Something I learned in college came back to me with force. There is no such thing as religion. There are only religious people, who embody the scripts of their faiths as differently as dancers embody the steps of their dances. Until someone grabs a partner and heads to the dance floor, the tango is no more than a list of steps on the wall. The same is true of faith. We have inherited a sacred pattern, a series of artful steps meant to lead us closer to God and each other, but until someone finds a partner and gives it a try, it is an idea and not a dance.
What this means is that is it not possible for a generic group of Christians to meet with a generic group of Buddhists to discuss a generic issue on which they differ.1 If you have met one Buddhist, you have met exactly one—and the same is true of the followers of other faiths as well. Although we may all be tuned to the singular teachings of our distinct religions, our religious experience is not singular but plural. This is as true within our religions as it is between them.
That was the key insight for me, back when I was failing Christianity. Once I fully accepted that there are mutually exclusive views of what it means to be Christian—that Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians of good faith can disagree about a great many things without being forced off the dance floor, and that God alone is competent to judge their performances—it was only a short step from there to accepting that there are mutually exclusive views of the divine mystery as well, among which I am not competent to judge. All I can do is dance my heart out, finding as much to admire in the other dancers as I do in those who dance with me.
Though I am retired from teaching religion, I am not done searching the scriptures, history, and tradition of my faith for good reasons to engage other people in theirs. Some days I do it because I want to be a peacemaker. Other days I do it because I am starved for the God I did not make up. In either case, I often find myself at what Richard Rohr calls “the edge of the inside” of my tradition, where I can keep an eye on the door. After half a lifetime near the center and no wish to be outside, being eccentric suits me in the truest sense of the word. It suits me to be off center, sometimes pressed against the edges of my tradition like a kid on the Gravitron at the county fair.
Rohr explains that being on the edge of the inside is not a rebellious position any more than it is an antisocial one. “When you live on the edge of anything with respect and honor,” he says, “you are in a very auspicious and advantageous position. You are free of its central seductions, but also free to hear its core message in very new and creative ways.”2 Since I know how quickly my ego warms to advantageous positions, I appreciate David Brooks’s warning about the downsides of living at the edge in his column for the New York Times. “You never lose yourself in a full commitment,” he says. “You may be respected and befriended, but you are not loved as completely as the people at the core, the band of brothers. You enjoy neither the purity of the outsider nor that of the true believer.”3
He is right about that. Yet the best reason to stay put, he says, is because reality looks different from the inside of the edge. People who are all the way in or all the way out tend to think in terms of “us” versus “them,” but from the perspective of the edge it is possible to see how the two may actually be in relationship with each other and with some larger process, even when it does not look that way to either of them.4 “A doorkeeper must love both the inside and the outside of his or her group,” Rohr adds, “and know how to move between those two loves.”
John Philip Newell offers a different way of thinking about how to navigate the distance between the center and the edge of faith. Sometimes you just have to pack your bag and go. Early in the Christian story, he says, Celtic monks living in the British Isles engaged in the practice of peregrination, which involved the deliberate decision to leave home for parts unknown. The word “peregrine” comes from an old Latin word for “foreigner” or “pilgrim,” as in the peregrine falcon, which can fly from the Arctic Circle to South America and back again in a single year, or St. Brendan the Navigator, the sixth-century Irish monk who spent seven years on the sea in a hide-covered boat searching for the legendary island of Paradise. Early Christians sometimes described peregrination as “seeking the place of one’s resurrection,” Newell says, since it meant dying to their old boundaries in order to find new life out beyond the buoys.5
I plan to keep that practice up, even if it does not involve an actual boat. I want to keep leaving my comfort zone on a regular basis in order to visit the neighbors, without expecting them to exemplify their faith any better than I exemplify mine. I also want to keep pressing the boundaries of my own faith, which can turn into walls if I let them. Recently my neighbor installed an electric fence to keep his old German shepherd and his new golden Lab from running away. Every time I see them inside their yard with their shock collars on, barking a safe three feet away from the white flags that mark the hotwire buried underneath, I feel a sting in my neck.
My holy envy has taken an interesting turn in recent months, as the practice of peregrination has led me to explore different churches in my own faith. My best friend, Martha, has joined me in these voyages, which have taken us from the huge Passion City megachurch, which meets in an old Home Depot, to Our Lady of Lourdes, the mother church of African-American Catholics in Atlanta. One Sunday we visited a tiny storefront church in a strip mall with people from many nations inside, tended by an Episcopal priest from South Asia. Another Sunday we sat quietly with the Quakers. Still on our list are St. Elias Antiochian Orthodox Church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the Buckhead Church, where members watch a hologram of their pastor preaching from one of the six other churches in his network.
I have found something to envy every place I have been—the parking-lot hospitality at Passion City, the graceful dancers who waved banners of red silk over our heads at Our Lady of Lourdes, the refugee ministry at the storefront church, the blissful stillness of the Quakers. But none has compared to my first experience of the Church of the Common Ground, which meets at a public park in the heart of downtown Atlanta. “We’re like any other church,” their website reads. “We just don’t have a building.” I envy that.
