shall find. And the other is: follow the light where it leads. But beyond that, why, uh, it’s your project, if it’s what you want to do with your life ahead, for several years or something, why, God bless you. Do it.”

Out of the advice giving business? I was unsure what to talk about if advice was off-limits. I struggled for a minte, then figured I could ask how he’d come to his lifelong passion for the religions of the world.

Professor Smith’s parents had been Methodist missionaries and, because of that, he’d grown up in a small frontier town in China. Smith still considers himself a Methodist.

I asked, “But how did you go from the tradition that you were raised in to an interest in other faiths?”

“I’ve been very, very fortunate. I hope you feel that way about your life, too.” He waited, genuinely interested to find out if I felt I was leading a truly fulfilling life.

I said, “I do, so far. I am very, very grateful.”

His concern answered, he continued, “I have always had the deepest yearning within me to nurture what Aldous Huxley called that ‘small precarious flame, (which) kindled or quenched, creates the noble or ignoble man we are, the worlds we live in, and the very fates, our bright or muddy star.’ And I wanted to tend that flame. And then part of my good fortune was that I came upon Alduous Huxley’s book, The Perennial Philosophy (that’s basically an anthology of mystical texts) and I found myself saying: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ And, when I met him, he said, ‘You’re going to St Louis, you say?’ I said: ‘Yes.’ He said: ‘There’s a very good swami there.’ Swami? I doubt that I even knew what the word meant but he gave me the name.”

While continuing his devotion to Christianity and attending church every Sunday, Professor Smith soon found himself in weekday classes with the head swami at the fledgling Vedanta Society there, classes he said were “like Bible study” held in the small apartment then used by the Vedantists in St Louis.

The Society soon outgrew its space and had the resources to buy a building but it was 1950. Professor Smith said, “When the owner found out he would be selling it to one of those heathen groups, they refused to sell. And so we did kind of an end run around them and I bought the building - with their money, of course - and then it turned it over to the Vedanta Society. The current swami (there), Swami Chetananda said, ‘The deed for this building is still in your name!’”

After some discussion on how to go about doing this kind of project, the subject of Ramakrishna came up. I asked what he thought of him. Without pause and as if the answer was utterly obvious, he said, “Oh, he’s an Incarnation.”

“You feel that way for sure?”

“Yes.”

I don’t know why I felt so paralyzed by the conviction in his answer but I was. I retreated into asking for names of the most profound thinkers he knew in the various traditions, people who might be willing to share their wisdom with me.

Soon it was clearly time to go. I thanked him for his time.

“Remember my two dicta? Can you repeat them?”

I wasn’t prepared to be tested. I sputtered, “Uh, follow the light…”

And Profesor Smith finished, “Where it leads.”

I went on, “Seek and ye shall find.”

He nodded and said, “So, that’s my advice to you.”

I started to put my notebook away. I don’t know what I’d wanted, what I’d imagined. I got names of people to talk to, books to read -- what more could I expect? His blessing?

The dogs were on their feet, ready for anything, their nails slipping on the hard wood floor. As I stood up, I said, “I may let you know from time to time what’s happened.”

“All right. You have my address.”

Before I knew it, I was moving to touch his feet. “I know I should do this because this is what I feel.”

He laughed for the first time. “Oh no! I should push you away! Swami Satprakashanada said, ‘When I’m in India in my robes, then I accept that. But in America, no.’”

“Well, that’s how I feel. Thank you.”

“You are welcome. Because of my back I’m just going to let you make your own way out. Be well.”

Back down the steps and then out into my car, I was kicking myself for all the questions I was too shy or too scared or too conscious of time to ask. But it was done. There was no going back.

But the very next day there was a message on my cell phone. “Marley? This is Huston Smith. I have an afterthought about our conversation yesterday afternoon. I expect to be here until about six o’clock this evening or all of tomorrow. Good bye.”

Before I returned the call, I faxed him the one question that gnawed at me most: “How do you distinguish an “Incarnation” from the idea that there is divinity in each one of us? And how do you know so clearly that, for example, Sri Ramakrishna was one?”

He answered the phone himself later that night. “I have received your fax. I’m holding it in my hand.”

In answer to Professor Smith’s request that I clarify my question, I said, “I believe there’s divinity in everybody—”

“I do, too; it’s a fundamental element in each of us, the divine spark.”

