(from movie trailer, various voices): I’ve tried to be a serious man. We’re going to be fine. I’ve tried to do right, be a member of the community. Please just tell him I need help.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: “A Serious Man” is a dark comedy that asks some universally serious questions.

CATHLEEN FALSANI (Author, The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers): Why do we suffer? If God is there and God is a good God, why do bad things happen to decent people? I don’t care what flavor of spiritual person you are, or if you are a person of faith or not, there is no real good satisfactory answer to that.

LAWTON: Religion columnist Cathleen Falsani is author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers. She says the brothers’ newest film grapples with those theological questions in unexpected—and yes, quirky—ways.

FALSANI: It’s a powerful film, but it’s a powerfully funny film as well, and in the Coens’ 25 years of filmmaking, it’s often their funniest films that are in some ways the darkest, the most serious spiritually.

Ethan and Joel Coen

(from movie): Honey, I think it’s time we started talking about a divorce.

LAWTON: Set in 1967, the story centers around a Jewish physics professor, Larry Gopnick, who experiences a Job-like set of personal and professional calamities. He looks to his faith to make sense of it all.

(Larry Gopnick, from movie): Please, I need help. I’ve already talked to the other rabbis. I’ve had quite a bit of tzurus lately. Marital problems, professional, you name it. This is not a frivolous request.

LAWTON: He doesn’t find any easy answers.

(dialogue from movie): Rabbi’s secretary: The rabbi is busy. Larry Gopnick: He didn’t look busy. Secretary: He’s thinking.

FALSANI: To their credit, the rabbis in the film don’t really try to give an answer. I think they kind of encourage the wrestling out of the answer, which is, in fact, in my estimation, to continue to live your life.

LAWTON: The film is full of Jewish motifs. It’s set in a community outside Minneapolis, where the Coen brothers themselves grew up in the 1960s. They say with “A Serious Man” they wanted to explore what they call “the whole Jewish Midwestern thing.”

ETHAN COEN (filmmaker): The whole incongruity of Jews in the Midwest, Jews on the plains. It’s just—it’s odd, and that incongruity is something that we kind of wanted to get across, too. It’s its own strange subculture.

LAWTON: They acknowledge nervousness among some Jews about how the film may come across.

ETHAN COEN: People were really supportive in the Jewish community especially, but you know, occasionally people would ask, you’re not making fun of the Jews, are you? This really deep Jewish thing where, you know, is this good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?

LAWTON: Like Larry’s son, Danny, the Coen brothers went to Hebrew school and were bar mitzvahed. They’ve indicated that faith no longer plays a central role in their lives, but they are notoriously reticent to discuss their personal beliefs or the messages in their 14 films.

FALSANI: They don’t say a lot about what they believe or don’t, but their movies are filled with theological and metaphysical and existential questions.

LAWTON: Falsani admits those themes may not always be obvious in what she calls “the Coeniverse”—the enigmatic and sometimes violent worlds the Coens have created.

FALSANI: I think there is a moral order to the Coeniverse, if you will. It might not be the moral order we were hoping for, but it’s there.

LAWTON: “A Serious Man” may be more overt than other Coen films in its religious exploration, but it is no more obvious in its conclusions. Still, Falsani says, in true Coenesque fashion, meaning can come by simply raising the questions.

(Larry Gopnick, from movie): I need help.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Watch religion columnist Cathleen Falsani, author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers, discuss theological and moral themes in films by Joel and Ethan Coen, including “The Big Lebowski,” which has inspired its own religion, and read excerpts from the extended interview:

A lot of their films—I would say all of the 14 films that they’ve done at feature length—have religious and spiritual content in them. This one [“A Serious Man”] is perhaps the most obvious, because it’s set in a Jewish academic milieu much like the one they grew up in themselves outside of Minneapolis, and you have overtly religious characters for the first time. You have three rabbis, you have a cantor, you have all the characters in the film, except for the goy next-door neighbor, are Jewish, and it takes place within a religious community on either side of Danny Gopnik, the protagonist’s son’s bar mitzvah, so in that way it’s sort of the most obvious. But it’s not the most, necessarily, the most spiritual of their films. It’s just the one people are going to go, “oh, that’s the Jewish one,” and it is a very Jewish film, but it’s not only a Jewish film. It’s more than that.

It really does address a universal, theological, nagging question and answers it, inasmuch as it can be answered, in a Jewish context. But the question itself is one that everyone, I think, experiences in his or her life, and that is: What is the meaning of suffering? Why do we suffer? If God is there and God is a good God, then why do bad things happen to decent people? I don’t care what flavor of spiritual person you are, or if you are a person of faith or not, there is no real good satisfactory answer to that. To their credit, the rabbis in the film don’t really try to give an answer. I think they kind of encourage the wrestling out of the answer, which is, in fact, in my estimation, to continue to live your life.
There is a quote that my book has toward the beginning from Rilke that says enjoy the questions for what they are, or appreciate the questions for what they are and try to live your way to the answer. I think that’s what this film and, in fact, most of the Coen brothers’ films that raise this kind of a question—it’s what they say.

Some people have wondered aloud if this is sort of a self-hating Jewish movie, and it most certainly is not that. While the rabbis, the religious people in the film, don’t have an answer; they, I think, come off in a kind of tender way. That’s the difference between the role of a rabbi and a pastor, I think, in some ways—Christian pastors. They are not supposed to have all the answers. They are wise people. They are learned men and women. They have studied, they know the traditions, but they are human like the rest of us. That’s how pastors are supposed to be, too, but sometimes we put them up on a pedestal as being more evolved spiritually. They may or may not be that. The fact that the rabbis don’t give him [Larry Gopnik] the answer he is looking for is not something to their detriment, and I don’t think the filmmakers intended that to be a slam, and I don’t think it is.

I think they [the Coen brothers] are looking back at a time in their life. In 1967, Joel, the older of the two brothers, would have been making his bar mitzvah, and the character of Danny Gopnik, the bar mitzvah boy, is maybe—maybe he is a little Joel, maybe he is a little Ethan. He’s a stoner. He’s basically a decent kid, but he’s just going through the motions making his bar mitzvah, and yet he still winds up learning something from this ancient rabbi, the one his father tries to get in to see and can’t. He actually sees Danny and has one of the better lines in the whole film. So it is a Jewish film. I don’t think it’s a pro or con Jewish film. They are certainly not self-hating Jews, and I think they are probably secular Jews now. I think that they look back as they are in their 50’s on their more religious childhood with a certain kind of tenderness and not a lot of bitterness. There are two things that come to mind in terms of the specifically Jewish themes or motifs in this film. One is this sort of the tradition of Judaism. There is a scene between Larry Gopnik, the protagonist, and one of his neighbors, and he is saying, “I don’t know what to do. What have I done? Why is Hashem, why is God doing this to me?” And she says the beautiful thing about being Jewish is that we have this shared history. We can go back and look at what other Jews have struggled with, so look to that, and she encourages him to go see the rabbi, and I think that is a specifically Jewish thing. They’re saying that in a Jewish context, and that’s something you hold on to, that tradition.

The other thing that is mentioned here in passing is a lamed vavnick, which is a story from Jewish mysticism that sort of grows out of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, where supposedly in every generation there are 36 righteous souls—lamed vavnick stands for 36—who hold up the fate of the world on their shoulders. Now nobody knows who they are. They don’t know who they are, but in this film when Sy Ableman’s character is dispatched, there is a question about whether or not he was actually a lamed vavnick, a righteous man, a serious man. But if you know anything, in fact, about the story about lamed vavnick, somebody like Sy Ableman would be the last person who would be a lamed vavnick. He was sort of unctuous, bloviating, faux-pious man, and that’s certainly not what a lamed vavnick is. In fact, maybe Larry Gopnik is a lamed vavnick who has all these things happen to him. We talk about him being Job, a modern-day Job, and certainly there are allusions to that biblical story, but perhaps he is something more than that. We just don’t know. He doesn’t know, and nobody around him knows either.

