Question Five

At last, drawing this little interlude to a close. Thanks for your patience as I agonize over articulating where I'm coming from - and why that matters.

I toyed around with a lot of questions to finish up with: What gives me hope? How do I pray? What's the worst sin I can think of? What's happening to the world? All good - but as I thought about what I'd like to know about religion journalists I read, one question kept coming to mind.

Who asked you?

I mean, seriously - who asked you?

There are just pitfalls in talking about religion, for anybody. It's awkward. The subject is personal, charged, emotional. Hardly anyone agrees on the details. Quickest way to kill a conversation, alienate friends, start a fight. Whether you believe or don't believe, chances are the only folks you really feel comfortable in your skin talking about it with are the people who sit in your own brand of pew. Often, not even them.

And a magazine or newspaper is hardly the place for that kind of sensitive talk. I remember a speech once by Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, who broached the dislike that churches often harbor for journalists (he had just subjected himself to a year with Samuel Freedman). Churches give you the good news, he said, and then newspapers turn around and give you the bad news. They're working different sides of the war.

I often feel ambivalent about journalism. One of the first exercises in grad school left a powerful taste in my mouth when we were asked to write one another's obituaries. The exercise took about twenty minutes from interview to edit desk (generous for a daily). And in that, the sum of your life.

You can guess it was pretty awful. Coming up with the newsworthy details never seemed like the whole story. No one was happy. For one, names got misspelled. Sequences got jangled, places transposed. Even when the specifics were right, what obituary really captures something as important as your own life? I remember how that afternoon showed up, for us, what journalists did; and what the stakes were on the other side of the pad.

Religion is especially at risk for being lost in that kind of translation. On a good day, a church might be happy with the publicity a piece generates, or the nice things the journalist has to say. But no one is ever going to say that a story really captures very much about faith. What does it mean to sit in a church, year after year? Study, pray? Hear the voice that finally answers you in a dark hour? None of that comes across in 800 words, or 8,000. Can't be captured.

As much as I love stories of how people dance with their own faith, I sometimes feel that writers from outside are better off sticking to deaths and births, scandals and deals. Take a tip from Sammy Kershaw: "Let's talk about anything in this world/ but politics, religion and her."

Talking about my religion is uncomfortable, it's inflammatory, it's pompous. Talking about yours is worse. And, who asked you?

No one.

So why do it?

This last week was pretty gruesome in the religion headlines. It made me want to get back to blogging. On one day, there was...

... a Presbyterian congregation jailed in Eritrea (who jails Presbyterians??).

... the Falun Gong on the receiving end of more threats from the Chinese government.

... Malaysia authorizing exorcisms on those following "deviant" Islam.

... a report on the strongarm practices of the Vietnamese government towards Buddhists and Protestants.

... and from the same report, depressing news about religious oppression in Turkey, Russia and Iraq (this before the Bible publishers in Malatya were tortured and killed at a Bible Study).

... here in the west, tales of institutionalized religious bigotry: a Canadian Sikh denied entry to a restaurant and Muslim women unveiled by Scottish bus companies.

...and on it goes.

The idea of real religious freedom is a logistical headache. And a rare bird in the history of the world. I'm not surprised. Faith lives in a vulnerable, uncertain place. It's far easier to have a culture where everyone to be in agreement, coerced if necessary, with one or two flavors of faith or unfaith that everyone around you agrees to respect. Then you don't have to talk about religion - at all.

We didn't make that choice in America. I'm not saying that this kind of disturbing intolerance doesn't happen here. Our system is rocky and contentious, and you can always find someone who'll tell you that the balance is out of whack. But we are the descendents of religious refugees - and more importantly, a people who believed in an ideal of personal liberty, the right for anyone to have a fair hearing and a clear conscience. We are that experiment.

Some days it's easy to think it's going well. I live in New York's Lower East Side. Within one block of my front door, there are two Orthodox synagogues, two pentecostal churches, a New Age bookstore and the home base for the city's anarchists. Go another few blocks and you get the first Buddhist churches in Chinatown, and a stretch of sidewalk where Friday prayers are observed by the more devout neighborhood Muslims. From where I'm sitting, everyone gets along. And that feels deeply right.

But I have to be careful not to let what happens in my neighborhood lull me.

I was working in downtown Manhattan in the year 2001. I was supposed to meet up with a team preparing a big downtown food tasting, taking place at the World Trade Center. It was the day before their big event, and the group was still prepping in the central courtyard of that mammoth eyesore with banners and grills. I was running late, and rushing to find the coordinator. By the time I got out of the subway, an airplane had hit the North Tower. I remember watching it burn, while standing next to guy I bought fruit from almost every day. On his cart, he had a glittery bumper sticker that read "I (heart) Allah," which was shimmering in the morning light.

The next few hours affected me deeply. I watched the towers fall and I collapsed while trying to escape the oncoming debris. A group of us were trapped in a building blocks away from the ruins, for hours. When I finally found a space clear of dust, it was the bathroom of a bank whose windows had been blown out. In the same small bathroom with me: a latino teenager, an older orthodox Jew, and a middle-aged asian man - all thinking the big thoughts in our own words, having to confront our own mortality, and the world we thought we lived in.

I remember the coming weeks, the outpourings of support. Everyone wanted to do something: give blood, trek bottled water and aspirin to the workers. Prayer teams, too, came from all over America to offer what comfort they could. A news report from Seattle said that the parks in that city were empty - but here in the city, the parks were full of people coming together. The Brooklyn Botanical Garden and other public spaces threw open their doors and waived admission. We don't understand what happened, everyone seemed to say, but we know what we can do.

Me, I didn't know what to do. So in the end, I think I'm trying to understand what happened.

That's why I write about religion. It's not about bearing a grudge - far from it. I chose to become a journalist who covers religion because there is something very powerful that was under attack that day, which was not crushed. It was the sticker on the fruit cart and the synagogue down the street. It was the prayer teams and the businessmen who stopped or who walked by grumbling. We get it: the secret of a global world where the rich inner life of the individual is allowed to thrive. We know that a life of faith is a basic right and carries a basic responsibility. And that basic fact fills me with incredible hope.

The good news and the bad news - where do they come together? They dovetail in a document that holds a place next to Scripture in our culture. Our Bill of Rights, which starts with these words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."

The answer to the question? No one asked me. But the country that my immigrant father landed in has set itself the perplexing task of enshrining both religious freedom and the freedom to ask why. And living both of those ideals is not just a privilege - it's a duty, a duty to listen for Truth, and a duty to speak it.

Thanks to everyone for your patience. It's been harder than pulling teeth to get these out. I'll be editing these five entries, and maybe coming up with more. If anyone else has the sadistic impulse to do a similar exercise - spell out what they believe - I would l love to read the results. Send me a link and I'll post.

In the meanwhile - back to the religion roundup. And thanks for coming along on the detour.