Spirituality: Just Do It : Part 11

Working on God
By Winifred Gallagher

(Page 11 of 11)

The cathedral, says Canon Luce, is "inclusive, not exclusive. We Anglicans are Incarnation Christians, who celebrate God in the flesh. Jesus talked about a brand-new tribe or society-the people of God. The cathedral's premise is 'Let's behave like the Kingdom is already here! Don't just preach it, but do it! Let's show each other how it can be!' " Surely, I think, the Kingdom must be something like what was summoned up on St. Francis day. Heart on fire, the holy old man who has spent his life ministering to the poor tells us, "Religion demands a leap of faith. Its only question is 'On what are you willing to bet your life?' Then, you must live your answer. Just try it!" He laughs. "Do it! Love everyone! Fight injustice! See what happens!" In this invitation, as in the little story that preceded it, I recognize the heart of the Christian message, feel its push-pull, and stay away from church for a while. I would much rather study or meditate than fight injustice or love everyone.

After a few weeks, I brave one of the cathedral's low-key weekday Eucharist services. Part of the huge church's genius loci is that, like a vast forest, it contains many microenvironments that give a sense of shelter and intimacy. Held at noon in the small St. Martin's Chapel, one of several in the semicircular apse just behind the great altar, the Eucharist attracts an eclectic little group of about fifteen or twenty Columbia folk, clergy, office workers, and the occasional shopping-bag lady. The rough gray stone walls glow softly with light filtered through the old stained glass. The only sound is the abundant birdsong from the close. There's little in the way of decoration, other than a small cross and a serene Joan of Arc, eyes modestly cast down; she reminds me of Kwan Yin, a female Chinese bodhisattva.

The Eucharist is celebrated by Canon Jeffrey Golliher, a compact, bearded Southerner with a quiet but intense manner. Listening to the Bible readings, I cautiously allow to myself that being here feels okay. In his brief sermon, in which he seems to be just talking about how life is, the priest addresses this very thing: Why should we feel okay? Even good? First, he repeats a line from Psalm 139: "For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." Some people like to talk about salvation, he says, but he prefers to think in terms of awakening or remembering-and of course, sleeping or forgetting. Salvation, he says, is when we remember that God knew us before we were formed in the womb, and always will know us. Being lost is when we forget. Salvation is waking up to a world pervaded by the sacred, and being lost is being asleep to that fact. Salvation means putting our faith in this different reality, he says, "so that we aren't yanked all over the place by random events we can't control or by our own emotions. It's a disciplined, wide-awake calm that comes from remembering what's really true, and from prayer. Jesus said that prayer is an exploration. 'Open your hearts.' 'Don't judge, so that you won't be judged.' Those are magnificent ways to say 'Be open to the world'-to new possibilities, including who you think you are, and transcending a lot of what you were taught."

The roomy way in which Canon Golliher talks about such things is about the only kind of Christianity I can handle. One day, we have coffee in the Hungarian Pastry Shop, a hallowed sanctuary of West Side artists and academics that's just across the street from the cathedral. Jeff explains that he was an anthropologist and a professor in the college-degree program at Attica prison before his midlife ordination and now directs the cathedral's healing and environmental ministries, along with serving as an Anglican observer at the United Nations. It already seems to me that he's also a laid-back, low-key missionary to neoagnostics.

Most of the time, Jeff says, he doesn't talk much about ecology or healing, which he sees as the same thing, or even about religion, but about "meaning in life. I try to have really honest conversations that create sacred space, in the sense of making a place where you can tell the truth to yourself. That's it. That's a religious experience in itself. A lot of us don't have it often, as we didn't in our childhood churches and temples. Once that sacred space is available, people will have questions about how to live respectfully. Simplicity becomes available, at least as a thought, a possibility?" The more important the subject, the more Southern he sounds, ending his sentences, even declarative ones, on an upswing, as if they were questions. In this engaging way he can quite emphatically tell you something while seeming to be just wondering. "Then," he says, "people might want to make some changes in how they live?"

From Jeff's perspective as both professor and priest, working on God is a good thing. "I don't have an intellectual model of God," he says. "For the time being, and maybe forever, I don't want people to have preconceptions about what God's supposed to be. I want them to get rid of a lot of images so they can see God as a mystery that's real in everyday life." If pressed to define the divine, he says, "I'd say that there's this thing called spirit-I'd leave it at that-which, when encountered, makes you feel like you've woken up after being asleep?" As a Christian clergyman who has also learned from Central American shamans, he says, "the distinction between theology and culture is not a particularly real one to me. Whatever we call it, I'm interested in meaning and how we organize our worlds. Religion should give a sense of 'This is what the universe is like' that's more real than the standard version. To me, there's a sense of well-being, compassion, and a strange kind of neutrality about how the universe works, not in the sense of 'uncaring,' but in there being a peace beyond thinking about or testing-shalom 'that passeth all understanding.' God's a name for all that mystery?"

Gained in a zendo, synagogue, and cathedral, my recent experiences have given me a new sense of religion as relying on intuition more than belief. Yet for neoagnostics, trusting our own experience in such a matter is a challenge; it means going with our deep, personal perceptions of what is, which our education urges us to doubt. Since the Enlightenment, religion has lain at one end of a philosophical spectrum and science's version of reality at the other. To interest neoagnostics, however, just as religion must be "real" in the experiential sense, it must also harmonize with what we intellectually know to be true. Next, I decide to investigate the improbable rumors that after more than three hundred years of warfare, there are signs of a truce, if not peace, between science and religion.

Copyright © 2000 by Winifred Gallagher.

About the Author

Winifred Gallagher's previous books are Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. She has written for many magazines, from The Atlantic Monthly to Rolling Stone. She lives in Manhattan and Long Eddy, New York.