It’s a powerful film, but it’s a powerfully funny film as well, and in the Coens’ 25 years of filmmaking, it’s often their funniest films that are in some ways the darkest or the most serious spiritually, and I think that “A Serious Man” totally hits that nail on the head. It’s one of their best films, it’s a comic masterpiece, and I think it’s a spiritual masterpiece as well.

In sort of their typical, obscure way this film opens with a black screen and a quote from Rashi, who is a great Jewish sage. I mean, not many comedies would open with that kind of quote, but this one does, and it’s very Coen-esque to do it that way, wherein Rashi is talking about accepting everything that happens in your life with simplicity. Receive it with simplicity, he says. He’s not saying just accept what happens. It’s “take it at face value.” I think it makes life a lot easier if you do it that way, and then the film goes into this, for some people, strange 10-minute segment all in Yiddish, set in a shtetl years ago, that also retells another story from Jewish folklore, but it’s about if you just accepted the person who wound up at your door as the old rabbi that he said he was, rather than thinking that he’s a ghost, life might have been a little bit easier. The same thing could be said by the entire Larry Gopnik story line, that maybe it would be easier if he just accepted what was happening to him and not trying to answer the big “why?” question, because there is no answer to that question, at least not one that makes us any more comforted.

The Coen brothers are notoriously private for Hollywood types. I won’t say they are recluses, but they don’t like to divulge a lot about their personal lives or about the meanings of their films or the messages of the films, or why they do what they do, or the symbolism, certainly. But we do know a few things. We do know that they were raised outside of Minneapolis in St. Louis Park—that’s exactly the same place that the movie takes place; that they are Jewish; that their family was somewhat religious in that they went to Hebrew school, they made their bar mitzvahs. Their parents were both professors, and “A Serious Man” takes place in an academic setting. Larry Gopnik is a professor, Sy Ableman is a professor. They talk about now, more recently, how the whole Jewish religious thing is really not relevant too much to their lives. They don’t say a lot about what they believe or don’t, but their movies are filled with theological and metaphysical and existential questions and touchstones. Joel’s wife, Frances McDormand, the Oscar award-winning actress—her father and sister are both Disciples of Christ pastors. While they don’t have a whole lot of overtly religious characters in their films, many of them are set in a religious context. It’s just not stated, it’s not articulated obviously.

If you look at “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” that takes place in Depression-era Mississippi, and of course most of the people running for governor and everyone around them would have been church-folk. It’s a very Christian, Protestant place. In “Fargo,” for instance, another one of their more self-referential films in that they come from Minnesota—it’s set in Minnesota—it’s never said that all these characters with the Scandinavian and German last names are Lutheran, but obviously they are. I would be shocked if Marge Gunderson and her husband weren’t church-going, Ladies Guild-member Lutherans, and all of those contexts are, again, treated with a sort of tenderness—maybe not necessarily respect or an affirmation, but with a great tenderness for the decency that those ideas are at least supposed to inspire in people.

When I first told people that I was working on a book about the spirituality of the Coen brothers’ films, most people thought I was a) joking and b) that it would really be a short book. But when I started unpacking the films and why I was attracted to them—I am a huge Coen fan, always have been since I saw “Raising Arizona” when I was in college 20 years ago—and the films are so very different, and people are passionately Coen brothers fans when they are. When I look at something like that in culture I often think there’s a spiritual connection to it, when people are that passionate about something. It goes beyond fashion or funny to something deeper.

I started with “The Big Lebowski,” which is their most spiritual film, obviously tons of spiritual material to work with there, and then I started looking at the other films around it, and they often reference their earlier films in later films, and there’s a lot of inside jokes and stuff, and there’s just a lot of this content. I know it’s surprising. It’s not the top layer most of the time, but it’s there. That’s one of the beautiful things about the Coen brothers’ films, is that they are so layered with meaning and reference and joking.

People who aren’t familiar with the entire Coen brothers oeuvre know “No Country for Old Men.” They might know “Blood Simple,” their first film, they might know “Miller’s Crossing” or “Burn after Reading,” and all of those films are violent. There’s a lot of mayhem, they seem chaotic, and people have said to me there is no order, it’s just a chaotic universe. It’s a godless universe, and I don’t think that’s actually the case. I think there is a moral order to the Coeniverse, if you will. It might not be the moral order we were hoping for, but it’s there. I think the highest moral in the Coeniverse is to be decent. Some of that is reflected in what the Dude says in “The Big Lebowski”: “Just take it easy, man, it’s just your opinion, man. Like calm down, be decent.” But if you look at the heroes of their films, they are decent people. They might not be perfect, they might not be pious, but they are deeply, deeply decent. They are kind, they are respectful. Marge Gunderson is this moral anchor in this universe of unthinkable violence that befalls this little Minnesota town, and she always keeps her cool and she is always kind, even when she arrests Gaear Grimsrud, the almost catatonic killer who is feeding Steve Buscemi into a wood-chipper when she finds him. She gives him a chance to acknowledge that she is a police officer before she shoots him. She could just shoot him in the back, and she doesn’t, and then when she finally gets him in the squad car, she gives him this very serious but almost kind Sunday-school teacher talk: “All this for just a little bit of money, I just don’t understand it.” But she is always kind and affirming.

If you’re not good to women, if you abuse women in any shape or any way, you are in a lot of trouble in the Coeniverse. There is a line in “The Big Lebowski” that talks about somebody being a special lady: “Everybody is somebody’s special lady,” so we should treat women well. If you try to hide something, it’s going to be uncovered. Your sins will find you out. More than anything else, there is a reaction to every action that you take. Every choice—there is no such thing as an insignificant choice in the worlds that the Coens create. If you think they are, you’re usually corrected for it. I have fourteen Coenmandments at the end of my book, and those are just a few of them. The first Coen brothers’ film I saw was “Raising Arizona” when I was in college, and I loved the film because it was eminently quotable. It was one of those like “Caddyshack” and “Fletch,” really quotable and smart. Then I saw “Barton Fink” a few years later. I just remember walking out of the theater in a little town in the Midwest where I went to college and thinking, I have no idea what just happened. What was that? It was like the top of my head blew off. I think it took me about a decade to figure out what was really going on in “Barton Fink.” But after that I saw I think pretty much every film they made. It wasn’t until “The Big Lebowski” that I really got grabbed. Again, an eminently quotable film, but there was such a depth to the writing, such a spiritual depth I saw to what was going on, and every time I see the film I get something new and different out of it. I tend to look for God and for spirituality in places that some people might think are unlikely. I love writing about the intersection of faith and popular culture, and “The Big Lebowski” was just one of the best examples of that. So I started thinking, what about the other films? What about “Miller’s Crossing” or what about “The Hudsucker Proxy?” Is there this thread throughout all of their films that, in fact, I think there is? It’s stronger and louder in some films, but it’s there in all of them. It’s kind of, if you will, the rug that ties the room together, the spiritual questions that they have. It was really fun to go spelunking in the Coen brothers’ films looking for these little God bites and these little nagging existential questions that we all have.

I think “The Big Lebowski” is probably the only film in history to ever spawn its own religion. A number of years ago, a very clever guy named Oliver Benjamin, who lives in Thailand part of the year, formed something called “The Church of the Latter Day Dude,” or Dudism, if you will. You can actually be ordained online. I am in fact a duly ordained Dudist priest, and in most states in the United States you can actually marry people. I haven’t done it yet. I’m available for weddings and bar mitzvahs. There are 60,000 people who have become Dudist priests, and it’s a fairly active community. Yes, it’s tongue in cheek, but there is a certain ethos to this religion, even though it’s deeply casual, as we say. I think it’s probably more popular now than it was when it was first founded, and certainly I think we’re having a revival in Dudism right now with the new film and with the tenth anniversary of “The Big Lebowski.” It’s there, and it even has its own online shrine.