The crowd was bigger than usual on the day I visited, since the bishop was coming to help welcome the new vicar, an Episcopal priest named Monica. I recognized a few people from my old congregation down the street, a classically beautiful and well-endowed parish named All Saints. There were also a lot of people who looked as if they had spent the night on the street. When I asked a Native American man with a gray ponytail how long he had been a member of Common Ground, he said, “Years.” Trying to make conversation, I told him I had started at All Saints down the street. “Well,” he said, in an obvious effort to be kind, “we all have to start somewhere.”
A small wooden table covered with a white cloth had been set up for Communion in the middle of the park. Behind us, a wall of water ran down the side of a public fountain. Blackbirds flew between the trees overhead. When the bishop had arrived and most of the regular members were accounted for, the man with the gray ponytail held up a brass gong and banged it lightly, summoning us all to gather around the table. I found my place at the edge of the inside and surveyed the array of faces around the circle: the father holding his premature baby, the teenager with the uneven skull, the couple in their seventies whom I knew from All Saints, and the man with the rusty beard who had lost all his front teeth, along with Monica’s husband, Simon, holding the hand of their youngest child. There must have been close to a hundred people in all, representing a divine swath of the human condition.
We had just gotten started when a loud voice from the back rose above all of the others. “Liars!” a woman’s voice shrieked. “This is all lies, lies, lies!” As she pushed her way through the crowd toward the middle, it became apparent—at least to me—that she was in her right mind. She was African American, about five foot four. She wore nice sweatpants, a navy hoodie over a ball cap, and reflective aviator sunglasses. W
ith her trendy pink backpack, she could have been a student at Georgia State University across the street. She did not look or sound crazy. She just looked and sounded really mad.
“Wake up, people!’ she screamed. “This god you’re praying to, what does he look like? What does he look like?” She spat each word out as though it had a period at the end. “They are killing us all day long, people. You know they are, and here you are praying to their God! What do you think that’s going to change? It’s all lies, lies, lies!” As she ran this tirade a couple more times at high volume, people in the congregation started talking back to her.
“You need to step back now,” a man said. “You’re in my space.”
“Take your rant somewhere else,” someone else said. “This is a peaceful place.”
“There’s always one,” another person said.
The bishop had tried to begin his sermon once, but the woman had drowned him out. Since he is the first African-American bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, her smack talk about God fell short of its mark. To his credit, the bishop just folded his hands over his vestments and stood in front of the Communion table waiting for her to wind down. A minute later, a man in a red and blue jacket and a bicycle helmet rode up to the back of the crowd on a Segway. When he started walking toward the woman, she quieted down. When he reached her, she turned and followed him out of the crowd. His jacket had “Ambassador” written in big block letters on the back. I had not been this awake in church in years.
“One of the great things about Church of the Common Ground is that there are no walls,” the bishop said when he resumed his sermon. “This is where the church meets the world.” Everyone around me nodded and hummed their approval when he said that. Then they listened to him so quietly that I could hear the sound of the water running down the wall of the fountain behind me. The angry woman was still standing at the back of the crowd talking to the ambassador.
The bishop did not put her on the spot by looking at her, but he included her when he said, “There is nothing to prevent us from hearing the real concerns other people have about us, some of the legitimate questions they have about who we are and what we do. We need to listen to them too, so it is good that we are here, with no walls to keep us in or shut them out. What better way to remember that we really are one?”
There it was again—the “one” word, the expressed faith in Christian unity—only this time it sounded different to me.
“As different as we are,” the bishop said, “whatever concerns we bring, we are all one.”
Coming from him, in that place, with those people, I hoped it was true. I wanted it to be true. He said more after that, but pretty soon it was as if his words were coming out of the mouths of the people all around me. I could not separate what he was saying from the sea of human beings who proved the truth of it—not just the ones in the Christian circle, but also the ones walking by on Peachtree Street still dozy from brunch, the ones still rolled up in sleeping bags over by the fountain, and the ones I could see looking down on us from some office windows higher up. Were they janitors or executives? There was no way to tell. All I could tell, looking up, was that there was no ceiling on this church either. The sky just went on and on.
After we had all joined hands and listened to each other’s prayers, the new vicar invited us to come closer to the Communion table. I left my spot at the back and got as close to the table as I could. This was partly because I wanted to be one of the first to sip from the common cup—I’m just saying—but it was also because this was the only church in a long time that had drawn me to the center. I looked around to make sure I was not blocking anyone else’s view. The man with the rusty beard and no front teeth was on my left. A woman with platinum hair and a sparkly cap with “The Ministry Team” written across it was on my right. When the vicar finally held out the bread to me, it was as sweet as honey in my mouth. So was the grape juice. Then I must have sailed to the island of paradise, because I do not remember much after that. There was nothing left to envy. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
At the end, after the vicar gave the final blessing, I saw the angry woman standing under a tree at the back of the crowd with a pleasant-looking man from the community. She had kept her back turned to us the whole time. She never showed us her face again, but she never left either. Did that put her at the outer edge of the inside or the inner edge of the outside? Wherever she was, she was still there, nodding at something the man was saying, so that her pink backpack bobbed up and down.