“And is it that someone like Christ or Ramakrishna is different from us in that they are more aware of that fact?”

“Well, I would use different imagery,” Professor Smith said. “There was an early Christian theologian who put it: ‘God became man so man could become God.’”

“Oh.”

“An incarnation is what God would be if God had to fit himself into human form.”

But that wasn’t the reason Professor Smith had called. He found he did have some advice for me after all. “You are an experienced reporter but reporters present facts; it is very important that your book be a story of your progress.” What I feel, what I come to know, and how that changes my life – and me – over time.

For someone used to sticking her nose in other people’s business—I mean, for someone used to reporting on the world and the people in it while trying hard to remain invisible, this reversal has felt strange and awkward a lot of the time, so much so it’s made me wonder if I’m going about this in the right way, if this kind of personal probing is really the way to do this. To have Huston Smith tell me there really is no other way to go doesn’t remove those feelings but does say it’s time to let go of my endless second-guessing. There's nothing to do but continue on with “my story.”

5 February 2007

Huston Smith!

I found him at last!

Lands across the planet have become our neighbors, China across the street, the Middle East at our back door. We hear that East and West are meeting, but it is an understatement. They are being flung at one another. When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take another seriously.

Huston Smith
The World’s Religions

Two days after I sent the letter to Huston Smith, I was driving on a freeway, wondering when it might be proper to follow up with a call when my cell phone rang. A blocked caller.

“Hello?”

“This is Huston Smith calling for Marley.”

His voice was dignified, precise, his inner force rising to overcome the wear and tear of time.

“Professor Smith? I can’t believe it! Thank you so much for calling me so promptly. I cannot tell you how much this means to me.”

“Well, I read your letter and I’d be happy for you to stop by but I want you to know that, if you want me to read a manuscript, I must tell you I am just too busy and so my answer must be no. But if you want to stop by, the answer is yes.”

He was eighty-seven. He got a letter from a complete stranger asking to visit. He called back as soon as he got it. And, he said yes.

If there were other cars on the road, I no longer saw them. “Oh that’s terrific, Professor Smith. That would be just great.”

“Let me give you my fax number so we can finish up all the details that way. My hearing isn’t great this year - it will be much better next year - so I can’t do much over the phone but I’m much better in person. Please take this fax number and we’ll work out the details that way.”

While driving on the freeway, I’m sorry to say, I took the number down, afraid to risk losing him even in the small amount of time that pulling to the side of the road might have taken.

A couple of faxes and phone calls later and we were set. After the silent retreat, I was to stop by his house.

22 January 2007

Finding Huston Smith?

What a strange fellowship this is, the God-seekers in every land, lifting their voices in the most disparate ways imaginable to the god of all life. How does it sound from above? Like bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange, ethereal harmony?

Huston Smith

The World’s Religions

I gave up trying to find someone who might introduce me to Huston Smith and did what I should have been done to begin with: I looked him up on the internet. His last teaching job had been at the University of California at Berkeley. And there, still in the Berkeley phone book, were his address and home phone number. And I even found his age - eighty-seven.

There was nothing to do but write him a letter, telling him I was at work on a project inspired by his book, The World's Religions. I explained what I'm doing, then wrote:
It's the heart and soul of the project I would like to come talk to you about, if you think you might be willing to meet with me. If there is any way I could stop by, I would be so very, very grateful.

No matter what, thank you for all of your open-hearted work. It has made

an enormous difference in my life.

Yours,
Marley KD

I gave him my phone numbers and address, then dropped the letter in the mail. There was nothing left to do but wait.

20 October 2006

Bowling and death...

Focused on me at all times,
you will overcome all obstructions;
but if you persist in clinging
to the I-sense, then you are lost.

Bhagavad Gita, 18.58

My brain is exploding.

There’s a good reason why people only consider subjects like these once a week, a good reason why most religions have sabbaths only every seventh day: the brain can only process so much. At least, this brain. My head felt so crammed with new thoughts, ideas, and concepts it actually hurt. But it turned out to be the perfect week: both of my sons had different days off from school so I had an excuse to play and it came in the nick of time -- I needed mindless. I decided to take Matt bowling. It’s hard to be too serious in rented shoes.