In “A Serious Man” it starts out with the issue of pot smoking which, clearly, the Coens don’t think is a moral issue. Danny Gopnik owes somebody $20 because he bought a lid of pot, and I think also back in the day, back in 1967, it was probably a little bit different than it is now. They don’t really dwell on the obvious “sins.” There is the infidelity, but more than that there is the false piety of Sy Ableman, the guy that Larry Gopnik’s wife is having an affair with. That’s the more egregious thing—being deceptive. Sy Ableman is a gossip monger trying to destroy somebody; that’s really, really bad, more than anything Larry Gopnik’s brother might be involved in. He gets busted for a few things, but they don’t dwell on that. Those are sort of more minor things. There might even be victimless crimes, if you will. Those bigger issues of how we treat each other and the lack of respect and the lack of humanity, those are the things that are more openly condemned, even if they are not condemned in the plot line. Even if the person who is committing them is heralded, there is a sense that we know in the end something bad is going to come back around. No good can come of that kind of behavior.

BOB ABERNETHY: We have a story about the art of making a stained glass window, an art that enriched cathedrals long ago and is still very much alive today. Bob Faw has a report on a stained glass artist in Florida who talks about how a window is made — and why.

BOB FAW: In his Orlando, Florida studio, Jim Piercey, along with a handful of skilled artisans, carries on a 1,500-year-old tradition: creating — indeed celebrating — with color and glass not just beautiful stained glass windows but something more.

JIM PIERCEY (Stained Glass Artist): People have told me that my windows have helped them come closer to God, and if that’s what my windows do, then I consider the windows a success.

FAW: Stained glass — that is glass which has been painted then fired, which has graced the great cathedrals and private chapels — stained glass enriches an inner life, said one historian, with its own richness. Since 1981, Jim Piercey has completed nearly 400 works of stained glass, from a chapel in a wooded retreat to a Sunday school in a community started by Walt Disney, to this spectacular rose window in St Michael’s Episcopal Church in Orlando.

Reverend ROGER HAMILTON (Rector, St. Michael’s Episcopal Church): The objective, of course, in all things is to glorify God, but also to use it as a teaching vessel.

FAW: So many biblical stories in these windows — some well known, others less so — that every week Father Hamilton brings pre-schoolers here to study.

Rev. HAMILTON: We see, for example, also that wonderful story of Rahab lowering the spies of Israel out of Jericho and saving their lives.

FAW: To be successful, Jim Piercey says a stained glass window must fit with the personality of its church. But according to art historian Richard Gross, stained class which truly succeeds can do far more.

RICHARD GROSS (Stained Glass Association of America): If the stained glass is well designed and well executed, it’s going to lift your mind to God and to provide a way to encounter God and to grow in spirituality and understanding of the Christian faith.

FAW: The process of making stained glass is painstaking, even tedious. For Jim Piercey it begins at the drafting table, making a “cartoon.”

Mr. PIERCEY: So, basically, making a cartoon is drafting a full-size drawing. So if we are doing a window 20 feet by 20 feet, I have to draft it 20 feet by 20 feet.

FAW: Much, of course, depends on the glass itself. Piercey’s is all hand-blown in Germany, selected not just for its color but for whether it will transmit light directly or spread it.

Mr. PIERCEY: But this glass is totally transparent. This glass is translucent. This is really good to use if you want to obscure a view like a parking lot or a McDonald’s across the street from the church.

FAW: From the glass that’s selected, every piece is sectioned and numbered to match a corresponding number on the drawing, or cartoon. The glass then carefully painted.

Mr. PIERCEY: This glass is being stained. These are actually called glass-painter stains.

FAW: Then into a furnace, or kiln, heated precisely to 1,250 degrees, where paint fuses onto the glass.

Mr. PIERCEY: Once this glass comes out of the kiln and is cooled, that’s permanent. I mean, it’s there for 800 years.

FAW: Later, as he’s done for the last 58 years, Helmut Schardt glazes the panel using pliable lead strips to piece the sections of glass together.

Mr. PIERCEY: The lead is shaped like an “H,” and it has channels on either side. The channels receive the glass.

FAW: Finally the panels are covered with sawdust, a mild abrasive, and are buffed or polished to a brilliant sheen.

Mr. PIERCEY: Because it’s mouth-blown, handmade glass, these striations make that piece of glass sparkle.

FAW: Completed, Piercey’s stained glass does more than dazzle. At Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Lake Mary, Florida, parishioners asked him to create a dove — not descending as in most church windows, but ascending.

Pastor PAUL HOYER (Holy Cross Lutheran Church): The idea would be that as you look at the dove, your eyes would go up. When we think of the dove going up, we think of the spirit of man and that spirit connected with the Holy Spirit — ultimately connected for eternity with the spirit of God.

FAW: What Piercey has done here, says Hoyer, is to encourage worship.

Pastor HOYER: And this is where I like to pray. I like to sit right in the very center where I can see all of the glass, and the presence of God comes to me in that way. For me personally it’s just a great worship experience.

FAW: In all his stained glass there are similarities, each very labor-intensive and time-consuming. But each window is unique, and while some symbols are traditional — a lion for the Apostle Mark, an ox for Luke — those doves are another matter. Jim Piercey has done hundreds of them, and each one is different.

Mr. PIERCEY: You can depict a dove like it’s almost like a photograph, or you can abstract a dove to where you can barely tell that it’s a dove. While they’re thinking about that dove, what that dove is doing to them is taking their mind away from the economy, from political situations. It just gives them a brief moment in time where they can contemplate something greater than they are.

FAW: All this from what began as a hobby for a 62-year-old former high school biology and chemistry teacher who was raised as a rock-ribbed Methodist and who will tell you that though he is unaffiliated with any denomination he, like his work, has evolved spiritually.

(to Piercey): You said your windows allow people to have access to something greater than themselves.

Mr. PIERCEY: Yeah.

FAW: That’s the way you see what you do?

Mr. PIERCEY: I would say a lot of my work is spiritual. I’m spiritual, because I’m not preaching, you know, I’m not proselytizing. What I’m trying to do is interpret what their faith says.

FAW: You see the windows as being, almost fulfilling a priestly function, I gather?

Mr. PIERCEY: For a lot of artists, liturgical artists, stained glass or sculptures or tapestries, it’s their ministry.

FAW: Yes, it is enormously expensive, and lead, so essential here, is widely considered an environmental hazard. But those who uphold the tradition say the practice of stained glass is flourishing now and that it always will.

Mr. GROSS: People want to surround themselves with beauty, so just as churches will continue to have all sorts of religious art, stained glass will be a major part of that.

FAW: And if stained glass no longer holds the same exalted role that it held in the Middle Ages, both then and now it continues to teach, to inspire, to sooth, even to look beyond.

Mr. PIERCEY: That sunlight comes through those colors with all the texture and the striations and seeds and reams of stained glass. Nothing matches it in beauty.

FAW: Especially in the loving hands of someone for whom all this is more than just pieces of glass.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWS WEEKLY, this is Bob Faw in Orlando, Florida.

They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust by Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

by Juliana Ochs Dweck

“Hey! There was a big world out there before the Holocaust,” Mayer Kirshenblatt calls out in his recent book about Jewish life in Poland before World War II.

Passover Seder at My Paternal Grandfather’s, 1992

In 1990, when Kirshenblatt was 73, he began to draw to ensure that people would remember how Eastern European Jews once flourished before so many perished. At the urging of his family, he sketched his memories of life in Apt (Optów in Polish), the small town he grew up in before World War II and eventually left. He painted his mother and the town’s wigmaker, men praying in the besmedresh (study house), and prostitutes in the marketplace. As a child, Kirshenblatt spent his mornings in kheder (Hebrew school) and his afternoons in the town’s Polish public school, but he devoted almost as much time to playing hooky and exploring everyday activity in Apt. In an exceptional exhibition and ambitious companion book of the same title, They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust (University of California Press), we join Kirshenblatt as a young boy. We go on meandering walks with him, taking in the spectacle of the livestock market, eavesdropping on gossiping women, inspecting the components of a shoe and the workings of a whistle.