Just before I left to go back to my car, a fresh wind blew up out of nowhere and tossed the leaves of the trees around, sending the blackbirds scattering with loud cries. Then they settled down on new branches, watching as the church below them drifted back into the world again, all of us blinking in the sunlight of a brand-new day.
Acknowledgments
Where shall I begin? Obviously, with the hundreds of Piedmont students who taught me how to teach world religions by being their curious, straightforward, and tender selves. Among those who allowed me to tell their stories are Bryan Schroeder, Tim Hudson, Madison Marcus, and Joel Rodriguez. Other students will be happy that I did not mention them by name, though I hope they will recognize themselves here, since that is how they will know what important roles they played in my education.
Patrick Reid earns double acknowledgment for being the first reader of this manuscript as well as a front-row student in Religion 101. His ability to navigate both of those roles speaks volumes about his character. Patrick is now a student at Yale Divinity School, where he continues to impress his teachers with his racehorse mind, his generous heart, and his ready humor.
Catherine Owers also read this manuscript from beginning to end, giving me helpful guidance that led to significant revisions. Tom Grady, Mickey Maudlin, and Anna Paustenbach read enough different versions to make them all crazy. I count it a great mercy that they are all still speaking to me.
There is no bottom to my gratitude to the people who welcomed Piedmont students into their most sacred places through the years, often at the expense of taking time off from their real jobs: Swami Yogeshananda and Brother Shankara at the Vedanta Center of Atlanta; the monks and members of Drepung Loseling Monastery; the volunteer teachers of the Tuesday night open house at Shambhala Meditation Center; Rabbi Peter Berg, Rabbi Loren Filson Lapidus, Cantor Deborah Hartman, and Ronnie van Gelder at the Temple; Imam Plemon El-Amin and Imam Sulaimaan Hamed at the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam; Bilal Mahmud and Dr. Khalid Siddiq at Al-Farooq Masjid, along with other generous hosts at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation, the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Philip, and the Cistercian Monastery of the Holy Spirit.
If you have read this far, then you already know the names of the people I read regularly and admire most for leading the way in a new religious America. Their published work is collected in the recommended reading section of this book. Yet there are only a few whom I have met in person, who were willing to speak with me at any length about the subject of this book: Diana Eck, Eboo Patel, Laurie Patton, John Philip Newell, Lucinda Mosher, and Rami Shapiro. Jan Swanson, longtime program director of the World Pilgrims program, has also inspired me for decades. I am very grateful to all of these trailblazers for the work they are doing in this world, and for giving themselves so generously to conversations with people like me.
I also owe a word of thanks to my hosts at a variety of public venues, who encouraged me to present earlier versions of chapters in this book to live audiences. They include Buzzy Pickren, Billie Sargent, and Peter McCall of January Adventure; Randy and Pat Robertson of Gladdening Light; Ann Holtz and Fran McKendree of Awakening Soul; Bill Saling of Mountaintop Lectures; Barbara Lund of Wisdom Ways; Cathy Zappa of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Philip; Helen Blier and Shan Overton of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary; Nancy McGrath of Sunriver Christian Fellowship; and John Randolph of the Palm Beach Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
Members of my family and friendshi
p circle who appear in these pages include Martha Sterne, Judy Barber, Ava Mills, and Monica Mainwaring, all of whom have expanded my thinking about faith as well as the spaciousness of my heart.
Laina Adler, Anna Paustenbach, Jenn Jensen, Suzanne Wickham, Lisa Zuniga, Ann Moru, Yvonne Chan, Michelle Crowe, and Ann Edwards at HarperOne have all been vital to the publication of this book. I love working with these women, and am thankful for the ways in which each has exercised her considerable skills on my behalf. A long-stemmed red rose to each of you.
Having saved the best for last, I now come to Tom Grady, who has been my literary rock and trusted friend for more than a decade. Though we are seldom in the same room together, he can change my entire outlook on a book that is going south by giving it a firm nudge in a new direction and propping me up with prodigal encouragement. I cannot thank him often enough. Mickey Maudlin has been my editor for the same length of time, doing all the heavy lifting of getting four books out of my head and into the world. This has often required courageous intervention by him since I am as protective of my prose as a hen of her chick. He has persevered with a saving mix of editorial insight and true camaraderie, for which I am exceedingly grateful. Although Mark Tauber has moved on from HarperOne, he took me under his wing from the first time we met and remains one of my favorite people in the world. So does Claudia Boutote.
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