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Richard Ostling, Time magazine's religion correspondent, reports on the pursuit of sacred experiences in everyday life.

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RICHARD OSTLING: Every Tuesday, a small group gathers at St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in San Francisco for a service of prayer, silent meditation, and chanting. It was this experience that attracted Olivia Kuser. She was raised an Episcopalian but spent years searching outside the church.

OLIVIA KUSER: It's this real ebb and flow of breath that puts you in a meditative state. And it's very simple. There isn't a lot of--there's really no dogma on it. You don't have to think about, is it Christian, is it not Christian--it's just very simple.

RICHARD OSTLING: The same night on the other side of town Jews in Congregation Beth Shalom practiced a form of meditation drawn from Zen Buddhism but taught by their rabbi. Shawn Goodman, a one-time atheist who's returned to Jewish faith, says this simple technique has deepened her experience of Judaism and affected her everyday life.

SHAWN GOODMAN: It's given me a chance to learn how to accept, more avidly accept my states, my person, my place in life right now, and not constantly be struggling or yearning or fighting to get ahead, which is part my nature and part of what I grew up with.

RICHARD OSTLING: Kuser and Goodman are among a growing number of Americans in the midst of a fragmented and complex society who are searching for ways to practice their faith more fully. They are seeking to experience the sacred in their daily lives through devotional practices drawn from their own and other religious traditions. Some are joining congregations that nurture such heightened spiritual experiences. Princeton University Sociologist Robert Wuthnow has been tracking this trend.

ROBERT WUTHNOW, Sociologist: Some people are discovering is what I've been calling spiritual practices, meaning intense serious time spent usually in a devotional activity, often by oneself, or perhaps in communion with other people in a worshipful mode but often in a small setting, so that there's a sense of belonging, a sense of intimacy.

RICHARD OSTLING: Over the past two decades many Americans left their churches and synagogues to seek what they hoped would be a deeper sense of spirituality elsewhere. They dabbled in Eastern religions, followed various gurus, and pursued new age fads. Wuthnow says this quest was often superficial.

ROBERT WUTHNOW: Their spirituality is often focused on instant gratification, something that's quick, easy, low cost, low investment, high reward. And it's also then driven by whatever happens to be faddish at the moment. One year it might be an interest in angels; another year it may be an interest in near death experiences; or another year it's an interest in Gregorian chant.

RICHARD OSTLING: After years of experimentation, many are looking for spiritual depth and, in the process, transforming not only themselves but also their congregations. Martin Marty, a leading American church historian, spoke with Producer Kate Olson.

MARTIN MARTY, Church Historian: The big news in the end of the century I think is the infusion of I'll call it the amateur's piety--prayer, meditation, and spirituality into the larger whole. What we're seeing is a great period of novelty, innovation, improvising, and establishing of new things. Religion may have a new name but it won't go away.

RICHARD OSTLING: Olivia Kuser follows a daily practice of meditation and spiritual readings that she says has deepened her work as an artist. And even though she's uncertain about calling herself a Christian, she feels welcome at St. Gregory's to receive communion.

OLIVIA KUSER: Something draws me to it. I don't understand what it is yet. But I keep taking communion because something tells me there's something for you here. I feel fed by it. I feel nourished. It seems to me the whole point of spiritual practice is to be in relationship with something other than yourself, to be in relationship with God. The whole thing is about relationship.

RICHARD OSTLING: Shawn Goodman, who's a writer, also meditates daily and chants morning prayers. She now observes the Jewish Sabbath by following the traditional practice of walking, not driving, to synagogue.

SHAWN GOODMAN: The walk for me--in a sentence--really clears my mind. It really just vacuums me out. And it's time when I become just by virtue of walking, I have a heightened sense of my environment; somehow the detail becomes so crystal clear that it really makes me appreciate God--I just see God.

RICHARD OSTLING: Rabbi Alan Lew of Beth Shalom, which is affiliated with Judaism's conservative branch, says for some Jews outside of orthodoxy, the tradition of spirituality got lost.