In the 1930s, Apt was largely a Jewish town, with 6,500 Jews and 3,500 Christians, so much of daily life was Jewish life. Kirshenblatt illustrates the minutiae of formal and informal Jewish ritual in multicolored detail. Mikve: Thursday, Women’s Day depicts a women’s weekly ritual bath. The mikve was a square pool, four feet deep and heated by a wood-burning oven. Women would bring their own soap and towel and, with the bucket provided, rinse themselves with hot soapy water and then step into the water. Shlugn Kapures: Yom Kippur Eve shows Kirshenblatt’s family as they swing a chicken above their heads, a Yom Kippur ritual that symbolically transfers one’s sins to the fowl.

The Black Wedding in the Cemetery c. 1892, 1996

In Apt, Jewish life was intertwined with Christian life. Images such as Funeral of the Father of My Christian Friend, depicting the interment of the father of Kirshenblatt’s childhood fiddle partner, demonstrate the pre-war intimacy between Jews and Christians. Daily interaction in the Polish village was often cluttered and eccentric. There were the tomatoes Kirshenblatt’s mother forbade her sons from eating, deeming them trayf (not kosher) because she saw them growing in the church organist’s garden. There was the town’s main synagogue, which had a sunken floor: one had to descend four steps to enter. This made the inside of the sanctuary feel imposing without dominating the town church’s exterior, which was prohibited.

Mayer July’s folksy memory paintings and the lyrical narratives that accompany them have a frequently idealized sweetness and beauty. Their timeless quality is reinforced by an unvarying date, 1934, inscribed on nearly all of the paintings, as if Kirshenblatt’s entire childhood happened the year he left Apt and emigrated to Cananda. But Kirshenblatt does not sanitize pre-war life. He reveals and revels in “the carnivalesque side of life,” as Jewish studies professor Jeffrey Shandler calls it on the exhibition’s audio guide. We see this in the kleptomaniac who slips a herring down her bosom and in the depiction of Baynish the Drummer catching Yankele Zishes in bed with his wife. Kirshenblatt’s accompanying narratives are assiduous but also relaxed and episodic, expressed, as his daughter, New York University professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, writes in her afterword to the book, in the “realm of living speech.”

Purim Play: “The Krakow Wedding,” c. 1994

Kirshenblatt’s animated paintings are so bulging with vivid detail that, like stories themselves, they invite careful perusal (something the exhibition’s large paintings encourage). Their intricacy betrays a life and a memory that is about learning and exploration, not knowledge and erudition. They are about feeling more than fact.

Just as Kirshenblatt’s illustrations intimate the practice and process of life in Apt, his art is itself the result of a long, collaborative process. In 1967, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett began “listening with love” to her father’s stories of life in Apt. In the ensuing decades, Mayer Kirshenblatt’s entire family became involved, hoping that painting would alleviate his bouts of depression. His wife sent him to painting lessons, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s husband provided him with art supplies, and another son-in-law built racks for his canvases.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett helped her father build the scaffolding for his memory by eliciting stories through word associations, encouraging tales to become sketches and sketches to inspire paintings. This would provide a foundation for Mayer Kirshenblatt’s own recollections and also for stories he elicited from childhood friends and from the town’s memory book. The result is a collective autobiography, a story told in the “third voice” with multiple points of view intertwined to tell one story.

Kirshenblatt’s own memory of Apt ended in 1934, when he, his three brothers, and his mother traveled to Toronto to join his father, who had fled in 1928 to escape the wrath of a loan shark. It was only through letters that arrived after the war that Kirshenblatt learned the fate of his family members who remained in Poland. In Slaughter of the Innocents II: Execution at Szydlowiec 1942, he depicts the bloody execution of his family by the Nazis: “The Germans took the whole family out to a nearby field. They lashed my grandmother to a tree and, before her very eyes, they shot her entire family. Then they shot her.”

Slaughter of the Innocents: Execution at Szydlowiec 1942

But Kirshenblatt himself is not a Holocaust survivor, and the execution scene is a memory he borrowed from survivors and reports. Despite this, in Kirshenblatt’s painting borrowed memories and collective memories become as emotional and painstaking as his own.

In Jewish tradition, memory has long been preserved and transmitted through ritual and liturgy, passed on not only through texts but also through religious practice. Jewish rituals, such as the Passover meal, are an active way Jews share the past with future generations. It is how Jews heed the injunction zakhor, “remember,” which appears in the Hebrew Bible and has been echoed as Jews vow not to forget the Holocaust.

But in Mayer Kirshenblatt’s collective autobiography and in the exhibition of his work, we see that Jewish memory is also stored and transmitted through art, through the creative expression of painting. When Kirshenblatt paints Jewish rituals and Jewish life, whether in their joy or their sadness, he preserves both his own memories and also the collective memories of the Polish Jewish community. In Mayer July, painting becomes Kirshenblatt’s own religious practice of remembrance.

“They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust” was organized by the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. It runs through October 1, 2009 at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

Juliana Ochs Dweck has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Hebraica in Philadelphia and the Rose Haggadah at the New York Public Library.

BOB FAW: In the sublime realm of the world’s premier flutist, from the rarefied excellence of the concert stage to a hip club on New York’s Lower East Side, in this stunning confluence of technical virtuosity and the dazzling, sometimes aching purity of sound, there is something more.

Sir James Galway hasn’t just sold 30 million CDs and climbed to the top of the musical world because of what he can do. He also got there, he will be the first to tell you, because of what he believes.

“It’s a sign of what I believe in.”

Sir JAMES GALWAY: You have a talent. What do you want to do with it? Do you want to bury it? Or do you want to be average? Or do you want to really think, “Every day someone’s watching me, and it’s not somebody watching me for the first time. It’s somebody who knows what I can do, and somebody who knows what I should be doing.” Do you want to sort of completely ignore God?

FAW: That reference to the biblical parable of the talents isn’t the only thing unusual about this artist who plays to packed houses throughout the world…

Sir JAMES (playing flute and speaking to students in master class): You see, with nice fingering you can get the music to sound absolutely charming.

FAW: … whose master classes attract only the most gifted and who, wherever he goes, rarely fails to wear a cross. Galway insists it is not a fashion statement.

Sir James prays with wife Jeannie

Sir JAMES: It’s a sign of what I believe in, and what — when I put it on every day I think about the crucifixion. I don’t just put it on. It’s not jewelry. It’s something that reminds me of what I should be doing and how I should be behaving.

FAW: Which helps explain why, before every performance, such as this one with his wife Jeannie, there is prayer.

Sir JAMES (praying with wife Jeannie): Heavenly Father, we thank you for this talent that you have given us, and we ask you to let us demonstrate it to the best of our abilities tonight with the orchestra. We ask you to bless our concert and bless our audience. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

FAW: Sir James Galway giving thanks not just for the talent he has been given, but also, he makes clear, to the giver of that gift.

Sir JAMES: I ask God to get me in the spirit, let me get into the spirit of the evening and to do the best, and to walk in His ways to make Him proud that I would be doing this. I mean, this is what I believe and what I do.

FAW: Now 68, Galway is a long way from the poor Belfast neighborhood where he grew up and turned his back on his local church because it wasn’t, he says, working class enough. A Protestant, these days he visits churches wherever he’s performing, making sure not to wander into one that is “informal.”

Sir JAMES: To this day, I don’t like a happy-clappy bit.

FAW: Happy-clappy?

Sir JAMES: Yeah, you know (claps hands).

FAW: Feel good?

Sir JAMES: Yeah, bring a guitar, play in the band

FAW: You want a little more traditional, right?

Sir JAMES: Yeah (chuckles.)

“To me, it is like a prayer, the music.”

FAW: But make no mistake, this is no hide-bound, strait-laced Puritan. For one thing, as he delightedly tells audiences, there are all those remarkable flutes.