Right before we left I sent an email to Professor Amir Hussain, hoping he might know either where Huston Smith was or anyone who might introduce me to him. Although I’d decided to use the chapter structure of his book, The World’s Religions, as the archtecture for this project, it hadn’t occurred to me to try and talk to him about it until Swami Sarvadevananda mentioned that Smith had spent a great deal of time in the Vedanta Society temple in St Louis. I mean, how weird is that? After wandering around from one branch of Hinduism to another, I end up choosing a swami in the same sect of Hinduism as Huston Smith? It seemed, somehow, not accidental or, at least it made me think I should try to talk to him about what I’m doing. If he’d see me, that is.

Once I sent the email, Matt and I went bowling.

Just how bad a bowler am I? Let’s just say that Matt and I played with the bumpers up. Let’s just say that Matt, using his unique two-handed hurling strategy in which the ball slammed to the wood some distance down the alley and then bounced – sometimes twice - off the bumpers, consistently beat me. Three games, some air hockey, pinball, a game of absurdly poor pool and I could feel the pressure ease. But Matt still had his regular afterschool activities so it meant I actually could go to Swami Sarvadevananda’s private study group that afternoon so I went.

The class was already underway when I walked in to what used to be the living room of the small home that also houses the bookstore and Swami Sarvadevananda’s office. About four people were in a semi-circle of chairs with Swami Sarvadevananda in the center, his back to a fireplace. Painted onto the mantelpiece over his head were the words: “All Kare Abandone, Ye Who Tarye Here,” a remnant of the home’s original owner.

A somewhat elderly white woman with short, graying hair finished reading an excerpt from a book on Vedanta Hinduism called For Seekers of God. The subject was aging and death. Swami Sarvadevananda said, “It’s very difficult for people to accept growing old. I mean we accept youth, we accept the prime of our lives but can we accept change? Everything changes. Even since we have been sitting here in class, we have been changing. How many cells have died since this class began? Why do we care so much what happens to this body? This is a temporary, rented home. It’s decay and loss is natural.”

Decay and loss might be natural but I hate it. I’m about to turn fifty and I care very much what happens to my body. And I’ve never been much good at accepting change. I cried at the end of high school, of college, of every year of summer of camp, of jobs, of relationships, at the end of kindergarten for Luke because he was the first and for Matt because he was the last. But then change is easy to like when bad things finally come to an end, right?

The swami’s slim hands were doing their sinuous dance, turning over and over as though offering us his words. “Everyone loves a new car. Youth is like that. But when it becomes old no one looks at it, at us anymore,” Laughing, he looked around the room through his large glasses to see if we understood. “And then, when the car stops working, we exchange it for another. We are still the same driver but the car is new. I mean, we can beautify ourselves, some people have plastic surgery but, really, how long can you do it? We must accept our bodies as they are and see whatever stage we’re in as beautiful.”

Okay, that’s not so easy. My current body is a little tougher to love than the twenty-five year-old one but, if I stop to really consider, I was laughably harsh about my body even then. I look at photographs and can remember what I was thinking about how I looked and it makes me sad at the disconnect. For that reason and others, this stage is actually better. So some lines have replaced the blemishes, a trade-up if you ask me. And I was pretty uncomfortable in my own skin then. I was afraid and that made me judgmental, harsh, and not very trustworthy, even to myself at times. Looking back at old photos, there’s not one that makes me want to switch places with that girl.

There was a warmth, an intimacy in the room as the swami spoke. He said that there were six stages of life: existence, birth, growth, the prime of life, the stage where you gradually lose everything, and death. “Here I am in the fifth stage of life, nothing left but death. Well, okay! What is lost by dying?" he said. “Nothing! Who doesn’t like replacing an old car with a new car? That is what we believe. But why, why do we believe this? Ask yourself: who was there in your body when you were born? You would say: ‘I was.’ But your body isn’t the same as it was then. Yet you would say ‘I’ was in there, the same ‘I’ that is in there now. So, if your body is constantly changing, but the ‘I’ isn’t, could that ‘I’ be the same thing as your body?“

There was one of those pauses, a silence like a delta of thought branching off in all directions. The graying woman then ventured a quiet question. “Why do I have so much fear of death?”

Swami Sarvadevanda looked only at her. “Because you haven’t analyzed this. ‘I’ is continuously there. ‘I’ was there when you were just a girl. Your ‘I’ was there when you were a young woman and ‘I’ is here now. ‘I’ is birthless, deathless so what will you be losing in death? The ‘I’ doesn’t die, just the body does. And here’s the Vedanta answer to that question…” The swami seemed almost disconnected from his arms. “You can’t accept that you are going to die because you aren’t. You are infinite and the concept of death feels wrong because it is. The body dies but the ‘I’ doesn’t.”