RABBI ALAN LEW: Judaism in its authentic, in it's original presentation was very disciplined. It was daily prayer. There were spiritual requirements for every aspect of daily life, the way you ate, the way you made love to your wife or your husband, the way you conducted business, and I think that part of the reason that Jewish spirituality got lost was because this sense of discipline got lost. In America, I think that we've come to regard spirituality as some kind of leisure activity, something that we do on weekends, an enrichment activity.

RICHARD OSTLING: For Rabbi Lew, it took 10 years in a Zen Buddhist Center to learn the value of discipline. He now teaches Buddhist meditation and Yoga exercises to his congregation. Like many Jews, he didn't have a strong religious upbringing. But today he is helping members discover the mystical tradition within Judaism.

RABBI ALAN LEW: (Meditation Session) Each of these letters is a breath sound and taking together this name of God means to be.

RICHARD OSTLING: Blending Buddhist techniques with traditional Jewish prayer, he hopes to help them discover a personal experience of the sacred.

RABBI ALAN LEW: I think that's really the essential Jewish act, is to realize the sanctity of the moment, to realize the sanctity of your experience to bring a sense of the divine into the present tense reality of your life.

RABBI ALAN LEW: (Meditation Session) The purpose of this meditation is to help us fully inhabit our lives, our--

RICHARD OSTLING: Last week, Lew led meditation sessions at Synagogue 2000, a meeting for Jewish leaders from 16 congregations who want to create a new style of Jewish life that meets spiritual yearnings. The group, which represented the reform and conservative branches of Judaism, worshiped with dance, lively music, and especially participation from everyone, rather than just centering on the leaders.

RABBI ALAN LEW: I'd like it to be a place where people, first of all, came and experienced religion directly, didn't watch a religious pageant being performed for them whose subject was having a religious experience but actually had that experience themselves.

RICHARD OSTLING: That's what the priests at St. Gregory's want to provide their congregation every Sunday morning. Here the liturgy is a collective practice in which each worshiper helps create the service. Donald Schell is one of the church's two rectors.

REV. DONALD SCHELL: We're mining the tradition, and what we're looking for is over 2,000 years what are the things that Christians have done together that have invited the most profound participation.

REV. RICHARD FABIAN: I invite you to share an experience from your own life.

RICHARD OSTLING: Richard Fabian, the other priest at St. Gregory's, invited the congregation to speak their own prayers and to reflect on their personal experiences as part of the sermon.

WOMAN IN CONGREGATION: I know that for about the last year and a half I've been praying to be made ready for something, and in that time a lot has happened. A lot of you know about--I have a recent loss--my sister. I also have a recent gain. I have just got into a new relationship, and I have this weird feeling that I'm not ready, but that God's ready.

RICHARD OSTLING: Fabian says the most unusual practice is dancing by the entire congregation.

RICHARD FABIAN: I go to church to sing and dance. Common muscular activity has a great power, and it's probably rooted deeper in human consciousness even than languages. So the dancing experience is an experience of the congregation doing something together that reaches people at the deepest possible level.

OLIVIA KUSER: Well, I like the way it involves the whole body. You know, we move, we dance. There's incense. There's singing; there's silence. There's scripture being read out, so your intellect is engaged. I feel like my whole person can come to the service.

RICHARD OSTLING: Some critics worry that spiritual seekers can become too self-involved and lose sight of their responsibility to others, but Rabbi Lew sees the opposite happening.

RABBI ALAN LEW: At the deepest level of spirituality one feels one's connection to everyone else, to all living beings, and one recognizes that the suffering of any human being is one's own suffering, and so one feels compelled to heal that suffering.

ROBERT WUTHNOW: As people follow these practices over a period of ten years or twenty years or a lifetime, they begin to see real growth in their lives. They begin to sense that they do have a deeper relationship with God and quite often, they also begin to move out of themselves into more activity in the community.

RICHARD OSTLING: Although the movement toward a focused daily effort to cultivate a relationship with the divine is small, analysts like Wuthnow and Marty predict it will grow, and that it will gradually change the religious landscape of America.

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