Sir JAMES: (speaking to audience during performance) This one happens to be completely made of gold, keys and all.

FAW: There is also, in addition to all that virtuosity, an irrepressible sense of humor.

Sir JAMES: (speaking to audience during performance). The whole concerto opens up like this (plays flute) for about 10 minutes. So that’s the only reason I bought this flute, and it is for sale.

FAW: For Sir James Galway, there’s a time for merriment and a time, even in rehearsal, when the good times are put on hold, and the taskmaster takes over.

Sir JAMES (speaking to wife): Jeannie, I’d like to get my rehearsal done here. So if you could talk outside please, if you don’t mind.

FAW: It’s a steely determination tempered by his faith, revealed again when he and his wife talk to a young cancer patient.

Sir JAMES (speaking to student): Luke, I am going to do the fingering, and you’re going to do the blowing. OK, so we’re going to play, so hold it with your hand. OK, right. OK, good. Here we go.

FAW: All of it, the tenderness, the showmanship, the toughness — all part of the same fabric of a life lived, profoundly religious 24/7.

Sir JAMES: What do we do? We go to church once a week. That’s about it. I mean, we should be really on the ball, doing it all the time.

FAW: So there should be no surprise when, in most concerts, before Galway plays “Danny Boy” he urges listeners to do something different.

Sir JAMES (speaking to audience): To me, it is like a prayer, the music. So if you feel like praying, go ahead feel free to pray along. You know what happens if you don’t pray? Nothing. So don’t take the chance. And I think you’ve got plenty to pray for.

FAW: Praying, then, as he and his wife will do when the concert ends.

Sir James performing

Sir JAMES: We always thank God after a concert. Maybe it’s the next day, because you get caught up in everything, you know. But it’s always something I’m very grateful that happened.

FAW: And you thank?

Sir JAMES: Yeah, the Lord.

FAW: So the next time you hear this pied piper, remember there is more here than just music or talent.

Sir JAMES: I think personally that I play better now than I did before.

FAW: Because?

Sir JAMES: Well, because of my beliefs, and because of the way that I center things and what I do.

FAW: And if how he plays brings listeners happiness, even joy, James Galway will tell you there’s a reason for that.

(to Galway): Is the source of that the music? Or do you think it’s God?

Sir JAMES: I don’t know. I don’t know. I would think it’s because of my connection with a higher power that the people feel this, and I think that’s what the attraction is.

FAW: A connection with something greater in a life that has been a parable, indeed.

Sir JAMES: So I know that whatever we do, we are blessed anyway. I mean, look at me, this little guy from the working class of Belfast ending up like this. It’s quite a story.

FAW: Sir James Galway, in perfect harmony with his music, and within. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Bob Faw in New York.

The Tord Gustavsen Trio just completed an American tour to mark the release of a new CD called THE GROUND (ECM). “Gustavsen draws on his classical and church backgrounds to compose elegant, hymnlike melodies,” says THE WASHINGTON POST. Read an e-interview with Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen and listen to a track from the CD.

Almost everyone remarks on the prayerful, hymn-like quality of your music, and you call some of the pieces “wordless” hymns. What is the connection between hymns and prayer and jazz for you, and where did it come from?

Photo: Erik Laeskogen

To me, there’s a strong connection on a personal level. I feel it’s important to dig into what’s lying deep in one’s musical self in order to play “organic” jazz, and that may involve getting in touch with music sung, played and/or listened to during childhood. Growing up, I had a lot of hymns and spirituals along with lullabies and children’s songs in my home, and so this music is crucial in making up my musical foundation. It’s best to reach out and explore from a nurturing and caressing foundation.

Also, there is of course a strong link between spirituals and jazz in music history; both European hymns and African American spirituals were among the important musical traditions present in the melting pot area where “jazz” was formed. Contemporary jazz that moves too far away from the devotional feel — with or without an explicitly spiritual emphasis — has a tendency to lose its appeal to me. I do love a lot of complex, hard core, intriguing music… but there is something about uplifting and profound grooves and about essential, simplistic sensualism in creative improvisation and melodying … these things are spiritual to me, and they are core elements of the music I cherish the most.

Across the U.S. — from the famous St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan to the Church of St. John Coltrane in San Francisco — there are more and more churches where you can find jazz. What’s been your own experience of churches and their music (playing with choirs, your connection with Oslo’s Church City Mission) and where do you see and hear their influence on you? Where do gospel and the African American spiritual fit into what you do?

Jazz and “world music” have been present in churches in Norway for a couple of decades — not necessarily on a regular basis, but in occasional projects and special masses, etc. Also, a few of my colleagues have composed original “jazz masses” using Latin words from the old liturgies and Norwegian translations integrated in jazz’s musical language. Important as this has been, I often feel that one is looking too much for single-dimensional “happy” music when looking for jazz in churches. I have been involved in doing a meditative jazz vesper in an Oslo church during the last two years, responding to the need we’ve felt for a service with room for silence and reflection, using music with more space and incorporating musical landscapes that embrace melancholy and uplifted states without trying to impose a specific mood on people.

Regarding gospels and African American spirituals, cf. also the remarks above. I’ve played a lot of this music during the years, and spirituals are probably among the core sources of my own music today. I also did a special project a few years ago based on a collection of lesser-known but extremely inspiring spirituals I found at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. I’m not, however, too intrigued by the way these traditions are mostly performed today. They are often connected to an easy-going theology of success and salvation that I don’t really support.

Your bio says you’ve composed music for the words of poet John Donne and you’ve even studied the history of religions. What draws you to the religious and the spiritual and to things theological?

The John Donne thing was a very important project to me. It was the first CD I ever recorded, with singer Siri Gjære in a vocal-piano duo with no other instruments added, thus very focused on the lyrics. The almost erotic-mystic aspects of his writing appealed to us, as did the extravagant flow of words; we thought they formed an intriguing combination with the naked simplistic-yet-subtly-twisted music we were making.

Photo: Chris Tribble

I’m probably drawn to spiritual and theological issues mainly because I’ve been fascinated by the questions raised here ever since Sunday school. My outlook and perspectives have evolved from the traditional Lutheran views of my childhood toward an open-minded “secularized” spirituality still founded in the Christian sacraments but appreciating insights from several religions; staying in the liturgical serenity but taking in postmodern paradoxes; and being fed by the liberal theological wing of our church — this is basically my journey. The issues of theology are still important to me even though the perspectives are different.

It’s been said that jazz is music with deep religious roots and that it’s the best music for worship because of the way it speaks to the human condition. Does that ring true for you and your own experiences of music?

Well, I guess from what’s been said so far this should be quite obvious …

One critic has called your melodies “an abstracted alleluia.” When you write about the Colours of Mercy or Kneeling Down or other themes that seem to suggest something spiritual, even sacred, what do you want a listener to hear?

I should read this critic … it’s a really nice expression. But I don’t think I want the listener to experience anything specific — at least not something that can be equally well expressed in words in an interview. To me, the title “Kneeling Down” is almost too direct, but it still works because it really corresponds to the feeling I had of the melody myself. “Colours of Mercy” is a favorite title of mine, along with “The Ground,” at once mild and comforting and bold, and certainly always open to different readings — like I want the music to be, and like a religion we could truly relate to today would have to be.

Well, you know, so much that we do is industry driven. In music form, whether gospel, secular, it’s all industry driven. And it’s very rare that the artist can really do what is closest to his or her heart. You do what the industry dictates that the people want to hear. But there comes a time when you’ve got to know your audience and you’ve got to know where you really function best and you’ve got to take the chance. That’s what we’ve done with this CD. It’s more of the songs of the church because that’s the thing that people respond to more than any of the other songs that I sing, and there has to be a bridge that can connect the old with the new and everything in between. That’s what this CD does. It becomes an eclectic blend of the church songs that will bring the young people back to the foundation of where it started and the old people [to] a greater appreciation [of] what the youth of America and the world are partaking [of] in their worship services. We reached way back [to] songs that only your grandmother and great-grandmother would know, and we just brought them back into today and didn’t doctor them up. Just did it totally raw. We didn’t slick it down in the studio.