Swami Sarvadevananda pulled his pale orange tunic away from his body to indicate the spare frame inside. “What does it matter if this goes? If it’s proven that ‘I’ exists through the first five stages why not the last?”

I spent a lot of time worrying about death as a child. I hated going to bed. I was afraid of the dark. I checked for evildoers under my bed, in my closet, and even behind the pictures on my wall – after all, a secret compartment could have developed behind the wall during the day. But even once my room was investigated and secure, I was too full of adrenaline to sleep so I had a lot of time to think and death was the subject more often than not. It went kind of like this: Most people don’t really think they’re going to die. Do I know that? Do really know that I’m going to die? Or am I a “weak” person unable to handle the truth? My mother certainly was afraid I was going to be one. Along with asking too many questions and my interest in religion, I also wanted a light on in my room at night. Weak people needed religion and lights on in their room at night. I would worry this point until I was quite sure that I believed that I was, indeed, going to die.

My courage reservoir wasn’t very deep. The only tenable faith within my reach at the time was that, somehow, my parents could save me from the abject terror of facing death truthfully and alone. Going to their room was a poor substitute for faith, but it was a substitute. However, there are only so many nights parents of four children will put up with being shaken awake after midnight so, most nights, I had to settle for watching them breathe by the light of the television my mother can’t sleep without.

I’m not sure if I can completely abandon myself to it but the swami’s concept of death - the ‘I’ doesn’t die, just the body does” - is a lot easier to handle than the idea of humans as just a walking, talking set of complex chemical compounds on their way to breaking apart into their component parts. Surely we’re more than that, aren’t we? What about those moments of intense communion with another person? Or those perfect moments in plays or in stories where the veil is pierced and you feel you really know something, get that gut sense that you’ve seen It, felt It, even without having the slightest idea what It is? Randomly-assembled chemicals?

“Don’t be ridiculous. Eat your peas.”

And even now, like the gray-haired woman, I’m still stunned by the idea that one day I will cease to exist. That is, when I let myself think about it. The only moments of grace, of freedom from this paralyzing fear come when I can grasp some piece of the idea that there’s a difference between this physical form and what’s underlying it; that this specific, physical me might not be quite as important as I think.

The swami was getting ready to end the class. “Creation itself is nothing. It is a ripple on an ocean of God, it rises up and then collapses and, without the ocean, waves cannot dance. We come from God, we dance in God, we fight in God, we love in God, we dissolve in God -- only we don’t know that everything comes from God. That’s why birth, death is just a matter of course, it’s natural, like a wave returning to the ocean.

“Here is the key point: Everything that is accomplished, everything we achieve in our lives, these accomplishments are nothing. They will pass away just as our greatest failures will. They will die when our body dies. But the Self, the eternal Atman presence, remains as it is forever. We are all connected with that eternal presence – Atman. Okay, let’s stop here for now.”

And, with a short chant, we started to gather our things to leave. And then my fellow students – most of them American – each bent down to brush Swami’s feet. I was panicked. I couldn’t do it. It felt fake and false. And how do you put your palms together when holding a notebook, pen, and a cellphone? I thought of shaking hands but that appeared hopelessly out of the question, too. So, from a polite distance away, I tried to awkwardly beam my gratitude and he did the same.

When there were only three of us left, the swami asked, “Do you want to come see the Durga puja? It’s just ten minutes long, right here, in my office, on my computer.”

What I wanted to say was, ‘No, I can’t process anything more,’ but I didn’t. Instead, I followed him and two other women around the corner and into his miniscule office. The other two women were almost as excited as he was to see whatever this “Durga puja” was. Almost. I encouraged the excited ones to sit in the chairs so I could stand in the back, nearest the door, wanting to be sure to be able to get out when I wanted without having to disturb someone to do it. While I never did come to understand what a Durga puja was then, I did get that it was something happening in India, at the central office, the Rome, if you will, of Vedanta Hinduism in Belur Math, India and they were going to be able to watch it on the internet. I watched people eager to watch a ritual performed half a globe away on a tiny pop-up window on an old fourteen-inch monitor. Would I ever get to the point where I’d actually be excited to see a ritual performed? It was hard to imagine. When it was all strange and new, it fascinated. But that was different from finding meaning, peace, comfort, or transcendence in it.