Do young people who are listening to lots of other kinds of music have a heart or an ear to hear this?

Sure. I’m 45 years old, and it’s starting to tickle me very, very much how the young people — and I’m talking about from the kids five, six, seven years old on up to the young adults — gravitate to the music form that I sing. You’ve got little kids singing “I’ve Got My Mind Made Up,” jumping up on stage, doing all kinds of dances. You know, they appreciate it. The only reason why they haven’t is because it hasn’t been given to them, but they appreciate it and they gravitate and they even take it on. You know, they learn the songs, and they become a part of their lifestyles, just like they were mine. These songs that I’m singing were ancient to me when I was a child, but because they sang it to me it became a part of my relationship with God and my church world.

Are you hoping it will be a crossover success like some of your other songs? Are you hoping for airtime on secular stations?

No, and I can guarantee that it won’t. You can’t sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” on BET or MTV. They’re not going to play that, and it’s not for them necessarily. It’s for those people who have roots in the church even if they’re not in the church any longer. There’s no way in the world that this is going to have any crossover appeal or be picked up by the secular stations at all. It’s not supposed to. It’s geared to the church. But most secular artists and secular listeners have roots in gospel and the church, so it will appeal to them in that sense. And believe me, the majority of the people that listen [to] and buy secular music, they also listen to and buy gospel music, and that is how it will appeal to them. It won’t be something that will be commercial, but it will be something that grabs them in their heart and their spirit and brings them back to a place of remembrance that was precious, that was innocent, and that gives them, you know, that moral “oomph” that reminds them of who they are and who they are supposed to be, even if they’re not that. So we won’t see this played in between Lil’ Kim and, you know, Outkast, but it will have an appeal that will probably be greater than any other CD that I’ve done besides “We Fall Down.”

Music has been such a part of your spirituality. What is that connection? What is it about the music that affects your spiritual life?

Music has a divine root, a divine origin. Music comes from God. So it doesn’t only affect my spirit; it affects everyone’s spirit that hears it. No matter what music form it is, it affects our spirit. There’s some music that can make you sad because it can invoke memories. There’s some music that can lift your spirits. There’s some music that can just calm you down. There’s some music that can make you crazy and angry and do crazy things — mosh pit, and tear up furniture while you’re listening to it — hard heavy metal. But all music affects the spirit of man, in one form or another. The music that I sing affects me because it is my connection between God and my situations. It is how I relate to God and how he relates to me. I can learn more through the songs than I can through any other form, and that’s not just me but that’s people in general. But the music helps me to express my feelings toward God and even incorporate him into my different situations, that I can display through my musical interpretations. It’s a release.

I was always introverted. I was the guy that was scared of crowds, that was inferior. I had such an inferiority complex, and the only way that I could really depict any feelings or any emotions was through music. The only way that I had a voice was through music, because I was the reclusive fellow that sat in the back and that didn’t think that I had any worth at all. The way that God caused me to become integrated into society was through music. So that has a spiritual connection with me that was really imperative and important in my development [and] ministry, because other than that, I don’t think that I’d be able to function socially.

Does it still have that spiritual reality for you?

More so than ever before, because I’ve been through much more now, and the song “Stand” that I wrote, that Oprah fell in love with, came out of that because I was able to express some things that I was going through. You know, we fall down but we get up, the whole nine -yards; everything that I’ve ever really written or sung I’ve been able to pull out of me, what was in me, through that. I don’t know if I’m making sense, but it caused a release of the things that were pent up in me, through the music. It tapped into the spiritual side of me and the emotional side of me and allowed me a voice that I would have never had any other way.

Tell me about the song “Stand.”

Oh, Jesus! I was sitting on a plane. I was traveling from Los Angeles going to Miami and stopping in Detroit, and I had been gone for two weeks and I was going to be gone for a week and a half more and I was just having a meltdown, a real meltdown. I didn’t want to go any further. I wanted to stop, and I sat on the back of a big 260-seat jet, with only 50 people on it, ’cause it was 1 a.m. in the morning, red-eye flight. I was so tired. I was fed up with this; this didn’t make any sense, and my thing to God was, “God, why can’t I be normal? Why can’t I have a wife, 2.5 children, a dog, a cat, a white picket fence? Where’s my stuff? Why do I have to do this?” And I was really out of it. And within 20 minutes the whole song came. What do you do when you’ve done all you can? Seems like it’s just never enough. What do you say when people who thought that they would be with you, promised that they’d be with you — but they didn’t understand the level of ministry that God was calling you to, and they left because they couldn’t handle it, and you’re all alone? All of these different things came out in 20 minutes — the melody, the words — and I thought it was a song just for me. You know, artists have their own special songs that nobody else is going to hear and nobody else would understand because it’s totally crazy. And then I taught it to a choir in Cleveland — one of the stops I had to make — so I could remember it, ’cause I didn’t have a tape recorder or anything. I don’t know what happened from there. It just went, like, berserk, crazy, took on a life of its own. The next thing I knew, I was in the Bahamas and the telephone rang and it was Oprah. I never saw or spoke to her before, and she asked me to come and do a show with her in Cape May, New Jersey, and from then on Oprah would stand on the show and on television and talk about the song “Stand” week after week and told the whole nation, ’cause whatever Oprah says, you know, the nation does! That’s what happened. And we did this thing in Nassau, Bahamas, maybe about two years later, and she wanted me to come and sing “Stand” and she said, “Donnie, has this CD gone gold yet?” And I said, “No, no.” She said, “Okay.” She stood on television and said, “You’ve heard me talk about Donnie McClurkin before. This is a voice that you’ve got to reckon with, and this is my favorite song. This is the CD and the song is ‘Stand.’ You need to, everybody needs to have a copy of this. And now Donnie McClurkin sings ‘Stand.’” Two weeks later, the thing went gold, and the rest is history. That’s how it happened; it was just something that came out of something that I was going through and, again, the music was my way of expressing it — and not knowing that expression was going to touch a world. And it still boggles my mind.

What does it say to you about the songs — that it is something that did touch so many people?

I don’t know. A lot of this is really a mystery to me. A lot of this is so absolutely phenomenal and mysterious to me — that God would allow you to go through something for the purpose of touching a whole entire world. He’d allowed me to have a temper tantrum on a plane so that a whole entire world can be, you know, ministered to by a song. Why he does that? I don’t know, and when I get to him I’m going to ask him, because it seems like it would be so much easier for him to use somebody else because of the pains and stuff, but he does it for his purposes, and consequently people are helped. When you have people coming to you talking about how after they tried to commit suicide and lay in the hospital and somebody brought a tape up, a CD, and put it on their ears and gave them hope — now that kind of stuff, you know, just humbles you. It breaks you down because you never expected that type of thing, and it’s still mysterious to me.

You’ve been really open about some of your own struggles and certainly [about] some of the music that became a part of that.

It’s not an unusual story. It’s just one that’s not usually told. I have been totally, you know, taken by surprise by the thousands on top of thousands of people that relate to the story because it’s happened to them — child molestation that you have to keep quiet. I was raped at eight years old by my uncle and again, at 13, by his son. And it’s amazing, you know, when you stand up there and tell it and you become totally naked and transparent and you pull the skeletons out of the closet and your family goes totally berserk because “That’s our business” — and let me tell you, in the Black family we’re a very quiet family; we’re a very secretive family. “What goes on here stays here,” “Don’t air your business in front of people,” you know what I mean. And when I started talking about it, it became tumultuous. But this is what God laid on my heart to do. I wasn’t even trying to really reach out and help a world. It was just the spur of the moment where I felt the leaning of the Lord just to share it. And consequently, it has turned around and given me platforms in so many different areas to talk to different people who have gone through [it]. It’s all because of the brokenness of the past and the healing of the present. Yeah, the rape happened, twice. Yeah, there was a 20-year period of total sexual ambiguity and scars that dug so deep, you know, but at the end of the road it was worth it.

You’ve gotten a lot of opposition from gay groups for what you say.

This has been a three-ring circus. “Controversy” is a small word compared to what it’s been, with people not even giving me the chance to do what you all are giving me the chance to do — to talk about it, straight from me. But people have filtered things and said things and contorted things and distorted things to the point where it’s become a battleground now with a few, because it’s not the entire gay community; it’s a few of the radical activists in the gay community trying to spin things into something that it really isn’t — misquoting or adding quotes to things that I’ve said, misinterpreting purposely to start a war — and it’s been interesting.

It doesn’t reflect the whole of the gay community, because there are a whole lot of gay people that understand exactly what I said, and although they are in that lifestyle, they give me the privilege of having my opinion and my free speech, just as they have theirs. So it’s not so much of a full-fledged battle, but it’s just the few that are trying to make more of what I’ve said than I have said.

Now, I do have my views! Don’t get me wrong. I do have my views and as a minister of the gospel, I make my views known. It is not to condemn anyone, but it’s to give an opportunity for anyone who wants help. And for those who don’t think that they need help, then, you know, I’m not the guy. But for those that do and that want help, then I can use my experiences. I’m not talking from another place. I’m talking about, from my experiences. I can use my experiences and how God did what he did in me, in order to give them the help that they need.

Let’s be clear about it. What did God do?

Well, like I said, there was a big 20-year gap of sexual ambiguity where after the rape my desires were toward men, and I had to fight those things because I knew that it wasn’t what we were taught in church was right. And the older I got, the more that became a problem, because those were the first two sexual relationships that I had. Eight years old and 13 years old. So that’s what I was molded into. And I fought that. When I tell you from eight to 28, that was my fight — in the church. And you were in an environment where there were hidden, you know, vultures I call them, that are hidden behind frocks and behind collars and behind — you know, reverends and the deacons, and it becomes a preying ground, a place where the prey is hunted, and that was what it was like. And for 20 years, trying to find who I was, trying to define myself and my lust pulling me one way or my passions pulling me one way and my spiritual conviction pulling me the other. And I was never one that would say, “This is who I am. This is just who I am.” Because there was something that I read in the Bible and that had been preached for too long that said it was the exact opposite.

And finally God started showing me some things in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes. “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” There’s a time to love, and a time to hate. And they’d preached about the time to love, but nobody had really told me about the time to hate, and then God started making it plain to me the things to hate. You don’t hate the people, but there are certain things that are against God that may be in you that you have got to learn how to hate, even though it’s in you. It’s not self-hatred, of yourself, but there are certain things like, you know, anybody who has a lying problem; they get to the point where they hate being so, having such a lack of character that they make a change. And so on and so on. Whatever a person finds in themselves that is really counterproductive to them being the best that they can be — you learn how to despise that and cause a change, and that is what exactly happened to me. I had to be a man that was made for a woman. I wanted a family, I wanted a home, I wanted the whole lot of it. This was a problem to me. And God gave me the wherewithal to get out of that and to find out who I really am. And, consequently, that’s how the change took place — the different scriptures in the Bible, his will being shown through the scriptures.

Once I got to that point and that determination hit — that just because this happened to me doesn’t mean that this is who I’ve got to be — that’s when the change started taking place and God walked me through it until I became the Donnie that you see sitting in front of you. A little shabby, but it’s still the Donnie you see sitting in front of you. And there are other men and women, boys and girls that are going through the same thing.

There’s a group that says, “God made us this way,” but then there’s another group that knows God didn’t make them that way. And for those that are looking for that exit, there are those of us, — and I’m not a lone wolf; there are many more — that can tell that God did it for us and he will do it for them, and consequently we see it happening here in this church quite consistently.

Does it follow the theme of your song “We Fall Down” — this notion that people aren’t always perfect? How does all that fit together?

Not only people are not always perfect, but Christians are not always perfect. You know, the Christian body is the religious body that portrays, you know, sinlessness. You know, we are above sin and our character is beyond reproach. But the bottom line is, if you really looked underneath the covers and in the underbelly of Christianity, we are an imperfect people that are serving a perfect God. We have faults and failures that we just, you know — I don’t understand where the hypocrisy comes in heavily in Christianity. And it angers me in a way, because the bottom line is, if you mess up, just say, “I messed up.” Don’t cover it up and act like, you know, “I’m too pomped and pious to say that I’ve done wrong.” No, if you are a preacher and a pastor or a minister, and you mess up, just come clean and tell the truth: “I’ve messed up.”

The song “We Fall Down but We Get Up” brings the preacher and the pious to the same level as the so-called peons. That song levels the playing field. Every one of us are sinners that need a savior. And even in our piety, we jack this thing up so many times, and we just don’t want people to know it. But the song simply tells us, “A saint is just a sinner who fell down and got up.” That is the only thing that distinguishes the saint from the sinner. The saint was a sinner who fell down and had enough sense to get back up and know that God is merciful. And that’s the thing that I think turns people off about church — the pretentiousness that we are a bunch of people who have so been enlightened and brought to the greatest awareness that we don’t do wrong anymore. That’s a lie. That is nothing less than a lie that the church world is still paying the price for, because people don’t want to come to a hypocritical organization. That song just brought people to the realization that we are all the same. Consequently, the secular world grabbed a hold of it. “We Fall Down but We Get Up” just simply let people know we’re all the same, just some of us go to God for help.

How has celebrity changed you? And what new challenges has that posed for you as a minister?

It’s not so much a challenge [as] a change. If anything, it’s been more beneficial for the ministry. Celebrity has its pros and cons. But what celebrity has afforded me is a greater platform to declare the very message that has changed my life. I never intended, nor ever wanted — ’cause remember, I’m still the reclusive guy that’s afraid to be in certain areas and environments, and when I get around people of renown, I go back to that same reclusiveness. I’m not one to grab — “Hey, Stevie Wonder, I love you, man.” I’m the guy — they’re in the room, okay, let me go to the other room, because it still makes me jittery and nervous. What’s happened in my music career has bridged a gap that has caused people to embrace me. They’ve embraced me, and they’ve gravitated to me and pulled me into them also. A lot of them call me their pastor and I never dreamed of that; that wasn’t an intention of mine. It has given me a greater platform to deliver this life-changing message, and for that I’m grateful. You know, I don’t apologize for that.

How do you maintain your own spiritual strength or spark? What do you do to keep it fresh within you, so you have something to give out?

Well, the first thing I do is I never let this become really a part of me. The first and the main thing I do is never let this affect me. All the going and the singing and the crowds and the people and the church and the growth of the church — I take it off because at the end of the day, I’ve got to be the little boy that met God at nine years old. At the end of all accomplishments, I’ve got to be that little boy — the one who was broken, who realized his own lack of self-worth, who depended on God in the beginning. That’s the same little boy that I’ve got to be now — the one that depends on God now, that still realizes his own lack of self-worth, his own inabilities no matter what accomplishments have been made, attributing all of the success to God and all failure to me. That’s how I stay grounded, surrounding myself with people who are not going to praise me. I don’t travel with entourages. I don’t need folk, you know, [who say] “You’re great, you’re great. Oh man, that was wonderful, that was great. Oh my God, you’re the best thing since sliced bread.” Those people get on my nerves, and when people like that come around me I become enemies to them very quickly. I need people that are going to be levelers for me, that are going to help keep me aware of who I really am. I don’t want to be larger than life. God’s chosen that I am for his purposes. But when all this is over, and when these lights go off and this television show is over that you are doing right now — I go right back to being the nine-year-old boy that met God on July 14, 1969 and cried out at an altar in Amityville, New York and stayed in his presence, who felt most comfortable in his presence ’cause he didn’t fit in anyplace else. I become that boy all over again. In my bedroom, I become that boy. In my home, I become that boy. In my office, I become that boy. After the concert is over, everybody knows what I do. I go right back into the room and everybody that comes with us, we go and we pray and we go back to our hotel rooms and my admonition to them is, “Take this off. We’re not wearing this. The success of this concert — we’re not wearing this. Take it off. Don’t care who was here. Don’t care what they say, don’t care what they write about us. This ends here, and we wait for the next assignment, and we go back to God.” ‘Cause nobody can get the glory of this but God. If you know who I am, I’m Donnie McClurkin, a nine-year-old boy who met God. That’s it.