One of the women leaned in to point out where the Swami should click to start the web streaming. Swami Sarvadevananda’s head was tilted up so he could find the small arrow to start the video through the reading portion of his large glasses. His hands looked odd cupped over a computer mouse. With a click, the ceremony began to play.

He was delighted. “Oh, we’re right there! This is wonderful! Can you see? Look! There are a group of monks meditating.”

The swami began pointing out monks he knew, old friends who were participating in the service. The camera started to sweep to one side to show the crowd and, when it got to some trees and water, the swami exclaimed, “Oh, that’s the Ganges! You know the river, the Ganges? There it is, right there! I mean, this was happening just today, and we can see it, we can be there, can you imagine?”

He was transported, a traveler a long way from home with little hope of returning soon who was feeling the air, smelling the smells, knowing the light of a familiar, intimate place.

Within minutes, the video was over and, as the women helped the swami save it and email it to others, I said goodbye and slipped out, grateful I didn’t have to find myself unable to bow again.

The small relief I’d gotten from bowling earlier in the day, from not thinking, was gone.

I felt like a computer that needed a hard-drive upgrade.



(28 September 2008)

A bit about why and how...

In my limited contacts with religious faith over the course of my life, I’ve been hobbled by my own judgments, looking for what was wrong, inconsistent, false, hoping to find nothing wrong, nothing inconsistent, nothing false in any single religious institution. I wanted to walk in skeptical-- No. It's really more accurate to say “walk by skeptical” -- only to be lured in by the siren song of the obviously spiritual, true, and good into a specific faith and practice that would simply feel right. I wanted to be mugged by faith. After decades of waiting, hoping, it's time to try something, anything, different.

So you won't find me reporting on what doesn't resonate with me but what does. I've spent a lifetime - both personally and as a journalist - looking for the mistakes, the flaws, the inconsistencies. This is an attempt to balance that out. (If you need or want those pointed out, there are plenty of recent books doing a fine job of cataloguing inconsistencies and flaws in various beliefs anyway.)

Using the chapter structure of Huston Smith's book The World's Religions, I'm going through the conversion training for the seven major religious traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confuscianism, Taoism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. I've stayed in the United States - I am a mom after all - but I’m going where there are a lot of people are practicing that faith. (For instance, I've started with Hinduism as it's the oldest of the major religions currently practiced and I’ve started in southern California as it has a huge concentration of practicing Hindus with more diversity of sects than most any place in the country.)

When it became clear this idea wasn’t going away, that I was considering actually leaving my lifetime career and taking the leap, I started asking for advice. I wanted to make sure there was some chance, no matter how small, that someone who knew a lot more than I did thought this effort might be worthwhile. I went back to the professors who taught the courses I took – Professor Rick Talbott of California State University at Northridge and Professor Amir Hussain at Loyola Marymount University – and to new ones like Professor Christopher Chapple, who’s also at Loyola Marymount and an expert on Hinduism and Buddhism. After many questions and several words of caution, they each have agreed to advise me. Professor Chapple also gave me a tutorial on the history of Hinduism in the United States and its various denominations and spiritual leaders. I spent a lot of time asking, “Now, how do you spell that again?”

“A-n-a-n-d-a. A lot of the names end with ‘ananda.’ It means bliss.”

Afterward, when I asked him which temple I should go to first and who he thought might make the best Hinduism guide for me, the best guide for Buddhism. He said I should just start showing up in various temples and "the right teachers will appear."

Great. I was looking for direction and I got Yoda.

So, that's what I'm doing. The search for that "right teacher" allows me to get me some sense of the diversity of belief within a religious tradition while spending time with the "right teacher" gives me a much more specific understanding of the faith itself. And I’m confining my search to a faith’s more popular branches so that I’ll come away with a stronger sense of each tradition’s core beliefs.

Okay, here goes...

I've been at this for two years now and I'm getting buggy with all my time alone, keeping this all to myself, so I'm letting it out. My raw notes. As I go. Once I catch this blog up with real time, that is.

So, who am I and what have I been doing?

When my sons were six and four years old, they were arguing in the back seat of my car about whether or not God existed. Pretty soon a voice from the backseat asked, "Mom, what do you believe?"

All I could answer at the time was, "I don't know. I'm still working on it."


I am a blank slate. A tabula rasa. I come to the table with the fewest possible preconceived notions about any religious tradition because I was raised outside of any. Although there were rudiments of some religious traditions in parts of my extended family, my parents considered strong religious conviction the source of wars, hatred, and division among people. At the dinner table, on more than one night, they said religion was a crutch for those unable to handle the truth: that we're mortal, that “after life” we simply revert to the chemicals from which we're made. Nothing more.

Just chemicals? That's all we were? It didn't make sense.

One night, when I was twelve, I said, “I think I might want to, uhm, go to church.”

Forks clattered to the plates. "Well,” my mother said, “if you think you need that."

So, growing up, I knew nothing of any religious tradition. I tried to learn how to live, how to have a meaningful life, by reading books. Biographies were best; I was obsessed with them. Maybe if I could see the choices people made, and how it worked out for them, I might know how to live. The Bible was little more to me than a collection of stories that I learned about, one-by-one, when a teacher would point out allusions to them in novels or plays.

When it came time to get a job, I found one that allowed me to continue my obsession with the lives of others: I became a journalist. But my spiritual dissatisfaction didn’t go away. I just tried to ignore it. On occasion, a story would give me an excuse to learn about a religious tradition. A profile about the Archbishop of San Francisco introduced me to Father Miles Riley, who specialized in over-exuberant press management for the archdiocese at the time. We didn't get off to a good start. I thought all public relations people were only there to prevent me from doing my job with integrity. Our awkward beginning was made worse by my lack of experience with clergy of any sort crashing up against the vaudeville character of Father Miles, with his light yellow Cadillac convertible, his show-tune personality, and compendium of dirty jokes about his fellow clerics. He was not what I expected or even imagined as possible in a priest. We became friends, sort of. As friendly as one can be with someone wont to exclaim: “Oh, I love hanging out with the heathen!”

After that, I spent a bunch of years working on television newsmagazines which aren't very efficient tools for exploring faith.

Finally, in 2000, I decided to take two courses at a local college: an introduction to the Bible and a survey of world religions. By the end of the term, I felt relief: I had a basic grasp of what other people believed. I thought I'd taken care of this part of my life.

But I hadn't. I had factual knowledge but I found myself wondering what it felt like to actually practice a faith, to truly live by one. I went looking for books by beginners, people walking into a faith who might tell me what it felt like to learn how to practice it. I couldn’t find anything like that. And nothing came close to explaining the mystery of how a devout follower of any of those traditions could get from their faith, could get from the Golden Rule - some version of it is in every major religious tradition - to what I saw happening between people of faith all over the globe. If the faithful of different religions all believe they should do unto others as they would have people do unto them, if they were actually living lives based on doctrine, how could there be so much hatred and bloodshed in the name of those faiths? But, for all my newly-acquired, very basic understanding of the fundamental beliefs of various traditions, I wasn't one step closer to really understanding a thing I wanted to know.

Then I got one of those ideas people get while driving around or in the shower, the ones most people are sane enough to leave right where they found them. I began to wonder what would happen to me if I went through the conversion training - not to convert but to learn what a convert would learn - in the seven major religious traditions as identified by Huston Smith in his seminal work, The World's Religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Would I know something I couldn’t possibly imagine? Or might I end up at war with myself by the end, a riled nest of ideas, beliefs and practices in conflict?

Well, it's fine to have an idea, but actually doing this? I kept imagining my parents' reaction so I put it out of my mind and just confined myself to taking care of my two sons and doing my day job which was, at the time, running a regional public television newsmagazine.

Then 9/11 happened. My parents were the only people I knew who didn’t seem surprised at all; it was just one more item to add to their list of the damage religion has caused. But that act, and all that followed, finally made me feel like I had no choice any longer, that my personal confusion wasn’t something I could continue to shrug off as just that, personal. There was a life-and-death argument going on over the role of religion in our lives and I was disqualified from participating because I was an ignorant outsider.

And there was that question from my children, "Mom, what do you believe?"

So that's what I'm doing. I've decided to find out.

A note: If you're just joining up with me, especially for you first-timers to blog reading, it's in reverse chronologic order. You'll be grateful for this when you catch up to the most current post because the newest will always be what you see first when you come here but, if you've missed a lot, you might have a better idea of what's going in if you start with the oldest post and work forward.