What role does music play for you?

If you sit me at a piano now, I’d cry like a baby. There are certain songs that bring me into a greater awareness of who God is. There are certain songs that open up another illumination to how great God is that would reduce me to tears, you know. There’s a song that says, (singing) “Sweet hour of prayer, Sweet hour of prayer that calls me from this world of care, and bids me at my Father’s throne make all of my wants and wishes known.” Those songs reduce me to tears.

Music has always been a part of religious activity — always has. Go to any major religious belief system, and you’ll find that music plays a part, because music has always been something that has come from God. It’s a gift that God has given to man, and it’s the greatest thing in the world. I don’t understand it to this day, but music goes past the soul, goes past the emotions, and gets into the spirit of a man and can bring him to his knees.

If you ever want to get anybody in touch with God, sing to them. And if you can touch a person where they live, you can bring hope to them. That’s what music does. You won’t find a major religion in this world that doesn’t use music, because the truth of the matter is that music comes from God.

KIM LAWTON: Donnie McClurkin is a Gospel superstar whose voice is recognized around the world. But on Sunday mornings, as Pastor McClurkin, he has more local concerns — like the parking problems in his church’s neighborhood.

Pastor DONNIE MCCLURKIN (Perfecting Faith Church, at pulpit): You want to be mindful of Zack’s Delicatessen across the street also. You can park around there, but don’t block the front door entrance because they have a problem with the clientele getting in. Amen?

LAWTON: This Grammy award winning artist may sing for presidents, but he’s known for “being real.” And whether in his local church pulpit or on a stage before thousands, he preaches a forthright, often-provocative message about his troubled past, his struggle with homosexuality, and his faith in God. Music, he says, is his sermon.

“If you ever want to get anybody in touch with God, sing to them.”

Pastor MCCLURKIN: You won’t find a major religion in this world that doesn’t use music, because the truth of the matter is that music comes from God. I don’t understand it to this day, but music goes past the soul, goes past the emotions and gets into the spirit of a man and can bring him to his knees. If you ever want to get anybody in touch with God, sing to them.

LAWTON: McClurkin has sung for millions. His three solo albums have topped the Billboard charts and Gospel and secular R&B play lists. In 2003 he won a Grammy for his CD, AGAIN. He credits Oprah Winfrey with promoting his hit single, “Stand.”

Pastor MCCLURKIN: She said, “Donnie, has this CD gone gold yet?” And I said, “No, No.” She said, “OK.” She stood on television and said, “You’ve heard me talk about Donnie McClurkin before. This is a voice that you’ve got to reckon with, and this is my favorite song.” Two weeks later, the thing went gold.

LAWTON: McClurkin wrote the song “Stand” in 1996, after having what he calls “a meltdown with God.” He was on a red-eye flight, feeling exhausted and frustrated that God didn’t seem to be answering his prayers. The song that became his signature came to him, he says, in about 20 minutes.

Pastor MCCLURKIN: He’d allowed me to have a temper tantrum on a plane so that a whole entire world can be, you know, ministered to by a song. Why he does that I don’t know, and when I get to him, I’m going to ask him.

LAWTON: Much of McClurkin’s music comes out of his personal experience and his own pain. His happy early childhood ended abruptly in 1968 when he was eight years old. His two-year-old brother was hit by a car and killed. The night of the funeral, McClurkin’s uncle raped him. His family was torn apart by drugs, alcohol, and violence. McClurkin found solace in the church.

Pastor MCCLURKIN (from documentary, “The Story of Donnie McClurkin”): I received Jesus in that church right there, on a Sunday morning, July 14, 1969.

LAWTON: He was particularly drawn to the music of the church.

“Celebrity has afforded me is a greater platform to declare the very message that has changed my life.”

Pastor MCCLURKIN: I was always introverted. I was the guy that was scared of crowds, that was inferior. I had such an inferiority complex, and the only way that I could really depict any feelings or any emotions was through music.

LAWTON: When he was 13, McClurkin says he was raped again, by his cousin. That led to a 20-year-long battle over his sexual identity.

Pastor MCCLURKIN: My desires were toward men, and I had to fight those things because I knew that it wasn’t what we were taught in church was right.

LAWTON: McClurkin says that through Bible study and intense prayer, he has overcome his homosexuality.

Pastor MCCLURKIN: God gave me the wherewithal to get out of that and to find out who I really am and, consequently, that’s how the change took place. The different scriptures in the Bible, his will being shown through the scriptures — God walked me through it.

LAWTON: His comments have provoked a firestorm of controversy, particularly from gay rights groups that are offended by his belief that homosexuality is something that can be chosen or “overcome.” McClurkin insists he’s not condemning anyone, but he makes no apologies for his beliefs.

Pastor MCCLURKIN: There’s a group that says, “God made us this way,” but then there’s another group that knows that God didn’t make them this way. And for those that are looking for that exit — there are those of us, and I’m not a lone wolf — there are many more that can tell that God did it for us, and he will do it for them.

LAWTON: He’s also open about his continuing sexual struggles. He fathered a child out of wedlock five years ago. His hit song “We Fall Down” talks about the frailties of saints and sinners alike.

Pastor MCCLURKIN: You know, I don’t understand where the hypocrisy comes in so heavily in Christianity. And it angers me in a way, because the bottom line is, if you mess up, just say, “I messed up.” Don’t cover it up and act like, you know, I’m too pompous and pious to say that I’ve done wrong. No, if you are a preacher and a pastor or a minister and you mess up, just come clean.

“You’ve got to know your audience”

LAWTON: McClurkin is head pastor at Perfecting Faith Church, a nondenominational Pentecostal church in Freeport, New York. The 1,000-plus congregation meets in a former supermarket. He’s home for the services every Sunday unless he’s traveling overseas. Services there are exuberant and interactive. Church members are likely to be dancing in the aisles, speaking in tongues or lying on the floor, overcome by the Holy Spirit.

While many Gospel artists have been accused of abandoning their religious roots after they hit it big, McClurkin is emphasizing his roots all the more.

Pastor MCCLURKIN (at BET Awards): ‘Cause I’m telling you, I’m nothing but a glorified church boy. That’s all I am.

LAWTON: His new CD, “Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs,” is all praise and worship music recorded live at this concert in Virginia.

Pastor MCCLURKIN: So much of what we do is industry driven, but there comes a time when you’ve got to know your audience, and you’ve got to know where you really function best, and you’ve got to take the chance.

LAWTON (to Pastor McClurkin): Has success brought new challenges for you?

Pastor MCCLURKIN: Celebrity has its pros and cons, but what celebrity has afforded me is a greater platform to declare the very message that has changed my life. I don’t want to be larger than life. God’s chosen that I am for his purposes.

(from documentary, “The Donnie McClurkin Story,” on tour bus): Welcome to the world of touring. Welcome to Donnie McClurkin’s world.

“You won’t find a major religion in this world that doesn’t use music.”

LAWTON: McClurkin, who is still single, says he stays grounded by surrounding himself with family, including several of his sisters who sing backup for him. Music, he says, helps keep his relationship with God fresh.

Pastor MCCLURKIN: There are certain songs that open up another illumination to how great God is, that would reduce me to tears, you know? There’s a song that says, [singing] “Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer that calls me from this world of care.” Those songs reduce me to tears.

At the end of all the accomplishments, I’ve got to be that little boy — the one who was broken, realized his own lack of self-worth, that depended on God in the beginning; the one that depends on God now. If you want to know who I am, I’m Donnie McClurkin, a nine-year-old boy who met God. That’s it.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.